[dreamfactor]

The irony of this post when you will get reported and hellbanned for questioning libertarianism on HN. As for "political correctness" it was a term that was first popularised by the right to attack college activism and shut down people challenging the status quo.

I'd wager good money I'm a lot closer to that Conrad character than the author will ever be and from where I'm sitting it's pretty clear that tech culture has started becoming completely toxic. The article reads as if written by a psychopath (and one begins to wonder whether Evgeny Morozov has a point about SV's movers and shakers). Putting aside the shallow and barely informed notions about fashion and art themselves, dismissing morality as no more than a seasonal fad or craze is itself an unwitting confession of a deep-seated amorality.

[gizmo686]

>The irony of this post when you will get reported and hellbanned for questioning libertarianism on HN.

When has this happened?

>As for "political correctness" it was a term that was first popularised by the right to attack college activism and shut down people challenging the status quo.

Actually, it was a term first popularized by the socialists, to attack the communists.

[dreamfactored]

...and hellbanned again for comments in this thread actually. HN doesn't like disturbances to the appearance of right libertarian consensus it would seem.

(That's completely fine in the context of a private community with its own specific set of values but it should be clearly advertised so that participants understand it's not a wider consensus in the world at large and that they aren't getting anything like an open discussion with a range of views.)

[abecedarius]

I had the impression it started as a kind of joke among progressives in the 70s or so, a ha-ha-only-serious one. Later their opponents appropriated it, in the 80s when I started paying attention.

[dreamfactor]

> When has this happened?

Happened to me a few months back.

> Actually, it was a term first popularized by the socialists, to attack the communists.

I'm talking about it becoming popularised in contemporary politics. We can all google that it was rebirthed in 87. The reason I know this though is that I remember seeing it coming into common currency after it was repeatedly being used as a hot button term by the GH Bush election campaign team in 88. This was talked about in the broadsheets at the time.

[mxfh]

In general also see some other factual problems with his history backdrop arguments as well, besides PC and the arguably simplified popular history version narrative in the retelling of the Galileo Affair.

In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. And published it just before his death. So was Galileo himself deeply embedded in christianity trying to resolve the conflicts within the system. He didn't see himself as heretic, that was a label applied to him by others. The pope actually asked him to pursue his research on heliocentrism on a hypothetical level.

The Ludendorff reference seems overblown at least, as some picked up tidbits by a 3rd party retelling of history. Maybe he mixed it up with the so called Stab-in-the-back myth that happened after the war. The 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution was never popular with the already quasi-dictatorial OHL, so it never needed a purge in that sense. The events in Russia led people to believe an annexation victory Siegfrieden was possible at some point so the resolution got obsolete at some point.

The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. Huh? So seem Americans if seen from Europe.

Stalin and Hitler (who else of all people not name-dropped yet) are singlehandedly responsible for the claimed demise of representational art, not the advent of photography and film (aren't those two representational by the choice of medium already)? Maybe it simply got boring for artists for a while?

[abecedarius]

Hellbanned for questioning libertarianism? It'd be easy for me to miss them, but I'm not familiar with any such cases -- help me out?

[dreamfactor]

I didn't suffer some gun nuts gladly, what can I say. I think I may have committed the offence of calling them aspergic after they were repeatedly and passively aggressively obtuse lol

[abecedarius]

OK. Without seeing the original thread, that sounds more like breaking the site's code of conduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html has "be civil" and "instead of calling names" right at the start of the section about comment threads. I get angry myself sometimes in arguing with someone here, so I can sympathize.