The most ironic thing to me is the amount of coddling these self-purported “strong men” need. The idea that someone wouldn’t blindly accept what they say is enough to throw their egos into self-protection mode.
The most ironic thing to me is just how fast the political pendulum swings.
One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.
By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.
1. Before: People warning about a problem of corrupt police forces of power-tripping fools and bullies that routinely get away with murder.
2. After: A corrupt police state has metastasized onto the national state age, with its own fools and bullies, including illegally imprisoning and murdering people.
I wouldn't label that a "pendulum swing" between opposite situations.
Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure. Remember the soccer matches in places like the UK, where some continental teams or players were booed for not doing so?
Political theatre by people who wouldn't be able to tell you who was the Prime Minister, how much does milk cost etc.
Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
Whoah, hold up: One of these things is not like the others. (♫ One of those things just doesn't belong.♫)
The Prime Minister's name shows up regularly in news stories, and the price of milk is literally in front of you as you buy it...
So why are you expecting anybody to be decent at "estimating" even the easier version of "all people shot by police this year"? It's not like there's a daily figure shared after the weather-report.
> Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
> Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure
Pure social pressure. Whereas now everything is completely political pressure dictated from the top down. Idk social pressure seems more organic at least. Biden didn't order that anyone who didn't take a knee will be deported to a torture prison in Guatemala
By the grace of first past the post, winner takes all. This ancient system prevents people from picking shades of grey parties, since they simply don't exist in any significance. And from the other end it doesn't allow parties to split, since it will mean than the smaller block is immediately equal to zero (zero votes, zero seats). In when parties aren't allowed to split, they trend towards reactionism and radicalism, when radicals can hold the whole party "hostage". Applies to both sides btw.
The standard complaint is the opposite. In a generic first past the post two party system you should end up with two barely distinguishable centrist parties.
But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
How are these at all comparable? One is a photo op at the Capitol, and one is leading a massive immigration raid campaign full of civil rights violations. Even if you believe these raids are lawful, they are not performative like the photo op stunt was - they are massive operations that greatly affect millions of lives.
If you are making a “both sides are bad” argument then that is a pretty poor comparison.
This did not happen fast though, but over decades.
On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, because instead of fixing the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work") people are fixated on that right wing party itself.
When I did some skydiving in my youth I was fascinated by watching sooo many skydivers barely avoiding the lone single tree near the landing zone. Turns out, if you concentrate on something ("I must avoid that tree I must avoid that tree...") you end up steering towards it. The winning move is to instead concentrate on where you do want to go. There are precious little positive ideas in our politics, it's mostly about what we don't want, or distractions on things that while it sounds nice and it's definitely okay when it gets done should never be the main focus.
> the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work")
Insofar as people are actually going over to AfD (and it's not just exaggerated hysterics, the sky is always falling these days...), it's probably got something to do with the issues which are conspicuously absent from your list, which AfD ostensibly addresses, at least more convincingly than the other parties. Namely, immigration. You may not want to admit that as a real problem at all, but that refusal to engage with the issue is the primary reason people line up for the politicians who at least pretend to care about it.
> When you tell people their problem isn't real, (...)
Their problems might be real, but they sure are not caused by immigration. The Trump administration boasts about having deported 1M immigrants, and yet everything turned to shit, there are less jobs, pay hasn't increased, and things haven't became more affordable.
The first step to fix a problem is to identify it. Failing to do so risks aggravating the actual problems.
Tons of morons bought the Trump administration lie that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets. Their problem isn’t real. They are complete idiots with zero critical thinking skills who have more influence in elections than more rational populations due to this stupid ass country’s prioritizing empty land over actual citizens. Isn’t it funny how when “centrists” compromise with conservatives it always seem ruin things for decades if not centuries?
I had some hope as a millennial youth that we were “evolving” past the conservative mindset. It was insane to me that an ideology that has been consistently wrong from supporting slavery to opposing women’s suffrage would continue to have any support. But here we are still talking about gay marriage again because fucking conservative bigots cannot let anyone live in peace. But I’m sure you consider their “concerns” to be very valid and worth entertaining.
i am not telling people that their problem isn't real. i am telling them that their understanding for the cause of their problems isn't what they think it is, or what they are being told it is.
the people who are having problems finding work, facing crime, etc, do not actually have a problem with immigration. they are only getting told by deceptive politicians that dealing with immigration would solve their problems. they are the ones being lied to. that's the nature of a scapegoat.
Well, roots of everything are long. We are a long-lived species and our political attention spans decades or longer. People still think of the Roman Empire and write in Latin alphabet, after all.
But the actual short-term jumps in policy are absolutely wild now. That wasn't the case in the 1990s.
Imagine left leaning orgs being as organized and funded as the right.
GP made the same mistake by putting the AfD on the right and anything else on "the other side that ignores problems". This other side is not the left, its the center or the non-left, which gets good funding too.
The decades of political development were always meant to bolster the current power structures, and i am not talking about pol. parties or the interests of the many and their problems. From that angle, the current political swing is not suprising. Musk and Co are winning their war on the left mind virus, which is much older then them.
If you are left (I am not, but I have observed it) and you agree with 90 per cent of the ideas of some group, but disagree on the remaining 10 per cent, they will turn on you in fury, denounce you as a traitor, hate you more than an actual opponent. Deviation from orthodoxy is a capital sin.
(This is not new, see how Trotskyists were extirpated by their Stalinist comrades 100 years ago. Heresy is simply not tolerated.)
The right wingers of today are a lot more capable of building a bigger tent, at least right now. Personally, I am somewhat rightwing, but very secular, as usual in Czechia. I still get invited to Christian events even though they know that I am not a believer, and they won't grill me to convert.
The same can be said about the right, but you are correct, infighting is stronger on the left.
But...
Orthodoxy (or better: tribalism) is actually stronger on the right, the key difference is, the right has less political complexity to argue over. "Our pure native culture will fix our problems and the other left outgroups must be suppressed" is pure identity politics, which is imo the core of the right.
The left has, tribalism aside, at least identity independent topics like wealth distribution. Which, unfortunately, threatens the existing power structures.
I can confirm the left ostracizing their own. It happened to me too, but i still consider myself left, because my political ideals are based on more than a group membership.
How is that my mistake??? YOU came up with "left". I very deliberately did not say such a ridiculous thing, given that any "left" party has never in power.
I would also appreciate if you did not paraphrase what I wrote when what I wrote still is right there, or at least don't attribute your words to me.
I always find it fascinating, and quite disturbing, how people rewrite what other people wrote to base their "counter-"argument on their rewrite.
> On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
You bisected the political landscape, but not into left and right. I did this and, as you may agree on, the center is shifting right too. An aspect i wanted to bring up by adressing your "problems of the many" and where/why the political focus has been on in the past.
Maybe you are familiar with the whole lefty concept of "capitalism inevitably turning into fascism". The right and the status quo center have more in common, so you can group them together and i called it "your mistake".
The reality is that Northern Europe is the safest, most free and wealthiest part of this godforsaken planet.
People don't know how good they have it.
It is understandable that Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 2025 they have no excuse.
When Germans get grand ideas inside their heads everything always goes bad.
The economic difference between rural former GDR and, say, Denmark, is pretty huge, and AfD mostly dominates in the former GDR regions, where local industries collapsed almost overnight and all talents got picked off by West German employers.
I traveled around most of Europe with a backpack. Former GDR is a dying country, and no amount of subsidies into fixing roads will help it. You cross the border to Poland, nominally you entered a poorer country, but everything is so much more lively there. Poles are so much more optimistic about their future than Germans in general, and East Germans extra.
This psychological difference cannot be appreciated if you only look at GDP per capita tables.
People don't compare themselves with countries on other continents, but with their neighboring countries or with the memories of their own country (how it was in the past).
Swedes look at the statistics of bombing and shooting incidents in this century, while Finns look at economic growth, GDP and salary growth in the last twenty years, especially compared to other Nordic countries.
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere,
Voluntary actions including a protest against police brutality ..
> and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
.. versus the pro-brutality side of the argument. Social media has made it more acute, but the same line runs through e.g. the pre-social-media Rodney King riots. I think people mistook a suppressed problem for stability.
Of course, suppressing problems works quite well for stability. We can see in Hong Kong how having several tower blocks burn down might be destabilizing. There were calls for accountability. Accountability would be destabilizing to the political and real estate elite, so that can't happen and now everyone is quietly agreeing that it was just a tragic accident, no need to investigate further.
The pills originally come from Lewis Carroll, where Alice could change size by taking them. Jefferson Airplane used that metaphor to sing about psychedelics. The Matrix adapted Carroll's pill motif to represent an alteration in one's perceptions of reality. In the broad sense, yes, in the narrower sense, no.
The Wachowskis themselves pulled from gnosticism, eastern religions etc.
Pahlaniuk used the term "snowflake" to refer to people who were brittle and "not beautiful and unique" (his words from memory). He is/was a left wing anarchist.
I think you've experienced a bit of Mandela effect. Alice in wonderland is in fact mentioned as a metaphor in the movie. However, Alice would eat cake and take pleasant tasting potions to change size.
The famous song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane uses an extended metaphor based on Alice In Wonderland, and has the lyrics:
> One pill makes you larger
> And one pill makes you small
> And the ones that mother gives you
> Don't do anything at all
> Go ask Alice
> When she's ten feet tall
I've never read the Alice in Wonderland book, but the Disney adaptation of it from the 50s had cake and a drink I recall, and no pills.
I believe that was the point of both what I and GGGP wrote. Pahlaniuk would not be one of "those who love using the term snowflake", in its current context.
This is a Reddit-tier quip that keeps being repeated. It doesn't spark curious conversation:
"I consider myself fairly strong and self reliant."
"Okay well we are going to kick you off of every private website, try to make you lose your livelihood, and mock you relentlessly on most media broadcasting networks!"
"Well, I am going to attempt to stop you from doing those things, since I don't like them. "
"Ironic! You need coddling and aren't strong at all, haha, your ego is so fragile."
Do recognize, you're voluntarily participating in a highly moderated forum. If one were principled in their opposition to moderation, one would not voluntarily choose to use said forum for nearly a decade ;)
Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.
I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.
> Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation.
I agree with the enjoyable part but "reasonable" would require careful examination of the things that didn't make the cut and is highly subjective. I have no idea what "strong" means.
Most moderation seems to get done by the voting system (powered by weak and very unreasonable users?)
What is missing is a user manual to formalize this social credit system. I never knew that I have to upvote the correct posts. I thought the system was curious about my opinion. Quite preposterous in hindsight. Ill make more of an effort, who knows, in a few years we might go full North Korea retroactively.
The "marketplace of ideas" narrative was always a trick. And it worked.
Conservatives and reactionaries want to get their ideas into the mainstream but they know that just going straight out and saying race science or whatever will not get play in mainstream media. So they make the argument about how these ideas (which they claim not to hold) are being silenced by illiberal institutions. Then centrist organizations, who do at least want to believe that they ascribe to these principles, take the bait. Suddenly the New York Times is writing feature story after feature story about how universities are being oh so mean to the professor who writes "I don't shy away from the word 'superior'" and "everybody wants to live in the countries run by white people" (she didn't even get fired, by the way).
This convinces some center-left folks that various institutions have gone to far and they become participants in efforts to expel black people, women, and lgbt people from institutions of power.
But now people like Chris Rufo don't need the New York Times anymore, so they are happy to start saying that actually businesses should be allowed to only hire married men and that the civil rights act should be overturned.
It's a shame, the censorship process would make them look much more sane than they are. We do still get some opinions that seem worthy of burning someone alive but it would be better to get the full insanity on public display and score enough internet points for the padded cell.
They want to reduce censorship, not force people to "coddle" them. Anyone on the left can still criticize the current US administration if the censors give up. The only difference is, people on the right will be able to do the same to the next Democrat administration. If you don't think that's fair, you're the one who needs coddling.
One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.
By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.