> “They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast, [...] “If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”
I identify as very liberal/progressive (and was, e.g., already helping out trans people before many "woke" people were born), and I'm very skeptical of (and often angry at) techbro right-wingers, but I was also taught to believe in "the marketplace of ideas".
(Of course I know it's not that simple today, due to large numbers of bad actors with Internet-powered soapboxes, massive organized psyops of various kinds, and sketchy social media companies. But please bear with me.)
So I was horrified by the years of large numbers of liberal/progressive people who were rabidly witch-hunting, attacking, de-platforming, etc. people with whom they disagreed, and sinking to the levels of bad-faith non-dialogue as some of the people they attacked.
When a student at a great liberal arts college (to which I was donating) was in the news, for leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.
(I recall my thinking at the time: I knew people who very much needed money, and who never had the privilege to attend the university that this student was pissing away.)
Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
But their behavior definitely helped drive some voters that direction, at the same time the behavior forfeited many opportunities to teach and to learn.
> or leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.
The student was using his free speech and you was angry the university did not prevented him from using it by force. Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
> Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
No, we got those because far right was consistently excused, because people like you always blame left for what right does. We got nazi salutes, because these people were deep in far right wing echo chamber, because media refused to admit it and those who said it were punished.
Maybe if these people were not consistently radicalizing, the left response to them would be milder. Left was responding to real thing that was happening and it was proven right.
It is funny - far right attacking others is their free speech, everyone else must prioritize far right. And whatever far right do is always fault of someone else.
> Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this?
There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters.
You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
I think we got the far right reality of today by liberals completely ignoring working class pain and appearing to solely focus on a controversial minority. I say appearing because they didn’t seem to do anything else.
This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.
So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked?
Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing.
I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.
> getting your family out of the concentration camp
Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that.
It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away.
I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
HN thread about the 2024 post referenced in the OP:
Group chats rule the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867 - June 2024 (184 comments)
Signal chats are the new "clubhouse"?
> “They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast, [...] “If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”
I identify as very liberal/progressive (and was, e.g., already helping out trans people before many "woke" people were born), and I'm very skeptical of (and often angry at) techbro right-wingers, but I was also taught to believe in "the marketplace of ideas".
(Of course I know it's not that simple today, due to large numbers of bad actors with Internet-powered soapboxes, massive organized psyops of various kinds, and sketchy social media companies. But please bear with me.)
So I was horrified by the years of large numbers of liberal/progressive people who were rabidly witch-hunting, attacking, de-platforming, etc. people with whom they disagreed, and sinking to the levels of bad-faith non-dialogue as some of the people they attacked.
When a student at a great liberal arts college (to which I was donating) was in the news, for leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.
(I recall my thinking at the time: I knew people who very much needed money, and who never had the privilege to attend the university that this student was pissing away.)
Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
But their behavior definitely helped drive some voters that direction, at the same time the behavior forfeited many opportunities to teach and to learn.
> or leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.
The student was using his free speech and you was angry the university did not prevented him from using it by force. Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
> Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
No, we got those because far right was consistently excused, because people like you always blame left for what right does. We got nazi salutes, because these people were deep in far right wing echo chamber, because media refused to admit it and those who said it were punished.
Maybe if these people were not consistently radicalizing, the left response to them would be milder. Left was responding to real thing that was happening and it was proven right.
It is funny - far right attacking others is their free speech, everyone else must prioritize far right. And whatever far right do is always fault of someone else.
> Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this?
There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters.
You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
I think we got the far right reality of today by liberals completely ignoring working class pain and appearing to solely focus on a controversial minority. I say appearing because they didn’t seem to do anything else.
This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.
So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked?
Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing.
I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.
> getting your family out of the concentration camp
Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I don’t think I have ever disagreed with you dang, except in this case. The comment seemed thoughtful to me.
It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away.
I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
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