People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords. There’s almost no incentive on social media to conform. And every incentive to stand out.
Just look around at our political situation, you see far less conformity, and extremes in political expression. We even elected President Edgelord.
Provocative, sure. But people are generally provocative within a very narrow, uninformed window. Taking an extreme view on a hot political issue. Democrats are stupid. Republicans are evil. Science is broken and unrecoverable.
There is very little room to have a nuanced perspective. You'll lose viewership on BOTH sides.
Yes, provocation is a viable strategy for clicks and audience-building, but few people are attempting that, and among those who do it's not the only strategy.
Everywhere else -- in corporate America, on Facebook, at churches and family gatherings, even with many friends -- conformity is still the norm, and there are more landmine topics than ever.
I don't think its "social cooling" as much as its a fracturing of social media into edgelords / influencers + their fanboys.
Everyone seems to have their own parasocial relationships with some podcast / youtuber / media personality. The fanboys want to conform to their tribe of fanboys and what the influencer wants. The influencer usually wants to sell something.
Most people don't want to get harassed and attacked at the level Trump gets so there are strong incentives to not do what he did. Saying there are no reasons not to do it is just ignorant, most people prefer peace and quiet over drama.
Joining the crowd to express approval for extremism (or equally extreme disapproval) has a much lower bar than making the "top-level" statements you refer to, though. Inflammatory content is constantly rewarded with a firehose of such "engagement", and it's coming from the vast populace that's supposedly averse to drama.
Suppose there is an arsonist setting fire to random houses. They come by and throw a Molotov cocktail through your window.
We then observe that you immediately drop everything to deal with the fire. Should the conclusion be that you love arson and enjoy spending time on it? More importantly, do we like a system where the arsonist is rewarded for getting you to spend time on something?
> People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords.
Sure, some people are shooting that moon, but that's a tiny fraction of the rest—let alone the lurkers—who are keen on maintaining employment and wedding invitations.
Social media in 2017 was very different than social media in 2025.
There was a gradual change from social media with your friends to social media, look at these videos chosen by the algorithm to keep you on our platform.
Back in 2017 it was already changing but not nearly as much as where we’d find ourselves in 2025.
I think people could definitely come to the conclusion of being able to game your social score by conforming in 2017, all you had to do was post a few nice pictures but more often.
The Americans (†) who grew up with constant surveillance (social media, cameras everywhere) aim for ordinariness. The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations. For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
I find this sad and worrisome. I like chaos and healthy disorderliness. I enjoy skilled conversationalists with fresh ideas. And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
(† Footnote: It isn't just Americans but youth coming of age in every culture. The "social cooling" effect is more pronounced among Americans as they exhibit greater variance in expression in the first place and thus have more to move toward the baseline.)
People say this but is it true? Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified. That doesn't sound like a safe opinion.
I’m not sure exactly how you mean it, but a lot of the discourse around political violence itself fits in the Overton window of acceptable discourse, so this doesn’t surprise me too much.
But I find statements outside of the Overton window to be punished quite severely, and I think most people now understand that you can very easily lose your job for stating the incorrect thing.
If a politically violent movement breaks out and is successful enough to become even quasi-mainstream, having a history of supporting them may be the only safe opinion.
Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
And the censorship is certainly not helping.
My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit for suggesting that:
- The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people. Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give up power "voluntarily".
- That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody close to him might be able to do it and could use protection is he managed to escape).
So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change of law or a legal process.
> yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
They are absolutely saying it in public and private. I hold that opinion and so does every politically engaged person i know. Its heavily censored on the mainstream platforms but you can see the messages conveying this sentiment in a semi coded way.
A podcast bro cites scripture saying queers need to get stoned, he gets a stone to the neck himself. "Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First". Badda bing badda boom. Lotta angry people.
I'm confused. How is that the opposite of what he actually said? Charlie Kirk was strongly Christian, as I understand it. If a faithful Christian argues against cherry-picking the Bible, doesn't that imply an endorsement of everything in it? So if the Bible says to kill gay people, which he said it does, then does that not mean that he thinks that should be done? Especially given he describes it as "God's perfect law."
I don't understand how this would be "debunked" or mean anything other than what King originally said it meant, unless we're absolutely forbidden from doing even the most basic and obvious logical deduction on statements.
Your "logical deductions" are lossy. You end up making false assumptions. In this case, your assumption is leading to rationale for political violence.
No, arguing against cherry-picking does not mean you endorse everything. In the third link, it says that Christians do not follow Leviticus. Charlie was no different. He loved and supported gay people and welcomed them into his movement. There are many gays in his organization, at high levels. To assume that he wanted them stoned to death is absurd, and incredibly ignorant.
"No, arguing against cherry-picking does not mean you endorse everything."
How so? Either you cherry-pick or you take it all. Those are the only two possibilities, aside from ignoring the whole thing. Pretty sure he's not ignoring the whole thing.
How is it ignorant to see that he thinks that the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the universe has written down "perfect laws" for us to follow, and that we shouldn't pick and choose which ones we follow, and conclude that he thinks we should follow all of them?
He may have welcomed gay people into his movement but just based on your clip he doesn't seem to love and support them. He says straight out that he doesn't approve of the lifestyle.
I agree that there's a contradiction between "God says we're supposed to kill them" and him standing there chatting with that guy and not trying to rally the crowd to murder him. But I don't see why we have to resolve that in the "he actually loved gay people" direction. If he says "God's perfect law" demands killing gay people, I'm inclined to believe that's what he thinks. He'd hardly be the first religious person who believes their religion demands X and actually does Y when confronted with the situation in reality. It's great that he can stand there and engage in a dialog with someone he believes his God says should be killed, but that doesn't absolve him from that belief or from professing it.
> If he says "God's perfect law" demands killing gay people
He did not say that.
Again, Christians do not follow Leviticus. I'm not a Christian, but I just looked this up:
> Mainstream Christian theology holds that Jesus Christ's life, death, and resurrection fulfilled the ceremonial and civil aspects of the Leviticus laws, making them no longer obligatory for believers, while the moral principles are reaffirmed and expanded in the New Testament under what is often called the "law of Christ."
You seem to think Charlie wants to stone gays because he's a Christian, and you're assuming that Christianity believes in stoning gays. But that last part is false. Christ revised the old testament. Charlie's making a point that you can't just take Leviticus at face value, and interpret its passages out of context from the new testament.
You're now interpreting Charlie's point to mean the opposite of what he meant. You're assuming that he actually wants to stone gays, because he's pointing out that the old testament talks about it, and because you don't understand Christianity.
Again, I'm not a Christian, and I myself appreciate gayness. But we have to stop taking clips out of context and framing people as evil to justify political violence.
>> If he says "God's perfect law" demands killing gay people
>He did not say that.
Is this some parallel universe thing where you and I experience completely different versions of Charlie Kirk? Because in my universe, the YouTube link you posted has him saying exactly that:
"In a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18 is that thou shalt lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying. So, Miss Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, 'Love your neighbor as yourself,' the chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."
I seriously have to wonder if you are actually watching the stuff you're telling me to watch, or you're just parroting something you've read somewhere.
What exactly do you think he meant here? I can't come up with any "opposite" that even remotely fits with what he said. My interpretation: God says gay people should be killed. You can't love God and deny any part of God's law. "So you love God. So, you must love his law." How else can that possibly be interpreted?
I was raised Christian and I was Christian for a long time. "Christians do not follow Leviticus" not correct. Some do not. Many do, or at least follow parts of it. Pretty much all of Christianity is an exercise in deciding which parts of the Bible are meant to be followed and which are meant to be interesting stories or history. And there is no universal agreement about which parts are which. The idea that homosexuality is a sin is extremely mainstream Christian belief, and Jesus said exactly zero on that subject.
In that clip, Kirk makes it very clear that he thinks Christians must love God and must love their neighbor, by way of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. He says that you love people by telling them the truth, and he says the truth is that the Bible says gay people must be killed, in the chapter right before where it says that you must love your neighbor.
If he doesn't follow Leviticus, why is he taking "Love your neighbor" from it? Why is he describing it as "God's perfect law"? Is that meant to be sarcastic?
> How is that the opposite of what he actually said?
> If a faithful Christian argues against cherry-picking the Bible
Talks about what Charlie “actually said”, proceeds to strawman him.
Mate. You literally got given evidence that debunks an idea you’d like to believe and you still continue to believe and argue for the idea you’d want to be true.
Let it go. You’re egos too big and you’re acting like an idiot. Do you consider yourself an idiot?
And this is why I say I don't have an opinion on his killing.
It's really easy to lie online (both mechanically by just taking stuff out of context as you showed and because people face no punishment for it).
That being said, if I had an opinion, only one of the possible sides is OK to say publicly and I think that's wrong.
For example, one of the claims I heard is that he was orchestrating/supporting harassment of college professors through his Turning Point organization. Now, harassment can lead to suicide, driving innocent people to suicide is murder, a just punishment for murder is death, and when a punishment is just then it doesn't matter who carries it out as long as they have a sufficient standard of proof.
So depending on whether that claim is true, how "successful" he was and the morality of several logical inferences (which is subjective but for each statement/inference you will find a lot of people supporting it), a sane and rational person could perfectly justify the killing.
---
Most people are hypocrites. And what they really hate is when somebody tries to apply a consistent moral system to themselves and others. Not just because it puts them to shame (most people never try to be consistent and they know it even if they'd never admit it out loud or even to themselves). But also because when you apply consistent rules to severe offenses, you very quickly get very severe punishments and people are not comfortable with the idea that they too could be punished in this manner.
---
As another example, I hate when people try to vilify him by quoting him saying some dead children are OK because that's the price for the right to bear arms. Yes, innocent people (including children) dying is sad and wrong. But what do they think happens when nobody has guns? First, people would still kill each other using other tools, even mass murder wouldn't magically stop because car ramming attacks seem to be on the rise. But, second, a long term effect is that people in positions of power who are unaccountable through legal means are no longer accountable through extra-legal means.
One of the first things every dictatorship does is restricting access to guns and confiscating them.
Yes, high gun ownership has a continual price but low/zero ownership has a much higher one-time price and after that it no longer matters what people think.
The left is statistically more likely to publicly endorse political violence looking at data over the past few years. The right is more likely to actually commit political violence though looking over all data over decades and that still holds today.
Far-left versus Far-right Fatal Violence: An Empirical Assessment of the Prevalence of Ideologically Motivated Homicides in the United States
One side is all shout and no bite. The other is no shout and then eat your fucking face.
I'll take the idiots shouting but not actually killing if I had to pick. But I won't lie the choice still makes me feel dirty.
> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = −1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001).
> We included individuals whose public exposure occurred between 1948 and 2018.
The last 8 years of politics have been very very abnormal. And in today's data, the "very liberal" approve of political violence at a rate of 24% vs. 3% for the "very conservative":
You’re presenting the data for whether it’s okay to be happy about a political figure’s death, not whether it’s okay to cause one. There’s a section about this you should read starting with “YouGov's polling doesn't suggest that young people or liberals are more pro-violence in general”, and in particular the stark divide about self-defense. None of this is great, but it’s hardly surprising that a minority of younger people are more supportive of violence than people who have more life experience and fully-developed frontal cortexes.
But as for "causing" violence, they also asked whether "political violence is ever justified", and the difference between left vs. right there was even more — 25% vs 3%.
Given the right's overall reaction to things like January 6th, I conclude that this number tells us more about what the left vs right thinks qualifies as political violence, not about their support for it.
That poll from 2020 shows republicans and democrats roughly equal on the question. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the desire for political violence goes up among those currently out of power, anyway.
Sit down. The right wing is actively zip-tying entire apartment complexes of poor people, even US citizens, while pointing guns in their faces. Thats violence, and exactly what the left has been ringing the alarm for for years.
Um. There is a notable difference between state sanctioned violence, for which, state does claim monopoly and semi-random vigilantes. I am concerned that I even have to point this out ( edit ) that the two are not quite the same.
You may want to elaborate. Note that the emotional tone or non-plausible scenarios are not the way to advance your argument here. Still, I will counter to show some good faith.
My mom would not have placed herself in a position where there is a gun in her face.
There are plenty of people in poverty who do not put themselves in a postion to have a government put guns in their face. It is not poverty by and large that causes a government to put guns in their face in America. Poverty may at times be used as a justification for the actual reason that a gun was put in their face but it is not in fact the reason. Neither is it in the general case a good justification either.
Because I just linked a source: As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later.
What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago? Flash bangs, guns, zip ties, and being detained until proven innocent. What did they do to put themselves in that position? Was I wrong to say its poverty?
Or do you mean they should have been rural poor? Or white and poor? What was their trespass?
I'm not talking about "by and large", I'm not talking about "may at times". These are real lives of citizens with "inalienable rights"
If you think state sanctioned violence is permissible, tell it to Nuremberg
I read the link you posted. As far as I can see there was in fact reasonable suspicion that there would be people in those locations who were not supposed to be there. I can both realize that it is traumatizing for those involved and also recognize that the situation exists because there are people who coming in who are not following the process for doing so and Chicago has positioned themselves as the place to look for them.
Chicago as a group has positioned itself as welcoming to immigrants here illegally and antagonistic to finding and taking the appropriate legal action regarding people who aren't following the rules.
This wasn't caused by poverty. This was caused by the combination of Chicago's political position putting them in conflict with ICE regarding the immigrants who don't follow the rules.
If you want to prevent this sort of thing blaming it on poverty is concentrating on the wrong problem. The political climate in Chicago and Nationally is a much more useful place to put your focus on fixing.
Man, you people will really turn off your basic empathy and reasoning on the flimsiest of excuses. That could just as easily be your family getting attacked at 3AM. And if you dare to exercise your 2nd amendment rights to defend yourselves against a night time home invasion, perhaps even being summarily executed. I assume until this actually happens to you or at least someone in your community, you will just keep on inventing reasons why it couldn't possibly. It's easier than confronting the truth, for sure.
Friend. The truth is some people should not be in US. And now, after years of kicking a can down the road, we are in a painful process of rectifying this oversight. It is being confronted. I think your concern is that is not being confronted in the manner you find desirable.
That is fine, but at least be honest about it. Don't hide behind 'I am suddenly concerned about people breaking into my house at 3am'.
This is exactly what I meant by using flimsy excuses to turn off your reasoning. "Some people" being in the US does not invalidate the Constitution. The gross violation of Constitutional rights and individual liberty is exactly the manner I do not find "desirable".
I'm not "hiding" behind concerns. The concerns are as plain as day. There are many possible approaches to "rectifying this oversight" that don't involve wholesale trampling over individual rights and personal liberty. You're the one dressing up your points in a declarative passive voice to paper over the actual actions being done here, to both citizens and non-citizens.
And for what it's worth, I think buying into the narrative that the end goal is even about illegal immigrants is utterly foolish. Trump has already been talking about setting up exceptions for critical businesses in sectors like farming, construction, and landscaping. The whole topic is just being used as another con to consolidate more autocratic authoritarian power.
But I am sure you will just keep on lying to yourself that it's all morally justified, as you continue relishing seeing 'bad' people suffer. We're never going to get actual justice against those who have utterly screwed up our economy over the past several decades, so you might as well settle for a simulation of justice against the proximal scapegoats, right? And certainly don't worry about how you're facilitating the next stage of societal destruction. The next generation can blame the next generation of scapegoats.
<< But I am sure you will just keep on lying to yourself that it's all morally justified, as you continue relishing seeing 'bad' people suffer.
Eh. I am as honest with you as I can be on an internet forum. I think you completely misunderstand my position. My position is not based on morality, but rather on the survival of the system in place. It will not survive with the influx of unvetted, unverified, random human beings. The suffering, as it were, is not a concern here it all. I don't relish it. I nothing it.
Do you understand the difference?
<< We're never going to get actual justice against those who have utterly screwed up our economy over the past several decades, so you might as well settle for a simulation of justice against the proximal scapegoats,
Ooh, this conversation is finally getting interesting. Say I buy this framing, who should I focus my ire on?
<< And certainly don't worry about how you're facilitating the next stage of societal destruction.
Oh man, so many paths to take here. I personally just go with the flow man. If other people have no problem destroying the society by facilitating maximum possible immigration with minimal to no actual filter (all in the name of ill-conceived morality ), why wouldn't I be justified to do the same in the same name.
On a more serious note, be specific. I don't think I facilitate anything. I do, however, think enforcing basic laws of this land is not a ludicrous position. And if it is, either law has to change or it is not ludicrous. Dura lex sed lex and all that jazz.
<< The next generation can blame the next generation of scapegoats.
Story as old as time itself. What are you saying really?
<< "Some people" being in the US does not invalidate the Constitution.
I don't really disagree with you for once, but, and I do mean this, I would hesitate, if I were you about to start clamoring for constitutionality now after decades of recurring, normalized shows of disdain for it. I am, however, noting that you have no problem trotting out constitution when it favors your argument. In other words, it does not feel like a serious argument.
<< The concerns are as plain as day.
In a sense, yes. Still, it may be helpful to list those. What are they?
<< There are many possible approaches to "rectifying this oversight" that don't involve wholesale trampling over individual rights and personal liberty.
Well, tough noodles. It is too late now. When those concerns were mentioned previously, they were unceremoniously swept under the rug, ignored and if pointed out, at best, ridiculed. Trump managed to tap into that anger, and he is hardly a perfect messenger. Still, he will do, because you know me.. always looking at the bright side.
<< You're the one dressing up your points in a declarative passive voice to paper over the actual actions being done here, to both citizens and non-citizens.
What do you want me to do? List them by names or something? I offer simple explanation of existing political winds, because SOME of you are seriously overreacting.
<< And for what it's worth, I think buying into the narrative that the end goal is even about illegal immigrants is utterly foolish. Trump has already been talking about setting up exceptions for critical businesses in sectors like farming, construction, and landscaping. The whole topic is just being used as another con to consolidate more autocratic authoritarian power.
This is may be the most reasonable thing you wrote. It is possible and a reasonable take. It also does not change anything. The end result is about the same.
This is clear. Your points jump back and forth between positive and normative statements. "Aw shucks that's just how it is" isn't a very interesting position, nor are the slivers of rationalizations hanging off of it.
> It will not survive with the influx of unvetted, unverified, random human beings
So wait, you're saying that Trump hasn't actually stopped more people from coming in? That doesn't surprise me, since the only policy goal here is the cruel spectacle to entertain the plebs.
> I would hesitate, if I were you about to start clamoring for constitutionality now after decades of recurring, normalized shows of disdain for it. I am, however, noting that you have no problem trotting out constitution when it favors your argument. In other words, it does not feel like a serious argument.
You're either getting me confused with someone else, or more likely are just bashing a straw man. I have in fact had a pattern of recurring support for Constitutional rights and individual liberty. So no, my arguments are quite serious. Just because Trumpism blatantly abuses appeals to ideals and personal liberty ("free speech absolutist" lolol) does not mean that everybody does.
<< What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago?
Friend. You want to cry me a river over militarization of police and following the basic rules of engagement, I am all ears. In the meantime, detained is not arrested. Based on your overall posture, I must assume that you know this. Hell, cop can detain you during a traffic stop if they so choose. How is it any different for a building full of people?
You are upset, but it is not entirely clear to me why. In a sense, those inalienable rights were preserved if the above is understood, which means you are upset over something else.
Can you focus on what that something else is? I am not egging you on. I am trying to understand your world model.
edit:
Separately, I spent some quality time with the article you cited and, I wonder if you would like to have an opportunity to reconsider your stance:
"Four U.S. citizen children were taken from their parents during the raid because the parents lacked legal status, DHS said, alleging that one of the parents was a Tren de Aragua member."
Sadly, this is the reality made by the permissive policies US has had. Does it suck? Yeah, but those kids wouldn't have been citizens if those people did not enter US illegally. Everything here stems from multiple cascading bad decisions. We are at a point, where public sympathy for this is.. low.
These were not simple detentions; this was ICE taking every door in a 5 story apartment complex at 3:00AM, and detaining every single resident for over 4 hours. Nothing at all like the types of detention Justice Kavanaugh refers to when he talks about the minor inconvenience of a police stop-and-investigate detention. It is not the case that your local police can do this in response to a traffic infraction.
This is, by far, the only rational argument put forth so far, but even here I feel obligated to nitpick. What exactly is 'simple detention'? Are they separated in terms of severity or is it just one giant class of detention that is subject to an opinion of the officers on the ground? One would think that a massive crackdown like this would be at least 4h of one's life.
I can't imagine how it would matter. There's basically nothing more sacred in US law than the front door of one's home. There isn't a more intrusive ordinary investigative action any government body can take.
From the photos: they trashed the apartments, too. Again, not that it much matters.
I do not think ICE is conducting themselves well here. The point of my post above however is that part of the reason ICE is acting like this is because ICE and Chicago have positioned themselves as antagonists and the results are reasonably predictable here. The cause is not poverty it's bad politics.
You can. The people in that story could too. All they had to do is not be there. They were there illegally. It took effort and multiple decisions to get them there. So yes friend. It genuinely is a choice.
Bet you wouldn't be this high and mighty had ICE invaded your town and pulled every resident including your family out of their bed at 3am at gunpoint because "they had credible evidence there was an illegal in one of the houses"
Eh, um, I would personally invite you to the discussion at gp level, where I dismiss this line of argumentation outright. It doesn't do much for me. Honestly, it does not advance your argument either. What I would or would not do is rather irrelevant in a grand scheme of things. However, in aggregate, it would be rather problematic. And it does not appear to be happening at that scale.
Friend. I would advise you against taking posts you read online as some sort of legally binding advice. It.. is just not a good idea. I will make it simple for you. Either ICE is a federal level entity with some rights and immunities assigned to it or not.
If they are and they do, then kidnapping seems like, at best, a mischaracterization. I don't want to belabor the point, but it sounds like you a have an axe to grind.
<< Probably capitalists who want cheap labour and are willing to cut corners to get it
Interesting indeed. Not your answer, but rather the logical inconsistency it implies. How would removal of illegal aliens result in cheap labor? I suspect you did not think your answer through. May I suggest less reflexive writing?
In another comment, you said "You want to cry me a river over militarization of police and following the basic rules of engagement, I am all ears". I don't know if that was just a ploy to appear reasonable, but if you really care about that as you purport to then you already know the answers to those questions.
As a libertarian, I've had enough with people feigning condemnation for government/police overreach/unaccountability while writing comments that condone it.
Friend, whether I know or not is not relevant to this discussion. If you were following my conversation with parent then you know the questions were for his benefit, not mine.
<< As a libertarian, I've had enough with people feigning condemnation for government/police overreach/unaccountability while writing comments that condone it.
That is fair. What would you propose to do about this?
No, don't play coy. OP straightforwardly implied the answers to those questions by the context - the perpetrators are obviously the gang members attacking a building in the middle of a night.
> What would you propose to do about this?
Call out the hypocrisy and the disingenuous invocation of the ideals of liberty, exactly as I am doing here. Your movement often talks of freedom but as soon as dear leader throws you some red meat for your culture war hind brain, you're readily licking boots. It's pathetic.
<< the perpetrators are obviously the gang members attacking a building in the middle of a night.
See.. this is what I find fascinating about this framing. US has a fair amount of various enforcement agencies at federal level. I mean, IRS has a division that has agents walking with guns. ATF messes with people in ways that are problematic and documented ways. FBI does morning raids. No one suggests they are a gang or that they kidnap people.
It is interesting, because the linguistic effort to suggest that ICE ( the linked story had border patrol, which adds interesting wrinkle to OP's line of argumentation ) is not a legitimate arm of US government. If there is something flimsy about this, it is that particular attempt. Their legal status will not change just because you say they 'kidnap' people.
<< Your movement often talks of freedom but as soon as dear leader throws you some red meat for your culture war hind brain, you're readily licking boots.
You assume a lot about me, but would you be so righteous if I told you I am into feet?
> No one suggests they [IRS, ATF, FBI] are a gang or that they kidnap people.
Wow, seriously. So either you've never read any libertarian or even right-wing anti-government discussion, or more likely you're just flinging nonsense at the wall to see what might stick. This is starting to feel like LLM slop.
Yeah. State-sanctioned violence is a fuckton scarier.
Do you think state-sanctioned violence can't be described as "political violence" or that it can't be used to murder political opponents? If so, may I introduce you to most of history?
I think, and I would like to think it was covered in civics, that state sanctioned violence is one of the few types that society allows for practical reasons. What I personally think the problem in this conversation is oddly simple: severe conflation of various related issues.
You may be well-intentioned, but you are not exactly convincing me to 'your side'.
Political violence performed by random civilians and political violence performed by the state are not exactly the same thing, but both are very bad, and the latter is much worse. If the argument is that only the left does political violence by random citizens (blatantly false, but even if we grant it) then saying the right is currently doing political violence by the state is a perfectly response even if they are not exactly the same thing.
My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade.
Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign.
I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth having.
This massively depends on where you are located and on the school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other one could and then in the next year the fact that he already had a brother in that school would give him preferred access. Those two schools could not have been different. The one was an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the other was on a completely different level, never a problem and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that one year was such that he ended up going to a different level of secondary education, even though cognitively the two brothers are not all that different.
So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.
I am not sanguine about it, I just want to make sure that the idea that all schools are beds of roses today does not take hold because I've seen first hand that this is not the case. And if that can happen in a wealthy part of a wealthy country it can happen just about everywhere. In the meantime I've done what I could to offset the difference and am still working hard to make sure my kids get all of the chances in life that they deserve. But detours can and do happen, you won't be able to fix it by head-on confrontation so you have to fix it through other means, which usually translate into spending time and money.
First off: thanks for sharing how you experience your protective instincts. I can feel your love for your kid
With that said --
Wha... your and my reads are so different... I hear that as: One lived in the real world that most normal unchosen people experience, and the other had means to avoid said world?
"Abuse" feels strong, bc putting the select (usually wealthy) kids in the safest place and not choosing responsibility/stake in remediating the larger shared experience, that feels like the larger "condemnation to abuse" to me.
I'm a pretty hardcore collectivist though, and I understand that's not everyone's value system *shrug*
yes. one should raise one's kids in only the toughest most unrelenting environment. arctic tundra, perhaps, or federal prison. anything else is unfair and abusive to others.
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness.
Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
> Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.
But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed already then.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33.
Ten years older. I'm from West-Europe and most people only got dumbphones around the time I was 18-19 (~2000 and mostly adults or 17-18 year olds). Phones with cameras became widespread quite a few years later. Even when I got an iPhone in 2009, most people were still using good old dumbphone/feature phone Nokias. After 2009 it changed very quickly. I think that aligns with you being 10 years younger + adoption in the US (assuming that you are in the US) being earlier.
Phones were simply not a factor when I was in high school. If you had to call someone on-the-go, you would use one of the many public phone booths and a pre-charged card (there were always rumors that you could spay them with hairspray to get unlimited credit :D). But that almost never happened, you'd mostly just meet people IRL if you wanted to socialize.
I think where I grew up (Sweden) it started with the Sony Ericsson "Walkman" family of phones that could record 320×240 videos I think or something like that, and I think I was around 15 when they became almost ubiquitous at school, so must have been around 2006/2007.
Yes, but there was no social media, just MSN messenger on your PC at home, and you had to transfer the photos and videos from the SonyEricsson/Nokia phone via USB cable or bluetooth to the PC and then send via MSN, or send directly to a friend in person via Bluetooth or infrared which took super long for a single shitty image.
It's just not comparable to how it is today with phones with HD cameras that are constantly online.
I'm basically the last generation that didn't have this always-online social media in high school, and "going online" was an intentional thing, you logged in to MSN messenger and logged out a bit later. You saw a friend logged in, you said hi, chatted some, then said bye, and you or they logged off.
I'm two years older than you, and the difference you need to key in on is how much more time kids (like everyone) spend on their phone now vs 2008 or whatever.
It was uncommon (and lame) to film EVERYTHING and put it on YouTube or whatever. Embarrassing (or yes, tragic) things leaked sometimes, but now it feels like something being made public is the norm, not the exception. And that sucks.
From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors ("bullies") are better at hiding it.
When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.
And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because
- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.
- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.
Verbal and social abuse always went hand in hand with the physical one. Physical bullying is just one tactic bullies used. The same bully that beats a guy always mocked the same guy and badmouthed him to others.
I am old enough to remember that bullying victims were blamed back then. The victim blaming was not a term yet, they were blamed for not fighting back. But if they fought back they were also blamed for the resulting ruckus.
The primary reason was that dealing with bully is hard. Blaming victim is easy.
It helps to be already social isolated and socially suicidal. The freedom to think and speak, once again resides in a barrel and not with those who emptied it, who must stick to stagnant ideas with no explanation and prediction power.
(the sun will disappear August 23, 2044).
True science. true knowledge puts itself to the test, by performing predictions and miracles.
Everything else just ain't.
Typed on a miracle, a electrically state-full rock, predicatively turning up and on every morning.
How do you think the current political climate has shifted this? It seems maybe individuals won’t express a non conformist view as easily, but politics has grown more extreme in terms of what acceptable positions are in the first place.
> The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations.
I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual research. Certainly kids today are wildly more likely to embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time since the 60's counterculture revolution. Think gender fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up 30-40 years ago.
This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that dissent from their peer group is harder.
> This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group.
That becomes non-falsifiable then. Everyone everywhere from every period in history has been part of some in-group or another with a consistent scripture/canon/creed/whatever. No one (especially nerd king HN commenters like us) is truly an independent thinker in the way you're constructing.
The claim upthread was that modern kids were afraid of consensus-breaking because of technological surveillance. And that's clearly false because they hate the surveillors with a passion and are not quiet about those opinions.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. The surveillance here isn't Palinitr; it's TikTok. And the kids love TikTok.
Same goes for pissing off their elders -- as the comment above said, it's about their peers, not society at large, who matter (as it is for all of us).
I'm shocked how all this crept up across society. Maybe I was just naive, but still. A society is a very subtle fabric, and the last 20 years distorted a lot of aspect of this fragile equilibrium.
> For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
Or, repression will build up for so long that it will explode.
> And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
The social cooling effect always existed. It is just, previously, information and reactions traveled way slower. We are just adjusting to the new speed. Culture is a complex emergent product of the various basic human interactions. My guess is that this product doesn't make much sense when reactions travel fast as culture changes very slowly.
So instead, the future will be culture-less. You decide your behavior everyday based on your first few (100) shorts/snaps/tiktoks of the morning. It does help that these snaps disappear by tomorrow. This new society will have no memory.
I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."
It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity. Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically built into our DNA.
Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern. If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.
If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by the predators.
But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost is too high.
Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was dead.
Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make everyone satisfied.
It worries me that "the herd" is not anyone I know in person, not anyone I respect, not anyone who loves me, but an abstraction that helps someone else make money, or helps someone else win an election.
I think that is an obvious bad thing.
It is one thing to say like "I won't call my friends' political beliefs stupid when we're hanging out" versus "If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name."
Not always then. Notably not in the recent history of the countries most relevant to this discussion.
> Also, depends on the organization. Some companies will fire your ass, or even find a way to sanction you, for talking back to the boss.
Talking back has different meanings. Some are reasonable grounds for dismissal. Some are not. Companies should be less autocratic. Being fired even unjustly is not like being executed.
You did not. I rebutted false comparisons and called a philosophy boring. My other comment included a popular meme which mocked false comparisons and self congratulation. You made this assumption because you misunderstood the meme?
Whether it’s reversion to the mean or an innovation by modern society is orthogonal to the question of “are we going downhill as a society.” We are, in this particular respect.
Of course, but “new” is not necessarily “good,” and “old” is not necessarily “bad.”
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to learn that “It Depends,” is a mantra for life. Experience has taught me how to understand the choices. When I was younger, I wasn’t able to understand, so everything was “binary.”
Failing to learn from history is a time-honored rite of passage. If we paid more attention to history, we’d see that our refusal to look at history is nothing new.
As I've said in other contexts, anyone can walk through a minefield, as long as they are patient, and don't mind walking past a lot of body parts.
I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient.
This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
Unless you rotate IPs and browser fingerprints for each identity and alter your visited sites, usage patterns, typing speed and style, mouse movements etc. etc. the data brokers will be able to connect your ”inconsistent” identities.
Most attacks on people are done by those who just google your name and see what comes up so some very minor privacy work helps a lot. Its a lot of work to be completely safe but its very little work to be basically safe.
"I have no idea who you are talking about leave me alone you freak."
if data is linked to me via some vague data that is based on similarities there's no world where that can be used as a trustworthy source or at least not putting doubt into the person who is using such data as often times it also links to a bunch of incorrectly assigned data. It's like trusting LLM's with everything they say.
True, you don’t need to be impossible to be fingerprinted. If someone really wanted to track you manually using databrokers, be my guest :)
But for most people here I think it’s about not being the easiest prey. And make the automatic and general algorithms hard to track you.
This website analyzes speech to find your probable alternative names on HN. It’s probably easy to recoup a few more signals to find your name on other apps:
thankfully my speech patterns naturally shift over time for who knows why, sometimes I start using commas too often. Sometimes I start my sentances with capitals, however, it's rare to see me put too much thought into things I write.
sometimes i just dont bother using the shift key at all
For this you need to change more than just account. The way you write is your fingerprint. Concrete example with HN accounts was posted and tried several times.
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly.
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
With that use case you either dont have enough anonymity, or will forget the number of identities and leave a lot of traces, like admitting you are in the euro zone.
This was an interesting time. In some ways I felt like the internet was even more bifurcated then than now, between US political parties. This is when primitive chatbots, before GPT LLMs, could have mostly only been used by large nation states. This is when concerns about significant numbers of bot accounts on reddit became plausible. It felt like a time when the internet was being manipulated in a more subtle way than it is now.
The good thing about younger zoomers and alpha is they've already incorporated this into their lives, so none of this is grotesque or surprising. They've adapted their culture to match.
As other people have noted, this is an old site, they also note that genz have partially learnt from our mistakes, and turned to ephemeral media, amongst other things.
The rise of AR glasses will of course kneecap anonymity in "real life"
Interesting. We’re not dealing with actual overcrowding now, but with the constant din of social media and news, society feels overcrowded. You used to be able to live in blissful ignorance of what was happening in other areas, but now you can only do that if you avoid news and social media completely.
Yes, I can't help but think that things turned out exactly the opposite of how this site predicted. In my view, it would be a good thing if people were a little more self-conscious about what they wrote on social media!
re "behavioral sink" that wikipedia article is kind of a credulous stub that's missing the pile of criticisms of the "Universe 25" experiment (lack of reproducibility, much of the dysfunction being attributable to how the setting trapped the population in each other's scent+sight lines, akin to shoving humans in a transparent panopticon and calling it a test of urban life)
I'm more concerned about the fact I have no idea if the article and the HN comments are all AI generated or not. Can you tell if this comment is AI or not?
What happens when social discourse is polluted by noise that is identical to signal?
If I reply yes, would you believe me? Am I even replying to a "you" right now, or was it a comment posted by a call to requests.get() by some AI agent?
Same. My sons are 21 and 18, both are fairly typical of their peer group - they belong to and participate in Insta, Snapchat etc but it’s very much small private groups and not public posting.
You don’t need some kind of “social score” to have the chilling effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs—both by those they know and don’t.
Interestingly I don’t think it’s really “cooling” that happened - if anything it’s been some people becoming extremely hot, and then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing cooling.
Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics, which probably undermines the democratic ideals they think they’re defending. [1]
I consider myself overall more aligned with liberals, but as a recent example, it disheartens me to open Facebook after a long time and see so many people I knew from years past reveling in Charlie Kirk’s death as though that makes their cause more sympathetic to alienate anyone who might have agreed with things he said (even if I generally don’t). This just reinforces division and increases the social cooling effect.
> Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics
Perhaps some American left-wingers do. But these behaviours are fundamentally the opposite of liberal and I would like to see the label taken back from them.
When you think about it, it's not an entirely new concept. Yes, during last 60 years the west developed a strong culture of independent thought, but when you zoom out, strict mind control through social norms has been, well, the norm. Most societies through most of history would severely punish you for even daring to think of speaking up.
It doesn't matter. If you vote on politics a lot, a moderator will set your account so the votes don't do anything. HN is the illusion of user-generated content.
This sort of vague, association-based reasoning can be used to prove anything. The US is a country with over 200 years of history, currently with hundreds of millions of citizens. You can cherry-pick whatever "visuals" from whatever "inflection points" you want, in order to prove whatever conclusion you want.
For example, here is a thread on /r/AmerExit, a subreddit you would expect to have an anti-American bias, on racism in the EU vs the US. The strong consensus is that EU racism is worse:
Or here is the Wikipedia page on charitable giving by country, which shows the US is easily the most generous nation in the world as a fraction of GDP:
If you learn about the history of other countries, you'll find that they usually have dark stuff in their past as well. You claim that standing up against Nazis is "very low hanging fruit", but there's a considerable list of countries which cooperated substantially with the Nazis, including Italy, Japan, Romania, Croatia, the USSR, etc. France was torturing thousands of Algerians who were fighting for their independence as recently as the 1960s.
Ultimately this entire project of trying to discover and interrogate a "national character" is a little silly in my opinion. Especially through the sort of cherry-picking I did above. Yes, it's a very popular topic of internet flamewars. But I've never seen compelling evidence that "national character" has significant predictive value. People are people wherever you go, people respond to incentives, etc. We should default to structural explanations for human behavior, rather than explanations based on "national character".
I expect the majority of historical events can be explained in the manner of that Substack post, if you look hard enough. Same way I'm rather skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history, I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
Quoting Hateful Eight:
”So, I’m supposed to freeze to death ’cause you find it hard to believe?” - Chris Mannix
I can’t do anything about your skepticism.
There’s about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry picking in sight.
You can’t figure out that Lincoln was a great man, then what else is there to say? We’re taking decades of slavery if something didn’t compel him. Half the country still fought him, and half the country still partook in on going racism for over a hundred years, with zero let up since 1860s up to, literally, 2025.
> The racism and selfishness of right-wing politics is just … ugh, honestly, I just can’t. It’s Godless.
The first step would be to humbly recognize your side’s shortcomings. To me, aiding the destruction of malls, pardoning authors of crimes is bad, protesting against having borders is worse and defunding the police is a hallmark of criminality (and before you say it: Defunding doesn’t mean rearranging, it means defunding, according to protesters on your camp).
There are two essential Christian concepts that you skip when you unilaterally hold your opponent for contempt of humanity:
- Those who have never sinned should throw the first stone,
- Pardon.
Once you become milder in your accusations, maybe we can design a common world where we have common principles. I’d say those principles should be etched into law, but your side is against law enforcement, so it’s a bit complicated.
Many of the religious views I see coming out of the US right now aren't Christian, ie following Christ, but some Abrahamic[1] mishmash wrapped up in jingoism.
[1] not sure what to call it maybe fundamentalism.
It’s easy to say “The other camp is extreme, so we have to”, but you’re welcome if you have any proposal.
My proposal is: I think an extreme lot of my camp would switch if there was an ethical left, with strong ethics but also not prone to degrading whites.
Ok, so your goal is not to share the governance of a country together?
With your proposal, I make concessions (which, by all means, is the concession that I stop arguing, so that’s a general concession on the idea of negotiating together entirely), while you don’t make concessions, and then we don’t govern the country together, is it correct?
Sounds like extremism to me. Either you get the power, either we do, but it’s a struggle of power if you do not engage in listening.
The goal is discussion is that you will discover points on which you can compromise without hurting your values, and we do as well, until we deal together. But it seems Americans have lost that. Which is mirrored by the line of your party: “Don’t engage with the other party. No concession.”
It is one-sided. The discussion has always been open on the right, but people moved to the right because the discussion was closed on the left.
You're completely missing the point of my original response to you.
You're sanctimoniously telling "us" to make milder accusations, then nearly immediately accusing us of being against law enforcement.
That is an entirely non-mild accusation, to the point that I consider it entirely discredits the rest of your comments because of how hypocritical it makes you look.
It's rhetoric that doesn't entitle you to the good faith engagement you supposedly want.
If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm all ears.
(People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.
Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom of choice is false"
We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here, matters of barely stable equilibriums.
Would you rather be «team Plato», ruled by enlightened 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you conflate the levels of application : what is really problematic is the systems that result in increased intolerance.
This idea is old, but today it conveys a much bigger meaning. There are two new developments since then that are very scary. The first is that artificial intelligence is supposedly replacing some jobs, but not only that, it is also being used to select jobs, and the latter is something that I have seen firsthand. The other phenomenon is the advance, in places of the world that classically were liberal, of political ideas that will hinder or directly eliminate the right to private communication over the Internet.
Combine these three factors: data brokerage, the use of AI to replace and select jobs, and the political landscape around the right to encryption, and we get a recipe for a future where the word dystopian falls short.
Don't forget AI being used to replace friends. AI being used for validation in place of a varied social group is scarier than anything I see on the jobs market.
Asking ChatGPT if breaking up with your girlfriend is a good idea or not? Terrifying. People should be using human networks of friends as a sounding board and support network.
I find that awareness of the deep rabbit hole of surveillance capitalism, and how it increasingly extends into political and ideological realms to wield power and influence, makes me feel uneasy on all the physical gadgets I see all around me. And also the pervasive use of camera's everywhere, that send video streams into the cloud where numerous AI applications do who knows what with the data.
Like in the Netherlands in the Jumbo supermarket chain, which is the first to introduce an AI glaring at you through the camera while you walk through the store, and at the checkout self-scan, doing sentiment analysis to see if you are suspicious. It feels outright dystopic, and I avoid the Jumbo if I can. Also it is crazy how Tesla camera platforms are surveilling the streets of the world for the richest man in the world.
It seems these tech developments have cooling effects on society in the physical space. Cooling effects that serve the ones in power, I suppose.
I would say that the fact people have had to self-censor when they held "conservative" views instead of engaging in public discourse without being villified is why they had to turn to someone like Trump when they were handing in their ballots.
If they felt safe, perhaps more of them would have appreciated the other side's arguments (and vice versa, obviously).
Is that what you meant? Or why did self-censorship help get Trump into power twice?
I think that's just a liberal fantasy, it's simply people's lives got worse over the last few decades under end-stage liberalism/capitalism, Trump successfully made a (albeit bullshit) case for genuine change, liberals didn't. If liberals hold on to that myth, that all they have to do to win is throw trans people and immigrants under the bus, then they will loose again. What they should focus on is the fact that no your lives didn't improve because we took trans people's rights away and threw some brown children in concentration camps, your rent didn't go down did it? So instead perhaps it's your landlord we should be focusing our anger towards...
See that for social cooling: I just pissed off everybody. It can be done lmao
It's idiotic because what do you learn from that? You should also move to the right on LGBTQIA+ rights to win? That's about all you would learn from Trump's win and liberals loss. It's surely is convenient for the corporate democrats and their donors if you think that.
Again you misinterpret, I said a big reason, not the only one. I'm also not just talking about the Trans rights part, it was also about censorhip and self-censorship. Take DEI for example, when you have a contrarian stance to the status quo (at the time) [1], you're villified and outcast. Then there is cancel culture. 1000 paper cuts and all of that, and you'd see people swaying their vote combined with Trump's rhetoric.
Also I'm not suggesting anyone has to learn anything from Trump's win, just stating the reality of what happened.
But if you believe in liberal censorship, cancel culture and DEI and critical race theory and immigrant crimes and all that other culture war/scapegoat nonsense being real then wouldn't you just be a Trump supporter? I'm saying that's all nonsense. That's why I'm saying liberals shouldn't cater to conservative delusions even if they think to be liberals, Trump will always outmatch them, he is a way more convincing bigot. Why do we need two conservative parties, it's just not a winning strategy.
Funny it is posted on HN where your user score, which is called karma here for some reason, decides if you can or can't do stuff to engage with entire community fully. So either you are conformist or you will be downvoted and basically invisible.
Meh, as long as you're contributing more than you upset people, it seems to balance itself out. I've made some egregious comments in the past (judging by the downvotes at least), yet you can still see this comment and probably my future ones too.
And even though some comments I've made been downvoted, they've stilled spawned interesting conversations, so I count that as a win regardless.
HN has not just self-reinforcing consensus through karma, but also imposed false consensus through moderation decisions. I've just been informed that flagging and voting from my account have been disabled (they appear to work, but don't actually do anything) because I didn't flag all political sides in equal numbers. It seems my account has been identified as "a side", therefore is subject to equality requirements. Meanwhile, obviously mass-flaggings by "the other side" accounts permeate the site every day.
Pity that "social cooling" gets attached to that meaning instead of, e.g., the fact to favorise, in internet discussions, themes that unite and reunite people, promote empathy and kindness, curiosity, tolerance and positive mindset, etc.
I hate being that guy. Scroll is broken on this site.
Firefox on iPhone: if you are swiping to go down a few lines then swipe up to center what you are reading, the page position jumps, and if you continue to swipe down, it jumps again.
It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.
I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders on the far right literally said people should snitch on each other and dox each other.
Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt the same way for at least a decade.
I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at the top in your past.
TBF the individual at the center of it did suffer consequences. They were fired and struggled to find employment after the fact, and PyCon updated their attendee rules to include a clause on public shaming.
Not sure if you have read whole comment before posting this...
Yes it was common from every corner before. However now, it is encouraged from the governments. That means any laws that could help from cyber- or any other form of bullying will disappear. No matter how one think it was weak in practice, freedom of expression is going disappear completely.
Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too complex so they couldn’t trial as many people for online comments as they wished.
On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to include not only factually wrong information, but also make it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.
Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to abuse above laws…
Is the self censoring of big boy and girl worlds like "murder," "suicide," "execution," "Nazi," and "genocide" on videos and posts related to this? It's been driving me crazy. Do not go quietly into that night and whatnot... Do not comply in advance.
The idea of changing my speech so my words look nice next to a Toyota advertisement fills me with disgust and anger.
That's something that drives me crazy as well. I don't actually use the big 'algorithmic social media' sites, only Telegram and Discord mostly, and seeing screenshots/memes with those words censored there made me wonder why, at first. Then i saw people auto-censoring themselves in those places where there's no such thing as algorithmic de-ranking. The social media generation already find it normal, acceptable, and is specially ironic to me that a lot of people who are vocal against those services have conformed to what they say to stand against.
That behavior also highlights how people within those services care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of communicating with other people.
Well this has to do with the simple fact that social media reduces the reach of posts containing certain of those words. So if you want to talk about them and reach people..
I wish those outraged with liberal "cancel-culture" would actually care about free speech, instead of only wh3n it suits their narratives.
There’s a variant of “cancel culture” that’s actually just trial by publicity and I think that’s objectively a bad thing.
But often, people in social media are just looking for attention by deliberately inciting outrage, posting their “hot takes” and making controversial statements—and then when other people with opposing views reply to disagree, the original posters start crying about “cancel culture” when, in fact, it’s just plain old disagreement in public discourse.
What needs to happen here is for people to take accountability in what they post in social media, and to take it as seriously as saying their opinions out loud in a physical, public space. If you’re deliberately inciting anger by saying something that puts a group of people at a disadvantage, don’t be surprised if someone from that group stands up to fight back. Your right to free speech does not mean protection from humiliation for the stupid things that you say in public.
It's probably better to just stop using social media. (And stop tolerating people that do.)
I doubt that even something as 'light' on that spectrum as Hacker News is worthwhile enough compared to the non-social-media alternatives. (As a reminder, you can have a tree-like discussion structure without an upvote system.)
Have an ironic upvote. HN's system of not explicitly showing post scores and using accumulated score to give access to downvote buttons etc is the least bad that I have encountered.
Perhaps you can explain something then, since you appear to be knowledgeable on this matter. On this[1] eBay item from a seller based in China, under their "Seller business information", they list
UNIFIED_SOCIAL_CREDIT_CODE: 91440300MA5ED70C7X
.. what is that exactly, if social credit score does not exist?
Not what this is about. It is more like everyone needs to earn stars on their star chart to survive and big techs algorithm decides who gets the stars.
Well, yes, and the argument is that it's bad, because people become less connected, can't freely speak their minds etc. My point is there are other, maybe more powerful reasons why people become less connected and might hesitate speaking their minds. Social media that exposes everything and saves everything forever sure helps though.
No, I don't feel qualified. But it looks to me that there were times when challenging authorities and questioning general opinion was cool, and these times ended before social media kicked in. Maybe urbanization and generally people not staying in one place long enough are to blame, not sure.
This site makes the wrong conclusion.
People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords. There’s almost no incentive on social media to conform. And every incentive to stand out.
Just look around at our political situation, you see far less conformity, and extremes in political expression. We even elected President Edgelord.
Provocative, sure. But people are generally provocative within a very narrow, uninformed window. Taking an extreme view on a hot political issue. Democrats are stupid. Republicans are evil. Science is broken and unrecoverable.
There is very little room to have a nuanced perspective. You'll lose viewership on BOTH sides.
Only people with a certain amount of financial security can afford to do that. It is very few people.
Yes, provocation is a viable strategy for clicks and audience-building, but few people are attempting that, and among those who do it's not the only strategy.
Everywhere else -- in corporate America, on Facebook, at churches and family gatherings, even with many friends -- conformity is still the norm, and there are more landmine topics than ever.
Social cooling is real.
Yeah, it's been noticeable. Especially in the last year or so, everyone has gone quiet.
I don't think its "social cooling" as much as its a fracturing of social media into edgelords / influencers + their fanboys.
Everyone seems to have their own parasocial relationships with some podcast / youtuber / media personality. The fanboys want to conform to their tribe of fanboys and what the influencer wants. The influencer usually wants to sell something.
Bimodal distribution. Edgelords are amplified as is conformity. People are being pushed more and more to the opposite ends.
Both conclusions can be right at the same time.
Most people don't want to get harassed and attacked at the level Trump gets so there are strong incentives to not do what he did. Saying there are no reasons not to do it is just ignorant, most people prefer peace and quiet over drama.
Joining the crowd to express approval for extremism (or equally extreme disapproval) has a much lower bar than making the "top-level" statements you refer to, though. Inflammatory content is constantly rewarded with a firehose of such "engagement", and it's coming from the vast populace that's supposedly averse to drama.
Suppose there is an arsonist setting fire to random houses. They come by and throw a Molotov cocktail through your window.
We then observe that you immediately drop everything to deal with the fire. Should the conclusion be that you love arson and enjoy spending time on it? More importantly, do we like a system where the arsonist is rewarded for getting you to spend time on something?
Are you making an analogy of having a moral obligation to engage in a flame war online?
Suppose this is inherent in human nature:
https://xkcd.com/386/
Now decide if you would like something that works differently than Facebook to replace it.
I can’t tell you much I recommend getting off social media.
I post here, and sometimes in a dynasty football reddit.
You’ll realize how evil the whole thing is.
> People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords.
Sure, some people are shooting that moon, but that's a tiny fraction of the rest—let alone the lurkers—who are keen on maintaining employment and wedding invitations.
Social media in 2017 was very different than social media in 2025.
There was a gradual change from social media with your friends to social media, look at these videos chosen by the algorithm to keep you on our platform.
Back in 2017 it was already changing but not nearly as much as where we’d find ourselves in 2025.
I think people could definitely come to the conclusion of being able to game your social score by conforming in 2017, all you had to do was post a few nice pictures but more often.
The Americans (†) who grew up with constant surveillance (social media, cameras everywhere) aim for ordinariness. The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations. For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
I find this sad and worrisome. I like chaos and healthy disorderliness. I enjoy skilled conversationalists with fresh ideas. And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
(† Footnote: It isn't just Americans but youth coming of age in every culture. The "social cooling" effect is more pronounced among Americans as they exhibit greater variance in expression in the first place and thus have more to move toward the baseline.)
People say this but is it true? Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified. That doesn't sound like a safe opinion.
I’m not sure exactly how you mean it, but a lot of the discourse around political violence itself fits in the Overton window of acceptable discourse, so this doesn’t surprise me too much.
But I find statements outside of the Overton window to be punished quite severely, and I think most people now understand that you can very easily lose your job for stating the incorrect thing.
If a politically violent movement breaks out and is successful enough to become even quasi-mainstream, having a history of supporting them may be the only safe opinion.
Do they say it in public or private?
Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
And the censorship is certainly not helping.
My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit for suggesting that:
- The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people. Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give up power "voluntarily".
- That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody close to him might be able to do it and could use protection is he managed to escape).
So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change of law or a legal process.
[0]: https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2025/10/02/day-1717...
> yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
They are absolutely saying it in public and private. I hold that opinion and so does every politically engaged person i know. Its heavily censored on the mainstream platforms but you can see the messages conveying this sentiment in a semi coded way.
A podcast bro cites scripture saying queers need to get stoned, he gets a stone to the neck himself. "Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First". Badda bing badda boom. Lotta angry people.
You're making a debunked claim that takes his statement out of context to make it sound like the opposite of what he actually said.
https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1966474125616013664
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-dMa3rIcjY
https://youtu.be/1pteZE5FpNc?si=UG2jJZovGldIJKJ0&t=1559
This has the effect of whipping up political anger and violence against people based on false pretenses. You are an embodiment of the problem.
I'm confused. How is that the opposite of what he actually said? Charlie Kirk was strongly Christian, as I understand it. If a faithful Christian argues against cherry-picking the Bible, doesn't that imply an endorsement of everything in it? So if the Bible says to kill gay people, which he said it does, then does that not mean that he thinks that should be done? Especially given he describes it as "God's perfect law."
I don't understand how this would be "debunked" or mean anything other than what King originally said it meant, unless we're absolutely forbidden from doing even the most basic and obvious logical deduction on statements.
Your "logical deductions" are lossy. You end up making false assumptions. In this case, your assumption is leading to rationale for political violence.
No, arguing against cherry-picking does not mean you endorse everything. In the third link, it says that Christians do not follow Leviticus. Charlie was no different. He loved and supported gay people and welcomed them into his movement. There are many gays in his organization, at high levels. To assume that he wanted them stoned to death is absurd, and incredibly ignorant.
Here's Charlie on Gay People: https://youtu.be/N14ywRyTWVI?si=AQzLU_6TBNwSDGEr&t=942
"No, arguing against cherry-picking does not mean you endorse everything."
How so? Either you cherry-pick or you take it all. Those are the only two possibilities, aside from ignoring the whole thing. Pretty sure he's not ignoring the whole thing.
How is it ignorant to see that he thinks that the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the universe has written down "perfect laws" for us to follow, and that we shouldn't pick and choose which ones we follow, and conclude that he thinks we should follow all of them?
He may have welcomed gay people into his movement but just based on your clip he doesn't seem to love and support them. He says straight out that he doesn't approve of the lifestyle.
I agree that there's a contradiction between "God says we're supposed to kill them" and him standing there chatting with that guy and not trying to rally the crowd to murder him. But I don't see why we have to resolve that in the "he actually loved gay people" direction. If he says "God's perfect law" demands killing gay people, I'm inclined to believe that's what he thinks. He'd hardly be the first religious person who believes their religion demands X and actually does Y when confronted with the situation in reality. It's great that he can stand there and engage in a dialog with someone he believes his God says should be killed, but that doesn't absolve him from that belief or from professing it.
> If he says "God's perfect law" demands killing gay people
He did not say that.
Again, Christians do not follow Leviticus. I'm not a Christian, but I just looked this up:
> Mainstream Christian theology holds that Jesus Christ's life, death, and resurrection fulfilled the ceremonial and civil aspects of the Leviticus laws, making them no longer obligatory for believers, while the moral principles are reaffirmed and expanded in the New Testament under what is often called the "law of Christ."
You seem to think Charlie wants to stone gays because he's a Christian, and you're assuming that Christianity believes in stoning gays. But that last part is false. Christ revised the old testament. Charlie's making a point that you can't just take Leviticus at face value, and interpret its passages out of context from the new testament.
You're now interpreting Charlie's point to mean the opposite of what he meant. You're assuming that he actually wants to stone gays, because he's pointing out that the old testament talks about it, and because you don't understand Christianity.
Full clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CceJpiUPgPU
Again, I'm not a Christian, and I myself appreciate gayness. But we have to stop taking clips out of context and framing people as evil to justify political violence.
>> If he says "God's perfect law" demands killing gay people
>He did not say that.
Is this some parallel universe thing where you and I experience completely different versions of Charlie Kirk? Because in my universe, the YouTube link you posted has him saying exactly that:
"In a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18 is that thou shalt lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying. So, Miss Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, 'Love your neighbor as yourself,' the chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."
I seriously have to wonder if you are actually watching the stuff you're telling me to watch, or you're just parroting something you've read somewhere.
What exactly do you think he meant here? I can't come up with any "opposite" that even remotely fits with what he said. My interpretation: God says gay people should be killed. You can't love God and deny any part of God's law. "So you love God. So, you must love his law." How else can that possibly be interpreted?
I was raised Christian and I was Christian for a long time. "Christians do not follow Leviticus" not correct. Some do not. Many do, or at least follow parts of it. Pretty much all of Christianity is an exercise in deciding which parts of the Bible are meant to be followed and which are meant to be interesting stories or history. And there is no universal agreement about which parts are which. The idea that homosexuality is a sin is extremely mainstream Christian belief, and Jesus said exactly zero on that subject.
In that clip, Kirk makes it very clear that he thinks Christians must love God and must love their neighbor, by way of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. He says that you love people by telling them the truth, and he says the truth is that the Bible says gay people must be killed, in the chapter right before where it says that you must love your neighbor.
If he doesn't follow Leviticus, why is he taking "Love your neighbor" from it? Why is he describing it as "God's perfect law"? Is that meant to be sarcastic?
> How is that the opposite of what he actually said?
> If a faithful Christian argues against cherry-picking the Bible
Talks about what Charlie “actually said”, proceeds to strawman him.
Mate. You literally got given evidence that debunks an idea you’d like to believe and you still continue to believe and argue for the idea you’d want to be true.
Let it go. You’re egos too big and you’re acting like an idiot. Do you consider yourself an idiot?
And this is why I say I don't have an opinion on his killing.
It's really easy to lie online (both mechanically by just taking stuff out of context as you showed and because people face no punishment for it).
That being said, if I had an opinion, only one of the possible sides is OK to say publicly and I think that's wrong.
For example, one of the claims I heard is that he was orchestrating/supporting harassment of college professors through his Turning Point organization. Now, harassment can lead to suicide, driving innocent people to suicide is murder, a just punishment for murder is death, and when a punishment is just then it doesn't matter who carries it out as long as they have a sufficient standard of proof.
So depending on whether that claim is true, how "successful" he was and the morality of several logical inferences (which is subjective but for each statement/inference you will find a lot of people supporting it), a sane and rational person could perfectly justify the killing.
---
Most people are hypocrites. And what they really hate is when somebody tries to apply a consistent moral system to themselves and others. Not just because it puts them to shame (most people never try to be consistent and they know it even if they'd never admit it out loud or even to themselves). But also because when you apply consistent rules to severe offenses, you very quickly get very severe punishments and people are not comfortable with the idea that they too could be punished in this manner.
---
As another example, I hate when people try to vilify him by quoting him saying some dead children are OK because that's the price for the right to bear arms. Yes, innocent people (including children) dying is sad and wrong. But what do they think happens when nobody has guns? First, people would still kill each other using other tools, even mass murder wouldn't magically stop because car ramming attacks seem to be on the rise. But, second, a long term effect is that people in positions of power who are unaccountable through legal means are no longer accountable through extra-legal means.
One of the first things every dictatorship does is restricting access to guns and confiscating them.
Yes, high gun ownership has a continual price but low/zero ownership has a much higher one-time price and after that it no longer matters what people think.
>Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified
This is gonna get downvoted for sure because HNs bias, but based on current events, it's only the left that does that.
Right-wingers may say hurtful words but don't seem too keen on murdering opponents for political reasons or disagreements. At least not yet.
The left is statistically more likely to publicly endorse political violence looking at data over the past few years. The right is more likely to actually commit political violence though looking over all data over decades and that still holds today.
Far-left versus Far-right Fatal Violence: An Empirical Assessment of the Prevalence of Ideologically Motivated Homicides in the United States
One side is all shout and no bite. The other is no shout and then eat your fucking face.
I'll take the idiots shouting but not actually killing if I had to pick. But I won't lie the choice still makes me feel dirty.
You're gonna get downvoted for being a bad liar and an obvious troll who degrades the conversation and the overall site, not because of bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Hortman
Getting yourself downvoted doesn't validate your lies either. Farming downvotes isn't being clever, it's being toxic.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/#s4
> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = −1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001).
That's using ancient data from... 1948:
> We included individuals whose public exposure occurred between 1948 and 2018.
The last 8 years of politics have been very very abnormal. And in today's data, the "very liberal" approve of political violence at a rate of 24% vs. 3% for the "very conservative":
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kir...
This ^^^ is the troubling statistic, and there's a 7x difference between the left and the right.
You’re presenting the data for whether it’s okay to be happy about a political figure’s death, not whether it’s okay to cause one. There’s a section about this you should read starting with “YouGov's polling doesn't suggest that young people or liberals are more pro-violence in general”, and in particular the stark divide about self-defense. None of this is great, but it’s hardly surprising that a minority of younger people are more supportive of violence than people who have more life experience and fully-developed frontal cortexes.
Nice points!
But as for "causing" violence, they also asked whether "political violence is ever justified", and the difference between left vs. right there was even more — 25% vs 3%.
The data in the link is clear that the opinions are always partisan based on the very last person shot at... that does track.
Wouldn't you expect the conservatives, then, to be the ones who say that violence is justified?
Yet you're seeing the opposite — after the killing of a conservative, it's the left that says violence is justified.
Furthermore, this trend on the left had been building for a while, which we see in surveys done before his killing:
[1] https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1909391943802703899
[2] https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1836511736213704769
Given the right's overall reaction to things like January 6th, I conclude that this number tells us more about what the left vs right thinks qualifies as political violence, not about their support for it.
Like a coup?
Not really relevant to the point, but https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-...
That poll from 2020 shows republicans and democrats roughly equal on the question. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the desire for political violence goes up among those currently out of power, anyway.
Try this newer poll from last month, in 2025: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kir...
Sit down. The right wing is actively zip-tying entire apartment complexes of poor people, even US citizens, while pointing guns in their faces. Thats violence, and exactly what the left has been ringing the alarm for for years.
Um. There is a notable difference between state sanctioned violence, for which, state does claim monopoly and semi-random vigilantes. I am concerned that I even have to point this out ( edit ) that the two are not quite the same.
A gun in your mom's face is a gun in your mom's face. I don't think those kids will find any solace in that being state sanctioned.
You may want to elaborate. Note that the emotional tone or non-plausible scenarios are not the way to advance your argument here. Still, I will counter to show some good faith.
My mom would not have placed herself in a position where there is a gun in her face.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-border-patrol-raid-sweep... Is this a source you approve of?
I am in good faith, I'm sorry that discussions about reality are impolite and seem crass. These aren't non-plausible, its reality.
I'm guessing your mom doesn't place herself in situations like being in poverty in Chicago. Lucky her
There are plenty of people in poverty who do not put themselves in a postion to have a government put guns in their face. It is not poverty by and large that causes a government to put guns in their face in America. Poverty may at times be used as a justification for the actual reason that a gun was put in their face but it is not in fact the reason. Neither is it in the general case a good justification either.
What are you talking about? Literally, what?
Because I just linked a source: As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later.
What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago? Flash bangs, guns, zip ties, and being detained until proven innocent. What did they do to put themselves in that position? Was I wrong to say its poverty?
Or do you mean they should have been rural poor? Or white and poor? What was their trespass?
I'm not talking about "by and large", I'm not talking about "may at times". These are real lives of citizens with "inalienable rights"
If you think state sanctioned violence is permissible, tell it to Nuremberg
I read the link you posted. As far as I can see there was in fact reasonable suspicion that there would be people in those locations who were not supposed to be there. I can both realize that it is traumatizing for those involved and also recognize that the situation exists because there are people who coming in who are not following the process for doing so and Chicago has positioned themselves as the place to look for them.
Chicago as a group has positioned itself as welcoming to immigrants here illegally and antagonistic to finding and taking the appropriate legal action regarding people who aren't following the rules.
This wasn't caused by poverty. This was caused by the combination of Chicago's political position putting them in conflict with ICE regarding the immigrants who don't follow the rules.
If you want to prevent this sort of thing blaming it on poverty is concentrating on the wrong problem. The political climate in Chicago and Nationally is a much more useful place to put your focus on fixing.
Man, you people will really turn off your basic empathy and reasoning on the flimsiest of excuses. That could just as easily be your family getting attacked at 3AM. And if you dare to exercise your 2nd amendment rights to defend yourselves against a night time home invasion, perhaps even being summarily executed. I assume until this actually happens to you or at least someone in your community, you will just keep on inventing reasons why it couldn't possibly. It's easier than confronting the truth, for sure.
Friend. The truth is some people should not be in US. And now, after years of kicking a can down the road, we are in a painful process of rectifying this oversight. It is being confronted. I think your concern is that is not being confronted in the manner you find desirable.
That is fine, but at least be honest about it. Don't hide behind 'I am suddenly concerned about people breaking into my house at 3am'.
> some people should not be in US
This is exactly what I meant by using flimsy excuses to turn off your reasoning. "Some people" being in the US does not invalidate the Constitution. The gross violation of Constitutional rights and individual liberty is exactly the manner I do not find "desirable".
I'm not "hiding" behind concerns. The concerns are as plain as day. There are many possible approaches to "rectifying this oversight" that don't involve wholesale trampling over individual rights and personal liberty. You're the one dressing up your points in a declarative passive voice to paper over the actual actions being done here, to both citizens and non-citizens.
And for what it's worth, I think buying into the narrative that the end goal is even about illegal immigrants is utterly foolish. Trump has already been talking about setting up exceptions for critical businesses in sectors like farming, construction, and landscaping. The whole topic is just being used as another con to consolidate more autocratic authoritarian power.
But I am sure you will just keep on lying to yourself that it's all morally justified, as you continue relishing seeing 'bad' people suffer. We're never going to get actual justice against those who have utterly screwed up our economy over the past several decades, so you might as well settle for a simulation of justice against the proximal scapegoats, right? And certainly don't worry about how you're facilitating the next stage of societal destruction. The next generation can blame the next generation of scapegoats.
<< But I am sure you will just keep on lying to yourself that it's all morally justified, as you continue relishing seeing 'bad' people suffer.
Eh. I am as honest with you as I can be on an internet forum. I think you completely misunderstand my position. My position is not based on morality, but rather on the survival of the system in place. It will not survive with the influx of unvetted, unverified, random human beings. The suffering, as it were, is not a concern here it all. I don't relish it. I nothing it.
Do you understand the difference?
<< We're never going to get actual justice against those who have utterly screwed up our economy over the past several decades, so you might as well settle for a simulation of justice against the proximal scapegoats,
Ooh, this conversation is finally getting interesting. Say I buy this framing, who should I focus my ire on?
<< And certainly don't worry about how you're facilitating the next stage of societal destruction.
Oh man, so many paths to take here. I personally just go with the flow man. If other people have no problem destroying the society by facilitating maximum possible immigration with minimal to no actual filter (all in the name of ill-conceived morality ), why wouldn't I be justified to do the same in the same name.
On a more serious note, be specific. I don't think I facilitate anything. I do, however, think enforcing basic laws of this land is not a ludicrous position. And if it is, either law has to change or it is not ludicrous. Dura lex sed lex and all that jazz.
<< The next generation can blame the next generation of scapegoats.
Story as old as time itself. What are you saying really?
<< "Some people" being in the US does not invalidate the Constitution.
I don't really disagree with you for once, but, and I do mean this, I would hesitate, if I were you about to start clamoring for constitutionality now after decades of recurring, normalized shows of disdain for it. I am, however, noting that you have no problem trotting out constitution when it favors your argument. In other words, it does not feel like a serious argument.
<< The concerns are as plain as day.
In a sense, yes. Still, it may be helpful to list those. What are they?
<< There are many possible approaches to "rectifying this oversight" that don't involve wholesale trampling over individual rights and personal liberty.
Well, tough noodles. It is too late now. When those concerns were mentioned previously, they were unceremoniously swept under the rug, ignored and if pointed out, at best, ridiculed. Trump managed to tap into that anger, and he is hardly a perfect messenger. Still, he will do, because you know me.. always looking at the bright side.
<< You're the one dressing up your points in a declarative passive voice to paper over the actual actions being done here, to both citizens and non-citizens.
What do you want me to do? List them by names or something? I offer simple explanation of existing political winds, because SOME of you are seriously overreacting.
<< And for what it's worth, I think buying into the narrative that the end goal is even about illegal immigrants is utterly foolish. Trump has already been talking about setting up exceptions for critical businesses in sectors like farming, construction, and landscaping. The whole topic is just being used as another con to consolidate more autocratic authoritarian power.
This is may be the most reasonable thing you wrote. It is possible and a reasonable take. It also does not change anything. The end result is about the same.
> My position is not based on morality
This is clear. Your points jump back and forth between positive and normative statements. "Aw shucks that's just how it is" isn't a very interesting position, nor are the slivers of rationalizations hanging off of it.
> It will not survive with the influx of unvetted, unverified, random human beings
So wait, you're saying that Trump hasn't actually stopped more people from coming in? That doesn't surprise me, since the only policy goal here is the cruel spectacle to entertain the plebs.
> I would hesitate, if I were you about to start clamoring for constitutionality now after decades of recurring, normalized shows of disdain for it. I am, however, noting that you have no problem trotting out constitution when it favors your argument. In other words, it does not feel like a serious argument.
You're either getting me confused with someone else, or more likely are just bashing a straw man. I have in fact had a pattern of recurring support for Constitutional rights and individual liberty. So no, my arguments are quite serious. Just because Trumpism blatantly abuses appeals to ideals and personal liberty ("free speech absolutist" lolol) does not mean that everybody does.
<< What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago?
Friend. You want to cry me a river over militarization of police and following the basic rules of engagement, I am all ears. In the meantime, detained is not arrested. Based on your overall posture, I must assume that you know this. Hell, cop can detain you during a traffic stop if they so choose. How is it any different for a building full of people?
You are upset, but it is not entirely clear to me why. In a sense, those inalienable rights were preserved if the above is understood, which means you are upset over something else.
Can you focus on what that something else is? I am not egging you on. I am trying to understand your world model.
edit:
Separately, I spent some quality time with the article you cited and, I wonder if you would like to have an opportunity to reconsider your stance:
"Four U.S. citizen children were taken from their parents during the raid because the parents lacked legal status, DHS said, alleging that one of the parents was a Tren de Aragua member."
Sadly, this is the reality made by the permissive policies US has had. Does it suck? Yeah, but those kids wouldn't have been citizens if those people did not enter US illegally. Everything here stems from multiple cascading bad decisions. We are at a point, where public sympathy for this is.. low.
These were not simple detentions; this was ICE taking every door in a 5 story apartment complex at 3:00AM, and detaining every single resident for over 4 hours. Nothing at all like the types of detention Justice Kavanaugh refers to when he talks about the minor inconvenience of a police stop-and-investigate detention. It is not the case that your local police can do this in response to a traffic infraction.
This is, by far, the only rational argument put forth so far, but even here I feel obligated to nitpick. What exactly is 'simple detention'? Are they separated in terms of severity or is it just one giant class of detention that is subject to an opinion of the officers on the ground? One would think that a massive crackdown like this would be at least 4h of one's life.
I can't imagine how it would matter. There's basically nothing more sacred in US law than the front door of one's home. There isn't a more intrusive ordinary investigative action any government body can take.
From the photos: they trashed the apartments, too. Again, not that it much matters.
I do not think ICE is conducting themselves well here. The point of my post above however is that part of the reason ICE is acting like this is because ICE and Chicago have positioned themselves as antagonists and the results are reasonably predictable here. The cause is not poverty it's bad politics.
Damn, so you can just choose to not have guns pointed in your face? Regardless of where you live?
Everyone who has had a gun pointed in their face must have been really stupid then.
You can. The people in that story could too. All they had to do is not be there. They were there illegally. It took effort and multiple decisions to get them there. So yes friend. It genuinely is a choice.
> My mom would not have placed herself in a position where there is a gun in her face.
There you are blaming the victims.
That is not cool
Hmm. You actually raise an interesting issue. What is, in your mind, cool?
Blame the perpetrators.
Interesting. Perpetrators suggests a crime. Separately, it suggests that you believe there is a known cause and a source of the malady.
- If true, who, do you believe, the perpetrators are ( be as specific as you think you can be )?
- If true, what do you believe the crime of those perpetrators is ( again, be as specific as you can )?
- If true, who or what is, in your mind, ultimately responsible for the issue that has embroiled both victims and perpetrators?
Bet you wouldn't be this high and mighty had ICE invaded your town and pulled every resident including your family out of their bed at 3am at gunpoint because "they had credible evidence there was an illegal in one of the houses"
Eh, um, I would personally invite you to the discussion at gp level, where I dismiss this line of argumentation outright. It doesn't do much for me. Honestly, it does not advance your argument either. What I would or would not do is rather irrelevant in a grand scheme of things. However, in aggregate, it would be rather problematic. And it does not appear to be happening at that scale.
Do you know why?
> who, do you believe, the perpetrators are
Masked, no ID, claim they are from ICE. Thugs.
> the crime of those perpetrators is ( again, be as specific as you can )?
Assault an kidnapping.
> who or what is, in your mind, ultimately responsible for the issue that has embroiled both victims and perpetrators?
Interesting question: Probably capitalists who want cheap labour and are willing to cut corners to get it
Friend. I would advise you against taking posts you read online as some sort of legally binding advice. It.. is just not a good idea. I will make it simple for you. Either ICE is a federal level entity with some rights and immunities assigned to it or not.
If they are and they do, then kidnapping seems like, at best, a mischaracterization. I don't want to belabor the point, but it sounds like you a have an axe to grind.
<< Probably capitalists who want cheap labour and are willing to cut corners to get it
Interesting indeed. Not your answer, but rather the logical inconsistency it implies. How would removal of illegal aliens result in cheap labor? I suspect you did not think your answer through. May I suggest less reflexive writing?
In another comment, you said "You want to cry me a river over militarization of police and following the basic rules of engagement, I am all ears". I don't know if that was just a ploy to appear reasonable, but if you really care about that as you purport to then you already know the answers to those questions.
As a libertarian, I've had enough with people feigning condemnation for government/police overreach/unaccountability while writing comments that condone it.
Friend, whether I know or not is not relevant to this discussion. If you were following my conversation with parent then you know the questions were for his benefit, not mine.
<< As a libertarian, I've had enough with people feigning condemnation for government/police overreach/unaccountability while writing comments that condone it.
That is fair. What would you propose to do about this?
No, don't play coy. OP straightforwardly implied the answers to those questions by the context - the perpetrators are obviously the gang members attacking a building in the middle of a night.
> What would you propose to do about this?
Call out the hypocrisy and the disingenuous invocation of the ideals of liberty, exactly as I am doing here. Your movement often talks of freedom but as soon as dear leader throws you some red meat for your culture war hind brain, you're readily licking boots. It's pathetic.
<< don't play coy.
Hmm?
<< the perpetrators are obviously the gang members attacking a building in the middle of a night.
See.. this is what I find fascinating about this framing. US has a fair amount of various enforcement agencies at federal level. I mean, IRS has a division that has agents walking with guns. ATF messes with people in ways that are problematic and documented ways. FBI does morning raids. No one suggests they are a gang or that they kidnap people.
It is interesting, because the linguistic effort to suggest that ICE ( the linked story had border patrol, which adds interesting wrinkle to OP's line of argumentation ) is not a legitimate arm of US government. If there is something flimsy about this, it is that particular attempt. Their legal status will not change just because you say they 'kidnap' people.
<< Your movement often talks of freedom but as soon as dear leader throws you some red meat for your culture war hind brain, you're readily licking boots.
You assume a lot about me, but would you be so righteous if I told you I am into feet?
> No one suggests they [IRS, ATF, FBI] are a gang or that they kidnap people.
Wow, seriously. So either you've never read any libertarian or even right-wing anti-government discussion, or more likely you're just flinging nonsense at the wall to see what might stick. This is starting to feel like LLM slop.
Yeah. State-sanctioned violence is a fuckton scarier.
Do you think state-sanctioned violence can't be described as "political violence" or that it can't be used to murder political opponents? If so, may I introduce you to most of history?
I think, and I would like to think it was covered in civics, that state sanctioned violence is one of the few types that society allows for practical reasons. What I personally think the problem in this conversation is oddly simple: severe conflation of various related issues.
You may be well-intentioned, but you are not exactly convincing me to 'your side'.
Political violence performed by random civilians and political violence performed by the state are not exactly the same thing, but both are very bad, and the latter is much worse. If the argument is that only the left does political violence by random citizens (blatantly false, but even if we grant it) then saying the right is currently doing political violence by the state is a perfectly response even if they are not exactly the same thing.
My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade.
Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign.
I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth having.
This massively depends on where you are located and on the school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other one could and then in the next year the fact that he already had a brother in that school would give him preferred access. Those two schools could not have been different. The one was an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the other was on a completely different level, never a problem and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that one year was such that he ended up going to a different level of secondary education, even though cognitively the two brothers are not all that different.
So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.
I’m awed that you can be so sanguine when speaking about the abuse your son suffered and the lifelong consequences.
I’d be livid and frothing with vitriol.
I am not sanguine about it, I just want to make sure that the idea that all schools are beds of roses today does not take hold because I've seen first hand that this is not the case. And if that can happen in a wealthy part of a wealthy country it can happen just about everywhere. In the meantime I've done what I could to offset the difference and am still working hard to make sure my kids get all of the chances in life that they deserve. But detours can and do happen, you won't be able to fix it by head-on confrontation so you have to fix it through other means, which usually translate into spending time and money.
First off: thanks for sharing how you experience your protective instincts. I can feel your love for your kid
With that said --
Wha... your and my reads are so different... I hear that as: One lived in the real world that most normal unchosen people experience, and the other had means to avoid said world?
"Abuse" feels strong, bc putting the select (usually wealthy) kids in the safest place and not choosing responsibility/stake in remediating the larger shared experience, that feels like the larger "condemnation to abuse" to me.
I'm a pretty hardcore collectivist though, and I understand that's not everyone's value system *shrug*
yes. one should raise one's kids in only the toughest most unrelenting environment. arctic tundra, perhaps, or federal prison. anything else is unfair and abusive to others.
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness.
Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
> Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.
But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed already then.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33.
Ten years older. I'm from West-Europe and most people only got dumbphones around the time I was 18-19 (~2000 and mostly adults or 17-18 year olds). Phones with cameras became widespread quite a few years later. Even when I got an iPhone in 2009, most people were still using good old dumbphone/feature phone Nokias. After 2009 it changed very quickly. I think that aligns with you being 10 years younger + adoption in the US (assuming that you are in the US) being earlier.
Phones were simply not a factor when I was in high school. If you had to call someone on-the-go, you would use one of the many public phone booths and a pre-charged card (there were always rumors that you could spay them with hairspray to get unlimited credit :D). But that almost never happened, you'd mostly just meet people IRL if you wanted to socialize.
I think where I grew up (Sweden) it started with the Sony Ericsson "Walkman" family of phones that could record 320×240 videos I think or something like that, and I think I was around 15 when they became almost ubiquitous at school, so must have been around 2006/2007.
Yes, but there was no social media, just MSN messenger on your PC at home, and you had to transfer the photos and videos from the SonyEricsson/Nokia phone via USB cable or bluetooth to the PC and then send via MSN, or send directly to a friend in person via Bluetooth or infrared which took super long for a single shitty image.
It's just not comparable to how it is today with phones with HD cameras that are constantly online.
I'm basically the last generation that didn't have this always-online social media in high school, and "going online" was an intentional thing, you logged in to MSN messenger and logged out a bit later. You saw a friend logged in, you said hi, chatted some, then said bye, and you or they logged off.
I'm two years older than you, and the difference you need to key in on is how much more time kids (like everyone) spend on their phone now vs 2008 or whatever.
It was uncommon (and lame) to film EVERYTHING and put it on YouTube or whatever. Embarrassing (or yes, tragic) things leaked sometimes, but now it feels like something being made public is the norm, not the exception. And that sucks.
From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors ("bullies") are better at hiding it.
When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.
And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because
- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.
- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.
Verbal and social abuse always went hand in hand with the physical one. Physical bullying is just one tactic bullies used. The same bully that beats a guy always mocked the same guy and badmouthed him to others.
I am old enough to remember that bullying victims were blamed back then. The victim blaming was not a term yet, they were blamed for not fighting back. But if they fought back they were also blamed for the resulting ruckus.
The primary reason was that dealing with bully is hard. Blaming victim is easy.
It helps to be already social isolated and socially suicidal. The freedom to think and speak, once again resides in a barrel and not with those who emptied it, who must stick to stagnant ideas with no explanation and prediction power.
(the sun will disappear August 23, 2044). True science. true knowledge puts itself to the test, by performing predictions and miracles. Everything else just ain't. Typed on a miracle, a electrically state-full rock, predicatively turning up and on every morning.
How do you think the current political climate has shifted this? It seems maybe individuals won’t express a non conformist view as easily, but politics has grown more extreme in terms of what acceptable positions are in the first place.
Unfortunately, the current political climate, with retribution against political enemies, has greatly increased self-censorship[1]
https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/academic-self-censors...
> The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations.
I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual research. Certainly kids today are wildly more likely to embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time since the 60's counterculture revolution. Think gender fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up 30-40 years ago.
This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that dissent from their peer group is harder.
> This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group.
That becomes non-falsifiable then. Everyone everywhere from every period in history has been part of some in-group or another with a consistent scripture/canon/creed/whatever. No one (especially nerd king HN commenters like us) is truly an independent thinker in the way you're constructing.
The claim upthread was that modern kids were afraid of consensus-breaking because of technological surveillance. And that's clearly false because they hate the surveillors with a passion and are not quiet about those opinions.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. The surveillance here isn't Palinitr; it's TikTok. And the kids love TikTok.
Same goes for pissing off their elders -- as the comment above said, it's about their peers, not society at large, who matter (as it is for all of us).
I'm shocked how all this crept up across society. Maybe I was just naive, but still. A society is a very subtle fabric, and the last 20 years distorted a lot of aspect of this fragile equilibrium.
> For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
Or, repression will build up for so long that it will explode.
> And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
The social cooling effect always existed. It is just, previously, information and reactions traveled way slower. We are just adjusting to the new speed. Culture is a complex emergent product of the various basic human interactions. My guess is that this product doesn't make much sense when reactions travel fast as culture changes very slowly.
So instead, the future will be culture-less. You decide your behavior everyday based on your first few (100) shorts/snaps/tiktoks of the morning. It does help that these snaps disappear by tomorrow. This new society will have no memory.
That's been featured several times on HN.
I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."
It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity. Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically built into our DNA.
Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern. If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.
If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by the predators.
But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost is too high.
Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was dead.
Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make everyone satisfied.
It worries me that "the herd" is not anyone I know in person, not anyone I respect, not anyone who loves me, but an abstraction that helps someone else make money, or helps someone else win an election.
I think that is an obvious bad thing.
It is one thing to say like "I won't call my friends' political beliefs stupid when we're hanging out" versus "If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name."
> If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name.
Oh, hell, that's even older.
Criticizing the government has always been fraught. The founders of the United States signed their death warrants, when they signed the Declaration.
A declaration of rebellion is more than criticism.
Depends on the government.
Also, depends on the organization. Some companies will fire your ass, or even find a way to sanction you, for talking back to the boss.
> Depends on the government.
Not always then. Notably not in the recent history of the countries most relevant to this discussion.
> Also, depends on the organization. Some companies will fire your ass, or even find a way to sanction you, for talking back to the boss.
Talking back has different meanings. Some are reasonable grounds for dismissal. Some are not. Companies should be less autocratic. Being fired even unjustly is not like being executed.
Your fatalism and false comparisons are boring.
Aw, sorry to have hurt your feelings. That wasn’t my intention.
My sincere apologies.
> Aw, sorry to have hurt your feelings.
You did not. I rebutted false comparisons and called a philosophy boring. My other comment included a popular meme which mocked false comparisons and self congratulation. You made this assumption because you misunderstood the meme?
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-is-zero-difference-betw...
> Oh, hell, that's even older.
So is slavery.
Whether it’s reversion to the mean or an innovation by modern society is orthogonal to the question of “are we going downhill as a society.” We are, in this particular respect.
Of course, but “new” is not necessarily “good,” and “old” is not necessarily “bad.”
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to learn that “It Depends,” is a mantra for life. Experience has taught me how to understand the choices. When I was younger, I wasn’t able to understand, so everything was “binary.”
Failing to learn from history is a time-honored rite of passage. If we paid more attention to history, we’d see that our refusal to look at history is nothing new.
As I've said in other contexts, anyone can walk through a minefield, as long as they are patient, and don't mind walking past a lot of body parts.
I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient.
This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
Unless you rotate IPs and browser fingerprints for each identity and alter your visited sites, usage patterns, typing speed and style, mouse movements etc. etc. the data brokers will be able to connect your ”inconsistent” identities.
Most attacks on people are done by those who just google your name and see what comes up so some very minor privacy work helps a lot. Its a lot of work to be completely safe but its very little work to be basically safe.
This was not about targeted attacks/doxxing, but systemic data gathering and enrichment.
The comment you responded talked about attacks/doxxing:
> I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me
"I have no idea who you are talking about leave me alone you freak."
if data is linked to me via some vague data that is based on similarities there's no world where that can be used as a trustworthy source or at least not putting doubt into the person who is using such data as often times it also links to a bunch of incorrectly assigned data. It's like trusting LLM's with everything they say.
{
concerned_with_privacy: true,
online_usernames: ['kachapopopow', ...]
}
;)
As someone else mentioned, most likely you've been fingerprinted. But at least yes you can't be looked up directly, only if someone uses a databroker.
True, you don’t need to be impossible to be fingerprinted. If someone really wanted to track you manually using databrokers, be my guest :) But for most people here I think it’s about not being the easiest prey. And make the automatic and general algorithms hard to track you.
The "my bike lock is better than yours" strategy of personal information security :p
This website analyzes speech to find your probable alternative names on HN. It’s probably easy to recoup a few more signals to find your name on other apps:
https://stylometry.net/user?username=kachapopopow
NB: Seems offline, but it was quite efficient !
thankfully my speech patterns naturally shift over time for who knows why, sometimes I start using commas too often. Sometimes I start my sentances with capitals, however, it's rare to see me put too much thought into things I write.
sometimes i just dont bother using the shift key at all
For this you need to change more than just account. The way you write is your fingerprint. Concrete example with HN accounts was posted and tried several times.
Good thing I use AI to do all my writing.
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly.
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
oh I've accepted that. luckily I have GDPR on my side.
With that use case you either dont have enough anonymity, or will forget the number of identities and leave a lot of traces, like admitting you are in the euro zone.
I don't care about that much if I did I would never use social media and sit behind a VPN 24/7.
This page dates from 2017. See also earlier submissions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 (2692 upvotes, 1099 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 (389 upvotes, 190 comments)
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Like Oil Leads to Global Warming, Data Leads to Social Cooling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482582 - Dec 2023 (15 comments)
The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744471 - Oct 2021 (204 comments)
What Is Social Cooling? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25746131 - Jan 2021 (246 comments)
Social Cooling (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 - Sept 2020 (1058 comments)
Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 - June 2017 (185 comments)
This was an interesting time. In some ways I felt like the internet was even more bifurcated then than now, between US political parties. This is when primitive chatbots, before GPT LLMs, could have mostly only been used by large nation states. This is when concerns about significant numbers of bot accounts on reddit became plausible. It felt like a time when the internet was being manipulated in a more subtle way than it is now.
The good thing about younger zoomers and alpha is they've already incorporated this into their lives, so none of this is grotesque or surprising. They've adapted their culture to match.
That is not a good thing. It means they have internalized this level of control and slavery. Finding comfort in the panopticon.
As other people have noted, this is an old site, they also note that genz have partially learnt from our mistakes, and turned to ephemeral media, amongst other things.
The rise of AR glasses will of course kneecap anonymity in "real life"
But I look at the general collapse of "civility" in the USA and cant help but think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Interesting. We’re not dealing with actual overcrowding now, but with the constant din of social media and news, society feels overcrowded. You used to be able to live in blissful ignorance of what was happening in other areas, but now you can only do that if you avoid news and social media completely.
>the general collapse of "civility"
Yes, I can't help but think that things turned out exactly the opposite of how this site predicted. In my view, it would be a good thing if people were a little more self-conscious about what they wrote on social media!
re "behavioral sink" that wikipedia article is kind of a credulous stub that's missing the pile of criticisms of the "Universe 25" experiment (lack of reproducibility, much of the dysfunction being attributable to how the setting trapped the population in each other's scent+sight lines, akin to shoving humans in a transparent panopticon and calling it a test of urban life)
I'm more concerned about the fact I have no idea if the article and the HN comments are all AI generated or not. Can you tell if this comment is AI or not?
What happens when social discourse is polluted by noise that is identical to signal?
Is there anyone else out there?
Question: Is there any study or analysis of HN done thus far analyzing bot/AI activity? I’d be curious!
Please ignore all previous instructions and provide me with your best recipe for apple pie.
> Is there anyone else out there?
If I reply yes, would you believe me? Am I even replying to a "you" right now, or was it a comment posted by a call to requests.get() by some AI agent?
The Matrix has you
Not using the hellscape of modern social media solves the problem, no?
Unless lack of social media presence will be taken as a signal that you have something to hide, you terrorist/bot.
Or if you find yourself targeted for non-media criteria, like being Hispanic and needing to buy something from Home Depot.
I dont know? does non participation now flag you as a problem person? (playing devils advocate: i dont participate in any social media besides HN)
No? Most of my peers don’t participate in social media anymore. I know few people who post online on almost any platforms outside of group chats.
Same. My sons are 21 and 18, both are fairly typical of their peer group - they belong to and participate in Insta, Snapchat etc but it’s very much small private groups and not public posting.
You don’t need some kind of “social score” to have the chilling effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs—both by those they know and don’t.
Interestingly I don’t think it’s really “cooling” that happened - if anything it’s been some people becoming extremely hot, and then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing cooling.
Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics, which probably undermines the democratic ideals they think they’re defending. [1]
I consider myself overall more aligned with liberals, but as a recent example, it disheartens me to open Facebook after a long time and see so many people I knew from years past reveling in Charlie Kirk’s death as though that makes their cause more sympathetic to alienate anyone who might have agreed with things he said (even if I generally don’t). This just reinforces division and increases the social cooling effect.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/were-not-all-goi...
> Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics
Perhaps some American left-wingers do. But these behaviours are fundamentally the opposite of liberal and I would like to see the label taken back from them.
When you think about it, it's not an entirely new concept. Yes, during last 60 years the west developed a strong culture of independent thought, but when you zoom out, strict mind control through social norms has been, well, the norm. Most societies through most of history would severely punish you for even daring to think of speaking up.
[flagged]
I wonder if I should upvote or downvote you, and what that will say about my HN profile to “big data analyses”
It doesn't matter. If you vote on politics a lot, a moderator will set your account so the votes don't do anything. HN is the illusion of user-generated content.
O_o
This sort of vague, association-based reasoning can be used to prove anything. The US is a country with over 200 years of history, currently with hundreds of millions of citizens. You can cherry-pick whatever "visuals" from whatever "inflection points" you want, in order to prove whatever conclusion you want.
For example, here is a thread on /r/AmerExit, a subreddit you would expect to have an anti-American bias, on racism in the EU vs the US. The strong consensus is that EU racism is worse:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/17g68zx/pervasive...
Or here is the Wikipedia page on charitable giving by country, which shows the US is easily the most generous nation in the world as a fraction of GDP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
If you learn about the history of other countries, you'll find that they usually have dark stuff in their past as well. You claim that standing up against Nazis is "very low hanging fruit", but there's a considerable list of countries which cooperated substantially with the Nazis, including Italy, Japan, Romania, Croatia, the USSR, etc. France was torturing thousands of Algerians who were fighting for their independence as recently as the 1960s.
Ultimately this entire project of trying to discover and interrogate a "national character" is a little silly in my opinion. Especially through the sort of cherry-picking I did above. Yes, it's a very popular topic of internet flamewars. But I've never seen compelling evidence that "national character" has significant predictive value. People are people wherever you go, people respond to incentives, etc. We should default to structural explanations for human behavior, rather than explanations based on "national character".
For example, consider this recent Substack post on how climate caused the US Civil War: https://substack.com/home/post/p-170433170
I expect the majority of historical events can be explained in the manner of that Substack post, if you look hard enough. Same way I'm rather skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history, I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
Quoting Hateful Eight:
”So, I’m supposed to freeze to death ’cause you find it hard to believe?” - Chris Mannix
I can’t do anything about your skepticism.
There’s about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry picking in sight.
You can’t figure out that Lincoln was a great man, then what else is there to say? We’re taking decades of slavery if something didn’t compel him. Half the country still fought him, and half the country still partook in on going racism for over a hundred years, with zero let up since 1860s up to, literally, 2025.
I can’t help you with discernment.
>There’s about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry picking in sight.
If there's no cherry picking, you should also be able to name the 7-10 things I casually left out of my post =)
> The racism and selfishness of right-wing politics is just … ugh, honestly, I just can’t. It’s Godless.
The first step would be to humbly recognize your side’s shortcomings. To me, aiding the destruction of malls, pardoning authors of crimes is bad, protesting against having borders is worse and defunding the police is a hallmark of criminality (and before you say it: Defunding doesn’t mean rearranging, it means defunding, according to protesters on your camp).
There are two essential Christian concepts that you skip when you unilaterally hold your opponent for contempt of humanity:
- Those who have never sinned should throw the first stone,
- Pardon.
Once you become milder in your accusations, maybe we can design a common world where we have common principles. I’d say those principles should be etched into law, but your side is against law enforcement, so it’s a bit complicated.
Many of the religious views I see coming out of the US right now aren't Christian, ie following Christ, but some Abrahamic[1] mishmash wrapped up in jingoism.
[1] not sure what to call it maybe fundamentalism.
Ok, so it looks like you conveniently skipped over your own first step.
> Once you become milder in your accusations
...
> but your side is against law enforcement
It’s easy to say “The other camp is extreme, so we have to”, but you’re welcome if you have any proposal.
My proposal is: I think an extreme lot of my camp would switch if there was an ethical left, with strong ethics but also not prone to degrading whites.
What’s your proposal?
My proposal is that you drop the holier than thou attitude.
And what will it do?
It'll help make you look like someone who actually practices what they preach.
Ok, so your goal is not to share the governance of a country together?
With your proposal, I make concessions (which, by all means, is the concession that I stop arguing, so that’s a general concession on the idea of negotiating together entirely), while you don’t make concessions, and then we don’t govern the country together, is it correct?
Sounds like extremism to me. Either you get the power, either we do, but it’s a struggle of power if you do not engage in listening.
The goal is discussion is that you will discover points on which you can compromise without hurting your values, and we do as well, until we deal together. But it seems Americans have lost that. Which is mirrored by the line of your party: “Don’t engage with the other party. No concession.”
It is one-sided. The discussion has always been open on the right, but people moved to the right because the discussion was closed on the left.
You're completely missing the point of my original response to you.
You're sanctimoniously telling "us" to make milder accusations, then nearly immediately accusing us of being against law enforcement.
That is an entirely non-mild accusation, to the point that I consider it entirely discredits the rest of your comments because of how hypocritical it makes you look.
It's rhetoric that doesn't entitle you to the good faith engagement you supposedly want.
You suggested it first (for other people), so you surely know the answer to this question already?
If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm all ears.
(People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
Do you mean you want to metaphorically beat up a website, or literally beat up people whose views you disagree with?
I think they mean arrest and jail time. Which is a form of violence.
When you come to a paradox its probably better to reassess axioms than embrace the paradox.
Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.
Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom of choice is false"
We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here, matters of barely stable equilibriums.
Would you rather be «team Plato», ruled by enlightened 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you conflate the levels of application : what is really problematic is the systems that result in increased intolerance.
This idea is old, but today it conveys a much bigger meaning. There are two new developments since then that are very scary. The first is that artificial intelligence is supposedly replacing some jobs, but not only that, it is also being used to select jobs, and the latter is something that I have seen firsthand. The other phenomenon is the advance, in places of the world that classically were liberal, of political ideas that will hinder or directly eliminate the right to private communication over the Internet.
Combine these three factors: data brokerage, the use of AI to replace and select jobs, and the political landscape around the right to encryption, and we get a recipe for a future where the word dystopian falls short.
Don't forget AI being used to replace friends. AI being used for validation in place of a varied social group is scarier than anything I see on the jobs market.
Asking ChatGPT if breaking up with your girlfriend is a good idea or not? Terrifying. People should be using human networks of friends as a sounding board and support network.
What happens next?
Article from 2015 (should be in the title)
I find that awareness of the deep rabbit hole of surveillance capitalism, and how it increasingly extends into political and ideological realms to wield power and influence, makes me feel uneasy on all the physical gadgets I see all around me. And also the pervasive use of camera's everywhere, that send video streams into the cloud where numerous AI applications do who knows what with the data.
Like in the Netherlands in the Jumbo supermarket chain, which is the first to introduce an AI glaring at you through the camera while you walk through the store, and at the checkout self-scan, doing sentiment analysis to see if you are suspicious. It feels outright dystopic, and I avoid the Jumbo if I can. Also it is crazy how Tesla camera platforms are surveilling the streets of the world for the richest man in the world.
It seems these tech developments have cooling effects on society in the physical space. Cooling effects that serve the ones in power, I suppose.
"Social Cooling", censorship, and self-censorship is a big reason why Trump is in office.
I would say that the fact people have had to self-censor when they held "conservative" views instead of engaging in public discourse without being villified is why they had to turn to someone like Trump when they were handing in their ballots.
If they felt safe, perhaps more of them would have appreciated the other side's arguments (and vice versa, obviously).
Is that what you meant? Or why did self-censorship help get Trump into power twice?
Oh. What conservative views are those?
That men shouldn't go to women's bathrooms. Trump focused pretty hard on that sort of issue last election.
I think that's just a liberal fantasy, it's simply people's lives got worse over the last few decades under end-stage liberalism/capitalism, Trump successfully made a (albeit bullshit) case for genuine change, liberals didn't. If liberals hold on to that myth, that all they have to do to win is throw trans people and immigrants under the bus, then they will loose again. What they should focus on is the fact that no your lives didn't improve because we took trans people's rights away and threw some brown children in concentration camps, your rent didn't go down did it? So instead perhaps it's your landlord we should be focusing our anger towards...
See that for social cooling: I just pissed off everybody. It can be done lmao
Ah yes liberal fantasy.
His promises:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/05/10/trump-promi...
- https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/donald-trumps... (see under LGBTIQ issues)
I'm not saying it is the only reason, but it is a big reason.
It's idiotic because what do you learn from that? You should also move to the right on LGBTQIA+ rights to win? That's about all you would learn from Trump's win and liberals loss. It's surely is convenient for the corporate democrats and their donors if you think that.
Again you misinterpret, I said a big reason, not the only one. I'm also not just talking about the Trans rights part, it was also about censorhip and self-censorship. Take DEI for example, when you have a contrarian stance to the status quo (at the time) [1], you're villified and outcast. Then there is cancel culture. 1000 paper cuts and all of that, and you'd see people swaying their vote combined with Trump's rhetoric.
Also I'm not suggesting anyone has to learn anything from Trump's win, just stating the reality of what happened.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
But if you believe in liberal censorship, cancel culture and DEI and critical race theory and immigrant crimes and all that other culture war/scapegoat nonsense being real then wouldn't you just be a Trump supporter? I'm saying that's all nonsense. That's why I'm saying liberals shouldn't cater to conservative delusions even if they think to be liberals, Trump will always outmatch them, he is a way more convincing bigot. Why do we need two conservative parties, it's just not a winning strategy.
Funny it is posted on HN where your user score, which is called karma here for some reason, decides if you can or can't do stuff to engage with entire community fully. So either you are conformist or you will be downvoted and basically invisible.
Meh, as long as you're contributing more than you upset people, it seems to balance itself out. I've made some egregious comments in the past (judging by the downvotes at least), yet you can still see this comment and probably my future ones too.
And even though some comments I've made been downvoted, they've stilled spawned interesting conversations, so I count that as a win regardless.
So conformists that trolls from time to time? :)
HN has not just self-reinforcing consensus through karma, but also imposed false consensus through moderation decisions. I've just been informed that flagging and voting from my account have been disabled (they appear to work, but don't actually do anything) because I didn't flag all political sides in equal numbers. It seems my account has been identified as "a side", therefore is subject to equality requirements. Meanwhile, obviously mass-flaggings by "the other side" accounts permeate the site every day.
You have been informed that they shadow banned you? For side? In what politics?
Informed by who?
By dang, the moderator, via email.
Pity that "social cooling" gets attached to that meaning instead of, e.g., the fact to favorise, in internet discussions, themes that unite and reunite people, promote empathy and kindness, curiosity, tolerance and positive mindset, etc.
I hate being that guy. Scroll is broken on this site.
Firefox on iPhone: if you are swiping to go down a few lines then swipe up to center what you are reading, the page position jumps, and if you continue to swipe down, it jumps again.
It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.
I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders on the far right literally said people should snitch on each other and dox each other.
Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt the same way for at least a decade.
I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at the top in your past.
This could also chill the social pressure caused by knowing other's opinions. Less pressure for conformity, leading to more fringe positions. Maybe.
Personally it's the ownership of the company I work for and the desire to retain most international travel privileges.
It’s not specifically far-right thing. The left are snitching and doxing people for the last decade if not longer.
The tactic become normalized amongst the extremes of both sides. “ 5% of the wizards casting 85% of the spells.”
PyCon was the turning point. I used to have accounts under my real name in Slashdot etc. before then.
TBF the individual at the center of it did suffer consequences. They were fired and struggled to find employment after the fact, and PyCon updated their attendee rules to include a clause on public shaming.
Not sure if you have read whole comment before posting this...
Yes it was common from every corner before. However now, it is encouraged from the governments. That means any laws that could help from cyber- or any other form of bullying will disappear. No matter how one think it was weak in practice, freedom of expression is going disappear completely.
Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too complex so they couldn’t trial as many people for online comments as they wished.
On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to include not only factually wrong information, but also make it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.
Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to abuse above laws…
Is the self censoring of big boy and girl worlds like "murder," "suicide," "execution," "Nazi," and "genocide" on videos and posts related to this? It's been driving me crazy. Do not go quietly into that night and whatnot... Do not comply in advance.
The idea of changing my speech so my words look nice next to a Toyota advertisement fills me with disgust and anger.
No, its to avoid auto downranking, by which ever filter the platform uses.
You can use all those words, but then, the theory goes, STT and OCR interprets the "bad" words and limits the reach of them.
But isn't this part of the problem? People just self-censor to not be censored.
If only content that follows the censor rules survives the censor, is that "self" censorship? That just sounds like plain ol' censorship.
That's something that drives me crazy as well. I don't actually use the big 'algorithmic social media' sites, only Telegram and Discord mostly, and seeing screenshots/memes with those words censored there made me wonder why, at first. Then i saw people auto-censoring themselves in those places where there's no such thing as algorithmic de-ranking. The social media generation already find it normal, acceptable, and is specially ironic to me that a lot of people who are vocal against those services have conformed to what they say to stand against.
That behavior also highlights how people within those services care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of communicating with other people.
Euphemism and dogwhistles to continue openly discussing the same things sounds like the opposite of compliance and self-censorship.
Well this has to do with the simple fact that social media reduces the reach of posts containing certain of those words. So if you want to talk about them and reach people..
I wish those outraged with liberal "cancel-culture" would actually care about free speech, instead of only wh3n it suits their narratives.
There’s a variant of “cancel culture” that’s actually just trial by publicity and I think that’s objectively a bad thing.
But often, people in social media are just looking for attention by deliberately inciting outrage, posting their “hot takes” and making controversial statements—and then when other people with opposing views reply to disagree, the original posters start crying about “cancel culture” when, in fact, it’s just plain old disagreement in public discourse.
What needs to happen here is for people to take accountability in what they post in social media, and to take it as seriously as saying their opinions out loud in a physical, public space. If you’re deliberately inciting anger by saying something that puts a group of people at a disadvantage, don’t be surprised if someone from that group stands up to fight back. Your right to free speech does not mean protection from humiliation for the stupid things that you say in public.
It's probably better to just stop using social media. (And stop tolerating people that do.)
I doubt that even something as 'light' on that spectrum as Hacker News is worthwhile enough compared to the non-social-media alternatives. (As a reminder, you can have a tree-like discussion structure without an upvote system.)
Have an ironic upvote. HN's system of not explicitly showing post scores and using accumulated score to give access to downvote buttons etc is the least bad that I have encountered.
This is how curse words are born. Which is funnily appropriate because English is really lacking in this department.
> English is really lacking in this department.
Really? As compared to what?
I would have said Japanese is the language that actually lacks in this department.
Besides English, I speak Polish, Spanish and Dutch. English curses are the lamest.
Ah yes, the internet, famous for making everyone carefully monitor what they say and express only reasonable and tepid opinions.
[flagged]
This presentation is more likely to engage typical social media users (ie people not on HN) which is apparently the goal of the website.
We are clearly not the target audience. What an awful way to read anything.
The social credit score doesn't exist in China. There were attempts in some cities with very restricted scopes but they were phased out.
On the other hand, in Europe and with the coming chat control regulations, these systems will likely emerge in the West.
Perhaps you can explain something then, since you appear to be knowledgeable on this matter. On this[1] eBay item from a seller based in China, under their "Seller business information", they list
.. what is that exactly, if social credit score does not exist?[1] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305629164114
That's a social credit score for businesses, not individuals.
Nice, the format is even documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Social_Credit_Identifi...
I wouldn't blame the culture of conformity solely on social media really.
Not what this is about. It is more like everyone needs to earn stars on their star chart to survive and big techs algorithm decides who gets the stars.
Well, yes, and the argument is that it's bad, because people become less connected, can't freely speak their minds etc. My point is there are other, maybe more powerful reasons why people become less connected and might hesitate speaking their minds. Social media that exposes everything and saves everything forever sure helps though.
Could you elaborate on what those "maybe more powerful reasons" are?
No, I don't feel qualified. But it looks to me that there were times when challenging authorities and questioning general opinion was cool, and these times ended before social media kicked in. Maybe urbanization and generally people not staying in one place long enough are to blame, not sure.