The article has good points, but all of them summed up times 10 is still child’s play compared to the Cultural Revolution proper. I’m sorry, but this kind of sensational labelling is exactly the one thing Americans don’t need right now, and it’s a shame since, again, the article does have many good points.
Personally as a continental philosophy academic prior to software, its fascinating that a species of Michel Foucault interpretation became the predominant Liberal/Progressive discourse
Use a feed reader to access sites like HN instead of the front page, that way you get to see all content which has been posted in the order it has been posted - there is no ranking nor any direct censoring.
People of color are oppressed in the US, but “socialist revolution” is not a solution. This is a deep cultural problem that must be solved from kindergarden-age. Well educated people can defend themself.
In what way are 'people of colour' - between quotes because as far as I'm concerned they're just people [1] - oppressed in the US? I don't just blindly swallow the narrative espoused by BLM nor do I just blindly accept the opposite. For more than 2 weeks I've been listening to interviews with people who say that the narrative is in fact incorrect, that they themselves lived in the areas where the oppression should have been rife but - again according to them - did not seem to be. Many of these people put the blame for the disparity in income and outlook on social programs which have led to the dissolution of the family which is supposed to have led to the majority of children growing up in a single-parent household combined with the fact that schools are paid directly using local taxes which leads to poor neighbourhoods having underfunded schools. The lack of fathers, according to them, leads to a lack of male role models which in turn leads to boys finding their role models elsewhere, often on the street where they see gang bangers sporting fancy goods and gaining status. Many of the people I listened to found other role models to follow - one of their grandparents, a retired police officer, their own parents who came to the USA and built and existence for themselves and their children, a teacher in school, etc. Some of them ended up in academia, some of them started a business, some did well in sports in one way or another, some went into politics. Some are religious and pull that factor into the mix, others are secular or atheists. None of them seemed to be dirt-poor, nor did any of them seem to be rich, they all seemed to be part of the middle class.
All of them are, to use the term I dislike, 'people of colour'.
It can not be the case that both sides have it right here - either there is systemic oppression against people based on their skin colour or there is not. They claim this not to be the case and they back up their claims with data. They do not claim that there are no occurrences of discrimination based on skin colour but they do claim that these are just that, individual occurrences. What makes it possible for these people to succeed and thrive where so many others fail to do so? Either the people I mentioned have it right and the cause lies in the negative effects of social programs which keep people tied to the state as the source of handouts, keeping them alive but in poverty, or those who claim that 'people of colour' are oppressed in the USA have it right and the ones I have been listening to for the past week live in a fantasy.
The people I listened - and listen - to do not get heard in the media for some reason, probably because their point of view does not fit the preferred narrative. They get called bad names like 'Coon' and 'Uncle Tom' in the cesspit of social media. When I hear them talk they sound convincing, when I check the statistics they cite they seem to corroborate their position. To me it seems they have a better grasp on the actual situation than those who makes claims about systemic racism but, not being an American, I can not be sure. I can just observe, read, listen, compare to similar situations in my own experience and my own environment and draw my own conclusions. Those conclusions lead me to believe they are closer to the truth than the loud voices heard in the media. They do not claim that there is no discrimination, they claim there is no systemic racism. I know discrimination and racism exist, they even seem to be on the rise - there are not many Jews left in the city of Malmö for this reason - but that is not the same as systemic racism. I tried to table this subject before [2] and got a number of links related to what is claimed to be systemic racism related issues in reply. I followed the links and found that most of the mentioned issues were either not indicative of systemic racism or are mentioned as not being related to such in the interviews I've been listening to. My conclusion still stands, either those folks I've been listening to are deluded or the ones on the front pages of the news magazines are.
[1] Why I dislike that 'people of colour' term: From when I went to primary school it has been drilled into me that skin colour is not important, that it is merely superficial, that we're all people, that you should look beyond such things like you look beyond hair colour. That culture is what binds us no matter what colour we have. This seemed to work, things were getting better in my country (the Netherlands), culture did seem to be the binding factor - and in other cases the dividing one. Culture, not colour. And then... things changed. Where before it was not done to be focusing on that superficial aspect of skin colour suddenly a movement made itself heard which did nothing but focus on skin colour. And, lo and behold, there actually is more discrimination and racism in society now than there was before that movement got started. The cause-and-effect of this is unclear since this event more or less coincided with the arrival of a large number of migrants from the Middle-East and Africa but to me it certainly feels like this renewed focus on skin colour certainly did not make things better, nor does the expletive-laden simplistic rhetoric and labelling espoused by proponents of this movement.
Weeeell... do people keep packed bags by the door, for when political police comes to deport them to Siberia (Alaska?), or maybe shoot them in the head and dump in a ditch?
USSR existed for over 70 years and people there have seen a lot of varieties of oppression. “Silence is Violence” is one of them. “Kitchen Talks” too (you cannot say anything to random people and only to closest friends/relatives at home). Be ready for a new life, comrade.
Good point. Still, even now in Russia (never mind USSR), political opponents are put into psychiatric hospitals. In USSR there was a total state monopoly on media (propaganda), you could have your life ruined for not toeing the party line or not turning up at Communist fetes.
Things in the US look very ugly to me as an outsider, but still they got nothing on proper totalitarian state. Getting closer though!
Now that you have mention that... Add some unquestionable 3-letter agencies, "national security concerns" and "spies and outside-funded agitators are everywhere", and we are getting quite closely to what I remember from end of 70s/beginning of 80s. sigh
Well, funnily enough, I’m sure America’s opponents are helping to stir the mess. I’m sure roubles or yuans flow in via crypto or whatever to help stir trouble.
Of course not out of support for a noble goal, or a low desire to watch a fight, but to destabilise the situation.
Still, it’s America’s fault for getting to this point...
I'm sure they are, but the opposite is also true: every disordered regime or pressured state points to foreign interference as the reason for strife. There are distortions in both directions and not really any reliable information.
The mainstream media seems shockingly Soviet now, too, perhaps with the difference that more people still believe it. Do you agree? I'd like to hear your comparison.
One difference from the USSR is that there remain plenty of alternative sources on the margins. They're shut out of the mainstream, but they're a lot more accessible than samizdat. It will be interesting to see if they get shut down. I don't think they will. I don't think the future is full-Soviet, but it may be neo-Soviet. We've come further in that direction already than anyone expected.
Another difference from the USSR is that it's a binary system (Dems vs. Repubs, CNN vs. Fox) rather than a monolithic one.
Well, history doesn't repeat itself exactly, so current situation is very different in details but it's basically the same. Samizdat of these days is much more accessible indeed.
To me Dems/Repubs, CNN/Fox look the same, just different wings of the same bird.
It's really annoying to me that Hacker News is the forum which I regard as having the highest bar for conversational civility, but sadly the community completely refuses to discuss anything besides tech news and startup cheerleading.
Bluntly, if I wanted that, I'll go somewhere else. Speaking as a non-American, American politics already takes up far too much oxygen in every dang forum I participate in. I appreciate places where I can find respite.
And I say that while commenting on HN about an American political post because when I see them, I just can't frickin' help myself... sigh
Not even just the submissions, these sort of articles end up in discussions that break majority of thr In Comments guidelines, shattering any illusions that HN is somehow superior to everywhere else on the internet.
IMO, I don't think the articles should neccesarily be flagged, as the rules seem kinda loosely interpreted on this stuff, but more of the comments should probably be flagged than get so.
Yes, you should be allowed to call him that. No, you should not be allowed to punch him in the face, and should be arrested and jailed for doing so.
Violence is justified to protect yourself or others from violence. Not from speech, from violence. There are some small grey areas, but this isn't rocket science.
This line of thinking is almost always a less-than-useful simplification.
Should punching Richard Spencer be punishable by the law?
Yes.
Is punching Richard Spencer "moral"?
No.
"Should" you punch Richard Spencer?
No.
Is punching Richard Spencer "understandable"?
... this is grey. However, if you have a sufficient ideological motivation in a certain direction, the argument essentially makes itself: Violence! It's bad. If you're not motivated in the opposite direction, it's the easiest thing in the world to stop there. If you're motivated enough, you can tack on some extra easy hops in logic: "You're advocating violence! You're evil!"
Yet if somebody drives a car into a group of fellow citizens whom you know or identify with, killing one of them, and a news outlet puts out a story calling the dead a whore, you'll quickly find yourself willing to meditate on the scenario more thoroughly.
> But then there are sentiments that are beyond the pale.
A lot of people are working, successfully it appears, to make the pale a lot smaller by publicly destroying reasonable peoples' lives for the most minor infractions as a warning to the rest of us.
From my Catholic perspective it is remarkable how well it tracks with heresy, for context: dissent from one point of the Magisterium makes one a heretic. Analogy being dissent from one point of the most recent iteration of liberalism makes one worthy of unpersonage / cancellable. Recent high profile target being JK Rowling discussed here a few days ago
It’s not about conservatives. It’s not just “words taken down”. It’s regular good people who lose their job and career. For example, read the story of Professor Steve Hsu: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/16/open-thread-156-25/
This strikes me as awfully glib. My parents aren't racists and they empathize with the police reforms that BLM is advocating for (so do I).
But they were raised with the belief that racism was due to prejudice. To them, racism is judging someone by their skin color / background rather than the actions of that individual.
They don't buy into the idea of microaggressions and implicit bias. To many nowadays that makes them racist individuals. To me that begs the question, what behavior today might be seen as racist decades from now?
"We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies,” Kendi said. “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course [Stamped from the Beginning] shows that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there.
The self-interest: The Portuguese had to justify their pioneering slave trade of African people before the pope.
The racist idea: Africans are barbarians. If we remove them from Africa and enslave them, they could be civilized.
"We can understand this very simply with slavery. I’m enslaving people because I want to make money. Abolitionists are resisting me, so I’m going to convince Americans that these people should be enslaved because they’re black, and then people will start believing those ideas: that these people are so barbaric, that they need to be enslaved, or that they are so childlike that they need to be enslaved.”
We're absolutely doing things that future generations will find abhorrent. And as our thinking as humans evolves, I hope we'll also change our behavior. But let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. When we are aware that behaviors and symbols are hurtful to other humans, and we genuinely believe that other people should be able to live without fear, then we should change both.
We're not going to get it 100% right, or find 100% of the situations where we're screwing it up, or even come up with the right solutions right away, but it's too often that conservatives simply want to throw their hands up and either downplay or outright ignore the problem in order to say it's not solvable or not worth solving. That's just cowardice, and we can do better.
That's why I can never be a conservative. I think sometimes the left is absolutely full of it, but the voices I hear from the right sound as if they're saying "let's do nothing about our current social problems," at least to my ear.
I'd rather have imperfect progress than no progress.
>I'd rather have imperfect progress than no progress
Progress for the sake of progress is not progress. The fact that there is a problem doesn't mean that someone has to do something when there's nothing productive to be done.
People are apparently unaware that we are living in an unprecedented globalist diversity experiment, and there's no reason to believe that forcing disparate cultures to live in such close proximity to each other will end positively. In fact history has repeatedly shown the opposite.
> [...] too often that conservatives simply want to throw their hands up and either downplay or outright ignore the problem in order to say it's not solvable or not worth solving. That's just cowardice, and we can do better.
I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of conservatism. My perception is that conservatives disagree with me over the problem set, not the idea that we should solve problems.
Sometimes conservatives even agree on the problems set, but disagree with the proposed solutions. That isn't just obstructionism. If you actually care about solving problem X, then a "solution" that won't actually help isn't useful. Opposing the proposed solution doesn't mean that you don't care about problem X, or that you're part of the problem, or that you hate those who suffer under X, or whatever. It may mean that you think the proposed solution won't work, and that pouring all our time, energy, and money into that solution isn't the answer.
Well, I'm not trying to delve into the deeper philosophy of conservatism -- it's moot for what I'm talking about. I mean I see all these obvious problems in America, and the right doesn't seem to have real solutions to solve them.
If I'm being honest, most of the conservatives I've talked to seem more interested in undermining progress because it's coming from the other side of the aisle, or because it implies that government should have a hand in helping it along.
>When we are aware that behaviors and symbols are hurtful to other humans, and we genuinely believe that other people should be able to live without fear, then we should change both.
Some of us believe that the answer to a world which is chock full of scary things beyond our control is to learn to live internally without fear, not to impose our personal delicate sensibilities on upon others. This isn't cowardice and this kind of shaming only turns moderates away from your cause. Furthermore nonsense like microaggressions are effectively a form of thought control and when whiteness is treated as some original sin together with a completely subjective system of rules you have a social structure which is effectively designed to be abused for the transfer of power, while ostensibly claiming to be a champion of equality.
Are you really surprised that people turn away from an ideology which treats them as though they owe the world something, or need to change their behavior, for the color of their skin? We used to call that racism. Now it's increasingly normalized and shoved in our faces if we want corporate work. Frankly, people are tired of the bullshit and I'm worried about how far the pendulum is going to swing back.
Anger is not proof of anything, and that's something this entire movement does not understand. There is fundamentally no evidence to support the notion that equality of opportunity leads to equality of outcome. That goes for the justice system.
> Sacramento Kings play-by-play announcer Grant Napear, who’s been calling games since 1988, was forced to resign after saying the words “all lives matter.”
"All Lives Matter" taken literally totally is compatible with "Black Lives Matter". However "All Lives Matter" when said is not meant literally. No one said all livers matter until someone said "Black Lives Matters". It's an attempt to shut down "Black Lives Matter". And the opposite of "Black Lives Matter" isn't the opposite of "All Lives Matter", the opposite is Black Lives Don't Matter, which is what is happening when so many black people are killed by the police and no one says or does anything. Looking at the evidence how black people are treated by law enforcement as well as the legal system, that they are treated as less than equal.
> which is what is happening when so many black people are killed by the police and no one says or does anything.
Hard to say no one does anything when you see the massive riots and protests that have occurred recently. And are so many black people killed by police? They don't seem to be killed more than other groups. So maybe police killings in general are a problem, but they don't seem specifically directed at black people.
As a counterpoint, look at what happens with the "it's okay to be white" posters. Completely benign, commonsense and not a reaction to something. And yet...
Much like "radicalizing" the OK hand sign as meaning "WP," and the latest lolcow of making hawaiian shirts a sign of terrorist groups: seems like the right wing meme makers keep coming up with these things to alienate normies from activist types, and the left, who above all else in current year America, seems to enjoy thinking they have special knowledge that requires they lecture others about what is morally acceptable, keeps taking the bait. I don't see this pattern ending well.
lolcow - scheme or meme dreamed up by internet nerds that has the potential to cause humorous results (see: 4chan posting fake apple ads online saying your phone could be charged by putting it in the microwave, 4chan saying you could drill out the bottom corner of your iPhone to uncover the "secret" headphone jack, etc.)
Someone else answered, but literally the OK sign with your hand (index and thumb touching) is supposed to represent the letter W (the three fingers splayed make a sort of W I guess) and the letter P (I don't see it either). Which is supposed to mean "white power."
This is a meme completely generated by online pranksters, but some/many left leaning activist types take it EXTREMELY seriously. For examples [1] [2] [3]. There are tons of things like this (I mentioned hawaiian shirts being one of the latest); they're mostly generated as pranks on imageboards, and as far as I can tell, they're designed to discredit humorless leftists, rather than actually transmit high frequency right wing brainwashing messages. Imagine being a normal person who makes the OK sign, or wonders out loud why it isn't OK to be white and is condemned as an evil nazi by .... "activists" for the full effect. I mean, the OK sign has been used for assent for ... what? 2500 years?
I'm all for diversity in thought - typically though this kind of thing gets flagged on HN.
After 9/11, invasion of Afghanistan and both Iraq wars there were songs banned from the radio and people were thrown out of malls for wearing t-shirts that were anti-war. Conservatives were all for that or had little to say about stifling free speech concerns. The argument was its private property and companies can do what they want.
There were plenty of pro war advocates that brow beat anyone who disagreed with any of those military actions. There was very little anti war sentiment on any of the major networks in the run-up to Iraq 2003. The disparity of pro war to anti war advocates on all the major networks and cable news channels was heavily tilted towards being in favor of invading Iraq. I recall watching Nightline on ABC when it still did heavy and serious news, when Ted Koeppel hosted it. They had a very honest forum about both sides, it was very even handed and I felt like everyone in America should have seen it, as it may have had more influence on the country. No one was watching it at 11:30 EST, and quite frankly it was too late. Nobody at Nation Review complained. It was all too convenient for them.
And now that the mood of the country has shifted so much that even Rush Limbaugh has the hosts of a black radio program, and even the typical right wing blowhards concede maybe there's a problem with racism and policy brutality. And the National Review, which has trained the political and cultural attack dog, that typically goes after those on the opposite side of political spectrum, suddenly they are afraid that the monster they've helped create is coming back to get them. And the comparison is so weak its pathetic. Just because NYT subscribers (full disclosue I am one) didn't think they should have published is crappy editorial. Suddenly we're the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This is pathetic.
Tom Cotton, a senator who could have published his editorial anywhere, and the NYT, a barely center left newspaper got grief about publishing it. No one is shutting down Tom Cotton, the subscribers of the NYT could and would have heard about Senator Cotton's ideas anywhere. What a bunch of whiners.
> Conservatives were all for that or had little to say about stifling free speech concerns. The argument was its private property and companies can do what they want
No one is actually principled. They just use these sort of ideals as a convenient talking point when it supports what they want, and it's not just Republicans.
This is entirely true. It's also the reason that more and more extreme ideas flourish.
The disingenuous engagement disillusions more reasonable people. People left of center see how Barack Obama was treated for the mildest of progressive ideas, and then decide that there's no point playing nice. I'm sure there is a similar analogy for conservatives.
If you don't listen to reasonable, accommodating people, don't be surprised that you are selecting for people on the extremes.
Oh and look - you're downvoted for this opinion! Conservatives are not even hypocrites, this stuff is just talking points in an attempt to get one over on "the left".
If this is really the problem conservatives claim it is, there's a simple solution: Get a backbone and delete your social media accounts. Most platforms (unlike HN) provide account deletion functions (though some keep them well-hidden).
Tom Cotton's editorial was not run in social media. This is much, much bigger than social media. Also, do you understand that you're advocating self-censorship? How is that a positive development for a liberal democracy, when large swathes of the population just remove their voices from the public debate out of fear for the "shoot first, don't ask questions" social justice mob?
You call it self-censorship. I call it opsec. In case you haven't noticed, we don't live in a "liberal democracy". We live in a police state, where anything you say or write can be held against you, and you're lucky if it happens in a court of law.
Most of us moderates were shamed off social media years ago. I locked myself out of my HN account because I was tired of being flame baited by Woke tyrants. Don't use Facebook, don't use Twitter. This new ideology seems more popular than it is because the sane people have left the internet. Most of us keep quiet about this stuff because any wrong think will end our careers.
Congrats, Woke people. You'll never know the size of your opposition until election day because you've made it too dangerous to question the narrative openly.
You claim to be a moderate, but you speak as though you are quite politically biased, and emotionally so (though I can only go on tone here, since you didn't give specific examples). Lately there is a lot of usage of the word "moderate" to simply mean "I have clearly left or right ideologies, but want to sound like I'm above the rabble", and you should consider this pitfall.
The silent majority is bigger than any of us think. Angry twitter mobs give misleading impressions. Watching company after company, institution after institution cave to demands from the outraged woke-culture has completely pushed me the opposite direction.
I will never post any of these beliefs online under my real name. But I will vote.
If it was this easy to push you in the opposite direction, all it means is that you never had any core convictions to begin with. I find it easy to sympathize with people frustrated by the modern left, but I fundamentally don't understand the people who look at the horrendous, despotic, corrupt shit that the party in power is doing, and are more than happy to cover their eyes and ears just because they feel slighted by the other side.
I know myself well, and no matter how "bad" the left gets, there is no possible future in which I could vote for a party built around venerating money, imposing control, flaunting their lack of empathy, and — yes — propagating white supremacy. If, at some point in the distant future, the Democratic party becomes "literally Soviet Communism" (in quotes because I find this laughably unlikely, but w/e) then I guess I'll just have to stop voting, or vote for a third party. Frankly, I'm much more concerned about the US turning into a fascist hellhole to worry about that remote possibility right now.
Maybe you aren't a moderate? I mean, you literally are calling anyone who participates in the internet these days insane. That hardly scans as a moderate take.
This is pretty hyperbolic. Somebody who was "moderate" in 1995 could be considered left-leaning or right-leaning today, depending on their specific politics, and in fact, without any specific context like "internet free speech", I would think a majority of them would be considered more left-leaning on average today. And even if that isn't true, the alt-right is a pretty specific flavor of hate-motivated shitposters, not just "people who are heavily right-leaning".
If alt-right has any meaning at all, I agree that it ought to refer to rather extreme beliefs. In practice, the left uses it as an all-purpose slur to refer to the half of the country that voted for the current President. (Hence my quotes.) These days, the only thing the word means is that the one uttering it is being an ass.
As a more specific example, though, Hillary Clinton was considered a moderate in the 90s. Back then she notably referred to Black youths as "superpredators". I think anyone doing so today would be seen as pretty far right. That's an example of the ground shifting.
The alt-right has a strong relationship to Nazi ideologies, "ironic" or not, and the parent is therefore reasonable in pointing out that it's an inappropriate comparison to 1995 moderate politics, regardless of left vs right opinions. The GP could have just said "far right". Now, if the parent was accusing a specific person of being alt-right, you could absolutely have a case against him based on how reasonably the label was being applied.
You're using the term "alt-right" like it is a monolithic thing, but it's not. The person I was replying to obviously wasn't using the term "alt-reich" as a nuanced description. It was a bad-faith smear.
Edit: policies that were once held by people like Bernie Sanders on immigration or Bill Clinton on crime are now considered "alt-right", but would have been considered well within the mainstream in 1995.
I'm with him - the internet somehow works as competition for who is most extreme. Sane, healthy people neither have the need nor the time to engage with this.
I don't have any hard data backing this up, but in my experience most moderates who are exposed to the state of discourse on Twitter agree it's kinda crazy.
> The Times can claim that a harsh tone and a small factual error in Senator Tom Cotton’s recent op-ed was the reason the entire paper had a meltdown, but the staffers who revolted initially claimed that Cotton’s argument for bringing the National Guard into cities put black lives in “danger.”
Cotton’s entire argument was that the military should be sent into the cities to crack protesters’ heads, which is something significantly more aggressive than “a harsh tone.”
If I were to take to the op-ed page of the Times with the argument that national stability requires that we send the military to crack the heads of everybody who writes for the National Review, I suspect they would waver somewhat in their commitment to unlimited free speech.
The op-ed draws a distinction between those who are peacefully protesting and those who were rioting and looting. Dropping that context seems unfair and misleading.
This paragraph - which is probably the source of the criticism - is clearly in the context of how to deal with rioters who are breaking the law by causing substantial damage.
"One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law."
The problem is that a significant majority of Americans, including almost half of Democrats, agreed in polls at the time that the situation was so bad the military needed to be sent in. It's hard to seriously argue that representing such a mainstream view is so offensive the New York Times shouldn't do it.
Anytime someone equates private control of a private platform with an abridging of “free speech” rights I automatically think they have suffered a head injury that has damaged their ability to think and makes them take nonsensical positions.
If I flood Hacker News with TIMECUBE truth and they delete my posts are they infringing on my free speech rights?
> I am a Knower of 4 corner
>simultaneous 24 hour Days
>that occur within a single
>4 corner rotation of Earth.
If you disagree with that TRUTH you are a COMMUNIST from COMMUNIST CHINA, you DIRTY COMMUNIST.
This is absurd. The New York Times opinion section is primarily for right-of-center opinions that support the ruling class. They let in center left and actually left ones from time to time to be able to claim it isn’t. They went a little too far right on this one for their readership.
Have you ever seen an op-ed in the Times with a communist perspective on current affairs?
To those who think I am being hyperbolic, here is an op-ed they published in 2018 to no backlash.
Why We Miss the WASPs:
Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.
While the article itself is kind of an exercise in dumb self-pity, and I don't think it hits the mark at all when talking about the Times, I will say I am noticing a pattern of "mind closing" in Leftist spaces over the past year. I think it really kicked into gear with the Democratic primary where a lot of the "New Left" media went into the tank for the Sanders campaign. Being too personally invested into a political campaign (especially a losing one) has a way of shorting out people's analytical brains. There's just a very strong ego-preservation incentive to shut naysayers up and to engage in obviously motivated reasoning to explain away failures, insist there is still hope even when there isn't, and to point fingers and deflect blame. These are all bad for keeping any sense of perspective, keeping an open mind about things, having a movement that can actually assimilate new facts as situations evolve, or be able to talk to people outside who aren't already bought in. It's kind of like a fractional distillation, eventually the heat starts boiling off different groups of people, who might have added vitality or useful intellectual perspective to the movement, until you're left with kind of a burnt-out sludge on the bottom.
Of course, those outlets actually have really small readerships in the grand scheme of things. This dynamic mostly happens in smaller groups chats, forums, subreddits, discords, etc. But these groups do tend to punch above their weight in the minds of journalists because they're big on Twitter, and most journalists/media people spend way too much time on Twitter. I think what might be happening with the NYTimes debacle is people are reading their personal experiences in whatever smaller discussion groups they've been involved in into the Opinion section of the Times. What they're missing is the context that this is largely centrist journalists mad at a breach of standards rather than idealogues who can't just deal with people who disagree with them.
What does Putin have to do with anything? He runs a country that is not remotely communist (since at least 1991, nearly thirty years ago, last I checked)
That's why I had the caveat of "former". However, he's published NYT op-eds, and isn't exactly, I believe, considered persona grata in US politics, so there is precedent for the NYT running "officially distasteful" opinions.
After further reading, I get the impression that Bennet was already at odds with his newsroom, and far from being a "Cultural Revolution", running Cotton was simply the straw that shoved him out.
I'm sure the free market will find him another job, and he seems like a smart guy, so this time around he'll probably get along better with his staff.
The problem with this narrative is that it really doesn't fit. When you encounter situations like this, it's good to ground yourself as close to reality as you can get. Ie, ask questions such as: How has the guns? Who has the money? Who has the media? The clergy? etc.
In the case of the The Cultural Revolution, the answers were simple. Mao had it all and he cracked down hard. In the case of the Soviets, the answer is also the same - the party had all the guns, all the money, all the media and the clergy were irrelevant.
This situation is nothing like that. Conservatives control the guns, both officially (executive, half the legislature, most of the courts, most of law enforcement) and unofficially (the right-wing militias, which can show up anywhere and demand anything with guns and get treated deferentially). Money and Media are split, with everyone amassing on each side. The clergy is very heavily on the conservative side.
So no, this is much closer to the Prague Spring than it is to the Cultural Revolution.
