Reddit has a system that works better for controversy. Then if I really want to discuss a crazy idea I go on 4chan/pol/. There are a small percentage of really bright people on 4chan/pol/ who don't fit into normal society (mostly autism it seems) that can sometimes offer some surprising insights. People always focus on the racism on 4chan, but I ignore it because a lot of the time it's an identifier. You have to show some willingness to say things offensive to the normies to prove you are one of them. I'm not willing to do that so I get told to go back to Reddit often. It's uncanny how they know I don't belong there and not just because I don't say hateful things. They are very sensitive to tone.
>It's uncanny how they know I don't belong there and not just because I don't say hateful things. They are very sensitive to tone.
it has nothing to do with the frequency of your hate -- I could tell you don't belong just because of your word choice here.
there are things one picks up about board culture when browsing for a respectable amount of time, and it shows in the speech patterns of their posts. amplified by high post frequency and anonymity making it the only identifier, users get _very_ good at spotting when somebody either doesn't know the culture or is relying on an incorrect/incomplete summary like you are doing here.
If you're a teenager, which I'm not. And like I said, I don't post that stuff. I ignore it and then hope for an intelligent response to something I said and often get it. Barring that, 4chan is sometimes funny because it's so off the wall and out of left field.
Nitpick: "Nazism" (espec. capitalized) is a particular brand of white-supremacy racism. One which (by the book) held most white people to be non-members of its Master Race.
If all it would take to become a Nazi is reading Nazi opinions, don't you think we'd have a lot more Nazis?
I don't doubt there are people with reprehensible views on 4chan, but it's a bit uncharitable to the reader to suggest that browsing 4chan will put them at the precipice of becoming an Actual Nazi.
> but it's a bit uncharitable to the reader to suggest that browsing 4chan will put them at the precipice of becoming an Actual Nazi.
What else, other than "reading Nazi opinions" do you think it takes to become an "Actual Nazi?" It's not like the ghost of Joseph Goebbels flies in through your window and bites you in the neck and now you're a Nazi. Radicalization works by normalization, through repeated exposure to and gradual acceptance of propaganda, and gaining sympathy and trust for a community and its ideals.
This article is trying to make an excellent point (emphasized in the second half of the write-up), but the claim that "DID probably doesn't event exist" is untrue, and but I'm sure the author only meant as click-bait.
DID does exist, the problem seems to be the willingness of many psychologists & medical professionals to broaden the definition to encompass much of the phenomena we see on Tik-Tok.
Could it be that all young kids are extremely impressionable, and without a consistent culturally-enforced set of values (especially regarding identity), it's perfectly plausible for many of them identify (at the personality level) with a number of influencers that they follow on that platform? And how is that ultimately affecting their general mental health, even if they are not outwardly unhappy?
The highlight to me in this article is how pandemic loneliness + crypto frenzy has made this type of victim a lot more common today.
You can't do anything about crypto over the short-term, but I hope the loneliness aspect of this gets reduced as people slowly go back to their pre-pandemic lives.
This is just a case of false equivalency. Smoking and car-usage are completely different phenomena and the one should not be used make judgements about the other.
You're going to have to do more than that to convince me & others why car usage is that bad, sorry.
Personally, I'm too confused to be even cynical about it. I don't know anything about Van Jones other than what I see on TV, but that by itself cannot explain why Bezos felt he deserved the "award".
Previously he's been known for being openly communist (i.e. not just a regular socialist). As an aside, I still find it odd how we've rightfully shunned other totalitarian and mass murdering political ideologies, but we've completely whitewashed communism. I couldn't imagine another newscaster openly identifying as a nazi.
A core tenet of communist ideology is violent overthrow of democratic governments to implement a "dictatorship of the proletariat". Both are rooted in violence.
Aren't democracy and communism orthogonal? Admittedly, I'm not a scholar, but it seems to me that democracy is mostly concerned w/ how leaders are chosen. Whereas communism is about how resources are distributed. It sounds possible to have a democratically elected government that sets a communist economic policy.
I'm not aware of any communist country that didn't turn into an authoritarian state where the government imposed strict censorship and controls on the population.
When you look at why, it starts to make sense. Without strict economic controls black markets start to appear, where goods are bought and sold outside of the communist economy. Communist philosophy requires that black markets don't exist, because they allow for capitalism, private property, and a market economy. So Communism requires that these things be removed from society, which requires brute force.
Therefore taken from first principles, Communism is an authoritarian philosophy because it controls an individuals ability to buy, sell, and trade goods.
That's not true, because the goal is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat through violent revolution. Democracies are incompatible with dictatorship and must be overthrown in order to purge the other social classes. This is why every instance of communism has led to human rights abuses and/or mass murder: totalitarianism is part of the ideology.
It’s been a long time since I read the Communist Manifesto. Do you mean to say that Marx’s goal was violent overthrow? I thought he described more of an evolution of systems until the workers paradise was reached.
Are you sure you haven't just been taken by a talk radio conspiracy theory? The only thing I could find on this was that Glenn Beck was harping on it ten years ago. That guy is not well known for being a fountain of truth. [0]
I ctrl+f'd "Lenin" on Van Jones' Wiki page, and this is literally the only time Lenin is mentioned:
>He became affiliated with many left activists, and co-founded a socialist collective called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM). It protested against police brutality, held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin, and aspired to a multi-racial socialist utopia.[13]
I'm not sure how being in a study group that discusses Lenin's theories automatically makes one an actual Leninist.
Does one have to adopt every ideal of something when founding an organization? Would that not be the point of discussing those theories? What do we like? Dislike? Want to modify/mold to fit our current system?
But given your tone, and responses to other commenters, I am 100% certain that your feet are dug in and you aren't actually open to being swayed. So, enjoy your day! :)
> Does one have to adopt every ideal of something when founding an organization?
Let's change the labels. If someone founds an organization to spread nazism, is it a reasonable inference to suggest that the founder might be a nazi? I think yes, and that it is facile to suggest that the founder of an organization whose core principle is Leninism, is not actually a Leninist. And that's to say nothing of Jones' other activities that were cleaned off of wikipedia.
Are we supposed to take your word for it that it's a "Leninist organization"? Your only supporting evidence for that idea is the passage above mentioning that members of the group studied ideas from Lenin (and others), but that alone is not enough to make an organization "Leninist" (if it were, then I guess our high schools are all Marxist/Leninist/Nazi organizations too since we studied and discussed those beliefs there).
It is possible (necessary, even) to study, discuss, and debate all of history's notable policial/socio-economic ideologies and movements, regardless of which ideals you yourself hold (and which actions of those movements' prominent figures you view as justifiable).
His wikipedia page does not say that. It seems like this controversy comes from his stance 30 years ago[1]. Van Jones was protesting the Rodney King verdict and was rounded up as part of mass arrests. From there he fell into a crowd that radicalized him as a communist, but a few years later his politics changed. He became more focused on unity and results rather than revolution for the sake of revolution. He also says “One of my big heroes is Malcolm X, not because I agree with Malcolm, but because he wasn’t afraid to change in public,”. I don't see any reference to him still considering himself either a communist or a Leninist. Why don't we allow him to "change in public"?
You are suggesting that we hold him to a different standard than everyone else and give him the benefit of the doubt. Other people have had their careers ruined for far, far less, while Jones gets a television gig and $100M for his troubles.
And wikipedia does discuss his Leninist activities. See below.
>You are suggesting that we hold him to a different standard than everyone else and give him the benefit of the doubt.
The opposite. I am suggesting we allow people to evolve over time. If someone demonstrates that the person they are today is different than the person they were 30 years ago, I think we should be more willing to forgive those 30 year old beliefs. If the person shows no indication of change, I am fine with them being made to account for those old beliefs.
>Other people have had their careers ruined for far, far less, while Jones gets a television gig and $100M for his troubles.
You are insinuating that Jones can just pocket the $100m which almost certainly isn't happening and is probably illegal depending on how all the paperwork is being done on this.
A Nazi is not the opposite of a communist. Someone doesn't become a Nazi post-WWII because they believe in fascism. They do it because they are motivated by the hateful beliefs of Nazis. Therefore there is a higher barrier to prove that the person has truly changed before they can be forgiven. However there is still a path to forgiveness.
> Someone doesn't become a Nazi post-WWII because they believe in fascism. They do it because they are motivated by the hateful beliefs of Nazis.
Thank you, this is precisely my point. How can someone still support communism after the Soviet purges, the holodomor, Chinese cultural revolution, the Cambodian genocide, etc., etc.? Communism has oppressed and killed an order of magnitude more people than fascism, but in your opinion is this somehow more tolerable because those victims were killed out of love?
Just as fascists follow their failed ideology because of hatred, communists follow their failed ideology out of a lust for power.
Would you say republicanism/democracy are immoral due to the slavery of pre-Civil War America?
That is the equivalent of what you are doing. You are blaming a theory of government for the crimes of a specific implementation of that theory. Genocide is not a central tenant of either fascism or communism anymore than slavery is a central tenant of republicanism, democracy, or capitalism. Fascism and communism are more authoritarian than other forms of government so they are both more attractive for people who seek totalitarian power, but that doesn't mean they are synonymous with the crimes of those totalitarians.
If Jones identified as a Stalinist, Maoist, or something similar I would definitely consider that more worrying as that is more similar to someone considering themselves a Nazi. Identifying as a general
"communist" is not the same thing.
Copilot, as far as I know, also does not seem to factor in the greater context of the application/code you're in when auto-completing these tasks.
To me, this is a huge part of modern-day development. It's not only about producing functionally correct code, but also code that integrates well and is semantically relevant to the broader context of the application itself.
That doesn't mean Copilot's input will have no value, but it just means that developers will generally need to refactor that code in a way consistent with the app they're building.
I must be on a different planet because he didn't sound that way to me at all. Even his "village atheist" comment that parent had a fit over completely slipped by me until he pointed my attention to it just now, and it doesn't seem like the kind of thing the author meant in bad faith.
I quite enjoyed the ideas discussed in the article, and even though it is steeped in religious undertones, you don't have to be religious to understand his broader point, I think.
“The highest sort of knowledge concerns the divine first cause and last end of our existence, and of how to prepare our souls so that they might be united to him forever. The further one’s intellectual pursuits take one from interest in and knowledge of these ultimate matters, the more disordered they are.”
All I'm saying is that the charge of "antisemitism" is too heavy and the author's post didn't sound that way to me, but since I'm not Jewish, I'm not going to press this point this further at the risk of sounding too insensitive or privileged.
If you'd like a Jewish perspective on this, here's a comment made by someone who claims to be Jewish that basically echoes my sentiments -- that the author of that blog post was naive and got carried away in his rhetoric, instead of being an actual antisemite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27385448
"mild criticism" mixed in with generalizing Jewish people, regardless of country, in the last paragraph?
> If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself. Self defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering others.
Usually the argument I see online is that criticism of Israel isn't necessarily anti-semitic.
But this is just straight up criticism of Jews, based on the actions of Israel. He's saying that Jews in general should atone for their inherent bloodlust.
That's not "harsh", he's picked a bad thing that some members of a group did and tried to apply it to all members of that group. In other cases we would say that's sexist or racist, and here it's anti-semitic.
Does anyone really believe that these giant companies actually care about the so-called 'woke' values being foisted upon them?
Once companies realize that getting political is no longer a virtue (and by 'virtuous' we mean anything that increases their bottom line), we'll slowly start seeing sanity crawl back to the workplace. I'm glad to see some companies clearing that path.
Curious to hear about those other places.