It's pretty simple, we moved left too fast for even many on the American left, and there was a backlash. Most people want to do the right thing, and the left's brand is "nice for people" but past a certain point people need to have some social, political and economic stability and the changes just came too fast and hard for that.
I was a straight-up supporter of Occupy Wall Street. I know a lot of people who were. We all changed.
The alt-right is as much a reaction to a complacent, consistently-losing right wing establishment as it is to the rapid leftward shift of american politics in the last 13 or so years.
By the way, many campus sexual assault protests are very political, the ones that demand removing presumption of innocence, both at the university policy and even at the legal level. That is just about as political as you can get.
>this has been a conservative talking point for a long time.
It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use.
The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it.
I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.
I can say it because it's my lived experience. I think you should read my comment again - I have seen hate on my campus, and it is not a hoax. Richard Collin's death is a testament to that.
> And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.
In other words, we have the most potent tool for confirmation bias and alienation ever conceived by man. Lenses only capture moments, not sympathetic humans.
Periscope is pretty awesome, I watch livestreams of protests, get realtime info on events. What's funny is how often you see something as it's happening, then later when "witnesses" are interviewed about it, how often they straight up lie. I'll take the video.
I think they're working out how they're going to justify what they're going to do with his movement after he's no longer in charge of it. In the last year about three different times I have seen people making the same argument, that free software needs to be understood as part of a broader left wing ideology. It's bullshit and I hope those people lose hard.
I've been contributing to open-source software projects for more a decade now. I've never seen any connection with left-wing ideology, and no incompatibility with any ideology I can think of. I've seen all kinds of people participating, from communists to objectivists. I think that's why it worked so well. If something can seriously hurt the idea, it's trying to make an narrow political-ideological cause out of it. You may gain some partisan support and budgets on that, but the losses in goodwill would be enormous.
I am genuinely curious. Why exactly do you think doing this was a terrible idea.
Here's a person who didn't agree with the stand the ceo of her company took. Resigned because she felt morally responsible and announced it because she thought it was the right thing to do. Irrespective of content, that shows principles, integrity, courage and maturity. So again what exactly should an "adult" have told her?
Did it get easier recently? I tried getting into this about six years or so ago and found it really hard to get started. Finding appropriate applets (MUSCLE applet I guess was the common crypto one), incompatible cards and readers, etc.
>So, if you start thinking down that line, if someone threatened murder, you’d probably take that off the platform. If someone threatened assault, you’d take that off. But if a presidential candidate threatens to imprison an entire religious minority[...]
It's easy to see what he's referring to here, and thus, he demonstrates that he's captured by fake news as well, and doesn't even recognize it. Half-truths or intentional misreading of things Trump has said are bread and butter of the left wing's fake news organizations.
As a side note, he succinctly explains with what is wrong with a coincident push by the same people, banning of certain viewpoints off Twitter. Oh well it's a private company, and they can run it how they want! Your free speech is not being violated. But as he just admits, these private entities are extremely powerful brokers of speech, and what they decide stays and goes has a very large impact on society. But, consistency is not the strong suit of these people. It is entirely whatever argument works at the time.
He is doing the same thing to NPR, and by extension NPR's listeners, what he was doing to low-info right-wingers: telling them what they wanted to hear, whether or not it's true. He's good at it.
He wants you to believe that he tried, but he just couldn't get the left wing to fall for it. But anybody who has used Facebook as seen how popular AddictingInfo-org is, and it is an overtly left wing fake news site. It's not remotely the only one.
The fake news reporting is itself filled with fake news. And it's easy to find marks because after the election, many people need to find a scapegoat so they are turning off their critical faculties. The current complaining about fake news is a mirror image of the right's disrespect of the "mainstream" media. For instance all the reporting on the Trump-Russia covert email server communication matches the formula for fake news, it took a nugget of truth, twisted it, and tried to ride the lie long enough that by the time it was exposed as nothing, the election would be over and the "damage" done. But it wasn't fake news I guess because the outlet has to be small and the target and victim were reversed. Anybody looking at that should reasonably be upset about "fake news" but it's categorically ignored by the left. You are not inhumanly wise and immune to the effects of incentivized bias.
> "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.
Listening to the audio of the interview, I couldn't help but hear him say the above with a sneer. He claims to be a registered Democrat, maybe it's true, but since this is how he makes his living, he clearly doesn't give a fuck in either direction. It's something I detect from a fairly large portion of supposed alt-righters online: they don't actually believe that the racism and fascism they're espousing is righteous or good for them/humanity, but they just don't give a fuck. Years of living with their main source of socialization coming via disembodied interactions in the ether of memes, cynicism, shock material, etc of 4chan and reddit has driven many to a deep and true nihilism. This guy is the one eyed king troll in the land of the emotionally blind.
My guess is that part of the focus on fake news is a bit of deflection. The media hyperfocused on the Comey story in the week leading up to the election, and in the end that turned out to be nothing at all. Instead of looking at the issues in their own reporting, they're spending all the time talking about fake news (which is still an issue, however).
An observation on the right is that any organization that is not explicitly right wing will over time drift into being left wing. I think it's correct.
I was a straight-up supporter of Occupy Wall Street. I know a lot of people who were. We all changed.