There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.
It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.
You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.
His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.
Since 2016, he's appeared repeatedly in conservative outlets (including pushing conspiracy theories about Ukraine), gotten fired for uncritically pushing unsubstantiated claims from the Trump campaign as journalism, hosted a video podcast giving a voice to folks like RFK Jr.
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
RFK was also a lifelong Democrat. Not that long ago anti-war, pro free speech, anti 'big brother', anti illegal-immigration, anti political violence, anti mega-corp (especially big pharma), and other such stuff was all part of a very typical liberal 'resume.' Now it's more or less the exact opposite on many of these points.
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
Or, perhaps people can see the same evidence and come to different perspectives and conclusions. All without it being some malicious conspiracy, insanity, stupidity, or however you would like to frame it. If you look at society on a holistic level, it looks pretty bad. Mental illness rates are skyrocketing, testosterone is plummeting, IQ is declining, obesity is skyrocketing, and so on and so forth. The status quo isn't doing so hot.
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
"It's obvious that the internets is doing something so let's blame vaccines for autism ...
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be close, even though it shouldn't be.
You need to look up what 'ad hominem' and 'straw' men are because you've also misused those terms.
--> "Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role," <--
This is nonsense. That's not sraw man or ad hominem.
Your attempt to defend RFK Jrs nonsense and misrepresentation of reality, but using your own 'stream of consciousness logic' is exactly the problem with RFK Jr himself. Done with bad faith, at scale, it's destructive tabloidism.
>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
But in this case we're rather going in quite the opposite direction! For instance broad opposition to free speech has no place in any sort of formulation of liberalism, and so you find yourself in a scenario where a certain brand of liberal today would hold values deemed quite conservative, even by the standards of the past.
But this is also not particularly unprecedented. In the early 20th century the Republican and Democrat parties largely swapped roles. There was no formal agreement or acknowledgement of such. It happened quite organically, spurred along by decades of relatively significant events. I think we're seeing the outlines of such happening again, in much the same way.
When one debates aforementioned 'certain brand' types today, it often feels like a blast to the past. They share many of the characteristics of the die hard conservatives of times past - self assuredness bordering on divine authority, seemingly blissful ignorance of their numerous self-declared 'enemies', that trademark rabid intolerance, and more. The main thing that's changed is the dogma of choice.
First, the conversation was about the DNC, so what centrist Dems think is more important than "Progressives, radlibs, and the ultra-left". But beyond that, what specific policies are you talking about? Because without naming specific parts of the DNC platform, what you're saying sounds completely indistinguishable from "my niece corrected my pronoun usage and that made me angry".
Your point about the DNC is taken, although these groups do have sway there, as Yglesias often complains about.
Support for hate speech laws is common among leftists who primarily focus on social causes, as is support for “deplatforming” political opponents. Some also support German-style laws regarding politically extreme speech, which is funny, because those laws would almost certainly be used against them if they weren’t plainly unconstitutional.
I'm afraid I'm still not following you. In what previous generation did conservatives support hate speech laws? Because the topic being discussed was how a position can gradually over time change from liberal to conservative or vice versa. And from my perspective, it seems like you're just jumping at an opportunity you saw to complain about some fringe leftist position that you don't like.
> Who besides the conservatives right now is broadly opposed to free speech?
But to answer your question about conservative opposition to free speech, some conservatives are now showing support for hate speech laws, specifically laws against antisemitic speech, which is new. So this is actually a current “both sides” issue. Time will tell if the poles fully reverse on this; I think it depends on what form post-Trump politics takes.
Edit: wow, TIL. Apparently there were local laws against “race hatred” on the books in the early 1900s, and some conservative segregationists found that they could use those laws against “anti-white” speech (like supporting integration) in the 40s and 50s. So believe it or not, they became supportive of these laws until the Warren court overturned them, thanks to the work of the ACLU.
I'm not the biggest fan of him, but him showing up on conservative outlets because the other ones wouldn't platform him (due to going against US Dept of State propaganda) does not mean he is "conservative".
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
The source of that talking point was a young black protester who wanted real investment into black communities to stop the biggest killer of black Americans: criminals in their own communities. He wanted a structural solution rather than a media circus about an issue (police violence) that is minuscule in comparison to structural racism and would be rotated out of the conversation as soon as the media moved on.
Greenwald's main point seems to be that the conversation about race was used cynically to attack one of his coworkers for completely spurious reasons, and I don't see anything false about that.
If anything, ignoring the cycles of crime and poverty that black Americans are disproportionately victim to in favor of occasional media spectacles is completely on brand for America's dominant right wing neoliberal ideology.
Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.
Glenn, along with many others in the left-libertarian camp, correctly identified that “wokeness” was being used to fracture the left between the old guard, focused on economic justice and ending imperialism, and the “groups” who focused solely on racial and cultural agendas and were actively hostile towards traditional left agendas. These groups were also often hostile towards traditional liberal concepts of rights, such as freedom of speech and equal treatment under the law.
I agree that his reporting on this was sub-par. It’s not his beat and he should probably leave it to others.
Yep, exactly. People who aren't super familiar with American propaganda often don't appreciate this enough, but every stupid network here will feature you if you pissed off the other team, and when Biden's necrotic ass is overseeing our waning genocidaire state, anyone who speaks out against his baby annihilation tendencies is going to end up having to slum it up on Fox because they're desperate enough to feature you.
He endorsed Bernie through 2023 when he (accurately) noted Sanders shifting away from anti-war/anti-imperialism positions, which seems to be Greenwald’s #1 focus. He was opposed to what he saw as the Biden admin’s role in perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Biden-era “counter-disinformation” initiatives, which he is unsurprisingly opposed to. He maintains these positions under Trump while conservatives have moved against them; they are not “conservative” positions.
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.
I disagree with you. It’s important to understand the perspectives of people actively involved in politics. Even (perhaps especially) those with fringe beliefs.
In the past, I would have agreed with you. But I've seen that argument used in bad faith so many times since 2000, I've come to see it as an excuse to introduce bad ideas and move the overton window. Every oligarch seems to be in favor of absolute freedom of speech until they control the media in question, then it's hard right for thee.
See that's the thing: bad faith requests for presence in the marketplace of ideas almost always more the discourse towards authoritarian views, reactionary and racist views. Smashing it metaphorically means that monarchists and authoritarians flood the marketplace with garbage.
We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views, but we have no similar immune system for reactionary authoritarianism.
Socialist, communist, and reactionary views should all be equally allowed, along with bizarre views like Posadism and whatever Alex Jones believes.
I want to see a debate stage with Haz Al-Din, AOC, Ezra Klein, Thomas Massie, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Fuentes. Let the best one win.
> We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views
And this is why only reactionaries gain a foothold. Powerful people benefit from it, so reactionary views are let in while the rest of the “window” remains intact. Smash the window.
I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments with force.' That certainly doesn't seem to be the case with RFK, to say the least.
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For instance no less than Einstein rejected, to his death, a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.
And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.
That's what sealioning does. It makes it seem like you're ignoring a possibility unless you wholeheartedly engage with a disingenuous possibility. I'd get banned from HN if I tried to demonstrate because I'm not very good at it, but the original comic that coined the term is good.
The original comic didn't really resonate with me for a couple of reasons. The first is that the obvious metaphors it seems to have (which I assume you're alluding to here) are in quite poor taste. The second is because I think public debate is critical for a healthy society, and so am quite averse to anything that justifies making statements and then being unwilling to engage with challenges to them. Obviously outright harassment would be not only wrong but also illegal, so I think that's largely a nonexistent extreme.
In general I think if people were more regularly challenged on their claims, it might help reign in some of the self radicalization, intolerance, and so forth that's growing in society. When somebody only acknowledges 'friendly' voices, you end up in a scenario where they're effectively surrounding themselves with a baseline that's heavily biased, but that baseline will (from their perspective) be normal. That's just not healthy.
This was never really true at most places, and even where it was sort of true, it's been false since 2023.
The ladder has collapsed. No more juniors to mentor and grow (in some cases no more US hiring period), and all of the carrots have been replaced with sticks. If you're lucky, the reward for doing good work and being nice is 'not being laid off', but the promo budget is gone and it's not like your boss gets a say in who's laid off so may the odds be ever in your favor.
In general, joking that people's promotions are due to their names is thinly veiled racism, especially considering it's a very real phenomenon[0].
Jokes in general are, if not explicitly against site norms, discouraged: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1]
I have no idea what the person's real name is, their ethnicity, where they come from. How on earth could you make a racist statement about someone, if you don't know any of those things?
If you have no idea what their real name, and their user name doesn't seem to be related to their real name, then the "joke" doesn't make any sense and would fall flat.
So either you made a joke that isn't funny or one that is offensive. Either way, there's your answer to why people didn't react positively.
I know a dude with a traditionally female name. Dude just job hops. The wide "HR bins 99/100 resumes" part of the filter doesn't seem to apply to him...
He's a fine guy, and a fine coworker, but he's not the hot shit his resume progression would suggest.
I guess that's worth being taunted in graded school.
Well I disagree, at least in Europe - i don't know the state of the US market.
Sure, promotions are harder to get, but the "ladder hasn't collapsed" and many companies I know (at least in tech) will reward above-average dedication (that average being quite low...).
I have no doubt every organization is different, and to some degree different teams in organizations are different, but I've been fortunate enough to work at several employers where "staff" or "principal" truly mean things, and still have friends at all the FAANGs and many of the other companies of similar tier. They all report what I've said - the idea of just doing good work and getting promoted is basically dead. Perhaps if you work literally on a frontier AI product it's different, but what I said is the norm.
It doesn't help that this is being forced from above. I agree you can't turn off your brain, but any time I argue that AI isn't the right tool for something management gets angry. There is a constant push to fully automate things, regardless of what those things are.
Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.
This is definitely a scenario in which management has bought into the hype and the people working with the tool are aware of its limitations.
Like markets, the firm can remain irrational longer than you can push against it.
Beyond a certain degree of effort on your part, it is not within your capacity to right the whole ship.
I suspect that the people who are most likely to be allies are the CFO and budgeting teams in the firm. I’d be curious what that function is thinking of the situation.
Suppose I do something myself. I reap all the benefits, but it takes a lot of
time, I may not have the expertise to do a good job, and I get all the blame if
something goes wrong.
Suppose I go to the park and find one of several guys who would do it for free.
I get all the of benefits, he might do an excellent job, but, because there's no
contract, I still take all the blame.
Suppose I actually hire a professional to do it. I receive fewer of the
benefits. However, he's much more likely to do a good job, and the legal system
provides a variety of ways to hold him accountable for the work.
Suppose I hire a professional, but then insist that he use legions of guys from
the park to do the actual work, since that's going to be some much faster and
cheaper per quantum of work. I also tell him that if he's unwilling to do that,
I'll find someone who will. I also tell him that, since he has so much more
unoccupied time now that the original work is in the hands of all those other dudes,
he gets to supervise still more work done by other swarms of guys from the park.
At this point it should be clear that I'm not interested in quality work, but in
having someone poised to absorb blame. I want a patsy.
Now replace "guys at the park" with LLMs, and replace "free" with "nearly free,
but with no warranty."
Good on you. I absolutely hate reading the output from Opus. It's disrespectful to make people read it, and to share AI output without reading and understanding it first.
Yup. This is coming from the top, and it's very much because the AI sales pitch that executives bought into is, "Automation can help you reduce head count."
That means that they really don't care if, right there in the moment, just doing the job is faster and better. What they care about is that the actual work is being done by humans, and that's out of line with their grand vision of getting rid of humans.
> Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.
Some would tell you that you need to find a different job with a better boss, but I'd say that this is quickly becoming something very hard to escape from. Investors want line to go up, and they all talk to each other about this "AI" thing that lets them cut staff and keep productivity, so naturally we're all getting it crammed down our throats.
Finding a better boss is like picking up the good cop. There are none. The whole industry has gone completely bonkers, and bosses are the ones doing it. The problem is systemic and if there are any good bosses out there, then there are systems in place to ensure that their ideals and behavior are not allowed to stand.
Same.
My team lead sits near me.
He keeps checking if I'm using claude, or when we talk he pushes me to use claude.
It's have gotten to the point that I wanted to work on something manually, so I booked a room in the office. Just to not be at my desk, because I'm afraid my claude usage will be reflected in my performance review.
I spend a lot of time encouraging my manager and coworkers to ... write some actual english. To not just point an AI at a PR and call it a day. To actually collaborate before we jump into something - leaning on the knowledge we've built instead of being a cowboy and assuming you know it all (you don't, not yet).
In many ways it feels like we're back in some awful version of 90's based software dev. All these amazing tools have got us stuck deep in the shit swamp again.
> that AI can do everything economically necessary
Who gets to define this? Those with power are famously bad at understanding long-term implications, how things work, and what matters - especially when it comes to funding things like research.
The statistics and my experience disagree. Those stop signs lead to a lot of people blowing through them at high speed and plenty of deaths, especially in the dark.
Which Star Trek was "trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions"?
Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?
Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?
How about the one with the Nazi planet?
Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?
Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?
No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
"Patterns of Force" was broadcast within living memory of WW2; that the Ekosians were villains was as uncontroversial as water being wet. I always suspected they went with the WW2 German uniforms for the bad guys for that episode because they could rent them cheap (there were plenty of WW2 movies filmed in that era) to save on budget.
And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
It was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition.
Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.
Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.
Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.
Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.
Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
Star Trek exists because Gene Roddenberry's military drama was cut for making political statements[0], so he moved the political statements to be in space in the future.
Don't forget the Twilight Zone. The whole show existed because Serling wanted to make political statements and felt sci-fi might give him enough cover to make them. It's almost like...that's the point of the genre, to give enough of a fig leaf that the reactionaries will be lulled into allowing it...
Everything is political. If you think it's not, you're just benefiting from the status quo and blind to it.
Even ignoring that history loves to repeat itself, plenty of politics in all forms of media has aged excellently, and plenty of politics that haven't aged well are still insightful into the period of the piece.
"Everything is political" is the classic motte-and-bailey fallacy beloved by the most obnoxious politics pushers. The fact that it's impossible to remove all traces of politics from fiction does not excuse subjugating art to ideology. When people complain about "political" works they're complaining about works where the author appears to care more about how you vote than the story.
I’ve found when people complain about something being “political” 9 out of 10 times they’re complaining that they dislike the author’s politics.
The dictionary definition of “politics” (as in, what the word actually means) would support the statement that “everything is political” to be at worst a smidge hyperbolic. No motte, no bailey, no rhetorical fallacy.
Thing is, most art has ideology, it’s the weirdo reactionaries that try to pretend otherwise.
There's a striking difference between telling and tone deaf preaching and when people complain about politics they always, without fail, mean the latter.
The stance of "everything is political" itself is extremely tone deaf.
So is Casablanca art or propaganda? IMO 'art' and 'propaganda' are largely orthogonal concepts. Something can be art but not propaganda, propaganda but not art, neither, or both.
That's why old political writing is good - because the politics has been settled by now, most people won't argue 1984 was unfairly criticizing totalitarianism or Starship Troopers are too hard on fascism.
But new political writing is outrageous for half the people, because they disagree with it.
Among the reasons are that kids (and some adults) are idiots. That's it, it's not income inequality or rage at the system, some people just break things because they think it's funny. That's not something you can fix, so you have to guard against it in other ways.
Is't that just bad education or parenting in the end ? I don
t think many people with good parents & education would be essentially insane to break thinks just for fun.
In general, I think you kinda need to fix people rather than make the environment basically so hostile to everyone, to prevent a small group of people from breaking it. Not saying its easy, but in my the only correct way.
I don't agree with your claim, but assuming you're right: Do you think that trying to solve "bad parenting" is less intrusive than cameras in robotaxis?
I hope so, but at the same time - I'm not sure how to best do it without ending up with some different authoritative issues.
Like, in general, you kinda want people to be good parent so their children end up as decent humans (that for example don't vandalize public restrooms for fun). But any direct attempts to control that process, even if well meant, would be rightfully considered a horrendous form of government/societal meddling. So it is definitely hard.
In any case, I think removing as many sources or uncertainty and stress as possible (stable income, affordable housing, no naked corruption visible day by day, etc.) could hopefully have positive outcomes on parenting without direct interference with the process. And I guess a better founded & more prestigious for the teach school system could also help.
As much as I disagree with it, graffiti is an interesting topic. A lot of graffiti proponents fully believe that they are beautifying the environment by making it human, and even continue doing it as the level of effort to bypass the consequences go up. They don't believe it to be an awful thing (though I'm sure some do, plus some have other motivations, plus some are lying to themselves about their motivations, etc, I just mean what they say and do).
Greenwald didn't "have" to do anything. His politics took a sharp turn towards the right-wing fringe and he lost his original audience.
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