Or just other people's realities. You mention BLM riots, which affected me a great deal; tens of millions in damages to my city, destruction of local landmarks, one of the teachers in my local school district was arrested for assaulting a state politician for recording them burning a police car, and to top it off, they smashed the pharmacy where I get my wife's medicine, so she had to go without for a few days. This isn't some biased false reality/folk wisdom. This was my experience so when people tell me they were "peaceful protests" or the news says "statistically, they were 99.99999999% peaceful" but I look at what I saw with my own eyes, and also what was on TV in other cities... I can't be convinced that they weren't violent, destructive, and plainly, evil, no matter how much other people tell me what to think.
>This was my experience so when people tell me they were "peaceful protests" or the news says "statistically, they were 99.99999999% peaceful" but I look at what I saw with my own eyes, and also what was on TV in other cities... I can't be convinced that they weren't violent, destructive, and plainly, evil, no matter how much other people tell me what to think.
Your point is well taken. I live in a large city. The area where I live, while mixed, is majority minority. My own experience was quite different. No one assaulted teachers from my local school. I saw no businesses burned. I don't know anyone who was directly impacted by the months of daily BLM protests.
Those are my experiences. Why are you telling me what I should believe?
I mirrored my experiences against yours to point out that your anecdotal experience is not the whole of the story. Nor is mine.
Now for some facts that neither you nor I actually experienced:
Where I live there were a few instances of violence against police (and in every single case, nearly all the folks involved were both white and from out of town).
There were also numerous instances of police instigating violence against peaceful protestors.
There were a few instances of looting, and the police and local government addressed them quickly and harshly, as just about everyone, including the protestors (many of whom were captured on video chasing would-be looters away) was horrified and angered by such actions.
There were (and are) violent miscreants who should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, those folks were a tiny group compared to those who peacefully protested.
When you hear folks say the protests were "mostly" peaceful, they are empirically correct. Something like 20,000,000 people around the US peacefully protested against police violence.
At most, a few thousand people committed acts of violence and vandalism. Let's say there were even 10,000 (a high number, I suspect) folks who committed violent/destructive acts alongside the peaceful protests.
If that's correct, 99.95% of people protested peacefully and 0.05% of folks were violent/destructive.
I'm not sure how that could be construed as anything other than "mostly peaceful". in fact, I'd characterize it as "overwhelmingly peaceful".
I'm most certainly not telling you what to think or believe. Just presenting my own experiences and a few facts.
Don't take my word for it. I'm just some random asshole on the Internet.
Normally I'd agree, but I'll point you to comments elsewhere in this thread as to why this is misleading. The amount of damage is huge, and this was excused all the while by the group's leaders and other "peaceful" supporters with "people > property" and similar logic. Using this same logic, I'm sure 99+% of Nazis were peaceful during the holocaust as well.
>this was excused all the while by the group's leaders and other "peaceful" supporters
Who? Specifically. This is important. AFAIK, no reasonable, law-abiding people advocated for or excused violence and destruction.
In fact, such violence was roundly criticized and there were calls from all quarters for the apprehension and prosecution of anyone committing violent acts.
I've heard the same refrain over and over again. But no one ever actually names names. So. Who are these people who actually advocated for violence and destruction during the protests last summer?
I posted a status update the morning after a major riot happened in my neighborhood that consisted of a short summary of what happened, a statement that I was ok, and essentially "fuck the rioters." I could name names of friends who, in response, insisted on "people > property", "fuck the racist capitalist system", "rioting is language of the unheard", "looting is reparations," and "don't tell black people how to protest." I'm sure you can find examples of this on twitter and reddit if you look—it was unavoidable for a time.
>I could name names of friends who, in response, insisted on "people > property", "fuck the racist capitalist system"
How many of those friends are elected or appointed public officials?
And what political power/social clout does Ariel Atkins[0] have? Especially given that over 100 arrests were made and as the mayor of Chicago said[0]:
"This is not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech. … This was straight-up felony, criminal conduct"
So some of your friends and an "activist" made incendiary comments.
No one with any real power or media reach condoned or encouraged violence during the BLM protests. Not one.
If a bunch of randos mouthing off is a huge problem, how much of a problem do you consider the statements encouraging violence by some folks with real power and media reach[1][2][3][4]?
You asked someone to explain their comment about the "group's leaders and other 'peaceful' supporters." I gave you an example of both. If you want more, they're not hard to find by searching for the slogans I recited.
I am thankful that government officials and more respectable media outlets with significant reach have tended to condemn the BLM rioting. Outright endorsements probably would have made the situation worse. And even tacit support can have disastrous consequences, as we saw at the Capitol. But they're not activists and they don't speak for the movement (although who can?).
>But they're not activists and they don't speak for the movement (although who can?).
Exactly. Given the decentralized nature of BLM (dozens if not more local and regional groups), I don't think anyone can reasonably say that any one person or group speaks for the BLM movement as a whole.
As such, making the assumption that a few loud voices are representative of millions of people seems inaccurate at best, and an effort to discredit millions of people who desire positive change in the methods, focus and biases of US law enforcement, based on the violence and hyperbole of a tiny minority at worst.
And the same can be said of the vast majority of those who, however misguided, protested in support of the specious claims of a "stolen" election.
A vanishingly small minority of those people committed acts of violence and destruction too. And the millions who supported that point of view shouldn't be tarred with the same, broad brush as those who committed acts of violence and insurrection.
Both of those tiny groups should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The difference between those two groups is that the public/elected officials who supported the BLM protestors right to exercise their First Amendment rights overwhelmingly condemned and decried the violence committed alongside those legal, lawful protests.
While many public/elected officials decried and condemned the violence and insurrection at the Capitol, a non-trivial number of public/elected officials who supported the Big Lie[0][1] of a rigged election encouraged violent action, and some may[2] have even knowingly conspired with violent factions to facilitate their insurrection.
That's a big difference. And we should acknowledge that. Not because it's a partisan thing, but because we're supposed to be a nation of laws -- and when those who are elected/appointed to make and enforce those laws actively work against our constitutional order, they must be dealt with directly and strongly -- or we risk the basis of our societal order.
[2] It's important to note that no elected officials have been charged with aiding the insurrectionists, there are indications that a few may have done so. Investigations should continue and anyone who provably (and that's a critical point) aided and assisted the violent scum who tried to subvert our constitutional government must be vigorously prosecuted -- but only if there is sufficient evidence. We are, after all, a nation of laws.
That’s not much of a point. It’s really just you being on the demonstrably wrong side of actual facts, but acting like your extreme and indefensible take deserves equal validity or ontological status as a “right” belief, but it completely and unequivocally doesn’t.
You wouldn’t be saying this stuff to BLM supporters, only an echo chamber filled with your non-fact-based alternate world. There’s a complete difference of kind between what you’re saying and actual reality, one that can’t be overcome or mitigated at all just by your own gainsaying. Your stance just is, factually, invalid, and you calling the opposite stance invalid as if it’s just two sides of some coin is likewise just invalid all the way down.
It's only demonstrably wrong if you're going to insist on the very literal "almost none of the BLM protests involved violence" and ignore that that statement, in isolation, is rather misleading. Sure, most of the protests were peaceful. But when they weren't, it was was very bad.
I was living in Downtown Chicago during the two major BLM protests that went violent last year. From my window, I saw people shooting out windows, starting fires, and looting. Even if it were a moot point to call 911, it didn't matter because you'd get a busy signal if you tried calling. Businesses I frequented, including the coolest camera shop I've ever seen, were destroyed. In the days following these riots, it took 45 minutes to an hour to enter my neighborhood because of National Guard checkpoints. The grocery stores and pharmacies were closed because their windows were smashed in, they were looted, and they were generally smashed to hell. And local BLM organizers infamously defended their actions as the "cry of the unheard" and the looting as "reparations."
I've read accounts similar to my own from people in Seattle and Minneapolis.
I get that some opponents of BLM want to use these riots to discredit what the movement stands for. But BLM proponents shouldn't try to gas light me and others who were victims of these demonstrations in defense. They were horrific. People died.
Nobody is gaslighting anyone. By your own account, the perpetrators of the looting, property damage, etc., were not part of the BLM protests, but clearly differentiated groups adding violence to something non-violent.
I live in NYC and in my neighborhood we also had windows boarded up after days of looting, cars smashed in the street, fires and more. Literally none of it was related to the BLM movement.
Similarly with Portland where many friends and coworkers live, the violence there was literally brought about by Trump and his false allocation of Homeland Security agents to “protect” federal landmarks, yet they abducted people off the street with no due process.
I’m certain looting happened, destruction happened, violence happened. It happened literally around the corner from my apartment.
That absolutely does not give anyone any entitlement to indulge racist or fascist biases to blame that violence on BLM or associate it with somehow representing the purpose of BLM, etc.
You assert that the groups responsible for the rioting were clearly differentiated from the BLM protests, but I don't see how one can differentiate them without making a no-true-Scotsman argument that the rioting somehow goes against the principles of the movement and they can be distinguished on that basis. At the time, some people were claiming that the rioting was the work of alt-right agents provocateurs, but that doesn't seem to have panned out. (Cf. the assertions that the Capitol rioters were antifa agents provocateurs.)
It's also not a good argument given there were loud voices claiming to speak for BLM that were justifying the rioting and looting. Reparations, smashing the racist capitalist system, etc. Maybe they don't represent the movement as a whole, but if so, the movement had lost its voice to extremists by that point.
Bad actors doing embarrassing or destructive things is a real problem for ad-hoc decentralized movements. And that's why I'm careful to not hold the acts of individuals against a movement unless said acts are the whole point of the movement. But at the same time, "Black Lives Matter riots of 2020" is the most accurate label for the events in question that I can think of.
I hope you understand how unreasonable you sound to me. You're telling me that what I both saw and experienced, with verified fact and video evidence, isn't real. Your conviction that you know more about me and my life, than me, and your insistence on how invalid it is, makes you sound, frankly, like some sort of political zealot.
I tend not to waste my time convincing other people of things to this degree. I will share my experience, but beyond that, it would be unreasonable for me to tell someone else that their experience isn't even real, which is what you're doing.
You needn't look far—there was a personal attack in your GP comment: "you sound, frankly, like some sort of political zealot". Swipes like that are certainly not respectful, and they're definitely not ok in HN comments. Actually, every single sentence in that comment had some sort of swipe in it.
If you don't think that was crossing into personal attack and breaking the site guidelines, you're underestimating the impact of your comments. it would be a good idea to recalibrate by reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and remembering that this sort of comment always lands with far stronger impact on the reader than the commenter thinks it will. Objects in the mirror are much closer than they appear.
"you sound, frankly" -addressing their extreme rhetoric, not them. How they come across is different than who they are. Every statement was a "swipe" at their disrespectful and unreasonable arguments, not them as a person. If I'm not allowed to defend my ideas and position, respectfully, in the context of discussion, within site guidelines, what's the purpose of discussion? It's enough that respectful, in-context posts I've made on controversial topics have been flagged and removed regularly here. Is this supposed to be another reddit/4chan echo chamber?
> addressing their extreme rhetoric, not them. How they come across is different than who they are. Every statement was a "swipe" at their disrespectful and unreasonable arguments, not them as a person.
That's not how internet comments work. If you tell someone they sound like a zealot, you're calling names. If you then say "I didn't mean it about you, only about how you sound", that's a distinction that makes no difference to the receiver, with whom your comment has already landed like a punch.
I'm afraid the problem is that your comments aren't as respectful as you think they are. This is a common problem, as I tried to explain above. Swipes that feel harmless or perfectly kosher to the commenter can easily land with readers, and especially with whomever they're replying to, as aggressive.
Because of this asymmetry, it's easy to end up with a flamewar in which all parties feel aggrieved, like they're the innocent one who did nothing, while the other is the one who behaved badly and escalated. Everyone ends up feeling like they're just defending themselves from unprovoked attack. In reality we're all subject to this cognitive bias, and if we're to avoid having this place go into a downward spiral and burn itself to a crisp, we all need to be extra careful to err on the side of being respectful and editing swipes out of our posts here.
What you are saying is simply not ok. If your take away of your experience led you to believe BLM is responsible for significant violence, that is a manifestation of problems with you and your beliefs, not an accurate fact-based conclusion drawn from a legitimate interpretation of the BLM movement or any experience of BLM protests. You saying that I sound unreasonable by not letting your shit slide doesn’t change anything. You can say that. You can cling to racism-based biased refusal to accept the facts or accept your stated understanding of your experience is wrong and unduly biased, but it does not make what you’re saying any more legitimate or worthy of respect. What you are saying is just unacceptably wrong - it really is, really - in a way where you cannot just say, “well I believe different” and have that be treated like it’s valid or on equal footing.
You are starting off from a position so irredeemably far from acceptable fact-based reality, that for you to say my response sounds unreasonable is completely unsurprising and carries no weight.
It might sting to have your attachment to what you think is an acceptable interpretation of your experience called out for the unreasonable anti-BLM bias that it is. Oh well, the anti-BLM fantasy stuff is not OK, not going to slide.
I'm confused... it's verifiable fact... insurance claims from the riots are between $1-2 billion in damages... dozens of people died and between just a few cities thousands of police were injured, who knows how many protestors and bystanders... support for the movement dropped rapidly once things escalated... these are the facts. How can you look at this, and when someone says they witnessed just a small piece of it, say they're "irredeemably far from fact based reality" and you just can't let it "slide". Consider at least, that your extreme position harms your movement. What is your exact criticism of my opposition? Or at the very least, to what I witnessed?
I'm just saying, if I wanted to probe every solar system in the galaxy, I'd build a craft with extreme geometry that would fly very close to stars and accelerate for a gravity assist before flying toward the next target star. So it would look exactly like what we saw.
You would have to identify the star that Oumua is going to for that theory to work. Seems like it should be pretty easy to know if it's going to the nearest star (or coming from one), and it's not originated from or going to Alpha Centauri.
The next question is whether or not there is some other logical path that defines logical gravity assists to visit as many stars as possible - nothing like that has been put forward either.
Afaik, it's coming from so far away that we have no idea what star it previously visited.
I don't think it's safe to assume it would come from/go to the nearest stars to us, as the flight path might need extreme changes that aren't in the fuel budget, especially given its already very high speed.
"They're a private company! They can restrict their product for corrupt political and financial purposes and this is good... for... reasons... at least that's what the tv/social media told me."
Imo, society needs more of this, and these ideas are not in any way new to philosophy. We live in an age of widespread hedonism and much of the way people live is unhealthy on an individual and societal basis. I fully reject the "be yourself, do what makes you happy" mindset of today because the ideal day for a young person now is sleeping in, eating sugar for breakfast, smoking weed, playing video games and watching porn all day. Most people don't take it to that extreme, but too many people, in my opinion, go in that direction instead of the direction of moral productive work and rearing children that actually advances the human race and improves their life outside of momentary feelings of pleasure.
Delayed childrearing is also sometimes a desire to have intense and high-effort experiences: living in new countries, learning new languages, acquiring skills, climbing mountains, etc. The idea is once you have a committed partner your life is mostly over, and once you have a kid it's completely over, so you'd better have lived fully by then. To be honest, the messaging from my own parents was not too far off of that.
Some friends are theoretically open to committed partners, but only if they can be long-distance for the first few years while completing their adventures around the world. There's a big push against compromising even your travel agenda, let alone your career, to be with someone.
This is a really bizarre comment, to me at least. The central point of travel in your post, particularly, as some sort of universal, valuable goal is an unfamiliar concept to me. Travel, along with what I'm guess most of what you consider as "intense and high-effort experiences" to do before "your life is over" after getting married and having kids I would probably categorize as the self-destructive and ultimately pointless pleasure seeking I'm advocating against. My point is the fact that you and most people consider this "desirable" is not good. If you think you should seek a great deal of pleasure before "ending" your life by becoming a responsible adult, my advice is to get addicted to heroin, as it will offer a far more intense pleasure than travel, or whatever else you mean.
I have a hard time with the idea that there is anything moral or immoral about work or leisure. In 50 years time, it's very unlikely anything 'work' I have done will matter.
Leisure activities are only immoral if they hurt yourself or others. If your activities lead you to become an overweight shut-in in poor health with few friends, sure. You could make the argument they are immoral.
I think you can be a retired dabbler and dilettante and absolutely live a 'good life'. At the end of the day, all that matters is that we live lives true to ourselves and our relationships with others. All of our accomplishments are dust in the wind, and will be forgotten.
My point of moral productive work was to differentiate it from things like financial fraud or telemarketing, which require a great deal of work, but are ultimately unproductive and/or come at the expense of society.
My other point about leisure/pleasure seeking is that you are always, no matter what, giving your life to something. If you give your life to leisure/pleasure it is a resource that is wasted that detracts both from your life, and the lives of any person you may have helped with that resource. I reject the notion that self destructive behavior doesn't hurt anyone else. I'd hate to live in a society of bums and drug addicts. We all do better when we all do better.
Right now, fully a third of all of my work efforts (read: taxes) are wasted on retired dabblers and dilettantes who do nothing to help the rest of us. Their pleasure comes at the cost of myself, and my children.
So long as you pass on your genes and your ideas, your efforts matter on Earth, and potentially our actions matter on a spiritual/supernatural level. The only respite I find in these conversations as that the hedonists will just be dust in the wind.
>> moral productive work and rearing children that actually advances the human race
Do not assume that everyone has the freedom to make such decisions. Moral decisions are ones that you can make regardless of life circumstance. Many people simply cannot afford the traditional lifestyle of getting married and having kids. I don't mean incels, I mean that all over the world there are young people who want to marry and have kids but are locked into economic situations that preclude the ability to take that "moral" path.
This is partially caused by the thinking in the article.
The modern selfish senior would rather live 5 more years in a nursing home with a bad quality of life than give their inheritance to their children. The inheritance is instead given to the state and megacorps.
I would encourage you to read up on "the success sequence". It's very simple to avoid poverty, but it involves depriving yourself of pleasure. I say this as someone who grew up in poverty and escaped it.
Poverty isn't what I meant. There are people, sometimes rather well off people, who are nevertheless in economic situations that preclude marriage. For instance, some people have elderly or disabled family members which they must take care of. There is huge gap, the entire middle class, between "poverty" and not having enough money to hire 24/7 care. Others have good well-paid jobs, but jobs that mean they are located in places with male/female ratio that makes finding a partner next to impossible (China's "bachelor" villages). Still others are limited by cultural norms that do not accept marriage of persons without traditional full-time employment regardless of wealth (India, Japan). Just look at the difficulties surrounding Japan's princess. The real issue there isn't that her husband is poor, he really isn't, but that he doesn't have a traditional fulltime job.
Yeah, I don't buy it. I've made a few attempts to get into TikTok, because my wife and friends are into it, and I have not been able to find any positive or quality content. It's mostly low quality memes and rude or otherwise vulgar attention seeking. I understand the appeal, given my experience with other social networks, but I definitely don't buy the narrative that it's in any way "good".
I agree with you - it rewards attention seeking behavior and short attention spans.
That said I understand the term of good quality - in that it isn't vitriolic political messaging, conspiracy theories etc. It's mostly devoid of any true meaning - more like entertaining, sometimes hilarious content. I wouldn't say it's enlightening or provides much educational value. As I said early it also probably reinforces short attention span, attention seeking dopamine feed back loops... likely long term damage to brain development.
It also creates this expectation that your life is a performance for other people or that you produce content for other people to digest to get your dopamine rewards. There's going to be a strange generation coming down the pipeline.
yes to an extent, but there is a spectrum. I would count most forums under the umbrella of "social media", but for the most part I don't find them to have that performative aspect. platforms where your account is more strongly tied to your IRL identity and photos/videos are the main thing shared tend to be a lot more performative.
Tiktok has exceedingly powerful filter bubble effects. As a result, the nearly universally derided "straight-tiktok" (which is where you start and dominated by conventional social media influencers) is fundamentally different than other parts of the app.
My fyp is a combination of good natured dancing, linguistics, crowd sources music, hank green, a few comedy creators who engage positively with mental health and feminist topics, and animals doing silly things, recently a lot of possums. That's interspersed with memes and jokes, but very few that are particularly rude.
I agree. My fyp also has Dad Green, older LGBT creators, young PhD & postdocs explaining science Qs, lots & lots of dogs, linguists, cooking, trees, lakes, geology, etc. Plenty of light hearted dancing, but everybody seems to be pretty chill and glad to engage with their audience. It's pretty easy to get responses from creators, as compared to YouTube creators.
You have to scroll through for maybe ten minutes and interact with posts that you actually like. Their system very quickly figures out what to show you. The general population of tiktok videos is pretty bad.
I know I risk sounding offensive but please accept that this is just an honest inquiry. Have you considered that you are causing that sort of content to hit your “for you page” by how your engaging with it? I ask because if someone asked me for a description of what’s most on tiktok based on what is in my feeds, it would be woodworking, cooking, arduinio projects and 3D printing stuff, with a bit of stand-up and DnD. I didn’t set any preferences or such to make it so, it just ender up that way through what I liked and the half a dosen people I follow.
I am in no way under the illusion that this is what most see. But i have to question if people that complain about Charlie Damelio and similar people being shown too much, just aren’t spending a lot of time watching the videos, commenting and liking them. If you scroll past they stop popping up.
Overall the content creators I see content from seem extremely good for these smaller niche communities.
As a plus, the most unbiased source of content for the BLM protests I found was tiktok, because it was just livestreams and videos from the protests with little possibility to editorialize it. Instead of anchors screaming “violent!” Or sternly saying “peaceful!” You got streamers on spot showing exactly how violent or peaceful certain situations were.
Yes. Use the search, find a few videos you like on topic X. Interact with them (like them, comment on them, follow creators). There that is most of the interaction needed to influence your feed.
Then as you encounter stuff you like click hashtags that look interesting, explore sounds to find similar videos, checkout a producers other videos.
And the last 6 months of race riots? I'll take a few smashed windows and pictures taken in congress over tens of millions in burned and stolen property, assaults and murders in basically every city in the country. "Only my side's political violence is acceptable." That's what I get from facebook.
The BLM protests — the overwhelming majority of which were peaceful [1] — stretched over 6 months and involved thousands of events and millions of people. After all that… 19 people died [1].
The terrorist attack yesterday exceeded a quarter of that death toll in a matter of hours.
I don't know how to explain that invading our nation's capitol with the intent of capturing and murdering politicians is different than breaking into a Target.
I appreciate you taking the time to tell me how to think. I know what I saw both locally and on TV. You can give me as many bubble-filtered thoughts as you like, but you're trying to convince me that I saw and experienced something that I didn't see and experience.
Let me know when I can't get my wife's medication again because right wing ""terrorists"" smashed up my pharmacy, or when parts of my city are completely off limits for violence, or when one the teachers in my school district gets arrested for assaulting somebody filming them burning a car. I'm not losing sleep over congress getting delayed for a couple of hours. I'll keep my perspective that all political violence is bad, and that I want little to do with politics in general, but one side of extremists in particular has caused more problems for me than another.
I think it's easy to say Trump's comments condoned violence when you censor the comments themselves and everyone will just believe you because it's in line with their biases, like nearly every comment in this thread approving his bans.
As far as I'm concerned free speach is dead. You can only say what the corporate overlords allow.
The premise of this comment is absurd, and that meta-analysis is hilarious. "Testosterone level isn't closely linked to aggression, at least compared to being a man and a criminal." This is a case of common sense, and thousands of years of experience in the effects of castration on humans and animals, being more valuable than modern "science".
I thought I remember hearing one of the side effects of taking roids (steroids) is that the abuser loses self control more frequently and has tantrums and aggressive behavior and the like. Is that true?
At least according to several studies (though unsure if they're included in the above meta-analysis), the government's drug abuse pages, countless anecdotes, and the existence of the term "roid rage".
Or just other people's realities. You mention BLM riots, which affected me a great deal; tens of millions in damages to my city, destruction of local landmarks, one of the teachers in my local school district was arrested for assaulting a state politician for recording them burning a police car, and to top it off, they smashed the pharmacy where I get my wife's medicine, so she had to go without for a few days. This isn't some biased false reality/folk wisdom. This was my experience so when people tell me they were "peaceful protests" or the news says "statistically, they were 99.99999999% peaceful" but I look at what I saw with my own eyes, and also what was on TV in other cities... I can't be convinced that they weren't violent, destructive, and plainly, evil, no matter how much other people tell me what to think.