You don’t need some kind of “social score” to have the chilling effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs—both by those they know and don’t.
Interestingly I don’t think it’s really “cooling” that happened - if anything it’s been some people becoming extremely hot, and then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing cooling.
Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics, which probably undermines the democratic ideals they think they’re defending. [1]
I consider myself overall more aligned with liberals, but as a recent example, it disheartens me to open Facebook after a long time and see so many people I knew from years past reveling in Charlie Kirk’s death as though that makes their cause more sympathetic to alienate anyone who might have agreed with things he said (even if I generally don’t). This just reinforces division and increases the social cooling effect.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/were-not-all-goi...
When you think about it, it's not an entirely new concept. Yes, during last 60 years the west developed a strong culture of independent thought, but when you zoom out, strict mind control through social norms has been, well, the norm. Most societies through most of history would severely punish you for even daring to think of speaking up.
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I wonder if I should upvote or downvote you, and what that will say about my HN profile to “big data analyses”
It doesn't matter. If you vote on politics a lot, a moderator will set your account so the votes don't do anything. HN is the illusion of user-generated content.
O_o
This sort of vague, association-based reasoning can be used to prove anything. The US is a country with over 200 years of history, currently with hundreds of millions of citizens. You can cherry-pick whatever "visuals" from whatever "inflection points" you want, in order to prove whatever conclusion you want.
For example, here is a thread on /r/AmerExit, a subreddit you would expect to have an anti-American bias, on racism in the EU vs the US. The strong consensus is that EU racism is worse:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/17g68zx/pervasive...
Or here is the Wikipedia page on charitable giving by country, which shows the US is easily the most generous nation in the world as a fraction of GDP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
If you learn about the history of other countries, you'll find that they usually have dark stuff in their past as well. You claim that standing up against Nazis is "very low hanging fruit", but there's a considerable list of countries which cooperated substantially with the Nazis, including Italy, Japan, Romania, Croatia, the USSR, etc. France was torturing thousands of Algerians who were fighting for their independence as recently as the 1960s.
Ultimately this entire project of trying to discover and interrogate a "national character" is a little silly in my opinion. Especially through the sort of cherry-picking I did above. Yes, it's a very popular topic of internet flamewars. But I've never seen compelling evidence that "national character" has significant predictive value. People are people wherever you go, people respond to incentives, etc. We should default to structural explanations for human behavior, rather than explanations based on "national character".
For example, consider this recent Substack post on how climate caused the US Civil War: https://substack.com/home/post/p-170433170
I expect the majority of historical events can be explained in the manner of that Substack post, if you look hard enough. Same way I'm rather skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history, I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
Quoting Hateful Eight:
”So, I’m supposed to freeze to death ’cause you find it hard to believe?” - Chris Mannix
I can’t do anything about your skepticism.
There’s about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry picking in sight.
You can’t figure out that Lincoln was a great man, then what else is there to say? We’re taking decades of slavery if something didn’t compel him. Half the country still fought him, and half the country still partook in on going racism for over a hundred years, with zero let up since 1860s up to, literally, 2025.
I can’t help you with discernment.
>There’s about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry picking in sight.
If there's no cherry picking, you should also be able to name the 7-10 things I casually left out of my post =)
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> The racism and selfishness of right-wing politics is just … ugh, honestly, I just can’t. It’s Godless.
The first step would be to humbly recognize your side’s shortcomings. To me, aiding the destruction of malls, pardoning authors of crimes is bad, protesting against having borders is worse and defunding the police is a hallmark of criminality (and before you say it: Defunding doesn’t mean rearranging, it means defunding, according to protesters on your camp).
There are two essential Christian concepts that you skip when you unilaterally hold your opponent for contempt of humanity:
- Those who have never sinned should throw the first stone,
- Pardon.
Once you become milder in your accusations, maybe we can design a common world where we have common principles. I’d say those principles should be etched into law, but your side is against law enforcement, so it’s a bit complicated.
Many of the religious views I see coming out of the US right now aren't Christian, ie following Christ, but some Abrahamic[1] mishmash wrapped up in jingoism.
[1] not sure what to call it maybe fundamentalism.
Ok, so it looks like you conveniently skipped over your own first step.
> Once you become milder in your accusations
...
> but your side is against law enforcement
It’s easy to say “The other camp is extreme, so we have to”, but you’re welcome if you have any proposal.
My proposal is: I think an extreme lot of my camp would switch if there was an ethical left, with strong ethics but also not prone to degrading whites.
What’s your proposal?
My proposal is that you drop the holier than thou attitude.
And what will it do?
You suggested it first (for other people), so you surely know the answer to this question already?
It'll help make you look like someone who actually practices what they preach.
Ok, so your goal is not to share the governance of a country together?
With your proposal, I make concessions (which, by all means, is the concession that I stop arguing, so that’s a general concession on the idea of negotiating together entirely), while you don’t make concessions, and then we don’t govern the country together, is it correct?
Sounds like extremism to me. Either you get the power, either we do, but it’s a struggle of power if you do not engage in listening.
The goal is discussion is that you will discover points on which you can compromise without hurting your values, and we do as well, until we deal together. But it seems Americans have lost that. Which is mirrored by the line of your party: “Don’t engage with the other party. No concession.”
It is one-sided. The discussion has always been open on the right, but people moved to the right because the discussion was closed on the left.
You're completely missing the point of my original response to you.
You're sanctimoniously telling "us" to make milder accusations, then nearly immediately accusing us of being against law enforcement.
That is an entirely non-mild accusation, to the point that I consider it entirely discredits the rest of your comments because of how hypocritical it makes you look.
It's rhetoric that doesn't entitle you to the good faith engagement you supposedly want.
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> Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics
Perhaps some American left-wingers do. But these behaviours are fundamentally the opposite of liberal and I would like to see the label taken back from them.
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If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm all ears.
(People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
Do you mean you want to metaphorically beat up a website, or literally beat up people whose views you disagree with?
I think they mean arrest and jail time. Which is a form of violence.
When you come to a paradox its probably better to reassess axioms than embrace the paradox.
Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.
Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom of choice is false"
We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here, matters of barely stable equilibriums.
Would you rather be «team Plato», ruled by enlightened 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you conflate the levels of application : what is really problematic is the systems that result in increased intolerance.