1. Don't allow yourself to slide easily or prematurely into contempt. We do it too often these days.
2. Disagree better. You can disagree, but make your case and engage in the responses. Rhetoric has a place but it's being overused.
After all, it’s human nature to (often) entrench when faced with facts that challenge ones beliefs! And that dynamic is particularly acute when someone has chosen to believe the less-plausible-thing, the mark of conspiracy.
"Oh my goodness, how can anyone be so stupid that they don't agree with my (somewhat statistically fringe) position, they must be a troll!"
I'm all for a winding-down of this process, because eventually it could escalate all the way up to violence, but like nuclear disarmament, you first. Or at least some plausible commitment to de-escalation that can be observed to actually happen over a period of time, as a signal of good faith for the next round of talks.
I think this is partially why people like AOC or Ilhan Omar have suddenly achieved success; they know that, regardless of what they do or say, they will never get anything less than total disrespect from Republicans and a large segment of the media; so they're free to ignore that contempt. This comes across in the other direction as contempt, when really it's just a refusal to be intimidated.
Contempt is also being manufactured by a variety of media sources from foreign intelligence agencies to all-American fraudsters like Alex Jones.
I would also caution against concluding that one side "ramped contempt up to 11". As a foreigner observing the US elections from afar, I saw a lot of contempt in both directions, but especially towards conservatives in the USA who were being routinely described as if they were mindless cattle, good for nothing at all beyond slowly dwindling industrial production. Compared coldly to the rest of the world, Trump's policies (some trade protectionism and enforcement of immigration laws) are nothing special or unusual, not in contemporary times nor historically. But somehow this position became held with utmost contempt and was routinely described as the most hateful forms of racism. You can see that as well with Brexit in which the majority of the voting population has been routinely described as racist.
There's no word for this kind of rhetoric other than contempt - it's literally what the article describes, in which the complexities and motives of millions of people are considered in trivial moralistic terms of "you hate, i love".
Although I might agree that AOC's and Omar's success is predicated on Trump being in the White House -- in current climate Democrats pretty much have to circle wagons around even someone as vile as them.
By the way, doesn't, say, Al Sharpton predate Alex Jones?
It’s possible to assume goodwill and sincerity in the limited case of a site like this, but in the general case it’s literaly impossible. Brandolini’s Law ensures that this is effectively a form of asymmetric conflict, and the well-meaning person is doomed from the start. It’s like dealing with a forum troll, who dedicates the whole of their waking life to their “business” while the mods and other users actually have lives and limited energy to spare.
I don’t have a solution beyond using and refining heuristics, but at some point you have to accept that you can’t afford to treat everyone and every viewpoint fairly. At some point, dealing with dishonest, foolish, and potentially harmful ideologies breeds contempt, and when you can’t just log off to avoid it, that contempt will take root. Some people, some ideas are contemptible, and the rational response isn’t tolerance and acceptance.
I think my personal answer is to accept the world and life as it is, not just as I wish it could be. On some level life is a competition, and ideas are a competition. Choosing not to play the game is far from a winning move.
Even that's changing steadily, albeit slightly more slowly/subtly. The slower pace is likely due to the superior moderation here, combined with the astuteness of the HN crowd. But, that latter point also makes HN a prized target for propagandists and trolls.
And, if you look closely, you'll see them, including here on this thread.
But, the rest of your comment is spot-on: the sociopathic troll feasts on good-will and contemptible views should be met with contempt. In fact, however, this is their strategy: purposely earn contempt then claim to be the victim when that contempt is paid. For instance, they trigger vulnerable people, then attack them further when they try to defend themsleves. The trolls justify these attacks by claiming they are the actual victims.
It's almost like a kind of echo chamber for the media and famous people imo - I don't know if thats nessacarily a bad thing entirely, so long as people are aware on some level of that. There just aren't the opinions of suburban moms on twitter. There aren't plumbers on twitter. Cleaners.
Opinions might not matter, but it does bother me quite a lot when you see companies not caring on their support phone lines, on their facebook. There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem. It's concerning that such behaviour benefits those who need it least.
Surburban moms are also nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, programmers, etc etc, and all of these groups are active on Twitter.
But if you want a community of mums who are there as mums you could look at #netmums and #mumsnet. Here's one example: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23netmums&src=typd
> There aren't plumbers on twitter.
There are plumbers on Twitter. Twitter doens't do a good job of surfacing different communities, especially for new users. When you join the site Twitter makes stupid suggestions for celebs, and makes no attempt to find out what you're actually interested in. But you can ignore those selections and find, and follow, people who you're interested in.
> Cleaners.
This is a good point. People on low incomes are excluded from digital life, and we should probably work out ways to help them access tech.
> There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem.
So, this isn't quite what you've mentioned, but using Twitter is sometimes a useful way to get customer support. "This happened, what do you suggest, @CompanyName?" will usually get you the right number to call.
Twitter just doesn't work if people don't care what you say - you have to already be a celebrity, with an opinion that 'matters' to people.
" Twitter doesn't do a good job of surfacing different communities" Yes, but what I am getting at here is that they are communities in the sense of several important people in the field who all know each other
and thats it.
There simply aren't many 'average' people using twitter regularly, at least in the sense of writing thoughts and/or having conversations.
"using Twitter is sometimes a useful way to get customer support. "
Yes, thats what I was saying. I think it should not be this way - at least, the actual dedicated customer support of the company should be at least as effective as tweeting at them.
I agree that discovery is hard for Twitter, but these communities are there.
I use Twitter to talk to people.involved in suicide prevention, safety of MH services, and quality improvement of MH services. It's given me easy access to a bunch of people.
I'd prefer a different platform because Twitter has problems with hostility on top of user unfriendliness, but people are there.
So, I am not disputing the principle that good faith is required; on the contrary, I am lamenting its demise and the weaponization of good faith against its practitioners.
So, the issue is that while hoping it is sufficient to act in good faith, others are able to profit wildly from their own bad faith. In effect, your good faith empowers them. And, while the current situation unfolded over years, we cannot ignore the recent rapid acceleration and its meaning.
We have come to a place where bad faith is normalized and even celebrated. Not sure what the way back is.
Suspending judgement is an interesting and valuable intellectual exercise, and trying to see other perspectives makes us better people. We have to accept however, that a time comes when just like any other approach, such measures not only fail, but full catastrophically. Just like an ardent pacifist, or an equally ardent militant, lack of adaptability is doom. Sometimes you have to sit down and talk, and sometimes you have to fight to the death.
The trick, and no one has yet figured out a formula for this, is to know when to adapt and how much. Anyone who tries to tell you that the only way to deal with a Nazi is a bullet, or conversely, love, is wrong. It’s advice that sounds good, but it’s totally useless. When to to talk, when to listen, and when to reach for a sidearm is the real question and more often than not people don’t even acknowledge that; it’s too nuanced, too open to interpretation, and too messy.
The thing is, it’s messy regardless of whether or not we choose to approach conflict (intellectual or otherwise) programmatically rather than dynamically.
The difference is people in real life are not the ones who make the decisions.
The world would be a far simpler and better place.