The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down

[chroniclard]

Personally I find any left or right within sight of the centre mostly pleasant.

Could you expand on 'the right'? Generalised as you have the would imply that spans from anyone slightly right of centre to a fully paid up member of a supremacy group! which is a good example of why that meme is so on the money.

The centre is not a fixed point either so meme is garbage.

 

[Colonel_Klinck]

I'm a bit more optimistic that PR will get implemented eventually, at least the Tories have made a little progress on the voting front by equalising constituency sizes (despite doing it to get them more seats).

Do you think being in the EU would result in a significant libertarian social policies like the legalisation of drugs and sex work?

You honestly think the Tories will give us another vote on PR or some other electoral reform? They only did it last time because LibDems made it a condition of entering government with them. They along with their mouth pieces the right wing press pushed hard against it. Why would they give us a system that will hurt their chances of keeping power?

The EU isn't going to legalise drugs because that is a decision left to the countries, same with sex workers, they might give protections to sex workers through workers rights but I can't see it going further than that. EU nations are still sovereign after all. Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland have all decriminalised drugs. They are doing better than us.

 

[Energize]

You honestly think the Tories will give us another vote on PR or some other electoral reform? They only did it last time because LibDems made it a condition of entering government with them. They along with their mouth pieces the right wing press pushed hard against it. Why would they give us a system that will hurt their chances of keeping power?

The EU isn't going to legalise drugs because that is a decision left to the countries, same with sex workers, they might give protections to sex workers through workers rights but I can't see it going further than that. EU nations are still sovereign after all. Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland have all decriminalised drugs. They are doing better than us.

I don't expect the Tories to give us another vote on PR without a coalition, same with Labour but as the 2010 coalition shows, events like that do happen in our lifetimes. I didn't expect the Conservatives to legalise gay marriage either but that happened to my amazement.

They could make it a condition of entry into the EU and I would certainly have voted remain if they did. An EU with legal drug trade would see GDP go through the roof!

 

[Scougar]

What's this I see about twitter shareholders trying to sue Musk? Is this just trash, or has some merit?

 

[Werewolf]

What's this I see about twitter shareholders trying to sue Musk? Is this just trash, or has some merit?

There are clauses in his agreement to take over twitter that state what he, and twitter can and can't do and penalties for if they break those clauses.
From what I understand he broke one of the key clauses within hours of signing it.

No idea if that's what's going on.

 

[Irish_Tom]

It's not a case of thinking "it's a good idea but it wouldn't work in practice", as the guy in that video explained, the libertarian hope was that in the long term future Britain would be able to become more libertarian outside of the EU than in it, looking beyond the current government and the awful undemocratic system we have. While I voted leave I wasn't a brexiter by any means, and when the public vote leave after listening to a prominent economist as discredited in his field as he may be, I can't call them stupid for doing so. It's very different to listening to some rubbish Farage was putting out.

I think you added the video after I quoted you.

I've just watched it and I see where you're coming from, but like the guy in the video says, while the Leave leadership might have been more libertarian than the majority of the political class, the Leave voters were far more protectionist. He is also more optimistic than some about the prospects of the EU becoming more/less liberal than probably the majority of the Leave leadership (and you, I assume). I think you find yourself in a minority of Leave voters if a more liberal Britain was your aim. Personally, I think leaving might actually undermine your goal… but time will tell.

At least we can agree that Farage chats a lot of ****.

Normally I'd agree with the over amplification of terms like 'extreme right/left wing', however, it's pretty much just reflects the situation we have had over the last 10 years.
This meme is hilariously on the money:

I've seen this pop up recently on Reddit (didn't Musk retweet it as well?).

Purely anecdotal but I don't recognise it personally (and I do consider myself centre-left). As far as I'm concerned, I've stayed in the same place and both the further-left and the further-right have been running away from each other in the opposite direction for the last ~10 years.

@dowie's chart is interesting but it stops at 2017 — I'd like to see a more recent version that includes the shift in Republican sentiment following Trump's presidential term and beyond.

 

[jsmoke]

What's this I see about twitter shareholders trying to sue Musk? Is this just trash, or has some merit?

LMGTFY - Let Me Google That For You

For all those people who find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than to Google it for themselves.

bfy.tw

 

[Somnambulist]

The image is accurate to me when it comes to cultural institutions, academia and company HR departments, less so for political parties, local politics etc.

Anyway, as far as Twitter goes there’s mountains of room for improvement and I’d like to see a giant social media platform actually run by software engineers and nerds again and not suits and people from the revolving Big Tech/DNC class door. Give me revenge of the autists.

 

[Scougar]

LMGTFY - Let Me Google That For You

For all those people who find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than to Google it for themselves.

bfy.tw

So I shouldn't ask a question in a thread dedicated to this exact topic? Why are you even on a forum? Why bother asking anything here exactly since your God google can answer everything? Grow up in maturity jsmoke, even if you already have age.

 

[wesimmo]

The thing with Liberalism in its purest form is that it ignores the fact that humans are too often a bit ****.

I'm all for it in principal, but I'm also wise enough to know it will never work while humans human.

Jim Jeffries explains it well in his Gun Control piece which I cant link because of lots of swearing.

 

[Jono8]

@dowie's chart is interesting

It really isn't.

 

[Demon]

The centre is not a fixed point either so meme is garbage.

The meme was created simply to describe the phenomena where previously left of centre liberal figures were suddenly being branded alt-right because they didn’t 100% jump in bed with the ideological far left, in that regard it shows why perfectly.

It’s rooted in unidimensional thinking/viewpoints and the behaviour that if anyone disagrees with you they must be ‘right wing’ and start branding them ‘alt right’ as a justification to have a strong negative emotional response, leading to cancelling, smear campaigns and out right violence.

I’ve always hovered around centre, I have a mix of social and liberal values and like to take care of my fellow humans and treat people as I wish to be treated and only see people as people and vote lab/cons depending on their policies that best fit my viewpoint. But I don’t agree with the identity politics so can see many centrist liberals that have now been branded alt-right and see my own views may also be considered alt-right where obviously I’ve not changed one bit, hence the Meme to me is laughably accurate.

Of course UK politics is different, lab/con are really floating around centre, currently labour are pullling a bit further left lately with pandering to identity politics and cons are a bit further right in some ways, but on a scale of far left to far right they are very much still different shades of centre in my book.

 

[Rroff]

As a very generalised take I think it matches what tends to happen to a lot of people.

 

[dowie]

The guy who created the meme is a liberal evolutionary biologist who was canceled by woke idiots after sending an essay into Quillette calling out some of the nonsense prevalent in gender ideology. He used to debunk the pseudoscience of right-wing creationist types but his career was torpedoed when he called out the pseudoscience of gender ideologues on the left:

Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

By means of this damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t logic, cancel-culture Truthers can pretend away the existence of thousands of victims.

quillette.com

In 2008, I decided to pursue a career as an academic biologist. Science in general, and evolutionary biology in particular, had been a passion from a young age. Even as an undergraduate, I maintained a blog that I used to debunk pseudoscience, and critique creationism and Intelligent Design. I was outspoken, and sometimes launched headlong into debates with Christian conservatives. Creationists and IDers frequently told me I was wrong or stupid, but my critics never called me a bigot.

This changed, however, when I started graduate school in 2013. This was an environment where I didn’t have to worry about right-wing creationists. Rather, the pseudoscience I observed was coming from the other side of the political spectrum—especially in the form of “Blank Slate” proponents who argued (falsely) that sex differences in human personality, preferences, and behavior are entirely the result of socialization.
[...]

In October 2018, the Grievance Studies scandal dropped, bringing renewed focus on the intellectual degradation within academic fields focused on gender and sex. A few weeks later, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.” These events, happening in such close succession, pushed me beyond my threshold for restraint. Despite my academic mentors’ warnings that speaking up could ruin my career, I let my bottled-up frustrations out in an essay I sent to Quillette. It was published under the headline, The New Evolution Deniers.

 

[Irish_Tom]

The guy who created the meme is a liberal evolutionary biologist who was canceled by woke idiots after sending an essay into Quillette calling out some of the nonsense prevalent in gender ideology. He used to debunk the pseudoscience of right-wing creationist types but his career was torpedoed when he called out the pseudoscience of gender ideologues on the left:

Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

By means of this damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t logic, cancel-culture Truthers can pretend away the existence of thousands of victims.

quillette.com

I have no issue with the left-hand side of the cartoon. The “woke” side of the left is problematic for a range of reasons and I don’t feel they represent me in the left part of my centre-left self-identity.

My issue with the meme is the idea that the right has stayed static. Even your charts showed a shift further right and that was before Trump.

 

[chroniclard]

The meme was created simply to describe the phenomena where previously left of centre liberal figures were suddenly being branded alt-right because they didn’t 100% jump in bed with the ideological far left, in that regard it shows why perfectly.

It’s rooted in unidimensional thinking/viewpoints and the behaviour that if anyone disagrees with you they must be ‘right wing’ and start branding them ‘alt right’ as a justification to have a strong negative emotional response, leading to cancelling, smear campaigns and out right violence.

I’ve always hovered around centre, I have a mix of social and liberal values and like to take care of my fellow humans and treat people as I wish to be treated and only see people as people and vote lab/cons depending on their policies that best fit my viewpoint. But I don’t agree with the identity politics so can see many centrist liberals that have now been branded alt-right and see my own views may also be considered alt-right where obviously I’ve not changed one bit, hence the Meme to me is laughably accurate.

Of course UK politics is different, lab/con are really floating around centre, currently labour are pullling a bit further left lately with pandering to identity politics and cons are a bit further right in some ways, but on a scale of far left to far right they are very much still different shades of centre in my book.

Just another feeble attempt for righties to pass the buck and stoke their made up culture wars and/or refuse to move with the times.

 

[Tony Edwards]

Just another feeble attempt for righties to pass the buck and stoke their made up culture wars and/or refuse to move with the times.

Exactly. Calling yourself centre or left/right of centre doesnt include support for racists, mysoginists, rapists, homophobes. It is quite funny that supporting those groups should make you extreme right but those people dont accept that. Yet if you are against those groups you are extreme left and practice cancel culture.

What has happened is the acceptance of those issues has changed. I remember growing up in and constantly hearing racist things that were deemed normal. Things change. It is called progression. The right hate progression because they spend a lot of effort trying to still be able to be *****.

 

[dowie]

I have no issue with the left-hand side of the cartoon. The “woke” side of the left is problematic for a range of reasons and I don’t feel they represent me in the left part of my centre-left self-identity.

My issue with the meme is the idea that the right has stayed static. Even your charts showed a shift further right and that was before Trump.

No, it doesn't, the charts we have there show a shift to the left by the Republicans before Trump, remember Trump came to power in 2016, the chart shows the median Republican move to become more liberal (from 6 to 5-ish) between 94 and 2004.
Perhaps there is data between 2004 and 2017 to show a shift to the right at some other point before Trump becomes a candidate (perhaps the tea party or opposition to Obama etc..) but it isn't shown there.
The last chart does show a shift to the right, that's in 2017, after Trump has been elected... the Republicans at that point have gone from a median of 6 to 6.5 meanwhile the democrats from 5 to 2. That's kinda the crux of it, the Republican side hasn't shifted by as much.

The meme works, it doesn't really need to move the right by a tiny amount to tackle some "well ackchually" issue, it's just a funny meme and people can recognise the point being made easily enough.

 

[Stu999]

The centre is not a fixed point either so meme is garbage.

Look at the meme again. It doesn’t say the centre is a fixed point. That’s the “point” of it.

 

[Irish_Tom]

No, it doesn't, the charts we have there show a shift to the left by the Republicans before Trump, remember Trump came to power in 2016, the chart shows the median Republican move to become more liberal (from 6 to 5-ish) between 94 and 2004.
Perhaps there is data between 2004 and 2017 to show a shift to the right at some other point before Trump becomes a candidate (perhaps the tea party or opposition to Obama etc..) but it isn't shown there.

The last chart does show a shift to the right, that's in 2017, after Trump has been elected... the Republicans at that point have gone from a median of 6 to 6.5 meanwhile the democrats from 5 to 2. That's kinda the crux of it, the Republican side hasn't shifted by as much.

And since Trump they could have gone from 6.5 to 8, or 11 — we don’t know because we don’t have the chart for it. Equally, for all know, the left could have shifted back towards the centre.

The Republican Party certainly seems to have embraced much of the Tea Party nonsense that was considered “fringe” back when they had a higher profile.

The meme works, it doesn't really need to move the right by a tiny amount to tackle some "well ackchually" issue, it's just a funny meme and people can recognise the point being made easily enough.

Yeah, I get the point. I still think it’s lazy and inaccurate.