It's no news to those of us here, the left hates us. The left pushes the worst form of depracity though, and not only expects you to "accept" it, but you must approve it.
Again, not news.
That said, it's worth noting that, and as Aurini explores the background on why, the gap is growing and getting more extreme. The left truly is losing their mind.
This article starts with two premises: first, that political orientation is substantially influenced by personality, specifically the Big Five Personality Traits; this is a premise which has been thoroughly studied, and should not be controversial. But while the variations in these traits explain party alignment, they fail to explain the current polarization. Presumably we’ve always had a mix of personalities along these five axis, why should it suddenly result in such a substantial divide?>
The second premise is that it has been the Left which is growing more radical, while the Right holds to the same values it held in the 1980s (if anything, today’s conservative is more tolerant of minorities than his 1980s counterpart). Discerning this from the data is difficult, because Pew’s measurements only contrast the current Left to the current Right; while this demonstrates the growing divide, it doesn’t indicate which side is moving. Even on matters of policy, if America has been legislating for the Left, it is inevitable that the Right will start to push back harder, just to get back to where things used to be. Their values haven’t changed; the situation has changed. Which side is acting, and which side is reacting?
To identify which side has radicalized, a cursory glance at political platforms will suffice. When looking at issues such as gay marriage, immigration, privacy, and social spending, most Democrat politicians (Barrack Obama, Bill Clinton) have made public statements, some as recently as ten years ago, which would have them condemned as ‘Nazis’ today; and the policies advocated for by Donald Trump are strikingly moderate by historical standards, and yet are causing hysteria amongst his opponents.
Evidence abounds. On the one hand, they are back to extolling the virtues or acceptability of pedophilia, which we knew wouldn't get buried under the public outcry against Slate for their previous run of pro-pedo articles, given the increased sexualization of children as a good thing, the more extreme the better, and the outlook that life doesn't start until it's convenient for the mom.
That last is sadly not much of an exaggeration - if the infant is still inside her it's only her body that matters. That fetus, infant, "clump of cells" inside her has no rights or consideration.
And they stupidly attempt to back those on the right into a corner, and demonstrate as well that "the right" is anyone not as progressive as they are, again proving with precision the worldview expected from the graphs Aurini provides. The NYT, arbiter of pravda that won the Pulitzer for blatant lies, selects even leftists and liberals like Peterson, Dave Rubin, and so on, as radicalizong right wing neo-nazis.
I'm glad that Bill Whittle is angry about it at least, but he's still a bit too wedded to the boomer niceness.
Huffpo recently published an article on the supposed ongoing "White Nationalist" problem at Twitter, where such rabid right wingers like Mike Cernovich and "Cult leader" Stefan Molyneaux were featured, and almost every image was selected to include a MAGA hat, because, hey, Trump and his supporters are all racists, donchaknow. Also, it's a strange cult leader that insists you check everything out for yourself, and to not just take his word on it, or anyone else's.
We've seen an acceleration, including the recent move by Salesforce to not do business with gun-related businesses. This prompted a good post from Eric Raymond on the perils of counting on cloud services or "<blank> as a service" instead of controlling the storage, software, services yourself.
The reason this ban has teeth is that the company provides “software as a service”; that is, the software you run is a client for servers that the provider owns and operates. If the provider decides it doesn’t want your business, you probably have no real recourse. OK, you could sue for tortious interference in business relationships, but that’s chancy and anyway you didn’t want to be in a lawsuit, you wanted to conduct your business.
This is why “software as a service” is dangerous folly, even worse than old-fashioned proprietary software at saddling you with a strategic business risk. You don’t own the software, the software owns you.
It’s 2019 and I feel like I shouldn’t have to restate the obvious, but if you want to keep control of your business the software you rely on needs to be open-source. All of it. All of it. And you can’t afford it to be tethered to a service provider even if the software itself is nominally open source.
Otherwise, how do you know some political fanatic isn’t going to decide your product is unclean and chop you off at the knees? It’s rifles today, it’ll be anything that can be tagged “hateful” tomorrow – and you won’t be at the table when the victim-studies majors are defining “hate”. Even if you think you’re their ally, you can’t count on escaping the next turn of the purity spiral.
There's some interesting discussion at the post. It's also worth noting that even an anarcho-libertarian like Eric views this behavior as wrong, and requiring effective response to prevent such abuse by companies, but the boomercons at AR15.com have too many cases of "but it's a private business."
A few had the balls to point out "bake the cake" and that the particular free association ship had sailed. I was mildly and pleasantly surprised given the reaction to the concept of "it's OK to be white" type ideas in that forum.
In short, nothing new.
The press will lie to you. They will and do lie to others to smear people. Even the authoritative press will do so. Nevertheless, don't give up. Build. Take steps to be more antifragile, or to at least reduce your attack surface, because they will come after you, your clients, your job, and anything else.
They will paint you into a corner, take away everything, and give you no option but to fight, or kneel. You may survive on your knees, but you will not live that way.
