So one is bad stuff on the level of violent terrorists and intelligence agencies, and another is bad stuff on the level of mean girls in high school? No disagreement there. Both of those stink. Then, there's bad on the level of groups of people going around in masks, using anonymity to get away with beating people up (1), committing vandalism, and terrorism on a level where universities have to hire $600,000 in security. That's also happening. (Shouldn't this be the sad, tragic legacy of the past?)

Namecalling, exclusion, silencing -- none of these is intellectually worthy. None of these gets us closer to the truth. All they do is fuel and add legitimacy to the unreasonable extremists and prevent the reasonable discussions from being had.

Like going to jail or being killed and getting cancelled on twitter are close enough to the same thing that the same philosophical framework applies.

The common mechanism is the coercion in contrast to convincing. The key concept is that authoritarianism.

I'd suggest you back up and re-evaluate how you got here.

I'm not backing up. It's high time that lots of people stopped backing up and started calling out all the authoritarianism which is supposedly happening in the name of human freedom. It's coercion going against human freedom. If you are really on the side of justice, then when given the opportunity to hear people out and talk, you hear people out and talk. The side of justice, in the end, finally convinces through appeal to universal principle, not through force alone. In the long arc of history, it's clear who uses force alone. (Even in WWII, the victory of military arms would have meant just another war, if it weren't for the demonstration of principles and generosity by the US as victors. The subsequent cold war was won by the truth of our having a better system, not authoritarianism.)

(1 -- Even beating innocent people up, because they are too taken by anger to tell the difference.)

A lot of people are scared or confused by the fact that the internet and globalization has fractured the mainstream media narrative into multiple narratives and exposed the underlying politics (not "politics" as in "the discourse", I mean "politics" as in "the application of power to allocate resources"). But not much has changed materially, you are just exposed to more personal conversations in public spaces than we used to be. It is weird.

What you are actually seeing happen: politically engaged people are ignoring you or just brushing you aside or even telling you to shut or get lost because you don't matter to them politically. This might be an adjustment for you but no one has to answer your questions or convince you to accept the new consensus. If you mattered to them they would, but you got left behind because you don't.

It is less public conversation, and more "shut up and submit!"

What you are actually seeing happen: politically engaged people are ignoring you or just brushing you aside or even telling you to shut or get lost because you don't matter to them politically.

This is the authoritarian telling the supposed "inferiors" to submit.

This might be an adjustment for you but no one has to answer your questions or convince you to accept the new consensus. If you mattered to them they would, but you got left behind because you don't.

Spoken like any oppressor would have put it. "Just submit and accept. You don't matter, and there's nothing you can do about it." No answering questions on matters of principle. No curiosity about the other side. Just lay back and take it. It's exactly the behavior of the people who are on the "power" side of "speaking truth to power." The long arc of history bends towards justice. In the end, principles will win out over the temporary contextual power of "social consensus." It's what got us here to the most free and prosperous multicultural civilization in all of history in the first place.

It is happening, it is just happening among people with a different worldview, using different language than you prefer.

Sounds like you are trying to disenfranchise, or declare people disenfranchised. Sounds like you're just wishing entire swathes of the mainstream/center to disappear, or keep quiet and put up.

This is one of the dishonest absolute tropes which need to be squashed, because it obscures the truth. It's an obfuscation that's as good as a lie. (1) Here's the universal, timeless truth: All power is temporary and contextual. All of history teaches us this. A masked mob dominating the street for a couple of hours clearly has contextual power. The mob that took over Evergreen State College and made the president ask to go to the bathroom had temporary, contextual power.

Authoritarianism just requires power, and all power is temporary and contextual. Silencing speakers just requires this temporary, contextual power. Ruining a life just requires temporary, contextual power. Instilling fear so that people remain silent just requires temporary, contextual power. All of that is authoritarianism. All of that is coercion instead of convincing, and none of that requires the power of a government.

That said, there is plenty of centralized power now being used by corporations and by colluding groups spanning multiple powerful corporations. There is plenty of the corporate power of the purse acting to actively silence people operating in 2019 and recent years.

Whatever you're talking about isn't authoritarianism

Merely wielding power to make people do what you want is authoritarianism. That is what comes of pseudo-activism that never gets beyond grievance and outrage. That is what comes of pseudo-activism that stays in that potentially toxic zone and never gets to the level of universal and unifying principles. That's the dishonest ideology of people who want to wield power to coerce others, yet deny it at the same time. It's based on the obvious lie of static, timeless power, easily refuted by history.

(1 - "Power + Prejudice" being used to justify the distortion of a racial arrow onto what should be universal justice that applies to all human beings -- is part of the lie. We've seen ideologies that assign different justice to different races, creeds, orientations. They all claim to be part of a movement of justice, and in the end, they all turn out to be evil. If power is temporary and contextual, there can be no idiosyncratic directional vectors to justice, especially none related to melanin.)

Personally, I think what you see in the world around you is a reaction by people who realized that they don't have power by money (and thus hardly any power by speech) and don't have power by demoray in a broken system stacked against them, and have resorted to whatever other forms of power are possible. And yet still the positions they fight for are ignored because the way they petition for them isn't the right way, ie, they way in which they can be disenfranchised and ignored.

That would sound much more convincing if it wasn’t for the fact that most media and academia is dominated by the Left (which is far more authoritative these days).

In the cases cited, a group is over reacting to signals interpreted as historical oppression. It's awful when it happens and unfortunately it always will. Emotions at injustice are going to break windows (and worse) without thinking and sometimes at the wrong target.

Of course the issues are real and need to be discussed and criticized. But fortunately stories like Evergreen State College are rare, certainly not anywhere near the level of 1960s university sit-ins and even those were certainly not a national catastrophe of censorship. And Twitter storms are not oppression, they are just people being wrong on the internet. They are the inevitable result of ridiculously bad platform design.

So while events like Evergreen certainly need to be criticized, the more serious threat is that this is being systematically used by cynical parties in a dangerous way to portray a nation plagued by oppressive mobs who need to be put in line. Excuses that will spread to harsh treatment of protesters and a pattern that has occurred many times in the past.

One also sees people jumping up with a banner in the front of the mob. Lenin and Kim-il Sung, for example.

Of course the issues are real and need to be discussed and criticized. But fortunately stories like Evergreen State College are rare

But the incidences of tenured professors who are no longer free to say what they actually think anymore are legion.

And Twitter storms are not oppression, they are just people being wrong on the internet.

Tell that to people whose lives have been ruined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI

So while events like Evergreen certainly need to be criticized, the more serious threat is that this is being systematically used by cynical parties in a dangerous way to portray a nation plagued by oppressive mobs who need to be put in line.

Downtown Portland was tied up by such mobs as well. There have been hundreds of incidences of violence (a number closer to 1000 than zero) including assaults with serious injury. Why did tens of thousands of people surround a bunch of mostly normal, ordinary people, including a number of brown people, claiming they were "white supremacists" in Boston?

The Left in general is plagued by the zeitgeist of an authoritarian, angry mob, and wordplay/splitting hairs about what exactly should be classified as "authoritarian" is simply silly when you've been actually mobbed. Thugs going about intimidating and committing acts of violence for political purposes is authoritarianism. The wordplay is just one side wanting to act like thugs, trying to pretend it's something else.

But the leader of the most powerful nation on earth just declared a national emergency for no reason. The same guy calls the press "the enemy of the people". Are we really supposed to believe that a handful of university disruptions and twitter storms and against his supporters are the real threats to freedom?

Boy, I can't imagine why people are just ignoring you and insulting you instead of engaging with your obviously bad faith prompts to discuss Nazi rights. Bit insulting to the intelligence of HN in general to think this reddit-level BS would fly isn't it?

Typical projection. I'm anti-violence, and to the extent people in those groups committed violence, they should be prosecuted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6RDQ02AzLw

Boy, I can't imagine why people are just ignoring you and insulting you

Apparently, a lot of people like what I write here.

instead of engaging with your obviously bad faith prompts to discuss Nazi rights.

Hmm, I think you're the one laying cards on the table this moment. I've had my cards on the table the whole time. Pray tell, what Nazi rights have I been advocating for? Can you provide quotes?

Bit insulting to the intelligence of HN in general to think this reddit-level BS would fly isn't it?

Thanks for showing your true colors and resorting to name calling. I guess I touched a nerve. Thanks as well for letting your authoritarianism leak out. It seems like you can't help it, and it helps my case perhaps more than anything I can write.