https://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2018/02/12/m...
There is not a (net) mass exodus from the Bay Area, hence the ridiculous prices. I moved to SF in 2006 and there were always people claiming it was on the verge of collapse because everyone was fed up with the high prices and crowding and was fleeing. Funny to see that nothing has changed.
“No one goes to that bar anymore, it’s too crowded!”
"Engineers tend to view themselves as much less liberal and slightly more conservative than the general public, according to a recent survey of over 1,200 readers of MACHINE DESIGN and Electronic Design magazines. The same survey also found that engineers say they are more likely to be Republican (42.1%) or Independent (33.7%) voters, as opposed to Democrats (14.5%)."
this is an interesting asymmetry I've noticed too. There are countless of places where salt of the earth Americana is the de facto monoculture.
If I'd go there and try to create a liberal-hippie space for myself they'd probably flip me the finger and tell me that's not the local way of life, and somehow everybody seems to agree that this is perfectly fine.
Yet when people in the valley or in a big city share a common culture they somehow have to defend themselves and painstakingly carve out a space for Peter Thiel et al. Why is that? If he doesn't like California's culture Thiel can move, end of story. Why do we have to treat him like a wounded deer?
The people in SV are largely more willing to challenge orthodoxy and take risks.
And believe it or not, people in the south have to (from their point of view) put up with "the liberals" too - similar to people in SF or wherever.
Frankly, what is interesting here is that instead of the United States becoming more culturally similar with the advent of planes, mobile phones, and what have you it would appear, at least on the surface, that we're becoming more different. I live in the Midwest and when I hear somebody from Vancouver saying that explaining something to someone automatically is "mansplaining" and "placing an emotional burden" on that person I find that just as idiotic and incompatible with my way of life as some bible-thumping anti-climate change person from Mississippi. Now, both of these are of course generalizations, but the most pervasive noise, if you will, is this instead of the most likely interaction I would have with most people which is just a hey how are you, thanks, yes I like XYZ as well.
What we need to do is police the most radical people if we want the United States to be a united country. If we'd rather break it up or something then that's a different story.
Now Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. are all finding excuses to allow various meddling of the search results. There is too much money in it, it is inevitable.
Free speech is important to me because without it we quite literally end up killing babies for very small amounts of money.
You mean factually reporting the news? There is real and severe damage that is happening to our country and our standing in the world. The regressive politics will have consequences.
Even if you are a fan of Trump's policies, the White House is chaos, we essentially do not have a president. Imagine a real crisis hitting, and what this White House would do.
It's incredible how insulting portions are at the population that they think the very real harm (this is not normal) is just some kind of media sensation. I think you are confusing the real current administration with a season of the apprentice that Trump hosted.
No one cares about Huntsville, AL and most high-profile people would not reside there, so no one hears about any of this bubble behavior from the other side.
The most important cities (culturally and economically) are, at least, left-leaning. So, you'll only hear about conservatives being rejected by the "liberals" in {city}.
I grew up in a conservative town. Personal experience says the bubble on that side is arguably worse and more violent. Being openly gay or not-white or not-Christian (or accepting of those things) in my hometown was a good way to end up harassed and possibly assaulted on a regular basis.
Not only is it not “pretty liberal” by any definition, people here aren’t any less political than people on the coasts, and they don’t “live their lives” any more, whatever that even means.
However, people here are less angry about Trump and the Republicans because they’re much more likely to have voted for him and support what he’s doing. They were plenty angry when Obama was in office.
Also, “southern charm” is real and nice at first, but in my experience it’s actually pretty shallow, cheap, and discriminatory. It’s mainly surface-level and primarily extended to non-poor white Christian conservatives. Minorities, immigrants, gays, liberals, non-Christians, and poor people are treated differently.
The better question is: why aren’t you outraged like so many others?
And if the answer is that you don’t care or you agree with the policies in question, then perhaps the outraged people should justifiably ignore your condemnation of their outrage.
It’s ridiculous for me to claim that all conservatives were only anti-Obama’s policies because the right-leaning media whipped them into a frenzy, and it’s just as unfair and intellectually dishonest to do that to the left today.
If you count asians as white...
Also gonna want a cite on that. afaik sv hiring is about equal with labor market.
That's not a coincidence. It's a direct product of cosmopolitanism. The cities that represent it most clearly are its capitals. Like any working system, it has rules. If you want the benefits, you need to play be the rules. If you don't, you're free to leave. Goodness knows your apartment won't go unfilled for long.
The political issues are important, of course. Arguably more important than other topics. That's one reason why the above is the case.
The real problem is increasing polarization of the Congress since Gingrich. We are going to keep flipping back and forth between Republican domination and Democrat domination rather than slight right majority and slight left majority with great debates and comprises until some key issues with the electoral process and congressional procedure are fixed.
I think the end result is an overhaul and optimization of government by sensible, human-oriented technologists but that is a few decades and several bitcoin bubbles away.
So maybe check your article's sources first :-).
The media did not create deported children, paid off porn stars, and collusion with foreign governments. So let's not pretend this is on them entirely.
Like, for example, the flu season becoming a crisis because key medical manufacturers were devastated by a hurricane and found limited support from a government that barely realizes Puerto Rico is part of the US, much less that its industries are so essential.
Any definition? I'm not from there, but if you use votes for liberal candidates as a basis, they are pretty liberal [0]. That's at least one definition, whether or not it's yours. I could understand arguing nuance, but to say it isn't pretty liberal by any definition appears incorrect.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee#Politics
I don't see many people in SV culture claiming to value "diversity of thought". They value diversity of culture, races, sexual identities, etc. But not thought (unfortunately).
That said, other posters are 100% correct when they write that rural America is just as intolerant, only in the other direction. And you don't see many people moving to those areas and attacking their lack of thought diversity (probably because they'd get shunned, at best, or shot, at worst).
And you know, Roy Moore lost elections. How many Republicans did SFBA send to Washington lately?
What gets you in trouble here is talking about pro-life family values, personal responsibility, and how marginalized groups who are over/under represented in certain outcomes must deserve it.
If someone is using "intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself" as an insult, it only makes sense to assume they are claiming that they are different.
I think there's several claims here:
1) "no/very few women can be good at stem/math/language/programming." Nobody but the most comically self-parodying misogynists says that.
2) "fewer women are good at stem/math/language/programming than men." This is the "SV conservative/classic liberal" position. If equal opportunity is provided, any remaining differences in hiring are plausibly down to availability which is down to average capability.
3) "women and men are just as good at stem/math/language/programming." This is the progressive/feminist position.
The people who hold 3 want the rest of the world to think that the people who hold 2 actually hold 1. Many 2 would be willing to tentatively jump on board with 3, but 3 somehow keep antagonizing them. As such, similarly to the Trump election, it's politically a question of which side disgusts you less.
I've never seen much opposition to your run off the mill conservatism you find anywhere in the business world.
Can we please stop it with these political comments made to provoke instead of discuss? If you want to vent your anger go post on reddit.
A random example: taller people and people with broader shoulders make more sales.
We are intelligent minds grafted clumsily onto apes.
There might be some diversity of economic matterts; depends on whether you make money on walking through the outer fringes of legality (e.g. AirBnB) or not. On social issues that you mention SV is far more of an echo chamber.
Although I do wonder where you're getting the idea about groups that "deserve it". Personal responsibility, vs. identity politics seems to be a rather large dividing line between liberals and conservatives, and "deserve it" as applied to groups is a liberal belief, not conservative.
And as silly and ignorant as Coulter is, at the moment when one starts saying that she does not have a right to speak here, one signs off on his moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Ohhhhh yeah.
I have to admit I have a limited amount of personal experience with the South, but this is both the impression I have from my limited experience and what people who grew up in the South but live in the Northeast now tell me from their experiences.
Or as someone who grew up in Louisiana told me "'Southern Hospitality' and hospitality anywhere else is the same except that outside the South they don't feel the need to brag about it and also offer it to people that aren't white."
It's just sooooooo so so so shallow, some of the stuff I hear Southerners brag about I'm thinking, in my head, "well literally anyone I know would do that but that so I'm not impressed and, nobody would feel the need to brag about it later."
I just hate how shallow and insincere it is dressed up in in the thin veil of sincerity
Economically SV may not be too far from the mainstream, because really, if you drive away not only Thiel but the rest of VCs, who's gonna throw millions on your new world-changing blockchain crowdsourced augmented-reality chat app?!
Socially, though, SV positions itself far, far left of not only mainstream, but even of the outer fringes of common sense. Which comes out quite ironic in the end, e.g. when you look at tyhe stuff in Damore's lawsuit (the ones still proceeding) vs. the fact that Google is simultaneously being sued for underpaying women.
Just because somebody's opponents are biased doesn't mean they aren't.
Note that I am not saying that #3 is not the case! I'm saying that I personally have not been given reliable reason to believe #3 over #2, or reason to believe that the people who have tried to get me to believe #3 are competent and respect their own fallibility to the point where I could tentatively trust them.
Ironically, the more aggressively people try to get me to agree with #3, the more skeptical I tend to become of it. To me this is analogous to the AI risk debate, where I at least partially worry about it because the arguments against from otherwise intelligent people have been so consistently lackluster.
edit: To iterate on that earlier "which side disgusts you less" comment:
As with the Trump election, people on either side tend to assume that people on the other side agree with their candidate.
This is not necessarily the case. Often when forced to choose between two alternatives, the question is down to which outcome seems to you more desperate. People who vote Trump consider immigration a desperate struggle. People who vote $not_trump probably consider sexism/racism a desperate struggle. Both sides are willing to sacrifice some values so that they can try and preserve others.
I believe the debate between #2 and #3 is mainly down to whether you consider sexism or knowledge the more desperate struggle. Personally I tend to come down on the knowledge side, possibly because I am not personally affected by sexism. This does not mean I will condone sexism, it means that I will trade it off, if I am utterly forced to, against a value that I consider more vital. That does not mean I wouldn't like to reduce sexism if I could; it does mean that when people are censured due to citing scientific studies, I feel that something I consider more urgent than gender equality is at stake.
In any forced tradeoff, there is only one value that can win. I think sexism and racism are serious issues, but I don't think they are the most serious issues. If that makes me a misogynist in people's eyes, then so be it.
Of course, in any remotely sane civil society we would try to negotiate solutions that satisfy the values of everybody involved. This is a large part of why the aggressive, condescending rhetoric of certain parts of #3 is so frightening to me. I see no reason why the fight against sexism and racism has to be at odds with truth; it's an unforced overaggression that's alienating people like me for no reason.
In summary: my issues are with the #3 methodology, not the #3 position.
I also don't totally reject the notion that biology can explain differences in outcome. I just think that explanation should be a last resort after the far more likely causes of bias, random path dependency, and perverse incentives and feedback loops are ruled out. Blaming biology first is like immediately jumping to "compiler bug" when your program crashes. People who jump first to biology are probably racist or sexist.
As for immigration vs social justice: neither are IMHO existential struggles. Existial struggles are things like sustaining a modern economy post population growth and transitioning beyond fossil fuels before we either crash and burn in a Malthusian catastrophe or destroy our atmosphere and oceans. If we don't fix those things social justice and immigration issues won't matter much to the survivors of the nuclear war that ensues as global civilization collapses.
As for Trump: he is categorically unfit to be president, but Clinton was also an awful choice. That election was terrible and the lineup as a whole symptomatic of the decline of our political class.
I guess I tend to come down more on the nature side of nature vs. culture, but I definitely think that the possibilities you listed are entirely plausible and I'm definitely open to being convinced with well-designed, at-least-not-obviously-partisan studies.
(Amusingly, depending on what language you use, blaming "compiler bug" first when your program crashes can actually be surprisingly credible. Languages like D, for instance, which combine a strong type system with a homebrew backend overburdened with features, make it a lot more plausible than you'd think.)
I entirely agree that neither of those are existential struggles, but we still have to rank them. Personally, I'd rather lose feminist progress than liberal progress, because a liberal, open-minded society will make it a lot easier for feminism to regain ground. What good if we win equality-of-outcome, if it loses us the soul of equal rights? I believe that we ought to think that #3 if #3 is true, and that we ought to think that #2 if #2 is true. To do this, we have to be able to discern truth without bias.
Inasmuch as #3 is true, free thought and civil discourse is its ally in whole.
After that alt-right brought in their own thugs as well, which might be the ones you're referrring to.
In the antifa vs. alt-right contest both sides get a dishonourable second place.