Funny comment but in all seriousness, I am generally opposed to taking and treading regardless of the perpetrator. So I don't find these slogans to be that objectionable.
This is like making the Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter argument, or arguing with "it's okay to be white"[0]. It is foolish to argue with a slogan that is designed to be as agreeable as possible. You are fighting in the motte.
I dont get the sense that the "dont tread on me" folk are interested in balanced or nuanced opions about what constitutes treading. It's modern resurgency seemed clearly stemmed in an anti-any-government tea-partyism, seems like a rejectionist Thatcheristic "there is no such thing as society" view. It's insulting, gross & incredibly hostile naivety to many to treat our union as bad, to practice deliberately against it.
I think this is a click-bait headline for what is essentially a commentary piece on recent politics.
The rally actually had very little to do with the article other than some framing.
I think he did a reasonable job raising his issues without hyperbole. In essence, we just need more conversations and attitudes like this out in the social media jungles so we can move forward. It's a sad indictment that someone like this (reasoned and honest opinions) is losing friends still.
I portion a decent part of the blame on the media (inc. social media); they do nothing whatsoever to encourage honest and earnest discourse yet have massive influence over the attitudes of their viewers. They let politicians get away with posturing and dodging and go more for opinions and editorials than searching for data and 'truth.' Social media platforms are focusing all their resources on blocking content rather than behaviour, completely the wrong way around.
The term alt-right was coined by people who wanted to apply the term to themselves, and it described a contrast to the sort of Republicanism that started to end around George Bush Jr, but people just didn't realize it yet.
At some point the alt-right became the mainstream right and the old-school Republicanism represented by the likes of Mitt Romney are now the fringe Republicans. When the old guard ages out of office, it's young blood like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Greene that replaces them.
As for many political groups in heated times, there are plain old alt-right gatherings and there are dangerous alt-right rallies. The author is asserting that there is some unnamed non-trivial force identifying this particular gathering as a dangerous rally, but he is merely invoking the specter of hatred as a strawman for clickbait purposes.
While I do vehemently disagree with the authors position on guns, he raises some exceptional points I think most people don't get and are fundamental to breaking down the divisions we're seeing today.
"This kind of oversimplification of things encourages an “us vs. them” mindset"
"or is this actually an insane amount of posturing, it’s impossible for me to tell"
Lots of "I" statements. I write the same way but don't really care for it. Reads as a little self-absorbed. My favorite journalism has the writer disappearing from sight, maybe peeking around a corner once in a while to remind readers that they exist.
I wonder how the piece would read with all sentences starting with "I" removed.
This is a great personal-experience write-up of an independent photojournalist attending a rally for something akin to "the other side" (the author carefully doesn't articulate which side they belong to, other than that Trump-rally-attendee is far from their comfortable midpoint).
The piece describes the experience and the in-the-moment feelings of the author's experience simply. A good read, though I definitely also want to read the piece written a few weeks later with the benefit of time to work through the emotions and thoughts raised here. (Assuming that such a piece is going to exist!)
I mean, they say they're a libertarian (and other libertarians are fake libertarians, which is possibly the most libertarian thing to say) and expressed agreement with the culture war issues like the "death of men" so the comfort zone sounded more like being around a crowd like that. There are loads of different PTSD support groups (veterans, service industry workers, family trauma, just flat out for men) to the extent you almost need to willfully choose to seek out a domestic/SA group where they aren't comfortable with men.
Otherwise it read like a pretty run of the mill review of the politicans' public personalities plus some "centrist" appeals to the golden mean fallacy which are generally used as a pry bar to keep stretching the overton window to the right. Should we engage libertarian age of consent abolitionists for the good of open discourse and reach for 'not a black-or-white' answer there?
> so the comfort zone sounded more like being around a crowd like that
For what it's worth the "culture war issues" aren't a left vs. right issue anymore. The people in the middle, realistically the swing voters, are beginning to express concerns at how quickly discourse is crumbling under various regimes of speech control. It takes nothing but a trivial Google to see how many news articles are now writing about this.
To assert "culture war" is a far-right view is really a strawman. A lot of Americans who don't involve themselves in the extremes are concerned about the degradation of even mundane discourse in the US.
Your final paragraph
> Should we engage libertarian age of consent abolitionists for the good of open discourse and reach for 'not a black-or-white' answer there?
Is set up to be a perfect strawman. In otherwords, you're saying (without saying) "these libertarian pedophiles shouldn't be engaged". Very dishonest to associate an entire group of (most likely unrelated) people with an extreme fringe of the libertarian party in order to make an underhanded shot at conservative viewpoints in general.
> There are loads of different PTSD support groups (veterans, service industry workers, family trauma, just flat out for men) to the extent you almost need to willfully choose to seek out a domestic/SA group where they aren't comfortable with men.
Specifically targeting PTSD will capture veterans, police, firefighters, etc. Primarily male dominated fields. Men are over twice as likely to be without help in almost any domestic issue. There are more homeless men than women. Many (almost a majority) of these homeless are veterans. This is well known, and to be so dismissive of it is more telling of your own political bias than the truth of the matter.
Why the hell was this flagged? What? God forbid someone posts a great blog article with good photos about a person visiting a rally for a group often discussed disdainfully on this very website and demonstrates that they're not all monsters or redneck idiots.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
This isnt just politics. This is a nuanced & complex view of the world. This is anthropoly that happens to involve poltitics.
The anti-anything-at-all-political bias is way out of control, utterly unchecked, and absurd. [Ed: Im ok with this particular flagging, but it makes me so sad that some of the biggest & widest & most impactful parts of our world are off limits to discussion.]
Simply bullshit. It got flagged because it didn't fit a certain hive mind narrative I already mentioned. Top posts on HN routinely feature politics of all kinds, much of it quite ordinary or banal and far from touching upon some "interesting new phenomenon". Given how little is actually described (and with decent photos no less, accompanied by an in-person narrative) about conservative rallies, I'd say this post fit the bill just fine.
it's the ones who are not the most overtly monstrous or redneck idiots you need to watch out for, who'll work behind the scenes to do things like put christian fundamentalists on the supreme court.
So, what you're doing here is dehumanizing an outsider group (fundamentalist christians) so you don't have to feel bad doing bad things to this group. It's not a productive frame of mind for anything other than future coping with obviously immoral violent destruction carried out by you or your group on said outsider group.
A more productive thing to do is to look at why they still exist, what they do better than progressives (i.e. they build enduring societies, something that is not at all obvious progressivism does because of, for example, the extremely low birthrate in progressive societies). And figure out ways to improve progressivism from what these other societies are doing.
oh, right, because from the text of my comment which is a statement politically opposed to putting fundmentalist christians on the supreme court, you made the extreme leap to saying that I'm some supporter of violent immoral destruction. I don't see where I wrote anything about that. Been watching much Newsmax or OAN recently?
Of course, lets demonize all of them, redneck or capable of intelligent discourse. It doesn't matter, they're just cogs in a large right wing conspiracy. The funny thing is how many progressives consider themselves highly reasoned, unprejudiced people, despite being subject to exactly the same sorts of deeply emotional, irrational biases, just in other directions.
Ukraine Invasion really ran hard on this site earlier this year, and the comments were 49% geopolitical, and 49% domestic-political, at minimum. The remaining 2% were about actually-interesting-to-hackers like military technology or tactics.
So, no. It is indeed true that the borg-mind flags only those political topics that induce cognitive dissonance in itself.
see huge gadsen flag on a pickup truck next to a giant thin blue line flag
sir, who exactly do you think will be doing the treading?
see texas cannon design "come and take it" bumper sticker next to a big thin blue line sticker.
sir, who do you think will be coming and taking it?