Heresy (2022]

turtleyacht

Is the moderate view "strong opinions, weakly held?"

hackyhacky

Yet another "anti-woke, anti-political correct" screed, whining about how it isn't cool to be racist anymore. I guess this felt edgy in 2022, but in the current political climate this essay is utterly redundant.

andy99

2022, and pretty clear why. Here is the discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977147

regularization

There really hasn't been a heretical witchhunt in the US in recent times like against those who do not want US aid to Israel. BDS resolutions and state employees across the country having to sign pledges they won't boycott Israel, college expulsion of Palestine supporters, then expulsion of multiple Ivy League presidents for not cracking down on students more, with Congressional visits and hearings. Nothing this century in the US comes close in comparison. Despite that, half of Democratic Congressional representatives, including Nancy Pelosi, just voted to cut aid to Israel.

lowbloodsugar

The problem is that the questions end with “Is it true?” instead of following up with “Why is it true?”

AyanamiKaine

There is one question I ask myself everytime. Do words hurt in such strong ways that they should be censored? Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people. Other words are used to express that something cannot be human. While I personally dont feel much when such words are used against me, others explode with emotions. I dont see a problem with respecting others if they say a specific word hurts them, why should I use it? My main question is when people express their opinion and emotions with specific words and we would ban them as hateful. It wouldnt change their emotions or opinions just limit their tools at the current time to express them. Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea? Wouldnt it lead to the search of new tools someone could use? Our world would be better if we could respect people and their boundaries more.

GaryBluto

How the time flies. Now the ENL-world has two thriving cultural revolutions, both at each other’s throats. It’s all become very tiring.

derektank

>There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago I think the trend line has reversed a bit since 2022. Whether it be simply because public events have overwhelmed public attention, or there’s been a genuine retreat, it certainly feels as though (in private institutions at least, setting aside the federal government for a moment which has fumblingly attempted to enforce norms against criticizing the president) the Overton window on what can be said has never been wider in my memory. And not entirely for the good. People are out in public endorsing wild conspiracy theories, supporting political ideologies from Stalinism to Juche to Fascism, and outright criminality often while publishing under their own names. Maybe some of these people are getting fired, but for the most part there seems to be a tolerance for just spouting off on almost any topic in a way there wasn’t in 2020 or even before.

bpavuk

eh, I was watching a Space Marine 2 stream when this popped up in my sidebar. just one word - "Heresy" - as a title of the tab, screaming to be clicked. even though it's from 2022, it still resonates with how I got fired just recently. something that Warhammer's Imperium calls out and does with no shame, publicly, is being built out silently or with euphemisms in our world. ever more reasons to appreciate Warhammer as an unfortunate parody of our own little rock ball. and here I am, jobless, for calling Claude Code "a decent search engine"

dwroberts

Yeah heresy has ‘returned in a modern form’ - if you overlook the glaring issue of the fact that people were typically imprisoned or executed for heresy in the past. What a ridiculous false equivalence.

cjs_ac

As someone with many heretical opinions, I’ve found it very easy to avoid accusations of heresy by just shutting up. The right to free speech is not an obligation to speak freely. As a software engineer, my colleagues don’t need to know my opinions on economic policy for me to be able to work effectively with them.

WalterBright

> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade It's more like what was heresy earlier aligned with one's viewpoint. The change is it has shifted, not narrowed.

IshKebab

> The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does. That's a bit too reductionist. When people say things they often have a hidden motivation, and who they are is a strong signal about what their hidden motivation is. For example if Trump and Obama both say "all lives matter", well yeah of course it's technically true in both cases. But only a complete idiot would think they were saying the same thing. Otherwise, hard to disagree with anything here, but I don't think he's said anything new or profound anyway. The far left is definitely reaping what it sowed at the moment.

akramachamarei

Thanks to the hackernews community for flagging this and proving his point!

ChiperSoft

> when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion Aaand thats when I stopped reading. You're not being censored, Paul, you're being rightfully told you're an asshole and refusing to take it to heart.

dgeiser13

Why was this flagged in 2026 and not in 2022?

PorterBHall

> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased. Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true? It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true. Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same. When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”

gumby

I have to say I was distracted by the punctuation typo: (2022] means the range of 2022 including 2022. I never noticed before that when we write (2022) we are excluding the year 2022. I know this really apply to the topic but hopefully I’m not the only one to have gotten a chuckle from it.