The way they've always been made: a combination of social and economic pressures. "Social engineering" is a misnomer. The phrase makes us think we can engineer humans into creating a group of humans (ie: a society) that values what we want them to value and behaves the way we want them to behave. Never once in the history of man has this succeeded.
What if city planners fail to foresee a technological innovation (like fleets of self-driving cars) and end up spending billions and inconveniencing millions over an ultimately unnecessary cause?
That's how the nonsense of suburbs and extensive car culture began: city planners following an ideology. Instead of selling what was practical for the individual, they coined and sold the american dream.
I always thought any ideology was dangerous, something to be shunned.
Same here. It's a great way of not having to think for yourself, though. The success of ideologies throughout history makes me think it exploits a mental vulnerability that exists in most of the human population[0]. How do we make that work in our favor, though? At one point is history, we built a great western civilization. There must have been great incentive to do that, despite the ideologies at play over the past several hundred years. How do we recreate those conditions?
Look at the people making the accusations. They're all straight, white men. Socialists are typically upper middle class straight white men. Nice try painting me as racist, sexist or homophobic, though.
Look at the twitter hashtag #notyourshield. The PC hatemob isn't liked by women, people of color or LGBT. They tend to dislike straight, white men telling them what it's like to be black, female or gay.
> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."?
Marxism happened. Limiting speech has always been a tactic employed by the political left. Words like "racist", "sexist" and "homophobe" were designed to shut down free speech. It's extremely effective at silencing any opposition.
> He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else.
How can you possibly know that? People have lost their jobs and have been forced out of their own companies for less than allowing somebody who other people might consider "racist", "sexist" or "homophobic" to talk at their conference. You can't be aware that these things have happened to other people and say that it doesn't influence the decision.
Once it was brought to his attention, the decision Alex faced was either let Curtis go on and eventually be forced out of his own conference or disinvite him and strengthen the atmosphere of political compliance. I think he made the right short term choice for him, which is all you can realistically expect people to do, but in the long term allowing this sort of thing to persist will come and bite him in the ass.
The longer this goes on, the more radical you need to be to not become victim to the political correctness mob. In the end, if you're a straight white male, you will fall prey to it because you're not a protected class. You can see this playing out in video games, movies and SF&F publishing right now. Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton especially are vocal feminists who have taken a beating by feminists because their views aren't extreme enough.
Aren't we already there, though? This is one of the reasons I left Silicon Valley three years ago. My personal opinions would get me called racist, sexist and homophobic by Marxist standards and I was exhausted by the political mask I had to assume just to find and keep work. Luckily, SV isn't as large a percentage of the tech industry as it likes to think. It's just over represented on tech news sites.
The kind that uses logic and reason instead of rhetorical appeals to emotion. The 'personal is the political' is part of the culture in california and is common throughout the state. And if you don't believe me, you should go on a job hunt and tell every interviewer who talks to you that you're a republican.
Now that I think about it, I want to do just that and document the results. Should be interesting.
There are more than two sides to any discussion and not all sides are equally correct.