SV really has become a leftists echo chamber

Wise people has realized that political correctness is harmful to liberals and conservatives alike.

Sam Altman is a millenial, liberal, democrat, center left. And he is wise, and brave to voice the harm of poitical correctness. He can save Califonria democrats.

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Certainly, I understand this. Husband and I keep our mouths shut re politics with friends, neighbors, and family.

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In Seattle, people actually wish each other Merry Christmas. It’s so weird after living in sterilized SV. You always say happy holidays there.

You got me worried for a while, I thought I read SV really has become a Communist echo chamber for Putin.

Then I remember republicans voted for Putin’s lover. :grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin:

OMG!!! :slightly_smiling_face: The following video shows THE arch duke of liberalism saying this!

I’m just having fun… take it easy everyone.

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yeah, that has been bugging me too. On every coin it says “In God We Trust” {all others must pay cash}

Anyway, I started using checks with Bible quotes printed on them. So far, they got accepted.

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This so-called war on Christmas is so stupid. I was at my kid’s Christmas potluck yesterday in the bastion of liberalism San Francisco and people were saying merry Christmas left and right.

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Whenever anyone says happy holidays I always respond with Merry Christmas.
I grew up with Merry Christmas… It is what makes us all Americans.
When the liberals stole Christmas that was the last straw for me. Political correctness is actually a divider not a joiner… I tell everyone Merry Christmas and that I refuse to live in a Balkanized miserable country… instead of the United States where we all have more in common than not… And Christmas is the number one uniter… everyone loves Christmas even if you are an atheist like me…

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Kids at the potluck sang Hebrew Hanukkah songs along with jingle bell. That’s fine for me. “Happy holidays” to me is not PC but try to make more people happy than just Christians. I never feel you can’t say merry Christmas in SF.

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I think I see some childish statement from somebody who couldn’t perform in the bay area. Thanks God he was sent where we can’t see him or hear his constant praising for Putin. :laughing:

Seriously, for 26 years living in this area, more than what some kids on this topic have lived, I have never, ever heard Happy Holidays. At work, in stores, on signs posted on the side of the road, even when with Chinese/Vietnamese people, I’ve heard the expression Merry Christmas and seen signs everywhere.

But, what can you do when somebody is smoking marijuana and hear what his paranoid ears tell him? I would blame Foxnews a bit too :smile::smile::smile:

Yes, there are plenty of videos of Obama saying Merry Christmas. But what you expect from the conservative bunch praising a guy who couldn’t read a bible…2 Corinthians walk in a bar…:sweat_smile::sweat_smile::sweat_smile:

Merry Christmas to All!

Merry Christmas to Freedom!

No Terror on Christmas!

California’s 80 year old liberal seniors celebrate Christmas with 60 pounds of high grade marijuana. Is it politically correct?

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Merry Christmas in NYC…

Ahhh an idea for a new mobile app for Apple/Android Pay! :slightly_smiling_face:

Will probably not be popular in SV.:neutral_face:

http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/living/religion/article191364279.html

The Pew Research Center, which regularly studies Americans’ religious attitudes, surveyed 1,500 Americans from Nov. 29 to Dec. 4 and found that a dwindling number of people celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. Only 46 percent of those surveyed said they viewed Christmas mainly as a religious holiday, down from 51 percent in 2013. A third of respondents said Christmas was a cultural holiday for them, while others view it as a mix of cultural and religious celebration. Eight percent of those surveyed said they don’t celebrate it at all.

This trend was particularly pronounced among members of the millennial generation, defined by Pew as those born after 1980. Just 32 percent of millennials surveyed said they viewed Christmas as mainly a religious holiday.

They weren’t particularly bothered by the so-called “war on Christmas,” which has become a hot political topic for conservatives. Fifty-six percent of the 18-to-29-year-olds surveyed said they didn’t care wither a store greeted them with “merry Christmas” or “happy holidays.”

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This turned into being about a Christmas. That wasn’t Altman’s point.

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“Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.

That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things have changed since I first got started here in 2005.

It seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year. Debating a controversial idea, even if you 95% agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised.

This will be very bad for startups in the Bay Area.

Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones. Usually mainstream ideas are right and heterodox ideas are wrong, but the true and unpopular ideas are what drive the world forward. Also, smart people tend to have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeing many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.

It is bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, that evolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system.

More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.

To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy (the British authorities banned work on this because they feared the devaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen by the almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture.

You can’t tell which seemingly wacky ideas are going to turn out to be right, and nearly all ideas that turn out to be great breakthroughs start out sounding like terrible ideas. So if you want a culture that innovates, you can’t have a culture where you allow the concept of heresy—if you allow the concept at all, it tends to spread. When we move from strenuous debate about ideas to casting the people behind the ideas as heretics, we gradually stop debate on all controversial ideas.

This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea.

Political correctness often comes from a good place—I think we should all be willing to make accommodations to treat others well. But too often it ends up being used as a club for something orthogonal to protecting actual victims. The best ideas are barely possible to express at all, and if you’re constantly thinking about how everything you say might be misinterpreted, you won’t let the best ideas get past the fragment stage.

I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of San Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many ways to go wrong. If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard. I can picture Galileo looking up at the sky and whispering “E pur si muove” here today.

Followup: A Clarification

[1] I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true than I fear losing the opposite—we needed people to be free to say “gay people are ok” to make the progress we’ve made, even though it was not a generally acceptable thought several decades ago.

In fact, the only ideas I’m afraid of letting people say are the ones that I think may be true and that I don’t like. But I accept that censorship is not going to make the world be the way I wish it were.”

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The infantile guy on this topic, practically insulted everybody living in the bay Area, telling us nobody says Merry Christmas in the SV. Now, he can’t back out of the driveway of ignorance

Buahhhhhhhhhhhhh! :sob::sob::sob::sob::sob:

FAKE NEWS!

It reminds me how liars are the Republicans, always caught with their pants down in a lie.

Before shooting the “liberals and marijuana go together” generalization meme, use Google. It can make you think.

Angelos, who’s from Utah, had become a public face of America’s broken and excessive criminal justice system. His was one of the stories that Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah often cited in making the case for federal criminal justice reform.