Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Another example of trying to shut down discussion. If I were attempting to shut down discussion, I wouldn't have included a more serious version of the definition, in addition to the observation that it's remarkable how often people who want to play rules-lawyer with terms like "intolerant" or "bigot" or "racist" or "sexist" seem primarily interested in carefully excluding their own behavior, or that of groups they…
So, if you have Group A and Group B, each claiming the other is doing horrible, offensive things, which group gets deplatformed? Since I can't legitimately reply yet, consider this a reply: > any group not specifically defined by their intolerance. So, would that be Hezbollah or Shas?
A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
71–80 of 473 posts
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nevertheless, you made quite a lot of untrue statements previously. You don't care about that, pushing yet another point unrelated point. Suddenly we are talking about 9/11 through we talked about nazism before. Because apparently to you, there is equivalence between being Muslim and being Nazi. As if Nazism had many interpretations (it does not have) or as if it allowed peaceful coexistence with others in some branc…
> Because apparently to you, there is equivalence between being Muslim and being Nazi. I'm sorry but this is such a blatant fabrication that I cannot take any further words you write seriously. Any reasonable reading of my comment would recognize that references to Islam is to serve as an example of an intolerance perpetrated under the rationale of excluding the intolerant (e.g. calls to ban Muslims after 9/11). Did…
To make that point with proper analogy, you would have to use ISIS or al-Qaeda as an example. The trouble is, that such ban would make sense to quite a lot of people. There, the discussion is whether it is ok to lock them indefinitely on island without process or torture them, generally most people are perfectly fine with America not allowing those to enter. There is an actual ban in place for suspect or admitted ISIS members.
The other possible equivalence would be all Germans ban or ban on teaching all German originated philosophies. Which is not really the topic, since the discussion up there was limited to Nazism.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It is all very obvious. For example, suppose a marginalized group uses the hashtag #killallwhitemen to express the disempowerment they feel from the historical weight of white privilege. This, I think we can all agree, is an expression of righteous outrage through hyperbole, not intolerance. In fact, "white men" in this context does not refer to any person or group of people, rather a self-reenforcing system of…
(In case it doesn't go without saying, lest silence be interpreted as agreeing with this response: no, both of these parody arguments are completely ridiculous. Both of these have superficial similarity to useful discussions, but have intentionally turned them into absurdist parody in order to mock actual notions of tolerance.)
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#74I've been back and forth on distributed storage and blockchain in my mind but my current thinking is that the recent de-platforming is going to hasten the development of alternate solutions that are more robust with regards to censorship. I'm not even considering about whether it is right or wrong, I just think that's going to happen.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#75What's interested about Gab is that it wasn't content hosting on another platform (Facebook/Twitter). It was their own platform, that people wrote and built. What if you run a Plemore/Mastodon server that has users with controversial content? Is it okay for Vultr or DigitalOcean or Amazon to just yank your account? Sure you can claim capitalism and find another provider, but we've seen here that finding another provi…
I don't think that any solution is going to be a permanent one, whether it is a law or a technology. I tend to look towards technological advancement to first outpace laws and then the govts slowly catch up. I do think that decentralized storage solutions behind decentralized applications are pretty interesting. There is even something called IPFS which is being pitched as a possible challenger to HTTP. In some of the distributed solutions, the computers holding the data only ever see it encrypted, so the possibility of censorship on that end is mitigated at least for a while. I'm not expert on the topic but I've recently found it very exciting and has given me a glimmer of hope.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#76> The tech giants today are by their own actions cultivating the motivation and the will to necessitate the creation of their own challengers and everybody is watching closely what works and what doesn’t. And this is why I find the trend towards deplatforming to be altogether _exciting_. I haven't been this _excited_ about potential changes in how we communicate since I first installed Skype; when it was still P2P. T…
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Define intolerance That thing everyone except the intolerant seem to understand remarkably well, and the intolerant spend a lot of time quibbling over the definition of in a desperate attempt to derail their inclusion in it. Or, more seriously: treating other people as unwelcome or hated or less than human, for reasons other than being hateful and intolerant.
Yes. It is all very obvious. For example, suppose a marginalized group uses the hashtag #killallwhitemen to express the disempowerment they feel from the historical weight of white privilege. This, I think we can all agree, is an expression of righteous outrage through hyperbole, not intolerance. In fact, "white men" in this context does not refer to any person or group of people, rather a self-reenforcing system of…
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
(In case it doesn't go without saying, lest silence be interpreted as agreeing with this response: no, both of these parody arguments are completely ridiculous. Both of these have superficial similarity to useful discussions, but have intentionally turned them into absurdist parody in order to mock actual notions of tolerance.)
They both happened. It's an accurate description of the state of discourse.
1) the person admitted it was hurtful and unacceptable and that they should not have said it, and the mainstream publisher said they would not have hired her without this understanding
2) the argument the person made before being fired was not simply that there is a non-zero amount of sexual dimorphism in humans, it was concretely that womens' neuroticism, agreeableness, and other feeling-sy tendencies may explain why they are on average worse leaders, underrepresented, underpaid, etc.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is not that the extremism on one end cancels out extremism on the other. The point is, it is possible to tolerate both - there is no paradox of tolerance with respect to speech. As to your second point, the suppression of speech also has dangerous consequences. Plenty of anti-Semitic thought is rooted in the belief of Jewish control of the media. Suppressing speech probably only serves to reinforce this vie…
You can tolerate both, unless you are killed or injured by someone convinced on those words. Or, less dramatically, unless your salary is lower, because words convinced them that your kind is to be treated with more suspicion. You can tolerate extremism as long as you are not the target of said extremism. When you are the target, you have no choice. The believe in Jewish control of media is reinforced by people who p…
The precipitating issue in Weimar Germany was that a very clear social and cultural divide existed between those engaged in culture production and those involved in maintaining law and order. The former, generally, were the cosmopolitan worldly types and the latter, generally, were the Prussian law and order types.
I would say, like today in America, that there was not a homogenous treatment by society at large. I would argue instead that there was a layering of reactions by different parts of society, each of which had different reactions and frames of reference. You can make sweeping assertions about what "the media" or "the police" said, did, or thought in Weimar Germany, but that's already reducing extremely diverse portions of society to nothing more than singular unthinking mobs.
Yes, Freikorps members and National Socialists frequently received more lenient sentences in the Weimar Republic. This was because of a panoply of factors, not the least of which was that the accused were almost universally veterans of the war. Combined with the aforementioned Prussian law-and-order types that were democratized unwillingly, it's almost a guarantee that, on the whole, judges would view militant reactionaryism as less severe a crime (if a crime at all) than further perceived attempts to Sovietize the Weimar Republic. Conversely, the media tended to excoriate the judicial sectors for being too lenient against reactionaries and too harsh on communists for similar but opposite reasons.
> Somehow, nazi openly trying to silence Jews (even before they got power) or democratic politicians did not caused Streissand effect making Jews or democrats more heard. I also remember that their opposition was targeted by Nazi strongly and successfully.
The Streisand effect is when an already ubiquitous public figure accidentally enlarges the scope of a minority issue by publicizing it. The Nazis could not have created a Streisand effect when they were a disempowered minority party in the same way that the KPD couldn't have created a Streisand effect pre-1933. However, the Weimar authorities and media did create Streisand effects constantly for both the KPD and the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic by patrolling and outlawing various activities of both parties, which definitely contributed to their overall growth and popularity.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#80From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
This story is not spam, and it is not off-topic since it clearly relates to current news in technology.