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A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

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Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If memory serves, at least in the US this was the opposite. The free market was fine with serving least wing groups. It was the government that stepped in and told individuals to not be leftist, under threat of force. Only then did businesses stop associating with those people, because the government was implicitly threatening them. It was exactly the government's interference that caused the deplatforming of potenti…

The government isn't an entity with its own independent will; the US public broadly voted in officials that put in place those policies. Leftists who openly identified as such faced all sorts of problems doing business even without government intervention.

Hollywood blacklists, the most famous example from the red scare, only began after HUAC subpoenaed and held people in contempt.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#372

Reading this article is like watching someone beat the ocean with a stick. What would it look like for an "anti-deplatforming" initiative to succeed? All ideas have equal access to all platforms? Just the big ones? The objective is so poorly formed, it's not even wrong. A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept / cultivate, not vice versa. Infowars wanted to…

> Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on. That's an extreme simplification that borders on deceptive. No one is going to stop using Paypal and Stripe because they support a platform. Maybe if they were processing payments for ISIS, but Alex Jones isn't ISIS. No, Paypal and Stripe wer…

> No, Paypal and Stripe were given orders from above and this is them carrying out those orders.

Who is this "above" giving orders?

Frankly, this is conspiracy theory material. Sure, those companies are reacting to pressure, but it's distributed social pressure, not shady backroom dealings.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is exactly one way to distribute your message, and whether it is easy or hard is up to you. That is: satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of, and fill in the…

>> satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of This sounds simple, until you realise the requirements aren't well-defined, or that the definitions can be changed arbitrarily (and retroactively) by the platforms.

It doesn’t sound any more complicated given that. “I had no idea they would have a problem hosting my anti-Semitic writings or calls for violence, because the rules aren’t well defined, and they’re constantly changing, it’s so arbitrary!” is not convincing at all.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government isn't an entity with its own independent will; the US public broadly voted in officials that put in place those policies. Leftists who openly identified as such faced all sorts of problems doing business even without government intervention.

Hollywood blacklists, the most famous example from the red scare, only began after HUAC subpoenaed and held people in contempt.

You're just repeating the same invalid argument. Go and look up the history of widespread small scale anti-lefist incidents in that era that occurred before the HUAC existed.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#375
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can be explained entirely by discrimination I understand this is hyperbole, but this is the perfect case of how legitimate grievances are derailed by bad actors. Emphasis on the word "entirely". We don't and can't think in absolutes as a society. Everyone and everything is imperfect to some degree. Women sometimes falsely accuse men of sexual assault. Police officers sometimes kill unarmed black men for good reason…

this is the perfect case of how legitimate grievances are derailed by bad actors... The problem is that these sorts of arguments strip context entirely away If you want to figure out the villains, look for the side that is trying to strip the context away and screeching while holding to absolutes. Beware: villains often use the language of the noblest causes, and sometimes people become villains in the pursuit of nob…

And sometimes the very people saying we have to get rid of one awful system are the ones sitting behind the controls of another one.

-poorly paraphrased Chomsky

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#376
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society: "Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation,…

As much as Popper and Sartre (and the other left intellectuals) were diametrically opposed, they seemed to have found some agreement on this issue; here's a nice quote, using Sartre's example of anti-semitism: >“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their advers…

And once again, the quote in broader context:

"How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is "open"; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension.

But they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions; they want them to be innate. Since they are afraid of reasoning, they wish to want the kind of life wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein one seeks only what be has already found, wherein one becomes only what he already was. This is nothing but passion. Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning‐like certainty; it alone can hold reason in leash; it alone can remain impervious to experience and last for a whole lifetime.

The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."

Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since theyseek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious. He has chosen also to be terrifying. People are afraid of irritating him. No one knows to what lengths the aberrations of his passion will carry him — but be knows, for this passion is not provoked by something external. He has it well in hand; it is obedient to his will: now he lets goof the reins and now he pulls back on them. He is not afraid of himself, but he sees in the eyes of others a disquieting image‐his own‐and he makes his words and gestures conform to it. Having this external model, he is under no necessity to look for his personality within himself. He has chosen to find his being entirely outside himself, never to look within, to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others."

The issue is that by utilizing partial quotes from Popper and Sartre in order to justify presumptive bad-faith censorship, proponents are literally "loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past" solely through an argument from authority.

If I said, without citation, that "Our opponents can only argue in bad faith. Our self-righteousness is infallible because we're sincere and they are not. Never challenge their arguments or sincerity directly, because they will use your generosity against you without ever changing their minds." but without citation of a famous name, how would people evaluate this position?

Outside of who said it, I'd wager that most people would say that it presumes bad-faith and can only serve to ratchet-up and escalate any division already present. If any genuine attempt to understand or be understood was present, the proponent has shut it down from the outset.

Now when you attach a name to it, suddenly that same argument, given different verbiage, suddenly garners either knowing nods of self-righteousness or visceral renunciation, despite the content being quite identical.

Compare your selective Sartre quote with the following:

"The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The [category] had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day." -- [famous person]

Ignoring if people recognized the actual provenance, if I put anti-Semite and Sartre, it'd be upvoted, and if I put Jew / Hitler, it'd be flagged within minutes, yet it says exactly the same thing. And leads to exactly the same dehumanizing attitudes towards living, breathing, fallible human beings.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollywood blacklists, the most famous example from the red scare, only began after HUAC subpoenaed and held people in contempt.

You're just repeating the same invalid argument. Go and look up the history of widespread small scale anti-lefist incidents in that era that occurred before the HUAC existed.

The onus is on you to provide examples. Most of what I know of, and what I can find documented, was government sanctioned or under (implied) threat of government retaliation.

Please cite examples of these widespread small scale, grassroots anti-leftist incidents.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But gab isn't far right. As I understood it, it's just a Twitter alternative. It doesn't make it inherently left or right. Many people pointed towards lgbt content being taken down and said: "Look, you guys brought this on yourselves." The implication being that some vocal lgbt people were pushing for censorship of other people, but it ended up being used against themselves. I think the solution is to require platfor…

Twitter, reddit, facebook, hacker news aren't the public street. They are someone else's public meeting hall that you may rent out for the small price of contributing useful dialog and not being an asshole. The fact that they don't allow all comers is a feature not a bug because some would be patrons are hateful vandals whose presence is liable to discourage your more useful patrons from visiting. The public street i…

>> Twitter, reddit, facebook, hacker news aren't the public street.

I'd say these are the online equivalents of pseudo-public spaces[0], "[spaces] that seem public but are actually owned by corporations"

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseu...

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#379
post #18

Earlier 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…

[flagged]

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#380
post #321

Gab illustrates a “catch-22” around setting out to be specifically a “free speech platform”. You initially appeal to the most fringe elements of public discourse. Your first wave of users are going to be people for whom this has been a problem, and if you’re an absolutist and let them on then suddenly that’s your base. For me, this is one of the more profound take-aways from the article. This piece is very thought pr…

Yes, the first wave defines the project; if the first wave has problems, the project is infused with these problems. This is true of free software projects also. I have a couple of examples: • The KDE project (to create a nice graphical desktop environment based on the X windowing system) was initially formed around using the Qt library for graphical user interface widgets. The Qt library had, at the time, a somewhat…

Yeah, that's obvious on the face of it and not what grabbed me.

I'm fascinated by the power of positioning of the creators of the project and how easily that can go wrong. That has long fascinated me and this is an incredibly powerful example summed up in a nutshell in the paragraph I quoted, which is a rare thing to see.

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