751–760 of 859 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: people who shoot up churches and the like.
Those people are vanishingly rare. You're vastly more likely to die in a traffic collision than to be shot because somebody doesn't like your church.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You listed the 'very fine people' hoax so I don't think your judgement is very well calibrated here. There's a bunch of quotes with no context and some things that not even the most expansive definition of racism would cover. Tweeting about the squad? Leaving andrew jackson on the $20? Are you saying that land seizures and killing of white farmers don't actually happen in south africa? If the only source is 'the new…
Whattaboutism is not a good rebuke of any of what I have listed above. The truth that your idol is a racist is very unfortunate as it is uncomfortable for you, isn't it. There are certainly a far greater example of racism exhibited by your emperor, but I can see a bad faith actor when I see one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We found a lot of lies during the UK election last month. Not difference in opinions, not beliefs about whay may or will happen, easily proven lies, posted across community forums, copied and pasted to other ones, and repeated in an increasing cresendo People then believe those lies, they repeat them, and even if they don't those lies sink into their subconcious and change their behavior, not necessarily today or tom…
> Ignoring them doesn't fix the problem. "The problem". What problem are we talking about again here? Is the problem that people are believing wrong things, or the spread of polarization and toxicity? I don't care if people believe "wrong things". How's that old song go? "All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest"? People will always believe whatever they want to, regardless…
If you are an ethnic minority in a society where xenophobic nationalists believe you should be killed, do you think you'd care if people believed those "wrong things"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely wasn't cynically throwing up my hands and smugly concluding all sides are lying. All I intended to do was demonstrate how cheap it is to call someone a liar on the internet. It costs nothing to the reputations of you or your "lying friend" to call one another a liar and thats why it doesn't mean anything. The sooner people realize this the better off we'll be.
My prediction is that this is what will, in the end, change; technology will advance far enough to severely de-anonymize online interaction, at which point one's reputation again comes into play and people will find there are consequences for thoughtless shitposting. It has begun to happen, with phenomena such as people being fired for Facebook or Twitter posts. It doesn't seem impossible to tie a sufficiently-advanc…
This is naive. Facebook has just as many extremist bigots as any other anonymous platform.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem with this "intolerance-is-okay-against-the-intolerant" thing is I'm lumped in with some extremist politics because of my religion. I don't feel at all treated as an individual (or even treated fairly) by either the left or the right. Some people who identify as the same religion have been homophobic. Since I was of voting age, I have never been against legalizing gay marriage, or treating homosexuals diffe…
You say that "some people who identify as the same religion [as me] have been homophobic" but I wonder if that's not minimizing the truth. If you're part of an opt-in demographic that's known for negative characteristic X, even if you yourself don't exhibit that characteristic, you're going to receive some transitive association -- and it's at least somewhat warranted because your participation is voluntary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I'm afraid you've been breaking the site guidelines by using HN for ideological flamewar, personal attacks, and the like. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're for or against, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You’re fighting the good fight, mister moderator guy
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is Trump in this comment? You talk about dividing the country yet your comment does exactly that. Further I think you’re wrong in your claims that nobody wants to be anonymous. Some of us are punished for our points of view and very much want to remain anonymous, using it as a place to vent frustrations with no repercussions. I would go as far as to say that your comment is a prime example of toxicity on the web…
I mean, pro- or anti-Trump, you have to admit that he's at least symptomatic of divisive politics, right? It's probably fair to go one step further and say that he also embraces that divisiveness. That's without expressing an opinion on the underlying politics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall. It’s important to remember too there are incentives for people to argue and behave otherwise: FB, Twitter, hate-speech monge…
You realize Voat exists right? And Gab? I wrote this about how Voat grew: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/ Deplatforming was a big part of that. Deplatforming didn't stop Milo. His base dropped him because he started defending hebeaphiles & pedophile / men being attracted to teens/pre-teens/boys (there's actually something sadder here; with Milo not realizing he was himself abused ... there's an e…
>I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. You're crazy my dude(tte). I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. The big difference is we have reporter ding dongs on Twitter thinking Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence, is the real world. Also old people on Facebook who never learned the lessons of being…
I've been on dial-up bulletin boards since 1983, Usenet since around the same 1991. Though in some ways it's the same, here is the difference: it has become more diverse. In 1991, the people you might have conversed with on Usenet were a lot similar to you. Of course, if we go to some comp.lang.* newsgroup or whatever, people are similar even today. But I mean that if you went into any newsgroup whatsoever in 1991, o…
I'd suggest you missed noticing some of the more divided corners of Usenet back then. Consider (admittedly an extreme example)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/soc.culture.yugos...
Polarisation and 'toxicity' are two completely different things. The fact that people have increasingly divergent views (or rather, are voicing them, they probably always held those views) is just a fact of life. It's not unique to any online community or even any country. It might be simply the fact that too much diversity is inherently destined to collapse. 'Toxicity' is a made-up new meaning for the word, which me…
>'Toxicity' [...] means anything undesirable from the point of view of the speaker. I think it's more often the delivery than the message that gets something labeled as "toxic". Merriam Webster describes toxic (when used in this context) as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful" People are generally open to new ideas as long as they're presented in a friendly and factual manner.
People who use the term 'toxic' like this are people who subscribe to the mindset of "I'm being prosecuted because someone is saying something I don't like".
People seem to have forgotten that having free speech necessarily means tolerating speech you disagree with, speech you find objectionable etc. Blanket labelling anything outside one's bubble as 'toxic' and refusing to engage in any dialogue is exactly how polarisation begins.