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YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

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Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that guy's an idiot. He actually claims the Iraq War was a failure because Iraqis have IQs in the 80s and are therefore incapable of accepting democracy. Racism aside, if you've done even a bit of reading on IQ you know it's been rising for decades if not longer. His Jeffersonian Democracy was built by people with an IQ that would be in the 80s today.

Can you point to some of that reading? Pedantically, that goes against the definition of IQ, where 100 is always average so it can't really increase over time, but your general point about people getting smarter doesn't intuitively make sense to me. Obviously we have more knowledge and resources to build on today, but I've never seen any reason to believe modern humans are smarter from birth than humans born 300 year…

See the Flynn Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

IQ by definition averages to 100, but if you compare present populations to past populations without the normalization there's a significant difference.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#162
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adapt or be left out

Well. We had several ideological purges earlier in 20th century, and I can tell what will happen next: every netizen will be triaged by a progressive troika, and sent to rehabilitation and education camps. Internet versions (excommunication), or real life ones .

I don't mind purging ideologies that are about racial superiority. Erase that shit.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#163
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is incomplete. I don't dispute that he said those things but what do you claim is the similarity to Spencer or Duke?

Yeah, they're both very racist, to the level of supposing that that white society is inherently superior. The first quote implies a the existence of a conspiracy to lower white birthrates. The second states clearly that Iraqi people would not be capable of forming a just society due to "low IQ". These are definitionally white supremacist talking points. EDIT: spelling

Thank you for clarifying. However they don't prove your case, and I'll explain why.

Arguing that a conspiracy exists to harm a group is not evidence that this group is superior. It simply does not follow. Yes, I can see how this view might be shared by white supremacists but it simply does not follow from this statement alone. And for the record, I myself don't find his argument compelling.

The second statement goes deeper into Molyneux's thinking to an area where even I fear to tread. On this one I can concede that Molyneux establishes a link between IQ and what kind of gov't is possible in such a population. This _could_ be evidence of white supremacist thinking.

Now let me provide some counter evidence. Could a white supremacist accept/promote a claim that other races have higher IQ than whites? I don't believe so, because that would imply that whites are not superior in one area and throw the whole ideology into confusion. Yet he does so in this tweet: https://twitter.com/stefanmolyneux/status/116998248528916480...

The rush to judgment on someone is part of what's causing so much discord in the US right now. Molyneux is no white supremacist, but he doesn't shield himself from their arguments either.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#164

It's a purge. It won't stop with these three. The censorship will continue to get worse and be disproportionately applied to those on the right until all is left with the world. Conservatism has a place in society. I'm not endorsing any of these guys viewpoints nor am I associating them with conservatism in general, because it's a broad group of over 100 million people in the U.S. with a diverse range of opinions tha…

>The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor

This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).

Good riddance to them, I say. If you want to lead the KKK, and advocate for a white ethnostate, I won't lose any sleep when you can't post videos trying to convince others of the same evil ideas.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#165
post #87
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they true or false though? > The second states clearly that Iraqi people would not be capable of forming a just society due to "low IQ" Most people who've investigated IQ between different populations find east asians to have the highest IQs, which would contravene the concept of white supremacy entirely. Maybe the science is bad - there's certainly some historical basis to that. On the other hands it seems stran…

A) going to disagree pretty hard there being a conspiracy to reduce white birthrates B) Pretty sure the Iraqi people could figure out how to run a just government. I think the history of Iraq being a colonial holding by much more powerful governments for a while has more to do with it. So yea, both claims are false. EDIT: Getting some downvotes and not a single reply providing an argument for either claim.

You disagreeing with an idea does not mean is is false, likewise you agreeing would not make it true.

Edit / reply to opnitro due to rate limit: I am arguing that the truth of an idea is unrelated to whether it causes offence. That should hopefully be very clear when reading the posts you're replying to.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#166
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you are watching, but I have never been funneled to anything even remotely like that. YT sends you videos based on your watch history. If you watch hate videos to see what kind of stuff people are saying then you should delete them from your history to avoid YT finding you more.

Multiple experiments have demonstrated that as you follow recommendations it drives you more and more towards extreme content. If you don’t follow recs it obviously has no “drive” to keep you on as you’re not following the journey. Basically the recommendations system always tries to drive you towards slightly more “engaging” content. Zeynep Tufekci, amongst others, published about it back in 2018.

I've been watching youtube for years, and it finds me videos on physics and math, and woodworking, plumbing, and home repair, also electronics.

I even followed the white house for a while, but I get zero political recommendations.

I just now checked the recommendations of several people who are next to me and none of them have any extremist content either.

If you watch extremist content, you'll get extremist content. If you don't, you won't.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to some of Molyneux podcasts awhile back. He seemed very gray area, borderline white nationalist, almost consciously ambiguous with just enough plausible deniability. It was a little too close for comfort and I took him off my list. That said, I don’t think it’s fair to lump him in with folks like Spencer and Duke. I don’t agree with Moleyneux’s viewpoints but think he articulates them well enough that he…

The clever ones are the more dangerous ones. Plenty of people that will strike Spencer and Duke will be lulled to sleep by Molyneux but in the end the agenda is the same.

You might be right but trying to censor stuff on the Internet tends to make it bigger in the long run. For an intellectual threat like Molyneux it would better to confront head on with “logic and facts” than pretend it doesn’t exist.

Or on the flip side, if something he says makes you uncomfortable but you can’t explain why it’s wrong, then you need to step up your rhetoric game.

One of the most effective tropes used by folks like Molyneux is “liberals are emotional and argue with feelings, not facts” - by freaking out and banning a highly articulate speaker like Molyneux the “libs” are only proving his point.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#168
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but is the distinction actually important in this case? It seems to me to be more of a means of obfuscating/derailing the discussion of Molyneux's views.

I think precision is important in this context, because people have a bad habit of using terms like "white supremacist" as generic insults against any right-wing figure. Being imprecise diminishes the force of the arguments against Molyneux, who really has made explicit claims that white people are better than everyone else.

I agree with you. I edited my original comment to clarify a bit.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the legalities. It's about whether we have the kind of society that fights bad ideas by showing why they're wrong, or fights bad ideas by screaming and blocking them. These bans seem very much like part of a trend towards the second kind of society.

It is absolutely about legalities. Look at the complaints that are made when defending this type of content. The call it cancel culture in an attempt to victimize the aggressors as being unduly treated because of their opinion. The boycott has always been a tool to defend civility and putting your money where you're values are. Calling it 'Cancel Culture' is just a new phrase to delegitimize the right of people to st…

They call it "cancel culture" in an attempt to express that people are too willing to boycott nowadays. Certainly a boycott is sometimes justified, but it's a problem if people start organizing a boycott every time they hear an offensive statement.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#170
post #55

You are free to speak and exercise your freedom of speech no one really disputes that. You are not, however, anywhere guaranteed or granted the liberty to a platform for your dialog. That is the problem that we are encountering today, people are thinking that there are attacks to freedom of speech and confusing that with the freedom of an establishment to defend their property from damages. I think we can all agree t…

Not sure why people would down vote you - these are private companies we are talking about and they can do what they want I suppose. However I think the real rub here, that people seem to to have a hard time expressing, is that these platforms are blatantly hypocritical in what they allow or don't allow.

I also don't believe that society generally shares the "private companies can do what they want" point. The Hollywood Blacklist isn't considered as "okay, well, private companies", it's considered wrong.

Many people seem to agree that private companies should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as what private companies want to do is essentially what they want those companies to do. If the company actions change, so does their stance.

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