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You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

freddiedeboer.substack.com

201–210 of 863 posts

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#201
post #186
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who doesn't identify with the right or really care about any of these politics at all. Go google of a picture of the Minneapolis police department engulfed in flames shooting out 50 feet over the top. That was certainly a strongly predominantly left driven action.

The Minneapolis police department was set on fire by a "Boogaloo Boi". ... Ivan Harrison Hunter, a Texas rightwing extremist, bragged about helping to set the fire then was seen shooting 13 rounds at the building ... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/texas-boogaloo...

Boogaloos are far-right only in the sense that they're libertarians afaik.

> Video shot that night shows a person later identified as Hunter firing 13 rounds from a semiautomatic assault-style rifle on the 3rd precinct police station while people believed to be looters were inside. He then high-fived another person and shouted, “Justice for Floyd!” according to the complaint.

Doesn't seem like a person who you picture when you think about a "right-wing extremist".

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#202
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Alex Jones - Sandy Hook case wasn't censorship (he was free to say what he said), he was sued for defamation. We already have laws on that and all the other stuff you mention child grooming, fraud, false advertisement, doxxing, false testimony, etc. The point is - we have laws for speech that enters the criminal realm.

So how is Volksverhetzung, which is defined by law, any different?

That’s a speech law, thus it would be a circular argument (I.e. your speech violated a speech law).

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

My race and ethnicity has nothing to do with whether or not I am actively oppressing others. Whether these are correlated right now is irrelevant to how we should be behaving in a modern day, postmodern civil society. Not sure the rest of your post makes any sense. I don't consider myself a racist or a sexist and I find it appalling that I am unable to comment on ongoing social issues without being called a "white ma…

I didn't call you racist or sexist. And you brought up "white male" in your post I replied to.

Historically speaking, there was bo group more privileged than white, European males. Being one myself, I don't see anything wrong with simply acknowledging that simple fact.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#204

I'm surprised to see people agreeing with this hypothesis ... while commenting on HN. I'm a huge fan of the site rules ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) and the way they are applied by the moderation team. But that said, HN has the most heavy handed censorship of any site I frequent. Read all the rules from start to finish and ask yourself if you'd be ok following these rules in every Internet foru…

HN doesn't have very strong moderation. The things people got kicked off twitter and Facebook for saying would be allowed here, at least if they were on topic and phrased politely.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no racism against white people in the, what, northern hemisphere. And never was. In that part of the world, racism comes from the white population and is aimed at others. Calling white racists out definitely isn't racism.

Racism is literally defined as discrimination against any singular group based on race or ethnic group. Discrimination, irrespective of its origin on the left or right wing of the spectrum, should be treated identically. Implicit and explicit racial discrimination is omnipresent on both sides of the spectrum. This is evidenced by literally pulling up any of the popular social justice warrior channels on YouTube; you…

Racism is about institutions, power structures, and epistemology, it's not about youtube channels.

An internet rando blabbing to their cellphone camera isn't what makes median black family wealth 1/8th that of their white counterparts (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...).

It's institutions and power structures which creates that.

For example, speculative home values in whiter neighborhoods lead to higher home prices and thus higher property taxes and thus better funded schools and so the racist-system continues.

Nobody is explicitly being racist there. Speculating in the white neighborhood is genuinely a better investment yield. Just like with investing in Javanese over Sudanese neighborhoods in Indonesia or Croat over Serb towns in Croatia.

The human created systems, the cultural milieu and its structures, they lead to racist outcomes. It's all artificial. That's why passing works (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity)).

Realizing it's mostly cultural just like it is with say the Hmong and Lao people, where you can just change the clothes, grooming and mannerisms and our minds recategorize, that's the radical leap for people. There's physical differences but they're more imagined than real and can often be short-circuited. Our collective minds have an invisible override switch.

When people are being racist, they have an epistemology that the different outcomes is a natural result of racial hierarchies. They use these human created systems as their empirical evidence and not realize this logic is a self-reinforcing system.

It's like when police departments disproportionally patrol and focus on one group, find more things in that group and use it as evidence that their suspicions were well-founded. At different times the supposed more criminal groups have been everything from the roma, suffragists, gays, 7th day adventists, rock and roll fans, jewish people, Chinese immigrants, jehovah's witnesses, Catholics, italians... It's all arbitrary. The closed logic loop it perpetuates, that's racism.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this might be false equivalence. People far on the left (except from some nas-bols; which I’ve never encountered in the wild) call them selfs anti-facists. It is clear who their greatest enemy is. In fact far left groups (like food not bombs, etc.) often engage in social programs called mutual aid where the goal is to spread propaganda through helping the masses.

At the risk of entertaining the no true Scotsman : A leftist that doesn’t empathize with the masses, is not a true leftist.

Unfortunately it can be difficult to tell who empathizes with the masses and who is just pretending to in pursuit of power.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#207
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't rise to power if the political system is sane. In many countries without First Past the Post systems, an extremist rises in popularity. Then when the final vote comes, it is revealed that most people are moderate and the crazy does not get into power.

Is there a sane political system? FPTP is dogshit, agreed. But does even ranked choice voting result in a sane system? I'm not implying it can't. I honestly just don't know.

No system is completely sane but some are better than others at keeping out the loonies :-)

European ones are decent.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#208
post #65

> Look: the most powerful governments, militaries, and intelligence services in the world have in recent decades tried to prevent the communications of terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, using the most sophisticated digital means possible and with the full backing of various publishing and social media platforms. And yet those organizations effortlessly shared their propaganda and their rhetoric and coordina…

These are very good examples, but we just witnessed an even better one: Trump has been, for all practical purposes, entirely silenced, simply because Twitter deplatformed him.

Trump spoke at CPAC. Press covered it.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#209
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “all Mexicans are rapists” (a Trump quote) How can any sane person claim this without even giving a source?

That's not a Trump quote.

claim (that) this (is a Trump quote) without even giving a source?

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean it's wrong... The racists on the right know they're racists. They admit it. The racists I've encountered on the left are the racism-of-low-expectations kind with a dash of openly-racist-against-white-people, and then they go and act morally superior to people who aren't racist against any race. The sanctimony is grating.

> The racists on the right know they're racists. They admit it. Not necessarily. Even Richard Spencer, proud Hitler-saluting Neo-Nazi, essentially the founder of the "alt-right", denies being racist. People know that racism is bad, but a lot of racists will deny being racist while very explicitly saying they don't want to live next to a black person or will call the police just because they saw a black man walking th…

That's not really true. He's definitely claimed to be some flavor of racist on that documentary on Netflix.
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