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You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

freddiedeboer.substack.com

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

#331

Post by [deleted] »

titzer wrote: post #263
dmingod666 wrote: post #17

My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults. Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good. Like if all you want to do is dehumanize those guys so you can happily insult / hurt them without hurting…

Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. People are only sensitive to the shaming they won't accept, which always seems to come from the people they disagree with, and they are completely blind to the shaming that goes on in their in-group.

[deleted]

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

#332

Post by ryandrake »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #303
dmingod666 wrote: post #17

My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults. Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good. Like if all you want to do is dehumanize those guys so you can happily insult / hurt them without hurting…

It absolutely does work. A little bit, at first, when you have broad consensus backing you - but it does work. People will begrudgingly change their behavior for relatively minor things, and the change in the use rate of racial epithets in public reflects that. The problem is that A) this process is more useful for advancing within the ideological block than for advancing the ideology's goals, and B) there's a "Laffe…

> It absolutely does work. A little bit, at first, when you have broad consensus backing you - but it does work. People will begrudgingly change their behavior for relatively minor things, and the change in the use rate of racial epithets in public reflects that.

The only change is that you now have a bunch of people who are afraid to use a handful of naughty words in public because they might lose their job over it. You haven't changed any minds or hearts, you've just moved the conversations into private rooms. You can't end racism by just shaming people for using the n-word. It's arguably just as bad now as it was during the Civil Rights era, but you can't easily see it anymore because it's mostly kept within "friendly" company.

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

#333

Post by colllectorof »

titzer wrote: post #263
dmingod666 wrote: post #17

My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults. Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good. Like if all you want to do is dehumanize those guys so you can happily insult / hurt them without hurting…

Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. People are only sensitive to the shaming they won't accept, which always seems to come from the people they disagree with, and they are completely blind to the shaming that goes on in their in-group.

>Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming.

HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these.

Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments that pretend deplatforming is a mechanism for enforcing societal consensus.

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

#334

Post by sevencolors »

benchaney wrote: post #320
kthejoker2 wrote: post #229

Ctrl+F "Popper" - zero results found. If you don't provide a cogent counterargument to Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, I can't take an essay like this seriously. Simply throwing up your hands and saying, "hate exists, let it rain free on the marketplace of ideas" is ... well, not worth a lot. Also, I love the absence of evidence = evidence of absence argument: * Germans have stringent anti-hate speech laws * ...…

Is there any actual evidence that the paradox of tolerance is correct? I suspect people stopped taking it seriously (and mentioning it in discussions on speech) because it’s advocates always seem to expect everyone to take it on faith, instead of providing a real argument to support their claims.

To me it's like leaving cancer unchecked, and praying it'll go away. Just because you dislike it. There needs to be a point at which we collectively go, nope that's too far. You're done. And we prune back the cancer.

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

#335

Post by runarberg »

flyingfences wrote: post #314
runarberg wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Racial discrimination: Now here is a real long stretch... You might be thinking about discrimination against white people It's not racial discrimination unless it's grown on the Right; otherwise, it's just "sparkling discrimination on the basis of race".

Wow! A few sentences later I link to a leftist accusing a Maoist leftist for being reactionary and discriminatory. I even mention the fact that Maoists and National Bolsheviks (which are very much racists while leftists) exist in the very first sentence of the paragraph.

However, these are not the norm. They are a very small minority and most leftist groups will not tolerate them.

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

#336

Post by leetcrew »

mindcandy wrote: post #305
lighttannotwite wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're still terrible concepts that have been roundly denounced on their own merits Hol' up, "it is ok to be white," is a terrible concept denounced on its own merits? Lol ok It's a good thing that under Critical Theory, since race is a social construction (that's why Black is supposed to be capitalized, because it refers to the construction, not the color) there's no reason besides being "roundly denounced" (whic…

You are falling into the trap that was explicitly set up by trolls. If it was not well known to be explicitly set up by trolls, "it is ok to be white” would be a fine, boring statement. But, it has been established that chan trolls came together to figure out a slogan that they could use to stir up heated arguments exactly like you are making. They settled on "it is ok to be white" and started using it to troll peopl…

the fact that it's so effective says more about society than the trolls though. if you squint hard enough, it's almost like the reactions provoked when you say "anti-white racism doesn't exist" without further explanation. it's true under the modern definition, but sometimes hard to take in good faith.

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

#337

Post by yanderekko »

I'm not a fan of cancel culture but this isn't a great argument against it. The question isn't whether cancellation can achieve complete eliminationist objectives, but whether it can prove useful at the margins in terms of achieving your political goals. I think the answer is likely "yes to some extent", although people are predictably biased to over or underestimate the overall effectiveness depending on whether they see censorship working for or against their causes or net.

My main pushback to cancel culture stuff is something of a "paradox of the paradox of tolerance" critique - that people are trying to use it as a cudgel to pretextually silence views that are well within the Overton window and that rather than this leading to the Overton window shifting (the desired effect) it will lead to pillarization, wherein multiple non-overlapping Overton windows will vie for cultural/political supremacy in ways that will not only lead (and have already lead) to very ugly conflicts, but involve massive amounts of time/energy being wasted on hot-button issues that in the grand scheme of things are just not very important.

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

#338

Post by AshWolfy »

ctdonath wrote: post #232
clusterfish wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're the same racists on the left and the right extremes. It's just, we had decades of wars and (justified) propaganda that thoroughly discredited fascism and their style of racism so it's easy to see how the right extremes is bad. What the extreme left is doing on the other hand is a more modern variation of racism and totalitarianism. It's ostensibly driven by noble concepts like social justice but in reality de…

Yup. Try saying, with genuine honest neutrality, “all lives matter”, “it’s ok to be white”, or “capitalism doesn’t care about race/gender” and see what happens.

You clearly know they are dogwhistles. Just like saying sieg heil doesnt inherently mean anything racist, but everyone knows what you mean when you say it.

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

#339

Post by heterodoxxed »

morpheos137 wrote: post #315
thomastjeffery wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All lives matter" is a totally meaningless phrase outside the context of "black lives matter". The only reason to say "all lives matter" is to trivialize the phrase "black lives matter". It may appeal to neutrality, but the context is far from neutral.

Has any rigorous study shown that blacks are more likely to die in police encounters after adjusting for income level and crime rate of where the encounter takes place? If so please provide a cite or link. Although out of thousands of cops in the USA I am sure there are some genuine racists the notion that in 2020 cops would be killing blacks intentionally at a higher rate seems ridiculous. 99.999% of cops want to ha…

The reason we just had the largest civil rights protests in American history this summer has as much or more to do with the everyday experience with the police as it does the extraordinary events such as deaths. Deaths were the spark, not the fuel.

The grinding oppression of every day life in terms of policing has been shown in study after study. It is disproportionately felt by black people, mostly men, but it has been steadily expanding to all demographics for decades now.

| Plenty of poor and middle class whites

Yeah and a lot of poor and middle class white people were out supporting the protests because of their own experiences too.

Daniel Shaver's death is not argument against BLM's goals, it's an argument in favor of them.

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

#340

Post by potta_coffee »

Retric wrote: post #299
titzer wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. People are only sensitive to the shaming they won't accept, which always seems to come from the people they disagree with, and they are completely blind to the shaming that goes on in their in-group.

Yea, a recent example of environmental shaming that worked was the reduction of littering from cars. Roadside cleanup helped, but tossing stuff out of car windows used to be significantly more common. What’s notable is no organization benefited from littering so there is little pushback on the subject, just millions of people behaving slightly differently.

The tickets for littering are huge.
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