Live data from Hacker News

You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

freddiedeboer.substack.com

341–350 of 863 posts

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

#341

The censorship we are talking about is not censorship: it's moderation. Every forum worth using has moderation. The problem today is that most people aren't using user-moderated forums. Instead, they are using corporate-moderated social networks.

Agreed. All social activities that willingly injure others can't be stopped; they can only be suppressed.

Murder, theft, cigar smoking in enclosed spaces... you name it, the only way to counteract malignant behaviors is to punish transgressors in order to obstruct the activity to the extent that a) we prevent it from growing, and b) we can tolerate the persistence of the activity at some diminished level of intensity.

Free speech requires us to strike a balance, like fighting crime. Driving hate speech underground successfully hides it from public view so that folks who don't want to swim in that cesspool can avoid it, the same way we hide porn from eyes who want to escape it. And the fact is, ever smarter tech methods can do this increasingly well, despite what Facebook claims.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

So what would be the problem with changing the name of the movement to ALM all lives matter and making the focus against police militarisation rather than some divisive narrative of racism?

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the 30 stories currently featured on the NPR website, 1 is about race

In the title. However, I am sure, having listened to NPR almost every day, that most of those stories contain an explicit "racial analysis" segment. It is also possible that the written content is less race obsessed than what airs on the radio. I know when I am listening to NPR driving to work I hear racially focused stories back to back every single day as if there was absolutely nothing else interesting to talk abo…

If you had evidence you would have already presented it, i looked through a couple of articles and nothing about race. im not going to waste more time to confirm what i already know

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

#344

Gate speech laws are kinda like vaccines. They don’t stop it but they sure do keep it from spreading to everyone. End of the day A Nazi doesn’t have anything to say and doesn’t deserve the protections to be able to say it. They fact that we can decent this is what makes us humans or else it’s just computers applying filters

Not directed at this comment, one of the minority like it. But These hacker news posts where the majority of comments treat private companies like Twitter and Facebook censoring neonazi propaganda as if they are censoring unions or advocates of universal health care make me really dismayed at hacker news. It’s like they say there are really no way humans are capable of distinguishing between literal white nationalist extremist views and people advocating for universal health care. It really makes me question the user base of hacker news

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

#345

If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous? I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality. It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prev…

>If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?

Because the process itself involves heaping lots of social costs on people in the attempt to hurt their narratives, and that normally we would consider this bad? I mean, if we concede that literally throwing people in prison is ineffective then shouldn't the argument for not throwing people in prison be obvious?

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

#346

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.

> "Is there any actual evidence that the paradox of tolerance is correct?"

Nope, it's just a sound bite that people latched on to that supports their pre-existing beliefs, even though it's just one philosopher's opinion. Despite the fact that they're appealing to Popper's authority, most people using can't even name the book that Popper wrote that in, let alone any of his other philosophical stances.

That's why I say that there's a Meta-Paradox of Intolerance: "Those who quote Popper's Paradox of Intolerance are usually merely seeking to use it to justify their own intolerance, paradoxically identifying themselves as among those whom the Paradox of Intolerance warns us against."

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

So what would be the problem with changing the name of the movement to ALM all lives matter and making the focus against police militarisation rather than some divisive narrative of racism?

The vast majority of Americans understand that Black Lives Matter is an inclusive statement, not an exclusive one.

Those who make hay out of the name and have ignored the movement itself for almost a decade now are a small, ineffective minority.

The largest civil rights protest movement in American history doesn't need to spend its time focus-grouping and hand-wringing about people like that.

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

#348
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pictur…

It's a similar problem to the whole anti-fa thing. Both have groups organizing around a common idea. Opposition to fascism for anti-fascists and trying to bring about a second civil war for the Boogaloo Bois. Neither are a strict group that exists with a coherent ideology you can point to. Instead they are a name given to lots of groups. With trying to incite a second civil war comes a lot of baggage associated with…

> It's a similar problem to the whole anti-fa thing. Both have groups organizing around a common idea. [...] Neither are a strict group that exists with a coherent ideology you can point to. Instead they are a name given to lots of groups.

And the same goes for the loosely defined 'fascists', I guess?

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

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the title. However, I am sure, having listened to NPR almost every day, that most of those stories contain an explicit "racial analysis" segment. It is also possible that the written content is less race obsessed than what airs on the radio. I know when I am listening to NPR driving to work I hear racially focused stories back to back every single day as if there was absolutely nothing else interesting to talk abo…

If you had evidence you would have already presented it, i looked through a couple of articles and nothing about race. im not going to waste more time to confirm what i already know

While I also do not have time to do an analysis right now, and as I mentioned radio content may be different from web content, the number of upvotes my initial comment calling out NPR got suggests my opinion is not unusual.
Post reply on HN