Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

freddiedeboer.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 863 posts

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

#461

Post by ralmidani »

T-hawk wrote: post #454
Lammy wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still using subjective terms like "extremism" in an objective way that the people on the receiving end of that label may not agree with or appreciate.

This is a major and serious point. A large part of the discourse has become slapping the "extremist" label on every dissenting argument from the other side, regardless of where the position actually is. If you ban extremist speech, then what you've done is create incentive to label everything as extremist.

I consider myself a centrist; I have been registered as an Independent since the first election in which I voted (21 years ago), and have voted for Republicans and Democrats. Politically, I try to evaluate each idea on the merits rather than which party espouses it. So at least in my case, there is no "other side" which I can mislabel as extremist.

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

#462

Post by penetraitor69 »

ralmidani wrote: post #351

You can't censor it away completely, but you can help the redeemable extremists __know__ they're indulging in extremism by forcing them to go to fringe websites rather than allow them to stay on Twitter and Facebook as if nothing is wrong. As for the "deplorables" who know what they're doing and will never question it or feel any remorse, we should not be giving them a megaphone. sources[0]: I was susceptible to extr…

Agree 100%. I essentially started going down the "Qanon" rabbit hole a few years before "Q" existed (the tropes have existed in right-wing circles for longer than the specific conspiracy theory has); part of my realization that it was wrong was noticing that the sorts of things I believed were promoted almost exclusively in places also rife with obvious racism, sexism, and antisemitism.

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

#463

Post by CyberRabbi »

jdlyga wrote: post #372
ralmidani wrote: post #351

You can't censor it away completely, but you can help the redeemable extremists __know__ they're indulging in extremism by forcing them to go to fringe websites rather than allow them to stay on Twitter and Facebook as if nothing is wrong. As for the "deplorables" who know what they're doing and will never question it or feel any remorse, we should not be giving them a megaphone. sources[0]: I was susceptible to extr…

Definitely agree. Back a year ago when you saw this kind of stuff all over Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc it felt so normalized. But now you have to go to fringe websites. It's still out there of course. But it's very back-alley and definitely makes you take what people are saying with a grain of salt.

If it’s difficult for you to see political opinions with which you disagree being normalized, imagine how they feel.

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

#464

Post by rayiner »

Aunche wrote: post #382

You can censor obvious examples of extremism. I don't think anyone disagreed that Youtube was correct in censoring Isis recruitment videos, for instance. The problem is that people are trying to censor "dog-whistling" extremism. By its very nature, it's a losing battle. Only dogs can hear dog whistles, so there's a high likelihood that you're censoring someone innocent. Also, even if you do censor a dog whistle, they…

Allowing "dog whistles" to be censored also creates a powerful incentive to redefine ideas the censors don't like as "dog whistles." For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...

> With the help of two liberal pollsters, Joshua Ulibarri and Celinda Lake, we conducted 15 focus groups with members of various Hispanic communities across the country and ran a national survey. We also polled large cohorts of whites and African-Americans. The results are sobering. We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos. These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.

"Liberal pollsters" and "progressive" opinion writers perceived this example of "Trump-style rhetoric" as "dog whistles" and "obviously racist and divisive" but most Black and Latino people agreed with it.

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

#465

Post by at_a_remove »

runarberg wrote: post #402
throwaway53453 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God help the mixed race people who have it from both the left and right...

The left does not hate white people. It is reactionary rhetoric that is trying to raise a false equivalence. The left hates white supremacy and white privilege . If you are a white person that basks in your privilege, the left doesn’t hate you because of the color of your skin, but because of how you act as a result of it.

Those Coke indoctrination slides say "Try to be less white." Not "Try not to be a white supremacist," but just ... being less white. The sign "It's OK to be white" ought to have zero reaction if what you said is true, but somehow it causes rather a lot of reaction.

The "privilege" concept is original sin, and you can't even be absolved of it.

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

#466

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jawarner wrote: post #412
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up reasonably familiar with devout Christian culture, and one of the things they were absolutely convinced of is that society was filled with anti-Christian shibboleths. When someone said "let's build a tolerant society" or "climate change is an important problem", those might sound like neutral descriptors, but they knew not to be deceived. Obviously, in their view, nobody actually cares about tolerance or cl…

Siege mentality is real. I'm not sure I see the connection in this case to the racial issues. "All Lives Matter" is clearly a reaction to "Black Lives Matter."

Respectfully, it seems clear because you're living under a siege mentality. "All Lives Matter" is a short phrase composed of common English words - some people do use it as a slogan to oppose the BLM movement, but others use it as a compact expression of the idea that every human's life has value. When Jennifer Lopez tweeted "#AllLivesMatter #LoveMakeTheWorldGoRound" over a picture of herself holding hands with Lin-Manuel Miranda and rainbow flags waving in the foreground, is it really plausible that she was declaring her allegiance to anti-BLM groups?

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

#467

Post by ryandrake »

CharlesW wrote: post #381
ryandrake wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> 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. That's not the "only change". If were, that's still a feature, not a bug. It means that real consequences are possible, and that those possible consequences are widely understood. One is never going to change the mind and heart of a deeply racist person, but on…

How do you know that you're actually "bending the curve" and not just driving it underground?

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

#468

Post by MisterBastahrd »

ryandrake wrote: post #332
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Let's see...

My grandparents used the N word freely.

My parents used the C word on occasion when they were younger and grew out of it.

I don't use either, and neither do my kids.

Generations don't exist in bubbles. They are shaped and influenced by popular society just as much as their local communities.

30 years ago, the AIDS epidemic was a punchline.

17 years ago, you couldn't be openly gay in the military and the majority of people in the US supported it.

Now, most people are in favor of gay marriage and a sizeable percentage are fine with trans rights.

The best part about bigots is that they are mortal.

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

#469

Post by splistud »

heterodoxxed wrote: post #347
morpheos137 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, the vast majority of Americans do not believe that at all

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

#470

Post by ttt0 »

AshWolfy wrote: post #447
recursive wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's exactly what's being said. The photo has nothing to do with the story. NPR admitted as much. https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1274809408262938624 But your tone suggests that you disagree with something.

The implication was that npr was smearing this woman, rather than the editors being lazy. All in service to the argument that npr focuses on race, despite there being no evidence

So I can write an article about rapists, put a completely unrelated picture of your face with your full name on it, and that's not a smear? That's essentially what happened
Post reply on HN