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

621–630 of 863 posts

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

#621

Post by cloverich »

roenxi wrote: post #149
edrxty wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples? I'm not really sure what you're aiming at here. I don't know of any documented cases where too much environmentalism or healthcare really hurt significant populations.

The right supports environmentalism and healthcare. They disagree with specific leftist plans. The official right wing position towards the left is "your outcome would be lovely, but it isn't worth the excessive cost to getting there". There isn't a sizeable lobby who is "against environmentalism", for example. There is a huge lobby who just doesn't see how a comfortable living standard can be achieved without fossil…

> The official right wing position towards the left is "your outcome would be lovely, but it isn't worth the excessive cost to getting there".

Which makes even less sense, because the right since Regan have nearly continuously run up the deficit.

> The right supports environmentalism

You cannot simultaneously deny climate change and support the environment. They are mutually exclusive.

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

#622

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jawarner wrote: post #579
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-M…

You don’t believe that recent popular usage of ALM is related to BLM?

No. Again, it seems impossible to believe that JLo (and Hilary Clinton, and Fetty Wap, and...) said All Lives Matter as a covert signal they don't like the BLM movement. I'm sure some people somewhere have said it to troll, but I think the concern over the phrase is mostly a moral panic.

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

#623

Post by dang »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #60
runarberg wrote: post #36

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.

Calling yourself anti-fascist does not make you immune to totalitarianism, tribalism and othering any more than, to borrow an analogy, writing "cool" on a box makes it a freezer. edit: Oy! The downvote is not for disagreeing!

Downvoting for disagreement is ok on HN; always has been.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

What's not ok is going on about downvotes. It never does any good, and it makes for boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#624

Post by dang »

zapdrive wrote: post #56

What the left also needs is a realization that some of its beliefs are akin to extremism. And some of the left inspired policies have really really hurt and isolated a significant population. The left needs to soften it's stand on such issues.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological battle. The thread is crappy already, and it gets noticeably worse after swerving in directions like this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26432620.

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

#625

Post by cassalian »

runarberg wrote: post #571
cassalian wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coco-cola incident made national news, I imagine there are better articles out there; I simply grabbed the first one on google - I should have sought out a better one to link to. However, from the article, you can see several of the slides that are presented. I find it hard to believe that there's some other context than race being referred to in these slides. Do you have reason to believe that the "white" in the…

One (of many) plausible scenarios: Robin DiAngelo is talking about empathy. She asks people to put them self in the sues of a minority, knowing how boring it is, she puts the words “Try to be less white” on the slide in an attempt to humor. Another possibility: She has been working up the argument that whiteness is a social construct, and in this context, “being white” is the same as “being socially constructed to pe…

> It may be something entirely different though, point is it is not hard to come up with a context where these slides are not criticizing the color of people’s skin.

I agree that your above scenarios could change the context.

However, given that I perceived the slides in a different manner, and several others did as well (if no one perceived this to mean white people, then there would have been no news). Would you agree that using "white" to mean something other than the race in a seminar titled 'Facing Racism' is less likely than 'white' being used to refer to race? If not, would you agree that the Robin's usage of 'white' was poorly thought out, considering that people ended up with the conclusion that she was referring to race?

I do believe that Robin was referring to 'white' in terms of race; however, I'm willing to explore the possibility that this wasn't the case.

In the event that my assumption is correct - that Robin is referring to race - would you then agree that Robin is a member of the left who believes that white culture should be viewed negatively based on the content of the slides within the seminar?

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

#626

Post by anonymouswacker »

unethical_ban wrote: post #487
anonymouswacker wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the mainstream thinking in the US, and why everything is rapidly going to shit. There is no "we" giving people a microphone -- it is a select few oligarchs who wield exceptional control to take away the voice of people whose views run counter to their and their cronies' interests. There is no democracy, representation, or transparency. The coming antithesis will be bypassing the control of the few on the voic…

Your assertion lacks any evidence, supporting argument, or sense. It also offers no solution beyond "some different kind of Internet" but don't describe anything beyond, essentially, decentralization. And that the United States will actually collapse in the near term because Twitter is mismanaged.

You're right. I could spend the hours of time to write a thesis here, as if it will make any difference, but I prefer to just play the contrarian while I blow off from work for a few. Take it with a grain of salt, or just mark it as spam, etc. I wonder at what point I will just have this account banned off HN.

Big Corporations and centralization of power in the hands of few is bad, and should be obvious. I didn't think one would need to provide evidence that Big Tech/Media is canceling conservatives, libertarians, liberals, greens, and surmise that it is not just because of benevolence or public safety. These are advertising companies deciding what is truth. That some people still cheer as more people that disagree with them are wiped off the de facto public forums on the internet should be scary to the masses who are just one wrong idea from being similarly muzzled. US Government is bought and paid for by these interests, so the logical hope would be for a technical solution by neoanarchists and other disenfranchised groups. It's just a hope, sure... but with the growth of crypto for decentralizing infrastructure (Filecoin, for instance) it seems all but inevitable.

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

#627

Post by wnoise »

penetraitor69 wrote: post #547
ralusek wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the current primary strategy is to destabilize Western liberalism. Every tenet of liberalism is actively under attack, and successfully so. Individualism? Long gone, the name of the game is collectivism and your identity groups are everything. Color blindness? It's officially considered to be an outdated, laughable mode of thinking. If your identity collective is paramount, how can you be blind to the paramet…

"Individualism" was never really implemented as "western" value; it was only ever a catch-phrase to defend the status quo by insisting those at the top "earned the right" to be there. "Color blindness" likewise has mostly been used to argue that those on the bottom of society deserve to be there; (again) preserving the status quo. I.E. shutting down discussion by labeling racism a "solved problem". "Freedom of speech…

None of these were actually faithfully followed, and they were indeed used as excuses. But they used to be viewed as ideals to work toward. Now there are circles where they are _only_ seen as excuses, and they really have been demonized.

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

#628

Post by Alupis »

Jeema101 wrote: post #598
Alupis wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone name a time in history where the people censoring things turned out to be the "Good Guys"?

Yes. 1945 post-war Germany saw mass-censoring as part of the Allied de-Nazification program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification "the US Army continued its efforts to denazify Germany through control of German media. The Information Control Division of the US Army had by July 1946 taken control of 37 German newspapers, six radio stations, 314 theaters, 642 cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, and 7,3…

Propaganda isn't the same as censorship. It does not appear any of the Allies made it illegal to believe in Nazism, or to write about it, or even dare to own something from the Nazi era.

Nonetheless, it's arguable these efforts were futile, likely misguided, and likely drove some to extremism as a result. You cannot simply compel a population to think a certain way.

Instead, you must allow the "bad" ideas to be exposed in the public forum, and win over the population through logical arguments. Hiding them away does nothing to disappear them.

Regardless, it's pretty well established the average German citizen didn't believe in the extremes the Nazi party had gone to anyway.

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

#629

Post by dang »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #27

You can't dialog with fascist.

Please do not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. This thread is terrible enough without being pushed deeper into hell like this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26432620.

Post reply on HN