You can't censor away extremism or any other problem • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by stretchwithme » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:26 PM UTC

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…

There isn't a single widely-held opinion that did not begin as an extremist opinion.

And plenty of irrational ideas that became widely held.

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

#662

Post by soared » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:29 PM UTC

gampleman wrote: post #655

Today Scotland passed the wildly controversial hate crime bill. Thankfully the bill was amended several times which gutted many of the more extreme provisions. But I can tell you for a fact that people I know have been seriously preparing to go underground - they perceived this bill as such a serious threat to their freedom of speech and religious liberty that some where preparing to purchase property in remote locat…

I don’t think passing a law intends to change individual peoples’ worldview. I wasn’t able to find an article with a my example of things that would be prosecuted after the bill was passed that could be controversial, only hand-wavey claims.

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

#663

Post by Ajedi32 » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:29 PM UTC

jackson1442 wrote: post #644

closeparen wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today Dr. Seuss is hate speech. Tomorrow Dr. Seuss apologia will be hate speech. Even from the perspective that this is progress, it’s very fast progress. Today’s white supremacists are last week’s liberals who didn’t update their opinions fast enough.

When did Dr. Seuss become hate speech? Last I checked, my extended family still reads Dr. Seuss books with their small children. Yes, Seuss's family pulled a few books from production but I don't recall anyone decrying them.

I'm guessing GP is referring to how eBay banned third parties from selling used copies of the Dr. Seuss books in question. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26347654

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

#664

Post by fhood » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:29 PM UTC

wnoise wrote: post #646

bloaf wrote: post #356

I have some unprofessional sociological suspicions, so I will lay them out as assertions with this caveat serving as the blanket qualifier. First, some observations: 1. Research has found that the probability of conspiratorial thinking is quadratic with respect to political extremism in either direction. 2. Dangerous political movements are predicated on an "us v. them" mentality, almost by definition of dangerous .…

> 1. Research has found that the probability of conspiratorial thinking is quadratic with respect to political extremism in either direction. Extremism has no natural quantification. This statement is nonsense.

I don't what the research is in question, but I absolutely think that political extremism, particularly in the context of two party systems, can quantified in at least a semi-meaningful way.

Create a list of policies. Poll a large equally split group of registered voters from either party. Assign each policy an extremism index based on some combination of the amount of cross party support, and the percentage of total support for each.

Now you can use that list to make a reasonable assessment of political extremism based on which of the policies an individual supports.

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

#665

Post by lliamander » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:29 PM UTC

DC1350 wrote: post #570

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some slightly bad opinion suddenly finds themselves shut out of the main platforms because of hate speech rules A "slightly bad opinion" has to be more than "slightly bad" to break hate speech rules. If you feel a platform is overzealous in enforcing hate speech rules, don't use it. Or maybe ask yourself some questions before moving out. EDIT: the rain of downvotes is telling as usual.

That’s not true. Not being attracted to transgender people is enough to get banned on Reddit. I was banned from r/asktransgender for telling a girl in a relationship with a pre-transition MtF person that it doesn’t make sense to call herself a lesbian (since sexual orientation is based on sex and not gender)

I'm often surprised at how those who insist of the independence of sex and gender don't correctly or consistently separate those terms in practice.

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

#666

Post by JPKab » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #647

I keep coming back to whether people in general still think open mindedness is a virtue. By open mindedness, I mean open to new experience, open to new ideas, open to new people. Practicing openness means observing and hearing and then evaluating for yourself whether you want to assimilate the experience or idea into your life. Open mindedness also means being open to new information, even if it contradicts a basis f…

You are describing a core concept called liberalism.

As a liberal myself, we've become increasingly unwelcome in the United States' only viable left of center political party.

We've allowed regressive, illiberal religious fanatics to take over our party. Just like the Republicans allowed regressive, illiberal religious fanatics to take over their party in the 80s. In both cases, they were considered useful idiots to be appeased while the adults in the room winked and nodded at each other. In both cases, the game theory quickly devolves into pandering to them, and increasingly alienating segments of the population. The wokies have increasingly demanded Mao-like public concessions from elites, and have been universally successful in getting it. This echoes what the evangelicals were able to demand and solicit from GOP members in the 80s-today.

The worst part about this is that the coalition of regressives on the left is so fractious, because they are all so obsessed with immutable characteristic driven identity. Any time an argument or policy that helps one identity group is proposed, another identity group complains they aren't getting the attention THEY need. Because it's such a fractious coalition, elites within the party apparatus and their allies in the press desperately try to spin certain elements of reality. An example of this is the startlingly weird coverage of the violent attacks against vulnerable Asian Americans in US cities. The fact that they are perpetrated exclusively by young black men is deliberately obfuscated, with significant efforts to conflate the attacks with a narrative of ascendant "white supremacists".

This video is from a mainstream, respected news outlet. It's utterly shocking in it's blatant obfuscation of facts to serve a narrative bias: https://youtu.be/1lyVzQsXLl4

Meanwhile, the opposition to the fractious regressive left, are feeding off of this. They are recruiting, and are gaining moral license to justify violence. This is extremely dangerous. These right wing extremists, who they are increasingly awakening at an alarming rate, is far more cohesive as a group. Antifa are mainly annoying, and when they use violent tactics, can be mildly dangerous. But they are weak, untrained, and unorganized compared to their right wing counterparts. In the US, they can easily acquire weapons, but the expertise to use them is not easy to come by.

Liberals like you and me need to stand up, and boldly and loudly and aggressively speak out against any and all forms of regressive, illiberal leftism. If we don't, 2022 is going to be an absolute bloodbath electorally, but far worse is the increasing opposite reaction these lunatics will solicit from the right. Trump's voters aren't going to just go away because the tech companies have banned them. This article clearly points that out.

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

#667

Post by joe_the_user » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

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…

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.

This seems manifestly false. A lot of adult behavior can be changed by scolding, a lot of society runs on scolding.

I'm a pretty rational and strongly opinionated person. You won't change my opinions with scolding. But if someone says "don't talk so loud, you'll wake the baby", well, you can certainly change my behavior. But even more, a lot of people do not operate at anywhere near this the level of rationality and a wider area of their behavior can be changed by scolding. Which is to say the population of fully adult humans is a lot less than the population of humans above the age of majority.

And sure, you can't control everything with scolding, you can't replace the police and the army with scolding but scolding, peer (and non-peer) pressure, etc is a tool in the hands of all the different incarnation of "society".

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

#668

Post by soared » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

alacombe wrote: post #489

thomastjeffery wrote: post #312

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.

"moderation" is censorship.

Incorrect. If I spam a link to my personal blog on hn the moderator or community will flag/kill them. That is not censorship.

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

#669

Post by notahacker » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #628

Jeema101 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expos…

Oh, but the Allies did make Naziism illegal (the Soviets of course went further and made most other political speech illegal in their half of Germany)

Not only did West Germany have denazification programmes, but things like denying the holocaust are still illegal in Germany today, as the article discusses.

It's a bold claim to argue this was "futile" or "likely drove some to extremism" when the context was a reaction to the last war so extreme that it resulted in mass public support for a guy who blamed the Jews and geared up for a second war. Failing to defeat those arguments with logic drove an entire country to extremism, and there were a lot more people who still believed in those extremes in 1946 (even after suffering for them) than express sympathy for Germany's much watered down far right today. I doubt that would radically alter if they relaxed holocaust denial laws today, but there was certainly a time when public debate about whether the Holocaust was real or a big lie would have been useful to anyone wanting to follow in Hitler's footsteps and cast Germany as the victim.

Of course, on the other side the GDR absolutely failed in its attempts to force people to love its state and not realise their friends and family in the West were richer and free-er than them. There were limits to the effectiveness of censorship in achieving those goals, even when the censorship itself was almost unparalleled in its pervasiveness and harshness.

But sometimes not facilitating the discussion terrible niche ideas is much more effective at preventing them from going mainstream than debating them

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

#670

Post by morelisp » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

sabarn01 wrote: post #654

morelisp wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm reminded of Daryl Davis, and the way he de-radicalized KKK members. He did it by talking to them, engaging them in speech. 1. Daryl Davis is literally the only person ever mentioned in this context. If you don't have another example, this doesn't even qualify as an anecdote anymore. 2. Over the course of multiple decades Davis has, via intense 1:1 work and personal connection and at great risk to himself, derad…

Megan Phelps-Roper Derek Black George Wallce Via Shirley Chisholm https://www.persuasion.community/p/lessons-of-a-black-pionee... You are basically saying there is no power in integration and that the only effort for reform here should be negative consequences which generally isn't viewed as a liberal perspective on how to reintegrate people into society.

> You are basically saying there is no power in integration and that the only effort for reform here should be negative consequences

This an extremely uncharitable reading of my comments. I said a structural problem needs a structural solution, not a personal one. To invoke Chisholm as a counter-argument is offensive.