901–910 of 983 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would/do have a problem with that idea being supressed. The path to defeating a truly bad idea is to publicly flog it, not pretend it doesn't exist.
No. It takes more time to rebut ridiculous ideas than to generate them. At some point along the spectrum of consensus, the burden shifts to the person propagating the idea; otherwise, all we're doing is wasting time feeding the trolls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment does not appear to prove that Stephen Molyneux is not a racist. Can you explain why you think it does?
It's a good question politely asked, so uncomfortable as the subject makes me I'm going to try. Like I said though, this is an awful ball of wax and it feels dirty to approach it. I'm going to try and tackle it via the question of how one identifies a racist. Let me start with a generic, emotionally less charged example and then try to relate that to the specifics of the Molyneux story. Suppose two people are talking…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It takes more time to rebut ridiculous ideas than to generate them. At some point along the spectrum of consensus, the burden shifts to the person propagating the idea; otherwise, all we're doing is wasting time feeding the trolls.
Trolls can be ignored. Bad ideas can be expressed in good faith.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comment "The SPLC is a hate group" is not racist. Even if the person who said it is otherwise racist, it's entirely possible for racists to say things that aren't racist. Whatever "racist-adjacent" means, clearly it must mean "not actually racist" because if it was racist, I'm sure you would call that.
An outspoken racist falsely attacks one of the great legal defenders of Blacks in America and your argument is, "it's entirely possible for racists to say things that aren't racist." I'm doubtful you will convince anyone with that argument: perhaps not even yourself.
Now, if you think the statement "the SPLC is a hate group" is false that's fine. I think there is a debate that is worth having here on HN - especially when tech companies are using the SPLC's hate list to justify their deplatforming decisions. In my opinion, the SPLC's use of defamation and fear-mongering for profit make the statement perfectly justified.
Calling it "racist" or "racist-adjacent" is a rhetorical attack that does not serve the purpose of mutual enlightenment. "Racist-adjacent" strikes me as particularly insidious since implicit in that label is the admission that the thing being labeled is not actually racist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complaining about the /r/fragilewhiteredditor subreddit is kind of just proving their point though.
Why should white people tolerate racism against themselves?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators. I think there's a good reason for doing that, given that such a sub can almost trivially become a hate sub for mocking people on Twitter, much like fatpeoplehate. "We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle.
Let's do a CTRL-H test: "We want our community to be largely white" seems like a reasonable founding principle. How do you feel about the statement now?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think crappy ideas (like white supremacy) should be fought with better ideas (like treating everyone equally regardless of their race). Censoring/deplatforming will not have the effect you think it will. Nor is it ethically palpable.
This kind of half-measure response is exactly why white supremacy continues to thrive in America. You cannot argue with a white supremacist on reasonable ground, their world view is intrinsically incorrect, and I am convinced that you cannot convince a white supremacist they are wrong through debate. > Nor is it ethically palpable. Do not ascribe your ethics onto me. I think it is extremely ethical to deny white supr…
I'd love to link you to a Scott Alexander essay at this point which examined that very question and concluded, based on evidence and data, that there might be a few thousand genuine white supremacists in America. But of course he deleted his blog so I can't.
This is why so many people are arguing with you. The statements by the left and the observable reality are so out of whack it's clear it's a "dog whistle", as they like to say. The revolutionary left are using the word white to mean something quite different to its normal definition. It seems rather to be used to mean "anyone who isn't black" or more perniciously, "anyone conservative". Alexander had a great essay on this redefinition of whiteness as well, but alas ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> white supremacists most are actually white separatists, but labelled "supremacist". Its not about hating other cultures, but about preserving your own, like how Native Americans have exclusive spiritual rituals that outsiders are not allowed to attend. Imagine calling jews who want to have their own country in Israel "jewish supremacists". Your post used the words "supremacists", "hate", "nazi", "racist", and "toxi…
Keep telling yourself that, but it's all just a veneer over the same toxic, exclusionary, and racist bullshit. > Imagine calling jews who want to have their own country in Israel "jewish supremacists". Jews wanted to have their own country because of thousands of years of persecution by basically everyone, everywhere, after they were driven out of their own home. When that happens to white people, I'll accept your ar…
I mean, if you go back far enough basically every identity group has been on the receiving end of something terrible done by some other group. If that's all it takes for separatism to be legitimate and praiseworthy then more or less anyone could argue they deserve their own ethno-state.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do disagree, there was a lot of discussion about this on SSC prior to Scott shutting it down. If you just read what's on the site now, you're missing most of the important background information. In particular, the "reporter" at the NYT was clearly looking to get SSC cancelled, so Scott self-cancelled before that could happen, on his own terms. I'm ambivalent about his decision, but it was definitely his to make an…
I've read SSC for a while now, and check in with the community every so often. Before the takedown, there was talk about the reporter writing an article, with the general consensus being "nervous but optimistic". I'd love to see clear evidence about the reporter clearly looking to get Scott cancelled. The scare quotes on "reporter" are unnecessary. I'm sad that the blog is down. "Categories are for man" is an essay/l…
Here's an example of the NYT providing anonymity to a therapist with a political blog in 2015: https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/1275436187713286144
Here's the NYT protecting the anonymity of female gamers to protect them from harassment (on the same day that Scott took down his blog): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619347
There are other examples, but those strike me as the most related to Scott's circumstances. It's not proof per se, but it severely undermines the credibility of the statement that it would be against NYT policy to grant the same protections to Scott.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is crazy to think that ideas can be extinguished. These purges will serve to further concentrate and radicalize the adherents to these ideologies. edit : I may have been wrong, it seems deplatforming might work. [0] TIL! I had often read that echo chambers exacerbated radicalization but it seems more research has yielded better data to turn over that conclusion. edit1 : it seems like radicalization is more nuanced…
Communism, as a political movement, was largely extinguished in the US during the 20th century through purges and deplatforming. How many communist organizations do you see, these days? How much reach do they have, compared to the 30s? How much political power do they have, compared to the alt-right, today? Extinguishing that idea into the fringe seems to have worked rather well. As did de-nazification, post WWII. It…
And really, communism didn't actually die. It just altered its terminology a bit, but the core ideas remained widespread. How do we know this?
Well, one reason is that academia is still full of people who claim to believe in Marxism:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht...
At least outside engineering subjects. So that's a pretty big hint it didn't really go away.
But another is that what we're seeing happen now is pure Marx. Divide the world into two camps, one that oppresses the other. Argue that the oppressed group is victimised, which is why it's the oppressors that own the assets and the wealth. Argue for fixing this with forced wealth transfers, forced replacement in positions of power. Then start to actually implement it, all backed by reams of impenetrable ideological texts, purges, witch hunts, show trials and so on. Claim at all times it's all about equality, even as deeply unequal systems are created before everyone's very eyes. Dare people to point out the double standards and attack them when they do.
We've seen it all before. The words change - proles and bourgeoise were replaced by black and white, imperialism with white privilege or patriarchy, and so on. But scratch the surface and you find Marxist arguments, still there, they never went away.
Why? Perhaps because anti-communists got intellectually lazy. The USSR and to some extent the Nazis made their case for them (Nazi being "National Socalist", lest we forget). Anti-communists didn't really have to build intellectual arguments for their case when the Berlin Wall was making their case for them.
But it's been decades since the wall fell. People haven't really been pushing back on Marxist arguments until very recently and even now, their intellectual muscles are weakened by inactivity. Meanwhile the Marxists have been camping out in academia for decades, brainwashing generations of students into believing - against all data and evidence - that the world can be neatly split into black and white, victims and oppressors. And now we're reaping the whirlwind.