I am very wiling to critically analize any racist and bigoted manifestation from the right. I hope you can back up some of the stuff you claim as facts.
Can you point to a public statement where he states that the 'whites' need to be favored and that the rest need to take a back-seat?
Please watch the 60 Minutes interview and you can see and hear for yourself that he argues clearly in favor of the working man, which definitely includes minorities.
He clearly states that the black community has been hit hard by the illegal immigration, and being outbid in the job market.
In regards to your point about arguing in favor of the working man, here's an excerpt from a response about how to counter ethnic/racial tribalism:
"I think in Spain it’s something like 50 or 60% of the youth under 30 are underemployed. And that means the decade of their twenties, which is where you have to learn a skill, where you have to learn a craft, where you really start to get comfortable in your profession, you’re taking that away from the entire generation. That’s only going to fuel tribalism, that’s only going to fuel [unintelligible]… That’s why to me, it’s incumbent upon freedom-loving people to make sure that we sort out these governments and make sure that we sort out particularly this crony capitalism so that the benefits become more of this entrepreneurial spirit and that can flow back to working-class and middle-class people. Because if not, we’re going to pay a huge price for this. You can already start to see it."
Is this for real?! Which guidelines are you talking about that are broken? You mean to say that asking for arguments/specifics is something that goes against HN guidelines?!
Now it looks like it becomes an issue if you ask somebody to argue his/her statement. And if you praise somebody for providing a specific piece of info, at the expense of being down-voted, even that becomes controversial. What school of thought are you guys applying to this?
And how-come you show up to moderate this one week after everything has settled? This is an ideological witch hunt on your side.
And where can I verify your mod status? Who is to say that you are not simply pretending to be a mod and acting to stifle rational dialogue?!
I have a suggestion: to make things truly arbitrary, please ban me, and then I will be sure that you are a moderator.
For such a sad joke, feel free to ban this account. I am not interested in playing in your box.
Jesus, I just realize there's a whole generation of people on the internet who think the fact that no one will argue with them means they're right. Like, are you really going to go your whole life thinking that your worldviews are confirmed any time someone tires of you saying "postmodernism exists to promote marxism" and ignores you?
Anyway, funny story: after he was appointed Chief Strategist I wrote up a little thing explaining Bannon's white nationalism, with links to his writings, public statements, endless radio show, and quotes from people close to him from across the political spectrum, including not just liberals but libertarians, modern right-wingers, and traditional conservatives, who clearly understand that he's just another authoritarian who wants a racially and religiously homogeneous society. Because I've been paying attention to Bannon for years, ever since I decided to go and see what white nationalists actually thought, and got a bunch of alt accounts to hang out on fascist sites where they love what the guy's doing. Worked on it, edited it, expanded it out to a pointless book length, tried to make it as solid as I could. Shared it as wide as I could, tried as hard as I could to bring it up when someone (rightfully!) pointed out that most people criticizing Bannon just make fun of him for looking like a drunk or make casual and irrelevant Nazi references.
Didn't do a damn thing. Which I should have known, I mean I'd basically been aware that despite the claims of wannabe logicians, any high school debater knows that arguments don't really change minds, but hey, I was scared. But that sort of thing is never going to reach the right people, and it's never going to change the minds of people who ask for it.
Sorry for taking this all out on you, it's not really relevant, but like... christ. You think this is what being intellectually serious looks like. There's so many people out there vaguely mimicking logical processes like a cargo cult, but only ever asking to be spoon fed information. You're seriously going around asking people you disagree with for lists of sources, like you're trying to get a trophy and not actually understand the world. If you want a path to knowledge, challenge yourself, do your own research, try to find things that would disrupt your worldview, and stop taking shortcuts by trying to make other people make arguments for you to agree or disagree with. Actually live with the people you disagree with, rather than just studying them to recite lists of fallacies. The only people who will give you a worldview over the internet are propagandists.
Again, not really about you, exaggeration and all that, and this probably isn't the right place to vent, either. You're probably a fine person most of the time, but just please know that when people make bad arguments at you, it's not because we're stupid or wrong, it's because we've seen enough people doing your same song-and-dance to know that no amount of argument will convince you, time is limited and frustration is real, and there's a lot of work to be done in the real world.
This. Thank you for writing this. It's a crystallization of a whole set of emotions and thoughts I'd never quite had in clarity until reading your comment. It's the epitome of the self-reinforcing echo chamber to declare, "Nobody has posted a counter argument therefore we're right." And when someone does provide a counter argument, the source is almost always immediately disregarded as "inherently biased". At some point you just say to yourself, "This isn't worth my time. I'm not going to have the same useless exchange happen with every single person on the internet who doesn't want to actually do the work of understanding the basis for a position counter to their own."
If you care about the truth, some peoples reactions shouldn't matter. Your described reaction will only serve to create a self-reinforcing echo chamber.
Of course it's your choice who and what you decide to debate. Trying to convince the internet you're right, however, will be an exercise in futility.
It's not about "being right". It's about understanding how another person can hold a worldview completely opposed to your own and still "be right". It's accepting that the world is a complex place and that humans being innately attuned to pattern recognition and self-reinforcing bias are really bad at attempting to see how someone who doesn't hold the same beliefs and viewpoints may very well also "be right" or that in the end your own views "are wrong".
And I think that's where legitimate debate comes into play.
Yeah you can accept that others have just as much of a monopoly on truth as you think you do, but if you're not willing to walk over the proverbial coals to assert your experiences & what you believe to be true, then you've lost some agency over your own worldview.
Although I will agree that people need to see topics from more perspectives than they seem to, traditionally--I don't agree with letting down your guard without reason to. There are too many people and groups out in the world actively trying to get a free lunch by pulling the wool over your eyes.
Well, on the one hand, thanks, on the other, that sensation of your emotions and thoughts crystallizing into clarity is usually a sign of an oversimplified worldview, sometimes being supplied by someone trying to manipulate you.
I appreciate that perspective. Sometimes "emotions and crystallizing" can be enlightenment in the Buddhist sense. You need to understand and accept suffering to alleviate it.
As someone probably not too ideologically inclined to agree with you, I'd ask you to post a link to what you've got anyways, and I'll make an effort to read it. I can agree that facts and hard data and research usually don't have the kind of effect we would like, or at least not right away. But I think we have to believe that the truth will come out and win out over the long term if we all keep at it long enough. Call it faith maybe. We can either give up and be a bunch of monkeys constantly killing each other over what amounts to nothing, or we can work for something better.
I think one way to think about it is that there is a wide variety of ways to change the worldviews of people. After all, everyone experiences reality differently and has different preferences on what is more significant to them or not (especially when it comes to the interplay of mediums). In other words, articles only work on a limited subset of people. Other methods such as music, or art, or social setting etc. and whatever combination of these things produce the change that you're hoping.
Sometimes what seems like the most direct path (discussing the issue itself) is actually the longest path around.
At the cost of incredible irony, any chance you could link to that writing? While it may not make a difference in changing minds, it's nice to have all of that information collected together.
In the same vein, with how much Trump has done / scandals etc, few to none have documented everything in one place. Those that try to capture everything get tired after at most a month, if not sooner, and I worry that we won't have a good comprehensive list of events that occurred in this era.
Yeah, that's the draft of the second thing, which is fun to read as repeated edits get more and more deranged while I slowly realize that each edit is making the case against publishing it in the first place. There's a link at the top of that to the Cliff's notes version of assorted quotes, will convince exactly 0 people and re-affirm the biases of 100% of readers, basically as it should, since it's not a good argument.
I went through your Medium post and let me give you props for using writing as a cathartic tool.
My personal impression is that you might be seeing things a bit darker than they actually are.
I am absolutely sure that in real life we would manage to work together on a professional level. No need to fall for the media hype machine. With a deep breath, things are not as bad as they are made to be.
So... I've got a weird and evolving philosophy about those sorts of arguments in general, which is what led to me taking most versions down, and why I'm not really comfortable with spreading them any more either. (And why I feel bad about getting so mad over this, too.) I really do think that people on the Internet underestimate how much making a persuasive and well-sourced argument is about the skill of the arguer, rather than the ground truth. That's one of the reasons Breitbart and Bannon have been so successful, and why trying to combat that with persuasive and well-sourced arguments isn't really a good idea morally or practically.
My advice now if you're curious about what Bannon thinks or what Breitbart really does is: don't start from a position that they're bad, don't believe the media frenzy, don't follow the line of reasoning of people you agree with, definitely don't assume they're neo-Nazis or white nationalists, don't go out looking for arguments one way or another. You just have to start at neutral and spend a ton of time reading Breitbart, listening to his radio episodes, reading what former Breitbart workers have to say, getting savvy to how the community thinks, and, if you can stomach it, using the anonymity of the internet to ingratiate yourself to online fascists until they open up. That's how I did it, anyway. Not sure I can actually recommend it.
Basically, I think I really would rather people did their own research and came to conclusions I might disagree with than listen to my arguments and evidence. Which is the sort of frustrating thing to say that leads people who want to be told what to think to conclude that everything I believe is bullshit. Oh well. Back to taking a break from writing/getting mad on the internet.
It basically is bullshit if you have nothing to show for it. I could say I'm ex-MI6 and call you names the whole while you didnt believe me. I could tell you that you should try and figure out whether I was or wasnt yourself. No one will bother.
I think you've spent too much time hanging around thick-headed individuals. HN is not filled with the self-serving types of people you're describing. Commenters are eagerly awaiting support for your point of view, and you're practically spitting in their eye. No one will care what you have to say after that.
There's a big difference between caring about what someone says and looking for information. Your comment implied your article was mostly compiled information. At the very least I think you should consider releasing a research sheet of sorts with the sources you used/found, and which people can investigate themselves. Sure, the collection still has a narrative, but if you avoid all bias, you will avoid everything. Everything has a perspective, and whats important is that a reader can properly parse and consider that perspective, not that content is devoid of it.
It's okay to not agree with an approach or argument you used before, or even the why of the existence of either. But it doesn't mean all of the content is useless.
Can you point to a public statement where he states that the 'whites' need to be favored and that the rest need to take a back-seat?
Please watch the 60 Minutes interview and you can see and hear for yourself that he argues clearly in favor of the working man, which definitely includes minorities. He clearly states that the black community has been hit hard by the illegal immigration, and being outbid in the job market.