I have read Sarte's comments (at least I think I have - no link, so I'm not sure).
Look, I'm glad that racism and genocide are banned on HN, and that I don't have to wade through the garbage. CW wasn't trying to be HN, though. It had moderators, but they had a different set of filters, and they let a lot more through. That was by intent and design.
Then some people decided that, because it allowed stuff from the far right, it was supporting the far right, and that wasn't OK - any forum that allowed it at all had to be shut down, even if they allowed it from the far left as well.
From what it sounds like from the article (not an unbiased source, I know), the CW moderators were doing pretty well at their intended task, and a pretty interesting community was flourishing there. But some outside people decided that their definition of "odious" should be the one enforced, and threw various increasingly dishonest hissy fits until CW shut down.
Is that really a good thing?
Is it really a good thing if more than one group figures out that they can do it?
The urge to censor viewpoints that we consider odious is strong, but I'm really not sure it's the most righteous course (especially as it was practiced here).
The problem is if you allow those comments, then by extension you do in fact support them. If HN in attempt to be more neutral started allowing think pieces from far-right authors on how bad the Jewish people are, then people would believe HN supports them (and rightfully so) by offering them a platform. This is part of the reason why HN does have banned websites (such as InfoWars) because the information from those sites tends to not only be highly disingenuous but also potentially damaging to the overall community.
Communities have to have a baseline stance of things they don't support, otherwise you can rapidly turn into the flaming heap that is Voat and other various sites. As for the actual data relating to the CW thread, the data only tells us what people self-describe as, not necessarily the frequency of their posts, the content contained within or how closely the poll reflects the actual userbase. This is before going into issues of people potentially gaming the poll and other problems with online polling.
As for the urge to censor viewpoints, that is inherently part of human nature. The internet has only made it easier because the anonymity allows for zero consequence. To fix this problem requires either destroying human nature or tearing apart the internet as you and I know it. There's always going to be a disagreement with how far it should go; some people believe Reddit should've never banned FatPeopleHate. Other people believe Reddit still fosters far too many incredibly vile subcommunities. Everyone has a line eventually. And there's always going to be people that disagree with where the line is drawn.
> The problem is if you allow those comments, then by extension you do in fact support them.
FALSE. But you do in fact support censorship (or at least deplatforming, which I vehemently despise).
Here's what your position is like. Remember that baker in Colorado who wouldn't bake a cake for a gay wedding, because he felt that he would be participating in something he didn't think was morally right? You're agreeing with his position. In fact, his position is less extreme than yours, because he was willing to sell them any cake in the store, but wasn't willing to design a custom cake for them.
Yet I suspect (am I wrong?) that you think that the Colorado baker was in the wrong. But you're using his logic.
Your second and third paragraphs I think I agree with.
You're making a false equivalence here and assuming they're the same and your logic is incredibly irrational here but I'm going to try to address it in the best manner I can:
In the baker case, he decided that he would not support gay people. I believe gay people should be a protected group (as they are not harmful nor do they generally espouse harmful beliefs). You're right in that he felt that he would be supporting gay people, and my point is that he should support gay people, not that through some strange mental gymnastics I believe he's right to not support them (??). This is the reason why protected groups exist because if a person believes 'I refuse to offer service to women because I refuse to support women', we as a society believe that to be a net negative.
This is of course ignoring the context of the situation where we believe in free exercise of religion while also denying a man on death row access to his religion [1], which shows more the hypocrisy of the Supreme Court's decision on the baker case vs the Dunn v Ray case. But that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Your argument is essentially saying people should have the right to discriminate on the basis of age, religion, gender etc because to not allow so is censorship. People should not be forced into supporting something they disagree with, correct? Which then ties back into my core argument in that everyone has a line; society has reason to try and shift that line (to avoid discrimination) and communities have reasons to draw their own line as well (to signal for causes they support or to limit the scope of discussion).
I wrote a scathing reply last night, but didn't post it. I will try to be more moderate today.
Publication does not mean endorsement of the view. You see this in the disclaimer in all the editorials: "The views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of [publication]". They can publish, on their platform, views that they disagree with. On that point, you are simply wrong.
But your views here (that publication equals endorsement, and that communities should shut down views they don't accept) - I find those views to be odious. Contrary to the ideals of America, even. Should I be able to get you banned from HN? If they don't, should I say that HN endorses your views, and get a howling mob to shut HN down?
That's the fundamental issue here. It's not just those people out there. It's you. Your views offend people. It's going to happen to you. Think well whether you really want odious views removed.
And it's going to be me. That's why I'm so defensive here. I already hold views that some find odious; as society moves its position, I will hold more. Within the next ten years (and maybe a whole lot sooner), this is going to be me. That's why I'm opposed to societal censorship. If a mob can shut down the alt right for being too far outside society, they can shut down you and me when they decide that we're too far outside the new norm.
Should we just accept society's definition of what is right? No. Either there is a real right and wrong, or their isn't. If there is, why do we think society will converge on it? Why do we think that society's view evolves to ever-increasing correctness? (It has, in the past, evolved to ever-increasing conformity with the current view, but that doesn't say much.) Rwanda, for instance, abruptly decided that murdering one race was perfectly good. China decided that social pressure to conform to the party line was good. (You may say that was imposed on them by the party, and you'd be right. But it still became the way the society behaved.)
On the other hand, if there is no real right and wrong, why should we treat society's current views as if they had moral force?
About the baker: If you don't like that one, try this. A print shop prints flyers for a Richard Spencer rally. Is the print shop endorsing Richard Spencer's views? How about if they design the flyer? Where do you draw the lines between what happened on CW, the print shop, and the bake shop, and why do you draw them there?
> Publication does not mean endorsement of the view. You see this in the disclaimer in all the editorials: "The views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of [publication]". They can publish, on their platform, views that they disagree with. On that point, you are simply wrong.
Publication is, essentially, endorsement. Let's say I hosted a blog, and then I decided on my blog to constantly host people whom deny climate change. I can add a disclaimer to the end of all of their posts and say 'these represent views I personally do not endorse', but if the entirety of my blog consisted of those sort of views, people would naturally question what I really believe. At a certain point it is endorsement depending on how odious the behavior is. If the Washington Post decided to publish an article on how black people are responsible for all the evils in America, that would be a blemish on their reputation even if they added said disclaimer.
> Contrary to the ideals of America, even. Should I be able to get you banned from HN? If they don't, should I say that HN endorses your views, and get a howling mob to shut HN down?
If you haven't realized yet, this is why flagging and voting down posts exists on HN. It exists so that the users can self-curate content and remove things that are considered particularly odious. If you consider that contrary to American ideals, then why are you participating on a site contrary to your beliefs? Posters on HN can and do shut down people espousing alt-right beliefs.
>That's why I'm opposed to societal censorship. If a mob can shut down the alt right for being too far outside society, they can shut down you and me when they decide that we're too far outside the new norm.
This is the answer from someone scared of progress or change. This was the exact argument made during the Civil Rights era by people who were afraid of black people gaining rights: They were scared of mobs shutting them down, stopping them from being racist. Does this mean the mob is always right? No, but it does mean that you should strongly consider whether or not your beliefs are truly outdated.
Society as I mentioned evolves and changes over time. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. I would hope you would agree that society evolving to give more rights to people previous deprived of them to be a good thing. And I would also hope you realize that the reason why there's such a strong reaction against the alt-right is because they want to specifically take away those rights from minority populations.
And with regards to the baker thing, you managed to miss my point entirely. My point is that your concept of American ideals is flawed and broken: Because we have not and never applied those ideals equally. The baker case was never truly about endorsement or religious liberties: It was about entrenching the right to discriminate against minorities.
> And I would also hope you realize that the reason why there's such a strong reaction against the alt-right is because they want to specifically take away those rights from minority populations.
I hope you would realize that the reason there's such a strong reaction to the "alt-left" is because this kind of thinking leads people to such crazy places that they would defend Soviet gulags as "compassionate." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/11/soviet-labour-ca...
The 20th century had horrors of Naziism and racism, yes, but it also had horrors perpetrated in the name of "progress" and "reeducation." If you have emotionally internalized the horrors of Germany and Jim Crow, but haven't done the same with the USSR, the Cultural Revolution, and the Khmer Rouge, then I can understand why ideologically-enforced progressivism might seem harmless and noble.
The 'alt-left' as people claim barely exists in any tangible form. Yes, there are going to be people that'll excuse the crimes of the USSR but to try and equate them to the alt-right is a false equivalence. Particularly because when you look at the spike in hate crimes, violence, antisemitism etc, you primarily see members of the alt-right fall within that group.
Considering how our president behaves and excuses members of the alt-right, I'll start worrying about the alt-left when and if they start holding positions of power. Before you start trying to point out further members of the alt-left: I'll just remind you that it was during that same speech that the alt-left term was invented.
> Particularly because when you look at the spike in hate crimes, violence, antisemitism etc, you primarily see members of the alt-right fall within that group.
Let's just go from the last week. Here is some left-wing violence:
And for hate crimes, the news is that Jussie Smolett has been arrested for staging the "modern-day lynching" against him that has captured national attention for the last few weeks:
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. When you're on the edge of posting like this to HN, please catch yourself and take a step back—as we all need to do.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's against the rules here, and we ban accounts that do it. More importantly it's against the spirit of this site, so please don't.
It also looks like you've been crossing repeatedly into incivility. Please don't do that either.
Right, I'll back off a bit. I can admit that I've been especially hostile these past few days.
But, I am starting to see a serious issue with posters on HN engaging in bad faith arguments and spreading heavily anti-scientific nonsense. Not only have I seen posters here openly defending pedophilia [1], arguing in bad faith by making deliberately misleading arguments [2], people not even attempting to make an argument [3] and many more non-arguments [4]. This is without even mentioning the posts I have seen being highly transphobic and comments/articles made by trans-people (with good arguments!) being voted down into the abyss, both of which I could find examples were it not 3AM. I have flagged many comments and tend to err towards only the most egregious and while I can understand that the moderation team can only do so much at a certain point the trend I'm noticing is deeply concerning. If you don't want HN to be a site with any sort of political battles, then HN needs to better define what kinds of things make up politics. I avoid making threads here and I generally don't stray from the topic of said threads. But ultimately if the goal of the site is to flag and move on when you see someone make a bad faith argument or make a political post: That's tacitly leaving bad arguments unchallenged, especially when the flagging system fails to work.
And I want to make it clear that this isn't an argument against you in particular dang; but rather the issues I see looming on the horizon for HN. Hence my increasing frustration.
> You're trying to justify a term made up by a president who in the same speech defended and attempted to justify the murder of a woman by the alt-right.
If you just look at the speech by itself, who Trump was referring to was unclear. The protest was originally over whether some statues were to be torn down, and he could very well have been talking about those protestors.
But if you look at his presidency in total, the fact that he's never has appeared to expressed support to neo-nazis or murder(!) of people of the alt-left before or after should make it clear that he was supporting the people protesting the removal of the statues and not the alt-right.
> As for the actual data relating to the CW thread, the data only tells us what people self-describe as, not necessarily the frequency of their posts, the content contained within or how closely the poll reflects the actual userbase.
Scott did a random sample of comments from CW:
> During the last few years of Culture War thread, a consensus grew up that it was heavily right-wing. This isn’t what these data show, and on the few times I looked at it myself, it wasn’t what I saw either. After being challenged to back this up, I analyzed ten randomly chosen comments on the thread; four seemed neutral, three left/liberal, and three conservative. When someone else objected that it was a more specific “blatant” anti-transgender bias, I counted up all the mentions of transgender on three weeks worth of Culture War threads: of five references, two were celebrating how exciting/historic a transgender person recently winning an election was, a third was neutrally referring to the election, a fourth was a trans person talking about their experiences, and a fifth was someone else neutrally mentioning that they were transgender. This sort of thing happened enough times that I stopped being interested in arguing the point.
This is why all the claims of "odious views", "how the Jewish people should be eradicated", and other things you've mentioned in this thread fall so flat to me. People claim stuff like that is flying around to justify their call for greater censorship and shunning. But when you dig into the details about what people are actually saying, it virtually never lives up to the labels that have been put on it.
Look, I'm glad that racism and genocide are banned on HN, and that I don't have to wade through the garbage. CW wasn't trying to be HN, though. It had moderators, but they had a different set of filters, and they let a lot more through. That was by intent and design.
Then some people decided that, because it allowed stuff from the far right, it was supporting the far right, and that wasn't OK - any forum that allowed it at all had to be shut down, even if they allowed it from the far left as well.
From what it sounds like from the article (not an unbiased source, I know), the CW moderators were doing pretty well at their intended task, and a pretty interesting community was flourishing there. But some outside people decided that their definition of "odious" should be the one enforced, and threw various increasingly dishonest hissy fits until CW shut down.
Is that really a good thing?
Is it really a good thing if more than one group figures out that they can do it?
The urge to censor viewpoints that we consider odious is strong, but I'm really not sure it's the most righteous course (especially as it was practiced here).