Technology

This sub-thread is very long and I’m starting to lose focus. I don’t think we agree on everything, but I appreciate that you’ve been civil.

Haha yeah, all good. I enjoyed it, thank you as well. I'll wrap up my thoughts if you don't want to go back and forth indefinitely.

Why do you find people using their limited economic power coercive? You say you like boycotts. Telling Tide that you saw their advertisement on a nazi blog so you’re not going to buy Tide until that’s remedied is a boycott.

It comes down to the goal of the boycott. A boycott to stop someone polluting or abusing human rights, I'm down for. A boycott because some comedian said something someone doesn't like and they want to "deplatform" him, I'm against. A boycott because Substack allows Nazis, and you're trying to get third parties to punish Substack to make them stop, I also don't like.

Somewhat related, I think it's great to attack Nazis directly. Something like this where you're crippling them because they broke the law and hurt people, I'm very in favor of. I don't like Nazis any more than anyone else does. I just think it has to be based on behavior rather than speech. Letting them speak, but not letting them hurt people, I think is going to hinder their cause a lot more than it helps it.

their “Holocaust is a lie check out these posts [nazi propaganda link 1, 2, 3]” post up is a hazard

Okay, here's the crux:

I don't think that post is a hazard.

I think having an exchange of ideas which includes dangerous ones, even very dangerous ones, alongside the truth, is a good thing. I think trying to get rid of "dangerous" ideas by banning people from talking about them does more harm than good. I think declaring that no one is allowed to say the holocaust is a lie is a hazard. I think it helps the Nazis to make that rule. I think the people who want to ban Nazis are, unintentionally, helping the Nazis quite a lot. People are talking to me in this subthread like I'm being soft on the Nazis and Nazis are terrible, but I think letting them say what they think, having everyone see it, and having other people free to illustrate why they're wrong, is way harder on the Nazis than forcing them off somewhere where they can congregate in peace and no one can see them.

You might not agree, but that's how I see it.

There are some points of view that are so hashed out, it is unlikely to be worth our time to debate them again. Nazi ideology, for example, was pretty firmly settled as bad. The forum I mentioned before had a clear “We are not going to debate if gay people have rights” rule. Someone might want to make an argument that they don’t, but the belief that they do is so axiomatic for the locale it’s not worth entertaining the “debate”.

So we disagree on this point. I don’t see any good coming from platforming holocaust deniers or homophobes or whatever. If I’m running a bar, I don’t need to let the nazis have their meetup in the back booth.

I’ve also never run a forum. I expect there’s a big “for me it was tuesday” experience. For the guy who wants to debate if queer couples really need to get married, it’s the first time he’s ever waded into this topic. For the moderation team, it’s tuesday, and the fourth time this has come up this week. I expect dealing with the worst sorts of people would take the shine off anyone’s idealism.

Yeah, I get this. I wouldn't try to tell anyone running a forum that they have to entertain this type of debate, because it's incredibly draining and may not fit the goal of the forum and may obscure the actual goal of the forum. I get all that and I wouldn't try to tell you to run your forum any other way.

The thing is though, that "for me it was Tuesday" thing cuts both ways. You may have had this discussion a thousand times already, but for the guy that came in, it may be his very first time being exposed to certain things. I think a lot of religious people have this type of experience when they start talking with athiest people on the internet, and they may be coming from a pretty ignorant place when they start out. I had this type of experience as far as geopolitics and who the "good guys" are. And, I've heard a former white supremacist talking about having his awakening moment and leaving the KKK because of it.

The "talk.origins" newgroup on Usenet was this. It was a place to debate evolution versus creationism. Is that a pretty firmly settled question? Yes. Absolutely it is. Honestly, more so than gay rights (although gay rights is also settled, to me.) And yet, somehow, there are people in the world who don't agree. A lot of them argue in bad faith, a lot of them are tedious or ignorant, there's a ton of ground that gets covered over and over and over again. But is that a useful thing to have exist? Ab so fuckin lutely.

Does that mean that every 4chan troll arguing about the holocaust in bad faith, who's never going to change his mind, deserves your time and attention? On a forum that's not for that? Fuck no. I actually think that deliberate engineered misinformation, and the toxic and mind-change-resistant culture of debate on the modern internet, argues for a radical rethinking of what's a sensible way to approach "an open exchange of communication" so that it doesn't wind up as just the Nazis being able to spew hatred in places it doesn't belong, and public forums being soft fertile ground for disinformation pipelines. I've also debated with enough closed minded people on the internet that I'm not naive about what the result of engaging with Nazis in an earnest debate is likely to be. But, a lot of the creationists on talk.origins were just as bad-faith about their conduct as modern 4chan trolls.

Hopefully that makes sense. I just don't think that the answer is that as soon as someone says one ignorant thing about, for example, gay rights, they're stripped of their ability to continue the conversation. Because if no one is ever willing to talk with them about it except other gay-bashers, how would you expect they would ever change their mind about it?