22 ms·

Agree. The first thing I thought upon reading this was: would Twitter ban an account with the following description: "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and

by xaa 10y ago

Agree. The first thing I thought upon reading this was: would Twitter ban an account with the following description: "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." Undoubtedly not. The only difference, of course, is s/African/European/g. I'm a liberal, but I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger. It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow, and having done so, created some kind of First Alteration of the Constitution to protect this kind of speech, realizing that attempting to suppress it would cause more harm than good. I do realize that Twitter is not the government, but the same principle applies.

leereeves 10y ago
I feel like the left seriously damaged their ability to fight racist ideas when they abandoned the idea of equality. Now, the left calls colorblindness and "all lives matter" racist. (Remember when Martin O'Malley was destroyed for saying that?) They create advantageous standards based on race, and even exclusive positions for non-white applicants. (For example, at the BBC.) And I too doubt they would object to "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." MLK's dream that one day people would not be judged by the color of their skin was abandoned by the left before the alt-right rose to power, and I believe that helped the alt-right rise to power.
- glenda 10y ago
  This is a very forgiving point of view. Institutional racism is real and because of that it can't be undone by just pretending everyone is equal all of the sudden. It is much more nuanced than you make it out to be. That being said, many of the people that twitter banned are just straight up racist and xenophoic/intolerant speech should not be protected.
  - jsf666 10y ago
    >Institutional racism is real Any evidence of this claim? Cause as an outsider to the US I see a black president and a lot of reversed-racism (affirmite action I think you ppl call it)
    - glenda 10y ago
      Sure, the way the law works is different for black communities. For example, http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/06/news/ferguson-arrest-warrants/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/06/news/ferguson-arrest-warrant... shows that people in Ferguson are being arrested for things that wouldn't even be considered a crime where I live. Compare that with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch or http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/us/oregon-standoff-ammon-bundy-acquittal/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/us/oregon-standoff-ammon-bundy... and you will begin to see how crimes committed by white people are often punished by a slap on the wrist when the same crime committed by a person of color would land them in jail.
      - jsf666 10y ago
        After the whole year of Clinton propaganda the Clinton News Network is a joke to me, it's basically NK tier "news" (propaganda). Besides that what You said is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence Please give me some scientific articles (there should be a plethora of them considering how hot this topic is) with actuall statistics and measurments that would support this claim. In my opinion this is a victim complex (similar to the Jews and Holocaust) where people want to milk historical events for their own personal gains
- commenting 10y ago
  Black Lives Matter means Black Lives Matter as well. The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't, and that the racial struggles of American Blacks are irrelevant. That is the reason why All Lives Matter is considered abusive.
  - iopq 10y ago
    > The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't That's not what "all" means. It's turning the name of the movement by implying it means "only" Black Lives Matter. So All Lives Matter is saying that not only Black Lives Matter.
    - commenting 10y ago
      Only if you take the literal interpretation of the words, rather than the connotation and context that I explained in my comment.
    - grad_ml 10y ago
      The question is why people of color have to come up with "BLM" movement. Why not Latinos, White or some other racial entity (not yet, because they are not demographically significant)? Because there had been numerous instances, when black folks have been murdered by police brutally without any repercussions from courts or government. So, this is not the time for all lives matter, yet.
      - leereeves 10y ago
        In truth this happens to all races. It does happen to black people somewhat more often, per capita, but 50% of people killed by police are white.
        kemayo 10y ago
        Mind, since ~70% of the US population is white, that does imply whites are less likely to be killed by the police. Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races, and to what extent that figure is manipulated by conscious / subconscious bias on the part of law enforcement. (It's a swamp, and I don't feel like arguing about it tonight, I just wanted to acknowledge it's complicated.) Edit to acknowledge: yes, it's more like 60% white if you're splitting out Hispanic-origin into its own category. Still, disproportionate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- marcelluspye 10y ago
  I don't think it was a case of abandoning equality, as much as it was about defering 'colorblindness' until there is actual equality. However, the people on the left espousing these ideas seem to have forgotten to tell everyone about this, and assumed the rest of society would figure out what they meant. They haven't, and I think that's where a lot of the problem is for them.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Nuance is hard in this day and age, particularly when you're limited to 140 characters.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  HN is a bad place to discuss this sort of stuff because you're always risking karma, but here goes. As a liberal, I will say that liberals drastically overplayed their hand the last 8 years. Many of us have been saying for a while that the language, tenor, and actions of recent liberal movements was ultimately counter productive. I understand and share the demand to be treated decently and equally, but admittedly things kind of got out of hand. Micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger words - all things that have good intentions but the people who advocated for them were often, to put it kindly, un-diplomatic. With "demographics" on our side, many of us constructed this alternate reality where America, ready or not, was going to bend to our will - our worldview. And so we poked the bear. Over and over and over again. Then it woke up, tore our heads off and left us wondering what the f*ck happened.
  - autognosis 10y ago
    >>because you're always risking karma ----- That's why the serious discussion happens on 4chan. Say WTF you think, or GTFO. I also upvoted you. :-)
  - prewett 10y ago
    I'm not sure if you intended this meaning, but it sounds like you see (your) liberal view as the ultimately right one which will inevitably triumph in the end, its just bad tactics right now. I didn't notice this until after I got back to the US after some time in an authoritarian country, and I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness of being unwilling to consider the merits of the other side, a feeling of we are certainly right and we are going to enforce it on everyone else through legislation. California just banned single-use plastic bags; it could have simply charged a fee commensurate with the costs of cleanup. Or the hot-button issues. Abortion: women's rights, yes, but the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies. Homosexual marriage: people's rights, yes, but there are some good arguments to the other side, too. Usually issues have two sides because there actually are two different ways of looking at the problem, and to say that the other way is ignorant, intolerant, wrong, etc. is really not respecting the other side. (Full disclosure: I am a conservative. I am not saying conservatives (!= Republican) are any better, certainly we have our own failings.) I like your analogy about the bear, btw. I think you are probably right on. And even as a conservative, I was just as shocked as everyone else. Hopefully this election will get a good dialog going and people actually trying to understand the other side. That would probably make it worth it.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > when they abandoned the idea of equality They still champion equality. Unfortunately, it's now the equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity.
  - geowwy 10y ago
    > Unfortunately, it's now the equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity. Yeah – or to put it another way, they champion social equality instead of equality under the law. It's the difference between Classical Liberalism and the Social Liberalism which is currently in vogue.
  - filoeleven 10y ago
    Equality of opportunity cannot be pursued or achieved if it ignores the fact that the starting conditions are not the same for everybody. This is what the left is trying to address.
- throwaway4job 10y ago
  All Lives Matter is racist af. The message of black lives matter is not that they matter more than other lives, it's that they _also_ matter, in a world where it seemed that non-black lives were valued, but black lives were not. It took steps to try to ensue that blacks were treated the same as others. The All Lives Matter movement took no steps to protect all lives. If it did, it would be a great cause. But it existed solely so that racist assholes could slam the BLM movement with bullshit rhetoric. It's a garbage movement cited solely by garbage people.
- matt4077 10y ago
  This is a tired old argument, so let me just quote Daniel Victor: Those in the Black Lives Matter movement say black people are in immediate danger and need immediate attention, like the broken bone or house on fire. Saying “All Lives Matter” in response would suggest to them that all people are in equal danger, invalidating the specific concerns of black people. “You’re watering the house that’s not burning, but you’re choosing to leave the house that’s burning unattended,” said Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an organizer for the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter. “It’s irresponsible.” More to the point: It is a given that all lives matter, said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. “That has always been an assumption,” she said. “The entire point of Black Lives Matter is to illustrate the extent to which black lives have not mattered in this country.” “if we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ ”
  - jsf666 10y ago
    The thing is the statistics show the blacks should address themselvs cause the biggest contributor to black deaths are other blacks. But as with everything evil whitey is at fault
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      Hi. I live in a historically black neighborhood. There are countless community demonstrations against violence, marches, charity barbecues etc. Think about maybe why you don't see those on the news and why Breitbart et al. tend to focus on just the violent aspects and not the actual community building that happens. Also watch "The 13th" if you haven't.
- pron 10y ago
  > I feel like the left seriously damaged their ability to fight racist ideas when they abandoned the idea of equality. The idea of equality is not some abstract mathematical notion. The left's treatment of social issues, including affirmative action, stems from decades of serious empirical study of society, rather than from an imagined "spherical-cow" sociology. That does not mean that the policy is the right one -- either ethically or the best means of achieving its goals -- but I think that the debate should be carried out based on all we know about our real society, though history, anthropology, sociology and psychology, rather than by deliberately ignoring them in favor of an idealized model that bears no resemblance to reality. You can disagree with leftist policies on many fronts, but you cannot say that the left has abandoned the idea of equality based on your observations unless you choose that imagined model.
jknoepfler 10y ago
I agree with your broader point that suppression of viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas is a bad idea, but I strongly disagree with the idea that Twitter is inconsistent for treating compositionally identical sentences differently. For example, if you substitute "Swedish" or "German" or something more specific than "European," you get something that doesn't set off alarm bells, just as with "African" (or "Eritrean" or "Egyptian" - although you might set off alarm bells with "Hutu" or "Tutsi.") Why? I would wager at reasonable odds that a randomly selected American organization promoting the "heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent" will actually have an agenda dedicated to marginalizing or removing "undesirable" elements of the population (they will have an explicitly racist agenda, and support - if not directly participate in - hateful, illegal behavior). I would take the opposite side of that bet for the corresponding group with "African" or "Irish" substituted in. Words and symbols need to be understood against the cultural backdrop in which they appear. It means a very different thing to fly a giant national flag in the United States vs. in Germany (during anything other than a soccer match). The composition of a sentence is not sufficient to derive its significance, or its level of moral acceptability. And of course, it's perfectly conceivable to have a non-racist group in America with the description you provided. It almost certainly has happened. It's just not what actually happens in the real world most of the time, for "lots of reasons." It's uncomfortable to get down in the muck and deal with ambiguity and complexity. Evaluating whether or not a statement or group or personality is racist and worthy of approbation is generally really difficult. That doesn't mean it's impossible, especially at the extremes, and especially if you're willing to tolerate a false-positive rate.
- xaa 10y ago
  I would take your side on most of your bets. But I disagree with your implied conclusion that banning this type of speech is therefore OK. The reason is that it places our government (or Twitter, in this case) in a situation of making impossible judgment calls. A person who is "proud of their European heritage" could be anything from a docile recent Polish immigrant to a rabid neo-Nazi. Yes, you can make probabilistic determinations as to which account or individual is truly racist and who is not, but to what end? Speaking very broadly, we live in a democracy. And the underlying "faith" that is necessary to believe in a democracy is to believe that voters can distinguish between true and false, right and wrong. If we don't have that, we are completely lost. So I choose to believe that voters are mature enough to see alt-right posts on the Internet and, on average, consider the reasoning and reject it. What's the harm of letting voters see the alt-right's arguments and decide for themselves? Either we believe the median voter can come to rational and ethical conclusion or we don't. If we don't, we have much bigger problems than deciding what Twitter's specific censorship policy should be.
serge2k 10y ago
> The only difference, of course, is s/African/European/g. In a literal sense, but the latter is a pretty good example of a white nationalist dog whistle. > I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger That's your takeaway? Not that having a presidential candidate on TV giving his implicit approval to these ideas makes them stronger?
- aminorex 10y ago
  > the latter is a pretty good example of a white nationalist dog whistle. To quote Ray Davies: "Paranoia - brain destroyer." To parody "The Sixth Sense": "I hear dog whistles."
masondixon 10y ago
> it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger 100%. Throwing around "white supremacy" and "racist" is strengthening the actual KKK/Nazi types. > It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow, I am amazed that the Founding Fathers seemed to have such foresight. Its hard to see anyone who would be a "Founding Father"-type figure today.
legulere 10y ago
But those alt-right accounts are in fact not "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future", but dedicated to attack everything that isn't. It's just a façade to hide behind and act like a persecuted minority.
XJOKOLAT 10y ago
I agree with your conclusion but not the comparison. The context at the moment is that there are many rabid, racist, some violent, followers of these sites out there who have recently felt validated. If your gentle website "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." had a similar atmosphere of whipped up feeling around it, potentially leading to abuse/violence, I'd expect exactly the same response, or at least the need for response. Whether the response is correct or not, as you suggest, is another matter, but your comparison doesn't accept the context of current events.
- brlewis 10y ago
  It sounds like you're not only for banning abuse, but for banning emotionally-charged material that can make abusive people feel validated. To me that sounds like going too far.
  - XJOKOLAT 10y ago
    If that's what it sounds like, then I would ask you to read the comment again.
kofejnik 10y ago
Just stumbled upon exactly this: "Equality Twitter demonstrates the SJW commitment to one of the five fundamental pillars of their social justice ideology. I fucking hate white people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Trump. Fuck you! 1:57 AM 9 Nov 2016 Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet: Thank you for reporting this issue to us. Our goal is to create a safe environment for everyone on Twitter to express themselves freely. We reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of Twitter's Rules regarding abusive behavior. I fucking hate black people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Clinton. Fuck you! 4:08 AM 16 Nov 2016 Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet: We've investigated and suspended the account you reported as it was found to be participating in abusive behavior." from http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/equality.html?m=1 http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/equality.html?m=1
- orcdork 10y ago
  Behind on of the two tweets, there's a few hundrend years of slavery & oppression, based on race. Context is important. Edit: Why do I even bother. That same blog has the following snippet in another post: The white nations of Europe are, collectively and historically speaking, humanity's golden geese. It is to the long-term benefit of all Mankind to avoid killing them, or even adulterating them, through immigration, invasion, or assimilation. Sigh.
  - 67726e 10y ago
    You realize that white Americans were not the only folks to own slaves or oppress a people, right? Ask yourself this, would the results be different if I tweeted that from the Barbary coast were roles were largely reversed? How about from a SLAVic nation?
    - orcdork 10y ago
      And? This isn't a discussion on the slave trade. I was pointing out that the origin of the comment was by a biased source, which changes the context of the text to thinly veiled racism. And by biased source, I mean a racist idiot promoting his shitty ideas.
cmurf 10y ago
Not really. The article makes it pretty clear that giving a platform to spread these ideas has enabled the ideas to spread. In this case, permissive policy is what made the undesirable views stronger. In the long term, ~20 years, it probably doesn't matter what Twitter does today. It's a way for them to connect, now, with their primary demographics by making something of a political stance.

by xaa 10y ago

leereeves 10y ago

I feel like the left seriously damaged their ability to fight racist ideas when they abandoned the idea of equality. Now, the left calls colorblindness and "all lives matter" racist. (Remember when Martin O'Malley was destroyed for saying that?) They create advantageous standards based on race, and even exclusive positions for non-white applicants. (For example, at the BBC.) And I too doubt they would object to "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." MLK's dream that one day people would not be judged by the color of their skin was abandoned by the left before the alt-right rose to power, and I believe that helped the alt-right rise to power.

glenda 10y ago
This is a very forgiving point of view. Institutional racism is real and because of that it can't be undone by just pretending everyone is equal all of the sudden. It is much more nuanced than you make it out to be. That being said, many of the people that twitter banned are just straight up racist and xenophoic/intolerant speech should not be protected.
- jsf666 10y ago
  >Institutional racism is real Any evidence of this claim? Cause as an outsider to the US I see a black president and a lot of reversed-racism (affirmite action I think you ppl call it)
  - glenda 10y ago
    Sure, the way the law works is different for black communities. For example, http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/06/news/ferguson-arrest-warrants/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/06/news/ferguson-arrest-warrant... shows that people in Ferguson are being arrested for things that wouldn't even be considered a crime where I live. Compare that with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch or http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/us/oregon-standoff-ammon-bundy-acquittal/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/us/oregon-standoff-ammon-bundy... and you will begin to see how crimes committed by white people are often punished by a slap on the wrist when the same crime committed by a person of color would land them in jail.
    - jsf666 10y ago
      After the whole year of Clinton propaganda the Clinton News Network is a joke to me, it's basically NK tier "news" (propaganda). Besides that what You said is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence Please give me some scientific articles (there should be a plethora of them considering how hot this topic is) with actuall statistics and measurments that would support this claim. In my opinion this is a victim complex (similar to the Jews and Holocaust) where people want to milk historical events for their own personal gains
commenting 10y ago
Black Lives Matter means Black Lives Matter as well. The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't, and that the racial struggles of American Blacks are irrelevant. That is the reason why All Lives Matter is considered abusive.
- iopq 10y ago
  > The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't That's not what "all" means. It's turning the name of the movement by implying it means "only" Black Lives Matter. So All Lives Matter is saying that not only Black Lives Matter.
  - commenting 10y ago
    Only if you take the literal interpretation of the words, rather than the connotation and context that I explained in my comment.
  - grad_ml 10y ago
    The question is why people of color have to come up with "BLM" movement. Why not Latinos, White or some other racial entity (not yet, because they are not demographically significant)? Because there had been numerous instances, when black folks have been murdered by police brutally without any repercussions from courts or government. So, this is not the time for all lives matter, yet.
    - leereeves 10y ago
      In truth this happens to all races. It does happen to black people somewhat more often, per capita, but 50% of people killed by police are white.
      - kemayo 10y ago
        Mind, since ~70% of the US population is white, that does imply whites are less likely to be killed by the police. Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races, and to what extent that figure is manipulated by conscious / subconscious bias on the part of law enforcement. (It's a swamp, and I don't feel like arguing about it tonight, I just wanted to acknowledge it's complicated.) Edit to acknowledge: yes, it's more like 60% white if you're splitting out Hispanic-origin into its own category. Still, disproportionate.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
marcelluspye 10y ago
I don't think it was a case of abandoning equality, as much as it was about defering 'colorblindness' until there is actual equality. However, the people on the left espousing these ideas seem to have forgotten to tell everyone about this, and assumed the rest of society would figure out what they meant. They haven't, and I think that's where a lot of the problem is for them.
- grzm 10y ago
  Nuance is hard in this day and age, particularly when you're limited to 140 characters.
alistproducer2 10y ago
HN is a bad place to discuss this sort of stuff because you're always risking karma, but here goes. As a liberal, I will say that liberals drastically overplayed their hand the last 8 years. Many of us have been saying for a while that the language, tenor, and actions of recent liberal movements was ultimately counter productive. I understand and share the demand to be treated decently and equally, but admittedly things kind of got out of hand. Micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger words - all things that have good intentions but the people who advocated for them were often, to put it kindly, un-diplomatic. With "demographics" on our side, many of us constructed this alternate reality where America, ready or not, was going to bend to our will - our worldview. And so we poked the bear. Over and over and over again. Then it woke up, tore our heads off and left us wondering what the f*ck happened.
- autognosis 10y ago
  >>because you're always risking karma ----- That's why the serious discussion happens on 4chan. Say WTF you think, or GTFO. I also upvoted you. :-)
- prewett 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you intended this meaning, but it sounds like you see (your) liberal view as the ultimately right one which will inevitably triumph in the end, its just bad tactics right now. I didn't notice this until after I got back to the US after some time in an authoritarian country, and I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness of being unwilling to consider the merits of the other side, a feeling of we are certainly right and we are going to enforce it on everyone else through legislation. California just banned single-use plastic bags; it could have simply charged a fee commensurate with the costs of cleanup. Or the hot-button issues. Abortion: women's rights, yes, but the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies. Homosexual marriage: people's rights, yes, but there are some good arguments to the other side, too. Usually issues have two sides because there actually are two different ways of looking at the problem, and to say that the other way is ignorant, intolerant, wrong, etc. is really not respecting the other side. (Full disclosure: I am a conservative. I am not saying conservatives (!= Republican) are any better, certainly we have our own failings.) I like your analogy about the bear, btw. I think you are probably right on. And even as a conservative, I was just as shocked as everyone else. Hopefully this election will get a good dialog going and people actually trying to understand the other side. That would probably make it worth it.
paulddraper 10y ago
> when they abandoned the idea of equality They still champion equality. Unfortunately, it's now the equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity.
- geowwy 10y ago
  > Unfortunately, it's now the equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity. Yeah – or to put it another way, they champion social equality instead of equality under the law. It's the difference between Classical Liberalism and the Social Liberalism which is currently in vogue.
- filoeleven 10y ago
  Equality of opportunity cannot be pursued or achieved if it ignores the fact that the starting conditions are not the same for everybody. This is what the left is trying to address.
throwaway4job 10y ago
All Lives Matter is racist af. The message of black lives matter is not that they matter more than other lives, it's that they _also_ matter, in a world where it seemed that non-black lives were valued, but black lives were not. It took steps to try to ensue that blacks were treated the same as others. The All Lives Matter movement took no steps to protect all lives. If it did, it would be a great cause. But it existed solely so that racist assholes could slam the BLM movement with bullshit rhetoric. It's a garbage movement cited solely by garbage people.
matt4077 10y ago
This is a tired old argument, so let me just quote Daniel Victor: Those in the Black Lives Matter movement say black people are in immediate danger and need immediate attention, like the broken bone or house on fire. Saying “All Lives Matter” in response would suggest to them that all people are in equal danger, invalidating the specific concerns of black people. “You’re watering the house that’s not burning, but you’re choosing to leave the house that’s burning unattended,” said Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an organizer for the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter. “It’s irresponsible.” More to the point: It is a given that all lives matter, said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. “That has always been an assumption,” she said. “The entire point of Black Lives Matter is to illustrate the extent to which black lives have not mattered in this country.” “if we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ ”
- jsf666 10y ago
  The thing is the statistics show the blacks should address themselvs cause the biggest contributor to black deaths are other blacks. But as with everything evil whitey is at fault
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    Hi. I live in a historically black neighborhood. There are countless community demonstrations against violence, marches, charity barbecues etc. Think about maybe why you don't see those on the news and why Breitbart et al. tend to focus on just the violent aspects and not the actual community building that happens. Also watch "The 13th" if you haven't.
pron 10y ago
> I feel like the left seriously damaged their ability to fight racist ideas when they abandoned the idea of equality. The idea of equality is not some abstract mathematical notion. The left's treatment of social issues, including affirmative action, stems from decades of serious empirical study of society, rather than from an imagined "spherical-cow" sociology. That does not mean that the policy is the right one -- either ethically or the best means of achieving its goals -- but I think that the debate should be carried out based on all we know about our real society, though history, anthropology, sociology and psychology, rather than by deliberately ignoring them in favor of an idealized model that bears no resemblance to reality. You can disagree with leftist policies on many fronts, but you cannot say that the left has abandoned the idea of equality based on your observations unless you choose that imagined model.

jknoepfler 10y ago

I agree with your broader point that suppression of viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas is a bad idea, but I strongly disagree with the idea that Twitter is inconsistent for treating compositionally identical sentences differently. For example, if you substitute "Swedish" or "German" or something more specific than "European," you get something that doesn't set off alarm bells, just as with "African" (or "Eritrean" or "Egyptian" - although you might set off alarm bells with "Hutu" or "Tutsi.") Why? I would wager at reasonable odds that a randomly selected American organization promoting the "heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent" will actually have an agenda dedicated to marginalizing or removing "undesirable" elements of the population (they will have an explicitly racist agenda, and support - if not directly participate in - hateful, illegal behavior). I would take the opposite side of that bet for the corresponding group with "African" or "Irish" substituted in. Words and symbols need to be understood against the cultural backdrop in which they appear. It means a very different thing to fly a giant national flag in the United States vs. in Germany (during anything other than a soccer match). The composition of a sentence is not sufficient to derive its significance, or its level of moral acceptability. And of course, it's perfectly conceivable to have a non-racist group in America with the description you provided. It almost certainly has happened. It's just not what actually happens in the real world most of the time, for "lots of reasons." It's uncomfortable to get down in the muck and deal with ambiguity and complexity. Evaluating whether or not a statement or group or personality is racist and worthy of approbation is generally really difficult. That doesn't mean it's impossible, especially at the extremes, and especially if you're willing to tolerate a false-positive rate.

xaa 10y ago
I would take your side on most of your bets. But I disagree with your implied conclusion that banning this type of speech is therefore OK. The reason is that it places our government (or Twitter, in this case) in a situation of making impossible judgment calls. A person who is "proud of their European heritage" could be anything from a docile recent Polish immigrant to a rabid neo-Nazi. Yes, you can make probabilistic determinations as to which account or individual is truly racist and who is not, but to what end? Speaking very broadly, we live in a democracy. And the underlying "faith" that is necessary to believe in a democracy is to believe that voters can distinguish between true and false, right and wrong. If we don't have that, we are completely lost. So I choose to believe that voters are mature enough to see alt-right posts on the Internet and, on average, consider the reasoning and reject it. What's the harm of letting voters see the alt-right's arguments and decide for themselves? Either we believe the median voter can come to rational and ethical conclusion or we don't. If we don't, we have much bigger problems than deciding what Twitter's specific censorship policy should be.

serge2k 10y ago

> The only difference, of course, is s/African/European/g. In a literal sense, but the latter is a pretty good example of a white nationalist dog whistle. > I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger That's your takeaway? Not that having a presidential candidate on TV giving his implicit approval to these ideas makes them stronger?

aminorex 10y ago
> the latter is a pretty good example of a white nationalist dog whistle. To quote Ray Davies: "Paranoia - brain destroyer." To parody "The Sixth Sense": "I hear dog whistles."

masondixon 10y ago

> it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger 100%. Throwing around "white supremacy" and "racist" is strengthening the actual KKK/Nazi types. > It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow, I am amazed that the Founding Fathers seemed to have such foresight. Its hard to see anyone who would be a "Founding Father"-type figure today.

legulere 10y ago

But those alt-right accounts are in fact not "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future", but dedicated to attack everything that isn't. It's just a façade to hide behind and act like a persecuted minority.

XJOKOLAT 10y ago

I agree with your conclusion but not the comparison. The context at the moment is that there are many rabid, racist, some violent, followers of these sites out there who have recently felt validated. If your gentle website "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." had a similar atmosphere of whipped up feeling around it, potentially leading to abuse/violence, I'd expect exactly the same response, or at least the need for response. Whether the response is correct or not, as you suggest, is another matter, but your comparison doesn't accept the context of current events.

brlewis 10y ago
It sounds like you're not only for banning abuse, but for banning emotionally-charged material that can make abusive people feel validated. To me that sounds like going too far.
- XJOKOLAT 10y ago
  If that's what it sounds like, then I would ask you to read the comment again.

kofejnik 10y ago

Just stumbled upon exactly this: "Equality Twitter demonstrates the SJW commitment to one of the five fundamental pillars of their social justice ideology. I fucking hate white people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Trump. Fuck you! 1:57 AM 9 Nov 2016 Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet: Thank you for reporting this issue to us. Our goal is to create a safe environment for everyone on Twitter to express themselves freely. We reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of Twitter's Rules regarding abusive behavior. I fucking hate black people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Clinton. Fuck you! 4:08 AM 16 Nov 2016 Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet: We've investigated and suspended the account you reported as it was found to be participating in abusive behavior." from http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/equality.html?m=1 http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/equality.html?m=1

orcdork 10y ago
Behind on of the two tweets, there's a few hundrend years of slavery & oppression, based on race. Context is important. Edit: Why do I even bother. That same blog has the following snippet in another post: The white nations of Europe are, collectively and historically speaking, humanity's golden geese. It is to the long-term benefit of all Mankind to avoid killing them, or even adulterating them, through immigration, invasion, or assimilation. Sigh.
- 67726e 10y ago
  You realize that white Americans were not the only folks to own slaves or oppress a people, right? Ask yourself this, would the results be different if I tweeted that from the Barbary coast were roles were largely reversed? How about from a SLAVic nation?
  - orcdork 10y ago
    And? This isn't a discussion on the slave trade. I was pointing out that the origin of the comment was by a biased source, which changes the context of the text to thinly veiled racism. And by biased source, I mean a racist idiot promoting his shitty ideas.

cmurf 10y ago

Not really. The article makes it pretty clear that giving a platform to spread these ideas has enabled the ideas to spread. In this case, permissive policy is what made the undesirable views stronger. In the long term, ~20 years, it probably doesn't matter what Twitter does today. It's a way for them to connect, now, with their primary demographics by making something of a political stance.