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>First, there's a glut of people insisting they're only defending "free speech" and not supporting people such as those at that rally. I'm sorry but I'm really

>First, there's a glut of people insisting they're only defending "free speech" and not supporting people such as those at that rally. I'm sorry but I'm really having a hard time understanding your reasoning here. Are you really suggesting that the majority of people on HN who are defending the right to free speech of the neo-Nazis we saw in Charlottesville are doing so because they actually agree with the message those neo-Nazis and white supremacists are spewing? If this is what you believe, then please just come out and say that anyone defending this type of speech is in fact a neo-Nazi. You talk about mechanisms that undermine an honest debate but in the very next sentence you essentially argue that anyone in support(I'm adding an edit here to clarify: I mean support for the right to this kind of speech, not support for it's actual content) of this kind of objectionable speech is a Nazi in disguise. That certainly seems like undermining the debate to me. I don't like this kind of character assassination in disguise. Either be willing to call people out as Nazis and white supremacists, and back up your assertions, or give them the courtesy that they might be taking a stand in defense of a principle they actually believe in regarding speech, even in cases where they disagree with contents of said speech. I personally don't believe a reasonable person can be a neo-Nazi and thus I have very little interest in arguing or engaging with these types of people. When it comes to free speech I tend to fall on the side of having fewer restrictions on speech, although even here my views aren't really set in stone and do change on occasion. With that being said, unlike my views on Nazism, I do think reasonable people can disagree on the issues of where to draw the line on speech. Again, while I personally fall into the less restrictions camp, I don't think its unreasonable for someone to want restrictions on certain types of speech and thus I don't automatically assume those arguing for these restrictions are authoritarians in disguise. If you think this makes me a neo-Nazi I would prefer you just come out and say it, this is of course in the interest of "honest debate". Edited for spelling and grammar.

pjc50 9y ago
> defending the right to free speech of the neo-Nazis we saw in Charlottesville I have become suspicious of which kinds of speech and which contexts people choose to become vocally defensive of. In the context of "what can you say without being fired by your employer", there are people fired every week for trying to organise unions at work. Somehow there isn't the same outrage from HN at those people having their free speech impaired. (Random example in case people claim this doesn't happen: https://patch.com/new-jersey/newarknj/newark-workers-allegedly-fired-union-activity-reach-settlement-seiu https://patch.com/new-jersey/newarknj/newark-workers-alleged... ) It's not that people supporting the free speech of Nazis are transitively Nazis, but people doing so ought to take a good hard look at themselves and why they choose to spend their time and energy on this cause rather than others. Not to mention that there really are a lot of dedicated Internet trolls constantly probing the velociraptor fences of exactly how close to Nazi ideology they can get on any given platform without being spotted.
- belorn 9y ago
  Can you support the claim that there is no outrage from HN when people get fired for trying to organize unions at work? It seems similar to the claim that there is no outrage of the thousands children dieing to car crashes each day, but a single adult person getting killed in a submarine is world news. Does that mean that people do not care when children are killed?
- lhnz 9y ago
  > But people doing so ought to take a good hard look > at themselves and why they choose to spend their time > and energy on this cause rather than others. I somewhat agree with this but I think it's generally due to people trying to protect their rights or political position in one area by fighting over another. There are situations where I think it's clear that people have ulterior motives but generally I think what we see are people sparring on political events ill-fit to their particular arguments. For example, people that dislike the moral righteousness, views and political violence of antifa generally have a similar or greater level of hatred for nazis, but yet when there is a clash between them they are desperate to say "antifa are also terrible". If they don't say this, they feel that it is tacit support for antifa and for political violence. It's the worst time to say this in terms of messaging (serious context/subtext issues), but there is a large audience watching and they feel that they must get their message out. We're in a strange situation where we have to continually distance ourselves from words and ideas. We can't say "there are two sides to this" because Trump said that and it is 'moral equivocation' [0]. We can't say we're 'centrists' because people call this tacit support of nazis and will point and laugh that we consider ourselves 'radical centrists' (a desperate attempt to seem cool while standing for nothing or whatever biases they are least conscious of). Pacifism has always been hated. And moderation was never cool. I think we should reclaim these words and perhaps try to convince people to pick their moments better when trying to persuade other people that these things are good. As the saying goes "Is this the hill you want to die on?" [0] I personally believe that the frame of good/evil is a childish "two-valued orientation" that closes the mind to deeper thinking and to finding a mutual understanding of the world.
- Inconel 9y ago
  Interesting, so now we've gone from labelling people Nazis if they vocally defend specific free speech rights, to being suspicious that they might be Nazis if they don't vocally defend other specific speech rights, speech that may concern topics that might never get to the front page of HN resulting in widespread discussion? Again, personally I tend to fall on the side of the government having less ability to restrict speech but it doesn't really bother me if companies want to restrict the kind of speech their employees can engage in at work, or what kind of speech they'll allow on their platforms. This gets trickier in cases where the companies might have businesses that approach what I would consider a utility, but that's a different topic, and really that has more to do with regulating companies as utilities. I'm not positive in this, but I do suspect that if stories like the one you linked found themselves on the front page for hours at a time, perhaps if some Googlers tried to unionize and they were all fired, we would probably see quite a few people be defensive of their right to speech. I doubt we would see a complete overlap, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if we would see some overlap in the posters defending their speech rights with those defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis. I suspect we might also see some posters who think all Nazi speech should be outlawed but think this kind of unionization related speech should be protected. You're of course correct that these topics do tend to bring out the trolls, but on a site like HN I tend to find it relatively easy to identify trolls, even if not through a specific post they make, a quick glance through their posting history often reveals whether they are engaging with the community in good faith.
matt4077 9y ago
I don't think you're a neo-nazi. The problem is that with the arguments being made, everyone has plausible deniability because they're only defending X because of his right to free speech, or because he's trying to fix the ethics in game journalism. But I believe that taking the comments, and stories getting votes, in the last weeks in aggregate, there's a statistical signal that requires mention. To add to the excellent example of pcj50: I think we've seen something very similar with the treatment the "Google diversity memo" story got. If you check the stories that were upvoted on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=manifesto&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=manifesto&sort=byPopularity&pr...) you'll see that they're >90% in favour of what's written. Now there's obviously the possibility that this memo was simply right, and it was just the reasonable thing to support the author. But I'd like to point out that: - We saw the same, repeated, deference to "free speech", i.e. an attempt to frame support for him as some sort of higher principle (similar to the previously-mentioned "ethics in game journalism", or even Saturday's right-wing rallies in Boston etc. also invoking "free speech"). - There was a tendency to invoke "science" in support of him, just as the comment that started this thread invoked some sort of autistic super-rationality as the root cause of some unspecified "non-PC" comments. This ignored both scientists criticising the memo's content, as well as the first argument brought up by every single opponent: confusing what is with what ought to be, or (in other words) the nurture-vs-nature debate. - The author's subsequent choice of associating mainly with a very specific segment of the media, namely men's rights and alt-right outlets. If I were asked to explain my views on react.js' licence by, say, Breitbart, I would refuse. There are other such incidents. I think this community gave much harsher treatment to Marissa Mayers, Ellen Pao, and Elizabeth Holmes than similar cases involving men, although there are obvious difficulties because each failed company failed in it's very specific way. Jason Kalanick arguably has more defenders than they had (but Uber is arguably the greater achievement), and Mt. Gox's CEO somehow never got the sort of personal focus that Holmes got. I wish I could come up with a way to measure these things.
- Inconel 9y ago
  I appreciate you taking the time to respond and agree with your point about the whole plausible deniability angle, and how problematic it can be. With regards to the algolia link about the "Google diversity memo" that was actually really interesting to me for two reasons. First, I too am somewhat surprised at the number of upvotes some of those articles received, to be honest some of them seem really poorly reasoned irrespective of how one might feel about the whole issue, and secondly, because despite visiting HN daily, and usually checking in a couple of times a day, I can't remember seeing many of those articles. Is there any way to tell how long they remained on the front page? I don't want to imply that programmers sit in front of their computers all day and slack off browsing HN, but it wouldn't surprise me if many people who are in front of a computer do check in quite often. In my case, I usually only check in during the morning while I eat breakfast, and at night before I go to bed. I don't have access to the internet at work, occasionally I'll browse on my phone during lunch. And I usually only go through the first 50 or so submissions. From my experience, the type of articles that stay on the from page long enough for me to see them, read the article, read the comments, and formulate a coherent response, are either articles that are super interesting to the community or somewhat controversial, since these get the most votes. This obviously biases the kind of articles I usually comment on. I only bring this up to express that their may be a pattern in my commenting that would suggest I'm trying to push a very specific agenda, I hope this isn't the case, but that this might actually be greatly influenced by the kind of content I'm exposed to based on it's position on the front page. You make a very good point with regards to the difference in treatment between some of the people you list. I've noticed myself falling into that trap personally, and I think it was partially due to none of those people being particularly sympathetic in my eyes. This made it much more difficult to spot any bias that may be occurring in the comments.

pjc50 9y ago

> defending the right to free speech of the neo-Nazis we saw in Charlottesville I have become suspicious of which kinds of speech and which contexts people choose to become vocally defensive of. In the context of "what can you say without being fired by your employer", there are people fired every week for trying to organise unions at work. Somehow there isn't the same outrage from HN at those people having their free speech impaired. (Random example in case people claim this doesn't happen: https://patch.com/new-jersey/newarknj/newark-workers-allegedly-fired-union-activity-reach-settlement-seiu https://patch.com/new-jersey/newarknj/newark-workers-alleged... ) It's not that people supporting the free speech of Nazis are transitively Nazis, but people doing so ought to take a good hard look at themselves and why they choose to spend their time and energy on this cause rather than others. Not to mention that there really are a lot of dedicated Internet trolls constantly probing the velociraptor fences of exactly how close to Nazi ideology they can get on any given platform without being spotted.

belorn 9y ago
Can you support the claim that there is no outrage from HN when people get fired for trying to organize unions at work? It seems similar to the claim that there is no outrage of the thousands children dieing to car crashes each day, but a single adult person getting killed in a submarine is world news. Does that mean that people do not care when children are killed?
lhnz 9y ago
> But people doing so ought to take a good hard look > at themselves and why they choose to spend their time > and energy on this cause rather than others. I somewhat agree with this but I think it's generally due to people trying to protect their rights or political position in one area by fighting over another. There are situations where I think it's clear that people have ulterior motives but generally I think what we see are people sparring on political events ill-fit to their particular arguments. For example, people that dislike the moral righteousness, views and political violence of antifa generally have a similar or greater level of hatred for nazis, but yet when there is a clash between them they are desperate to say "antifa are also terrible". If they don't say this, they feel that it is tacit support for antifa and for political violence. It's the worst time to say this in terms of messaging (serious context/subtext issues), but there is a large audience watching and they feel that they must get their message out. We're in a strange situation where we have to continually distance ourselves from words and ideas. We can't say "there are two sides to this" because Trump said that and it is 'moral equivocation' [0]. We can't say we're 'centrists' because people call this tacit support of nazis and will point and laugh that we consider ourselves 'radical centrists' (a desperate attempt to seem cool while standing for nothing or whatever biases they are least conscious of). Pacifism has always been hated. And moderation was never cool. I think we should reclaim these words and perhaps try to convince people to pick their moments better when trying to persuade other people that these things are good. As the saying goes "Is this the hill you want to die on?" [0] I personally believe that the frame of good/evil is a childish "two-valued orientation" that closes the mind to deeper thinking and to finding a mutual understanding of the world.
Inconel 9y ago
Interesting, so now we've gone from labelling people Nazis if they vocally defend specific free speech rights, to being suspicious that they might be Nazis if they don't vocally defend other specific speech rights, speech that may concern topics that might never get to the front page of HN resulting in widespread discussion? Again, personally I tend to fall on the side of the government having less ability to restrict speech but it doesn't really bother me if companies want to restrict the kind of speech their employees can engage in at work, or what kind of speech they'll allow on their platforms. This gets trickier in cases where the companies might have businesses that approach what I would consider a utility, but that's a different topic, and really that has more to do with regulating companies as utilities. I'm not positive in this, but I do suspect that if stories like the one you linked found themselves on the front page for hours at a time, perhaps if some Googlers tried to unionize and they were all fired, we would probably see quite a few people be defensive of their right to speech. I doubt we would see a complete overlap, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if we would see some overlap in the posters defending their speech rights with those defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis. I suspect we might also see some posters who think all Nazi speech should be outlawed but think this kind of unionization related speech should be protected. You're of course correct that these topics do tend to bring out the trolls, but on a site like HN I tend to find it relatively easy to identify trolls, even if not through a specific post they make, a quick glance through their posting history often reveals whether they are engaging with the community in good faith.

matt4077 9y ago

I don't think you're a neo-nazi. The problem is that with the arguments being made, everyone has plausible deniability because they're only defending X because of his right to free speech, or because he's trying to fix the ethics in game journalism. But I believe that taking the comments, and stories getting votes, in the last weeks in aggregate, there's a statistical signal that requires mention. To add to the excellent example of pcj50: I think we've seen something very similar with the treatment the "Google diversity memo" story got. If you check the stories that were upvoted on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=manifesto&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=manifesto&sort=byPopularity&pr...) you'll see that they're >90% in favour of what's written. Now there's obviously the possibility that this memo was simply right, and it was just the reasonable thing to support the author. But I'd like to point out that: - We saw the same, repeated, deference to "free speech", i.e. an attempt to frame support for him as some sort of higher principle (similar to the previously-mentioned "ethics in game journalism", or even Saturday's right-wing rallies in Boston etc. also invoking "free speech"). - There was a tendency to invoke "science" in support of him, just as the comment that started this thread invoked some sort of autistic super-rationality as the root cause of some unspecified "non-PC" comments. This ignored both scientists criticising the memo's content, as well as the first argument brought up by every single opponent: confusing what is with what ought to be, or (in other words) the nurture-vs-nature debate. - The author's subsequent choice of associating mainly with a very specific segment of the media, namely men's rights and alt-right outlets. If I were asked to explain my views on react.js' licence by, say, Breitbart, I would refuse. There are other such incidents. I think this community gave much harsher treatment to Marissa Mayers, Ellen Pao, and Elizabeth Holmes than similar cases involving men, although there are obvious difficulties because each failed company failed in it's very specific way. Jason Kalanick arguably has more defenders than they had (but Uber is arguably the greater achievement), and Mt. Gox's CEO somehow never got the sort of personal focus that Holmes got. I wish I could come up with a way to measure these things.

Inconel 9y ago
I appreciate you taking the time to respond and agree with your point about the whole plausible deniability angle, and how problematic it can be. With regards to the algolia link about the "Google diversity memo" that was actually really interesting to me for two reasons. First, I too am somewhat surprised at the number of upvotes some of those articles received, to be honest some of them seem really poorly reasoned irrespective of how one might feel about the whole issue, and secondly, because despite visiting HN daily, and usually checking in a couple of times a day, I can't remember seeing many of those articles. Is there any way to tell how long they remained on the front page? I don't want to imply that programmers sit in front of their computers all day and slack off browsing HN, but it wouldn't surprise me if many people who are in front of a computer do check in quite often. In my case, I usually only check in during the morning while I eat breakfast, and at night before I go to bed. I don't have access to the internet at work, occasionally I'll browse on my phone during lunch. And I usually only go through the first 50 or so submissions. From my experience, the type of articles that stay on the from page long enough for me to see them, read the article, read the comments, and formulate a coherent response, are either articles that are super interesting to the community or somewhat controversial, since these get the most votes. This obviously biases the kind of articles I usually comment on. I only bring this up to express that their may be a pattern in my commenting that would suggest I'm trying to push a very specific agenda, I hope this isn't the case, but that this might actually be greatly influenced by the kind of content I'm exposed to based on it's position on the front page. You make a very good point with regards to the difference in treatment between some of the people you list. I've noticed myself falling into that trap personally, and I think it was partially due to none of those people being particularly sympathetic in my eyes. This made it much more difficult to spot any bias that may be occurring in the comments.