3 ms·

It’s not really practical to combat ideas with reason, after a while.

shkkmo 9y ago
I vehemently disagree. If you abandon reason, then you can only be right by pure coincidence. If you vanquish ideas using means other than reason, then you have only vanquished bad ideas by pure coincidence.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  And I disagree with that. Having to decry ever racist that pops up on Twitter with "reason" when they had no intention of debating in good faith in the first place is exhausting. And quite frankly, letting them run wild just means that other people are going to stop going there and contributing to the discourse. So now all you've done is succeeded in silencing marginalized people, which was their goal in the first place.
  - shkkmo 9y ago
    > Having to decry ever racist that pops up on Twitter with "reason" when they had no intention of debating in good faith in the first place is exhausting That sounds exhausting. Maybe you should pick a couple of the ones that do appear to be interested in debating in good faith? > letting them run wild just means that other people are going to stop going there and contributing to the discourse. So now all you've done is succeeded in silencing marginalized people, which was their goal in the first place. And the alternative is to ban everything from twitter that people find offensive? I think that is a losing proposition. I'd much rather focus on promoting and spreading content from silenced and marginalized people to make sure their voices are heard and amplified.
    - eesmith 9y ago
      Some trolls specialize in sealioning. It's hard to tell which ones are debating in good faith. Plus, assuming most are not debating in good faith then that still leaves us with the problem that the "other people are going to stop going there and contributing to the discourse". Perhaps you can share from your experience in decrying racists on Twitter how you can distinguish one from the other? "And the alternative is to ban everything from twitter that people find offensive" Is banning from above the only solution you can think of? One alternative is much more effective control tools. Some people voluntarily use collaboratively developed blacklists of accounts to ignore. This is not censorship any more than kicking someone unruly out of your meeting in a library meeting room is censorship. (Old-style shared Usenet killfiles are also not censorship.) Combine that with some collaboratively developed training corpus of spam/ham to filter your twitter stream. Then have Twitter set up a few default filters, rather like "Safe Search" on Google. Very few people say that GMail censors their email by automatically placing some messages into "Junk". However, this will cost money, and likely not increase Twitter revenue. It might even decrease it. So why would they do it?

I vehemently disagree. If you abandon reason, then you can only be right by pure coincidence. If you vanquish ideas using means other than reason, then you have only vanquished bad ideas by pure coincidence.

s73ver_ 9y ago
And I disagree with that. Having to decry ever racist that pops up on Twitter with "reason" when they had no intention of debating in good faith in the first place is exhausting. And quite frankly, letting them run wild just means that other people are going to stop going there and contributing to the discourse. So now all you've done is succeeded in silencing marginalized people, which was their goal in the first place.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  > Having to decry ever racist that pops up on Twitter with "reason" when they had no intention of debating in good faith in the first place is exhausting That sounds exhausting. Maybe you should pick a couple of the ones that do appear to be interested in debating in good faith? > letting them run wild just means that other people are going to stop going there and contributing to the discourse. So now all you've done is succeeded in silencing marginalized people, which was their goal in the first place. And the alternative is to ban everything from twitter that people find offensive? I think that is a losing proposition. I'd much rather focus on promoting and spreading content from silenced and marginalized people to make sure their voices are heard and amplified.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Some trolls specialize in sealioning. It's hard to tell which ones are debating in good faith. Plus, assuming most are not debating in good faith then that still leaves us with the problem that the "other people are going to stop going there and contributing to the discourse". Perhaps you can share from your experience in decrying racists on Twitter how you can distinguish one from the other? "And the alternative is to ban everything from twitter that people find offensive" Is banning from above the only solution you can think of? One alternative is much more effective control tools. Some people voluntarily use collaboratively developed blacklists of accounts to ignore. This is not censorship any more than kicking someone unruly out of your meeting in a library meeting room is censorship. (Old-style shared Usenet killfiles are also not censorship.) Combine that with some collaboratively developed training corpus of spam/ham to filter your twitter stream. Then have Twitter set up a few default filters, rather like "Safe Search" on Google. Very few people say that GMail censors their email by automatically placing some messages into "Junk". However, this will cost money, and likely not increase Twitter revenue. It might even decrease it. So why would they do it?