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> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been? When white people were afraid of black violence, Martin Luther King showed them black peopl

> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been? When white people were afraid of black violence, Martin Luther King showed them black people peacefully hand in hand with ministers in their Sunday best, walking toward Selma and remaining nonviolent even as they were met with violence. When straight people saw gay people as dangerous deviants, Harvey Milk showed them gay people in their families, jobs, and neighborhoods, behaving like the normal people they are. I personally grew up in a church that taught homophobia--my own opinions were fundamentally changed by one of my friends coming out in high school. Ask yourself your own question: when has censorship ever been effective?[1] I'd argue that, among other things the election of Trump is partly a backlash against attempts to control speech by the left. It's no mistake that a big part of the pro-Trump narrative was just that he "spoke his mind". [1] Whenever I ask this question, people always respond by pointing to one study which showed banning a few hate subreddits decreased hate speech on Reddit, so I'll preemptively respond to that by saying that there's absolutely no evidence that bigots on Reddit didn't simply move to Voat at that time.

ardy42 6y ago
Those were IRL things that happened before people even had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums. How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  > Those were IRL things that happened before people had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums. The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is. > How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit? Is there a reason you can't post memes with the truth? Anti-racist memes work just fine. In a similar vein, infographics have been extremely effective. The internet is one of the best tools for spreading the truth in existence. Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they wouldn't bother with dog whistles, they would just say, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship? And if someone says "Black people are criminals", I can respond with, "While black people are convicted of crimes at a higher per-capita rate than white people, this is a result of poverty: black people and white people at similar income levels commit similar numbers of crimes." What do you do when someone posts a subtly racist meme that hints that black people commit more crimes? Censor harder? The solution you're proposing takes us to a place where racists just agree on what codewords mean what in their own private spaces, say whatever they want in public using their secret codewords, and call us crazy if we figure it out and censor them.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is. The internet is a fundamentally different communications mechanism than TV or newspapers. Reasoning about internet forum social dynamics using pre-computer examples, is like reasoning about modern infantry tactics citing victories from ancient Greek history. A hoplite phalanx would be annihilated by a WWII German infantry battalion. > Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they would just, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship? Sorry, no. You're conflating censorship with exclusion again. "Censorship" didn't create those things; they were created by the widespread rejection and condemnation of the underlying racist ideas and the racist people who hold them. Earnest, up-front advocacy of racism isn't going to be effective in a population that's been primed to identify and reject it, so racists setup recruiting funnels with obscured entrances to spread their ideology by radicalizing people more slowly. That situation won't change, and the racists won't abandon their subtly racist memes and dog whistles, unless racism becomes respectable in polite company, which would be much worse than what we have now.
    - kerkeslager 6y ago
      You're just ignoring my questions: 1. When has censorship been effective? 2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles? And I'll add a question I haven't asked yet: 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc. in your censorship plan? I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions. The reason I'm asking the third question: I hear your point that I'm talking about exclusion rather than censorship, and I agree that racism becoming respectable in polite company would be much worse than what we have now. But I think you have to realize that the way we got to a point where racism isn't respectable in polite company is repeated, persistent confrontation of racism with the truth. The reason you and I know that black people aren't criminals, is that we both know the more nuanced truth. I know I didn't come up with that truth myself--I heard it from someone else, and I heard it in the context of confronting the racist trope that black people are criminals. I get the temptation to use censorship as a shortcut to remove subtle racism, but by doing that we're giving up something even more fundamental: the very debate that made racism not respectable in the first place. And make no mistake: racism isn't respectable in polite company in our little internet bubbles full of tech and startup people, but racism is absolutely respectable in many communities in our country and the world. If we're going to make racism not respectable in those places, censorship isn't going to work. We're going to have to have conversations that make that happen. If we let those conversations happen in public spaces, we can have those conversations in spaces that are friendly to us. But if we censor those conversations, then we just push those communities out, and then our only option is to go into those communities to have those conversations, which is much more difficult. And to be clear: censorship won't work in those communities, because we don't have the power to censor there.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  > How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit? I don't feel like I did this question justice with my previous answer. The most obvious example would be the George Floyd video, and in a larger sense, the extremely effective tool of filming police as they harass, plant evidence on, beat, and murder the people they're supposed to serve. In the current situation, I think the results of that video speak for themselves. In response to the pervasive narrative that focuses on looters and not on cops murdering black people (I linked to five minutes in, but the whole thing is worth a watch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWE8k5EUonE&t=5m0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWE8k5EUonE&t=5m0s This tends to be persuasive in my experience. This doesn't address racism because it's a white guy, but I find it's effective in getting people to take the complete lack of police accountability more seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc That officer (Philip Brailsford) was acquitted in a trial where the prosecutor moved to strike the video from evidence, and then the officer was rehired by Mesa Police briefly, before being given early medical retirement based on a claim of PTSD from the murder, earning him a $2500/mo pension. Watch any of those videos that you haven't seen, and see how that feels, and realize that that's how they make people who were on the fence about these issues feel.
  - saganus 6y ago
    What the fuck did I just see? That second video is revolting. I don't think I can correctly articulate my thoughts after watching that. Wow. Just wow.
    - kerkeslager 6y ago
      Share it around. The world needs to know that Philip Brailsford is a murderer, and Mesa PD and Maricopa County DA think murder is okay if it's done by a cop.
bobthepanda 6y ago
It is worth noting that MLK was not popular in his time: > Back in the 1960s, when King was actually leading protests, just 36 percent of white Americans thought he was helping “the Negro cause of civil rights,” according to historical polling data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. In a 1966 Gallup poll, more than 60 percent of the public rated King more negatively than positively. > After King was assassinated, two-thirds of Americans said their strongest reaction to his death had been sadness, anger, shame or fear, another survey found. Another 31 percent, however, said they “felt he brought it on himself.” Harvey Milk was also not necessarily popular amongst Americans, and a few years after his death we would have total mainstream paranoia about AIDS. The end of the US's majority disapproval of gay marriage only came about in 2010. [1] [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-third-of-americans-said-mlk-brought-his-killing-on-himself_n_5ac51373e4b0aacd15b7d37b https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-third-of-ame... [1] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  Is that worth noting? Why? Change isn't a popularity contest. If King changed views on black voting rights from 20% for to 40% for, that's a pretty massive change.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Part of what makes authoritarian behavior so dangerous is that they don't need a majority to cause a lot of damage, just a very sizable group. You want to stamp it out quickly before a lot of damage is done, and "fighting fascism with the truth" generally takes time on a generational scale. It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.
    - kerkeslager 6y ago
      You're playing very fast and loose with terminology here. Fascism is a form of authoritarianism, but not all authoritarianism is fascism. Censorship is authoritarian. We were talking about fascists before you joined the conversation, but if you're going to swap the terms here and start worrying about authoritarianism, neither side is innocent there, and taking a "stamp it out quickly" stance is inherently an authoritarian position, not an anti-authoritarian position. > It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power. Yes, but that's a fairly useless fact if you don't have any explanation for why that happened.

ardy42 6y ago

Those were IRL things that happened before people even had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums. How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?

kerkeslager 6y ago
> Those were IRL things that happened before people had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums. The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is. > How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit? Is there a reason you can't post memes with the truth? Anti-racist memes work just fine. In a similar vein, infographics have been extremely effective. The internet is one of the best tools for spreading the truth in existence. Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they wouldn't bother with dog whistles, they would just say, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship? And if someone says "Black people are criminals", I can respond with, "While black people are convicted of crimes at a higher per-capita rate than white people, this is a result of poverty: black people and white people at similar income levels commit similar numbers of crimes." What do you do when someone posts a subtly racist meme that hints that black people commit more crimes? Censor harder? The solution you're proposing takes us to a place where racists just agree on what codewords mean what in their own private spaces, say whatever they want in public using their secret codewords, and call us crazy if we figure it out and censor them.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is. The internet is a fundamentally different communications mechanism than TV or newspapers. Reasoning about internet forum social dynamics using pre-computer examples, is like reasoning about modern infantry tactics citing victories from ancient Greek history. A hoplite phalanx would be annihilated by a WWII German infantry battalion. > Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they would just, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship? Sorry, no. You're conflating censorship with exclusion again. "Censorship" didn't create those things; they were created by the widespread rejection and condemnation of the underlying racist ideas and the racist people who hold them. Earnest, up-front advocacy of racism isn't going to be effective in a population that's been primed to identify and reject it, so racists setup recruiting funnels with obscured entrances to spread their ideology by radicalizing people more slowly. That situation won't change, and the racists won't abandon their subtly racist memes and dog whistles, unless racism becomes respectable in polite company, which would be much worse than what we have now.
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    You're just ignoring my questions: 1. When has censorship been effective? 2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles? And I'll add a question I haven't asked yet: 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc. in your censorship plan? I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions. The reason I'm asking the third question: I hear your point that I'm talking about exclusion rather than censorship, and I agree that racism becoming respectable in polite company would be much worse than what we have now. But I think you have to realize that the way we got to a point where racism isn't respectable in polite company is repeated, persistent confrontation of racism with the truth. The reason you and I know that black people aren't criminals, is that we both know the more nuanced truth. I know I didn't come up with that truth myself--I heard it from someone else, and I heard it in the context of confronting the racist trope that black people are criminals. I get the temptation to use censorship as a shortcut to remove subtle racism, but by doing that we're giving up something even more fundamental: the very debate that made racism not respectable in the first place. And make no mistake: racism isn't respectable in polite company in our little internet bubbles full of tech and startup people, but racism is absolutely respectable in many communities in our country and the world. If we're going to make racism not respectable in those places, censorship isn't going to work. We're going to have to have conversations that make that happen. If we let those conversations happen in public spaces, we can have those conversations in spaces that are friendly to us. But if we censor those conversations, then we just push those communities out, and then our only option is to go into those communities to have those conversations, which is much more difficult. And to be clear: censorship won't work in those communities, because we don't have the power to censor there.
kerkeslager 6y ago
> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit? I don't feel like I did this question justice with my previous answer. The most obvious example would be the George Floyd video, and in a larger sense, the extremely effective tool of filming police as they harass, plant evidence on, beat, and murder the people they're supposed to serve. In the current situation, I think the results of that video speak for themselves. In response to the pervasive narrative that focuses on looters and not on cops murdering black people (I linked to five minutes in, but the whole thing is worth a watch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWE8k5EUonE&t=5m0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWE8k5EUonE&t=5m0s This tends to be persuasive in my experience. This doesn't address racism because it's a white guy, but I find it's effective in getting people to take the complete lack of police accountability more seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc That officer (Philip Brailsford) was acquitted in a trial where the prosecutor moved to strike the video from evidence, and then the officer was rehired by Mesa Police briefly, before being given early medical retirement based on a claim of PTSD from the murder, earning him a $2500/mo pension. Watch any of those videos that you haven't seen, and see how that feels, and realize that that's how they make people who were on the fence about these issues feel.
- saganus 6y ago
  What the fuck did I just see? That second video is revolting. I don't think I can correctly articulate my thoughts after watching that. Wow. Just wow.
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    Share it around. The world needs to know that Philip Brailsford is a murderer, and Mesa PD and Maricopa County DA think murder is okay if it's done by a cop.

bobthepanda 6y ago

It is worth noting that MLK was not popular in his time: > Back in the 1960s, when King was actually leading protests, just 36 percent of white Americans thought he was helping “the Negro cause of civil rights,” according to historical polling data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. In a 1966 Gallup poll, more than 60 percent of the public rated King more negatively than positively. > After King was assassinated, two-thirds of Americans said their strongest reaction to his death had been sadness, anger, shame or fear, another survey found. Another 31 percent, however, said they “felt he brought it on himself.” Harvey Milk was also not necessarily popular amongst Americans, and a few years after his death we would have total mainstream paranoia about AIDS. The end of the US's majority disapproval of gay marriage only came about in 2010. [1] [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-third-of-americans-said-mlk-brought-his-killing-on-himself_n_5ac51373e4b0aacd15b7d37b https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-third-of-ame... [1] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

kerkeslager 6y ago
Is that worth noting? Why? Change isn't a popularity contest. If King changed views on black voting rights from 20% for to 40% for, that's a pretty massive change.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Part of what makes authoritarian behavior so dangerous is that they don't need a majority to cause a lot of damage, just a very sizable group. You want to stamp it out quickly before a lot of damage is done, and "fighting fascism with the truth" generally takes time on a generational scale. It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    You're playing very fast and loose with terminology here. Fascism is a form of authoritarianism, but not all authoritarianism is fascism. Censorship is authoritarian. We were talking about fascists before you joined the conversation, but if you're going to swap the terms here and start worrying about authoritarianism, neither side is innocent there, and taking a "stamp it out quickly" stance is inherently an authoritarian position, not an anti-authoritarian position. > It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power. Yes, but that's a fairly useless fact if you don't have any explanation for why that happened.