4 ms·

What outcomes do actions like this encourage? Well, it encourages controversial writers to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest the vigilante m

What outcomes do actions like this encourage? Well, it encourages controversial writers to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest the vigilante mobs find them. This outcome also encourages people in general to say less, creates an atmosphere of self-censorship, and so harms our free society. Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? If we can not learn to tolerate others and respect their opinions, even those we find distasteful or deplorable, we will reap the consquences, and stagnate as a culture.

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
It also encourages the outraged to try to silence their ideological opponents.
PopeOfNope 11y ago
> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? Marxism happened. Limiting speech has always been a tactic employed by the political left. Words like "racist", "sexist" and "homophobe" were designed to shut down free speech. It's extremely effective at silencing any opposition.
- overgard 11y ago
  You're getting unfairly downvoted, but you're right: whether you agree with their ideas or not, the main tactic of the left is to police what topics are "appropriate" and marginalize those who are "inappropriate" with a label. I'm mostly apolitical so I'm not particularly outraged by this, but I wish they'd just own what they do. If they really think their ideas stand up, they should be welcoming opposition rather than trying to silence it.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Just curious why you say that is the "main tactic of the left"?
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    Unfairly? I think you're both ignoring the same behavior in other political factions. I certainly see certain groups trying to decide who can make decisions about a woman's body, who people can marry or adopt children, and other individual freedoms.
- nyolfen 11y ago
  marxism has very little to do with racism, sexism or homophobia
  - overgard 11y ago
    Sure, but those labels are very useful for throwing your opponents under the bus.
  - Grue3 11y ago
    It correlates pretty strongly. See, USSR, Maoist China, and so on.
    - hga 11y ago
      As some "for instances", in the Soviet Union, Jews were labeled as such on their mandatory internal passports, not Russians or whatever, and their access to higher education was limited, and I'd hope I'd not need to point out how the Han Chinese who run the PRC treat their ethnic neighbors like the Tibetans and Uyghurs.
      - topynate 11y ago
        Certainly true as a matter of those states' fundamental hypocrisy, but I believe PopeOfNope was referring to the Left's deployment of those terms as offensive weapons - which also happened. For example, the USSR was very big on paying lip-service to anti-colonialism as a form of soft power over the non-aligned block[1]. This did not seem to noticeably affect her behaviour towards Afghanistan in the Soviet-Afghan War[2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
- al3x 11y ago
  The political left in America were made enemies of the state during the era of McCarthyism. People's careers and personal lives were ruined during that Red Scare. That is "silencing". That is "limiting speech". Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? If someone is called out for racism and then voluntarily chooses to exit public life or withdraw further commentary, that's their own cowardly choice. Being criticized does not "silence" anyone. The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding. Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country. Far-right demagogues continue to fill newspapers, magazines, think tank briefing, the Internet, and airwaves with their ideas despite decades of criticism from the left.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    "Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"?" Well, you just personally silenced Yarvin, so there's one.
  - paxdickinson 11y ago
    >Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? Hi, nice to meetcha.
  - devalier 11y ago
    Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? Here is a very long list: https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badgered-pressured-and-purged/ https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad... Congratulations on getting the last and final scalp. The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding. The left has 99% of the university system including the entire Ivy league, which in total receives hundreds of billions of dollars in funding. The left also has most major media ranging from PBS and the NYTimes to CNN (although some are only partially under left-wing control, and will play cheerleader for war due to their own profit, not out of any right-wing ideology). The only way you can define the "right" as being stronger is if you find the left-most country out there as being the true way, and anything less than that as being rightist. A better way to look at strength is to look at who has been winning the battles. If you look at the past 50 years, the left has won most of them. If you look at the past 100 years, overall, the nation has moved way left on virtually every single issue. There has been some back-and-forth on individual issues, but overall, the direction is very clear. Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country. I don't actually have a problem with silencing hateful people. But Curtis was never hateful to minorities. He is a good person trying to make an honest critique based on the evidence as he saw it. When you purge people like that, you only make your own movement and group stupider. And that is a problem, because if you cannot investigate the true causes of a social ill without forcing people to self-censor and avoid crime-think, then you can never fix the problems.
muglug 11y ago
> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? I'll defend his right to say it, and I'll also defend a conference organiser's right to deny politically-outspoken developers a chance to talk about their (nevertheless interesting) projects.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  Nobody on the entire planet is saying that Strangeloop doesn't have the right to kick people out because they don't like their political views, so please put that argument back in the drawer. What everyone here is saying is that their actions are _wrong_, not illegal. By balkanizing people based on unrelated politics, their actions are destructive to the advancement of technology and fly in the face of the spirit of free speech. Do you not agree?
sagichmal 11y ago
> actions like this encourage . . . controversial writers > to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest > the vigilante mobs find them. Racist writers can stay well in the shadows; their human persons can suffer the consequences of their detestable opinions. Both of these are moral and just outcomes. Societies need not, indeed must not sacrifice forward progress on the altar of freedom of expression for the sake of it alone. > If we can not learn to tolerate others and respect their > opinions, even those we find distasteful or deplorable, > we will reap the consquences, and stagnate as a culture. Exactly the opposite is true. If we can not make moral decisions as a society, to say "the opinion that minority races are inferior is not one we are willing to tolerate," we stand no chance to have any meaningful cultural progression.
- devalier 11y ago
  If we can not make moral decisions as a society, to say "the opinion that minority races are inferior is not one we are willing to tolerate," we stand no chance to have any meaningful cultural progression. Can you suspend disbelief for a moment? Imagine, hypothetically, that in the world we live in, the one standard deviation difference in IQ between certain races was in fact primarily due to statistical differences in gene frequency. Would it still be morally unacceptable to point this out? Would it still be counter to progress to point this out? If you still think it would be immoral, how can you progress if you misdiagnose reality? I mean if you want to solve the problem, you have to know what causes it. If environment causes the problem, then environmental changes can fix it. If genes cause the problem, then we might have the technology in a few decades that allows parents to level-up their children. In the mean time, if genes are the issue, then universal basic income would be a lot better for disadvantaged then spending money on the school bureaucracy. So if you want to help people, you need to have a truthful view of the problem. Follow-up question. If would be OK to hold the genetic view in world where the genetic hypothesis was actually true, how are we to know which world we actually live in, if people are not allowed to make good faith cases of the evidence and analysis for both viewpoints, without fear of ostracism and career suicide?
  - jessaustin 11y ago
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
To 'defend it to the death' will require more than just sitting behind a keyboard posting on the hacker news forums.

ThrustVectoring 11y ago

It also encourages the outraged to try to silence their ideological opponents.

PopeOfNope 11y ago

> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? Marxism happened. Limiting speech has always been a tactic employed by the political left. Words like "racist", "sexist" and "homophobe" were designed to shut down free speech. It's extremely effective at silencing any opposition.

overgard 11y ago
You're getting unfairly downvoted, but you're right: whether you agree with their ideas or not, the main tactic of the left is to police what topics are "appropriate" and marginalize those who are "inappropriate" with a label. I'm mostly apolitical so I'm not particularly outraged by this, but I wish they'd just own what they do. If they really think their ideas stand up, they should be welcoming opposition rather than trying to silence it.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Just curious why you say that is the "main tactic of the left"?
- wavefunction 11y ago
  Unfairly? I think you're both ignoring the same behavior in other political factions. I certainly see certain groups trying to decide who can make decisions about a woman's body, who people can marry or adopt children, and other individual freedoms.
nyolfen 11y ago
marxism has very little to do with racism, sexism or homophobia
- overgard 11y ago
  Sure, but those labels are very useful for throwing your opponents under the bus.
- Grue3 11y ago
  It correlates pretty strongly. See, USSR, Maoist China, and so on.
  - hga 11y ago
    As some "for instances", in the Soviet Union, Jews were labeled as such on their mandatory internal passports, not Russians or whatever, and their access to higher education was limited, and I'd hope I'd not need to point out how the Han Chinese who run the PRC treat their ethnic neighbors like the Tibetans and Uyghurs.
    - topynate 11y ago
      Certainly true as a matter of those states' fundamental hypocrisy, but I believe PopeOfNope was referring to the Left's deployment of those terms as offensive weapons - which also happened. For example, the USSR was very big on paying lip-service to anti-colonialism as a form of soft power over the non-aligned block[1]. This did not seem to noticeably affect her behaviour towards Afghanistan in the Soviet-Afghan War[2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
al3x 11y ago
The political left in America were made enemies of the state during the era of McCarthyism. People's careers and personal lives were ruined during that Red Scare. That is "silencing". That is "limiting speech". Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? If someone is called out for racism and then voluntarily chooses to exit public life or withdraw further commentary, that's their own cowardly choice. Being criticized does not "silence" anyone. The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding. Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country. Far-right demagogues continue to fill newspapers, magazines, think tank briefing, the Internet, and airwaves with their ideas despite decades of criticism from the left.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  "Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"?" Well, you just personally silenced Yarvin, so there's one.
- paxdickinson 11y ago
  >Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? Hi, nice to meetcha.
- devalier 11y ago
  Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? Here is a very long list: https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badgered-pressured-and-purged/ https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad... Congratulations on getting the last and final scalp. The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding. The left has 99% of the university system including the entire Ivy league, which in total receives hundreds of billions of dollars in funding. The left also has most major media ranging from PBS and the NYTimes to CNN (although some are only partially under left-wing control, and will play cheerleader for war due to their own profit, not out of any right-wing ideology). The only way you can define the "right" as being stronger is if you find the left-most country out there as being the true way, and anything less than that as being rightist. A better way to look at strength is to look at who has been winning the battles. If you look at the past 50 years, the left has won most of them. If you look at the past 100 years, overall, the nation has moved way left on virtually every single issue. There has been some back-and-forth on individual issues, but overall, the direction is very clear. Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country. I don't actually have a problem with silencing hateful people. But Curtis was never hateful to minorities. He is a good person trying to make an honest critique based on the evidence as he saw it. When you purge people like that, you only make your own movement and group stupider. And that is a problem, because if you cannot investigate the true causes of a social ill without forcing people to self-censor and avoid crime-think, then you can never fix the problems.

muglug 11y ago

> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? I'll defend his right to say it, and I'll also defend a conference organiser's right to deny politically-outspoken developers a chance to talk about their (nevertheless interesting) projects.

13thLetter 11y ago
Nobody on the entire planet is saying that Strangeloop doesn't have the right to kick people out because they don't like their political views, so please put that argument back in the drawer. What everyone here is saying is that their actions are _wrong_, not illegal. By balkanizing people based on unrelated politics, their actions are destructive to the advancement of technology and fly in the face of the spirit of free speech. Do you not agree?

sagichmal 11y ago

> actions like this encourage . . . controversial writers > to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest > the vigilante mobs find them. Racist writers can stay well in the shadows; their human persons can suffer the consequences of their detestable opinions. Both of these are moral and just outcomes. Societies need not, indeed must not sacrifice forward progress on the altar of freedom of expression for the sake of it alone. > If we can not learn to tolerate others and respect their > opinions, even those we find distasteful or deplorable, > we will reap the consquences, and stagnate as a culture. Exactly the opposite is true. If we can not make moral decisions as a society, to say "the opinion that minority races are inferior is not one we are willing to tolerate," we stand no chance to have any meaningful cultural progression.

devalier 11y ago
If we can not make moral decisions as a society, to say "the opinion that minority races are inferior is not one we are willing to tolerate," we stand no chance to have any meaningful cultural progression. Can you suspend disbelief for a moment? Imagine, hypothetically, that in the world we live in, the one standard deviation difference in IQ between certain races was in fact primarily due to statistical differences in gene frequency. Would it still be morally unacceptable to point this out? Would it still be counter to progress to point this out? If you still think it would be immoral, how can you progress if you misdiagnose reality? I mean if you want to solve the problem, you have to know what causes it. If environment causes the problem, then environmental changes can fix it. If genes cause the problem, then we might have the technology in a few decades that allows parents to level-up their children. In the mean time, if genes are the issue, then universal basic income would be a lot better for disadvantaged then spending money on the school bureaucracy. So if you want to help people, you need to have a truthful view of the problem. Follow-up question. If would be OK to hold the genetic view in world where the genetic hypothesis was actually true, how are we to know which world we actually live in, if people are not allowed to make good faith cases of the evidence and analysis for both viewpoints, without fear of ostracism and career suicide?
- jessaustin 11y ago

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

To 'defend it to the death' will require more than just sitting behind a keyboard posting on the hacker news forums.