this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I have not seen it yet, though I have no doubt that it exists.
I believe that in real life as in the fediverse, hate speech and bigotry of all kinds needs to be very firmly shot down. Immediately downvote and block that shit. It has no place here, or anywhere.
That being said, debating or even engaging with these pricks is worse than pointless because you’ll never change their minds and will only give them a platform.
Won't it make them angrier and more racist, though?
Racist is racist. Fuck them. I have no interest in appeasing these people, and even if I did, it wouldn’t calm them down or make their hatred tolerable. Sexists, racists, homophobes and the lot should be shunned without compromise. As the saying somewhat goes, there should be no tolerance for intolerance.
Only caveat I'd add is to differentiate between A racist/homophobe/misogynist/whatever, and someone who just expressed an ignorant viewpoint. Whether or not there's actual malicious thinking behind things is important in figuring out if you can reason with someone or not.
Quickest example I can give off the top of my head: I'm gay, and one of my best friends is a straight man who, when I met him, had some reasonably-significant issues with his own masculinity, probably stemming from being short and slim and the resulting treatment he'd often get from both women and other men (which also lessened as we got older and out of the early 20s). That occasionally extended to things like worrying that other people would perceive him as gay because of hanging out with a bunch of LGBTQ+ people and women from work, or his slightly defensive reaction when I told him he looked good one day where he had a particularly nice outfit on and had styled his hair well, as if I'd propositioned him. Both things are a little insulting, but he also was never one of the types who views us as basically child-molesting mentally-ill deviants who don't deserve equal rights.
We got closer, enough that he was willing to open up on the subjects, and I was able to explain how that kind of thing looked from my perspective and, in turn, kinda figured out where it was coming from on his end, but it was always from a place where he just didn't understand why what he was saying or doing was wrong or hurtful, not because he intended to cause hurt. And he's significantly better about that sort of thing now in general, because it made him do some introspection, and he got better at doing that for other things as well. And in all fairness, I learned a bit, too; I knew short guys often got made fun of for it, but being average size myself it wasn't something I really had to deal with and I didn't understand just how pervasive and wearing it is, so now I better understand how he might have gotten there in the first place.
Yes, it's really unfortunate when I see people of a given oppressed group start attacking an ally simply because the person hasn't kept up to date on the latest preferred words. I know there is an angry subsegment of people that feel that everyone should spend all their time keeping completely up-to-date on the latest terminology, but it's a really unrealistic and damaging expectation.
There are often people who want to do the right thing and are simply out of date, or not well enough informed. These sorts of people can and should be educated as they generally want to help. When they get canceled for minor transgressions it's not constructive.
The internet has a big problem with people forgetting to read things with nuance, which leads to the behaviour you described. In the past decade, social media has convinced millions of people that all-or-nothing thinking is acceptable (because it causes conflict, and conflict is cash).
@Kupo_Knight posted an article recently that I think is very relevant here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
Similar idea: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376?gi=cd412a4f533d
Tolerance is a peace treaty between society's sub-groups. When one group breaks that treaty it's moral and necessary to respond in kind and not tolerate them.
If a country rolls tanks into your country it's not immoral to respond in kind to defend yourself. Same idea applies to intolerance.
Yudkowsky really is one of those people who's a stopped clock. I wish he'd focus on that sort of stuff more than the mad AI crap.
To change someone's mind, the person needs to respect you. Bigotry largely comes from a place of disrespect, so the targets of bigotry cannot change that person's mind.
Now, when my mom was starting down a pretty homophobic path, I had the opportunity to talk to her, to explain that her misconceptions weren't what most gay people were like. Because she respected me more than she respected internet strangers, I was able to change her mind.
But to strangers, no matter how much I type, or how convincing I am, I'm never going to convince someone who's racist or homophobic to stop being that way. They simply do not respect me enough to believe what I say, to trust me over their own friends, family or news sources. I don't have the time to build the trust and rapport with someone to be able to change their mind, so the best thing to do is just minimize the trouble they can cause me by blocking them.
Yeah, and then once they are banned from the public places they find the hell holes with the other racists and form groups that dress as nazis and march on washington. We literally drive them into echo chambers where people will agree with them, whereas we should be heckling them and showing them that the general public at large disagrees with them. It's impossible to show that your community is the general public when you ban people right away. Then they think they aren't allowed to be there and it's not because they're wrong, it's because you're woke or whatever. You can't concentrate the evil, you have to dilute it.
The problem with this assessment is that we've tried the approach of reasoning with people like this and all it does is allow them to proselytise. They don't want a polite debate, they want a pulpit.
A neo-Nazi who's stuffed in a box talking to other neo-Nazis is a neo-Nazi who's not infesting some other place trying to spread shit about "race realism". They'll find it a lot harder to "march on Washington" when it's just a couple hundred Nazis and not a couple hundred Nazis plus thousands of others they've radicalised.
Sunlight's a shitty disinfectant. I prefer bleach.
Yep. Deplatforming them works. When forced to their safe spaces, they have a much harder time recruiting.
No, you don't argue with them. You berate them. You harass them. Treat them with their own medicine. They aren't intelligent enough to get got with knowledge. That's why it hasn't worked. You've tried to outsmart people without brains.
Is that their go to reaction? Be more angry and racist?
it's really all they have, yeah.
Accepting them and letting them continue being bigots won't make them stop being bigots.
Who cares? They aren’t going to stop being racist so just let them bang on their keyboards in frustration.
Reporting their content means the content can be moderated which means us normal folks don't have to suffer the displeasure of reading hateful garbage
EDIT: oops, lack of comment collapsing confused me. I misunderstood! Sorry!