One heuristic settled on in "What You Can't Say" is the distinction between ideas that are dismissed for being false or absurd and ideas that are dismissed for being heretical.

If you go around saying the Holocaust didn't happen, people will tell you that you're wrong and will point to verifiable evidence in the historic record, and Holocaust denial is ten times as controversial as anything you'll read in Quillette.

This is not quite right. If you're a holocaust denier, then one in fifty people will intellectually engage with your arguments, and the other 49 will just call you a holocaust denier, and shun you from polite society.*

I don't see anything wrong with that. Someone has to read it and respond to it, but I'm fine with being one of the 49.

* For the sake of illustration, I omit the fact that 1 or 2 of the 50 might promote your work.

P.S. This may read like I'm comparing Quillete to holocaust denial. This is not my intent.

The tactic I'm seeing more and more of nowadays, is where someone starts talking about something nuanced, like the role of far left and far right breakdowns of the rule of law in the Weimar Republic, then someone else comes in and tries to claim it's something horrible like holocaust denial. It's disturbingly typical for discourse nowadays, and it's shockingly intellectually dishonest. What's even more shocking is the extent to which such illogic is defended by the far left and far right. It's almost like the extremists don't want the center to have a voice and want outrage chaos to predominate instead. (Sarcasm. Of course that's what extremists want.)

Most people will dismiss absolutely everyone they disagree with reflexively anyway, but the few people who will actually bother to argue with Holocaust deniers, young-earth creationists, etc. do so with facts and evidence, whereas the people who argue in favor of e.g. blank-slate psychology will, at their most charitable, concern-troll you over the social consequences of your ideas.

I don't know much about Quillette, so I just went to read a bunch of articles. A fair number of commenters seem to be posting about, for instance, "Jewish misinformation campaigns" and "jewish desire to destabilize America" (in the comments about "A closer look at anti-white rhetoric", mentioned above). A few other people do argue with the anti-semitism. Anyhow, are you sure that Holocaust denial is ten times as controversial as anything I'll read in Quillette, or is it only... twice as controversial?

I was talking mostly about the actual content. I virtually never read the comments anywhere on the Internet, aside from a few trusted sources (like HN) where high-quality comments are the point of the site.

I virtually never see comments about "Jewish misinformation campaigns" or "jewish desire to destabilize America", and I've never browsed Quillette.

Is there a reason people are talking about those things on Quillette?

Posting any content that's outside of the mainstream is a magnet to the fringe, unfortunately.

So are internet comment sections. If you've seriously never seen anti-Semitic nonsense on the internet before, I'm going to assume you either never read the comments or are in a left-wing internet bubble (and, even then, you'll still likely run into a different style of anti-Semitic nonsense.)

The question is which fringe it attracts. I guess the central point -- the defense of Quillette, in fact -- may be that since it publishes articles that are more nuanced than the norm in looking at questions like why women "don't code", why black people aren't as rich as white people in the US, etc., it opens up a space for discussion about how Jewish people are destabilizing American and how Keith Ellison and Maxine Waters are part of the new antifa brownshirt army or whatever. (Keith, I thought you were just a popular politician with a dumpster fire of a personal life!) And by allowing a place for that discussion to actually happen, with other right-y types pushing back that "hey, that's anti-semitic and factually incorrect! you can be anti-left without being anti-semitic!" then Quillette is actually fulfilling its goal of being a place that welcomes hard-hitting heterodox discussion.

In theory, some good is done by having this discussion in broad daylight instead of on Gab, which might just be an echo chamber. In fact, when I see folks like that coming into a party on a Friday night, I head out -- because as one of these people who is getting uppity and above my station in life by doing things I'm not genetically supposed to be inclined to do, I've developed a little bit of sense about who to avoid if I don't want to get beat up, literally or metaphorically.

Speaking as someone whose inclinations are, if anything, philosemitic, I find this entire line of criticism disingenuous and hypocritical. Comment forums are trash and if I were Claire Lehmann I wouldn’t have them on my site in the first place, but when it comes to the content Quillette curates and publishes, the overwhelming tendency is in service of exposing and condemning anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories:

* https://quillette.com/2018/11/09/an-israeli-agent-on-campus/ * https://quillette.com/2018/10/28/fight-the-scourge-of-antise... * https://quillette.com/2018/03/15/alt-right-gets-wrong-jews/ * https://quillette.com/2016/04/28/labour-in-meltdown-but-what... * https://quillette.com/2018/04/03/labour-power-games-threaten... * https://quillette.com/2018/05/13/libel-jordan-peterson-forwa...

It’s disingenuous to tar one side for their comment threads while making excuses for political leaders on the left who condone and even court anti-Semitism, such as Jeremy Corbyn, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton.

There's anti-Semitism on HN.

But there's anti-Semitism all over the quillette comment section.

I don't know, I clicked the Quillette link[1] in this HN comment[2] and there's over a dozen anti-semitic comments.

A couple of commenters even went out of their way to write coherently-worded, but disgusting, multi-paragraph anti-semitic rants.

I've seen comments like that on Stormfront or, recently, the comments section on Fox News articles.

However the dozens of social media groups, mailing lists and forums I'm a member of don't seem to have a problem with anti-semitic conspiracy theories littering their pages. Most of them are academic, tech or humor related and are far from a 'left wing internet bubble' you want to pigeonhole me as being stuck in.

What is it about Quillette that attracts such anti-semitic commenters? Is it just something about the article?

[1] "A Closer Look at Anti-White Rhetoric" https://quillette.com/2018/08/17/a-closer-look-at-anti-white...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18429602

Maybe you posted it to concern troll us. I don’t read comments; I don’t have much of a read on why some places have certain comment themes.