https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9174vt/cult... is a 2-part comment advocating for
> Mandatory abortions of the congenitally ill.
> Removal of tax incentives for homosexual marriages
> Corporal or capital punishment for adultery.
> Mental illness/having mental health medication prescribed disqualifying voting.
> Paid sterilisation (i.e., trading your fecundity for a basic income).
> National genotyping and IQ scoring as part of using any sort of public health subsidisation and education.
> Allowing insurers more room to discriminate on any quality they wish, including genotype, education, and IQ (i.e., no more disparate impact or genetic discrimination laws at all).
> La Sierra-style physical education in whatever public schools there are.
> Removal of all protected classes/free segregation (as mentioned above).
> Restructuring of "Free Speech" rights to include the "Right to Hate."
And so on. Basically all of the most awful things a human being could compile into a bullet pointed list, with absolutely no explanation of why any of these things would have a positive impact on the world. The second part of the comment literally just contains these, verbatim, as bullets.
These are the kinds of things one would advocate for if he wanted racism to be allowed (with a couple of other weird random points that most certainly trample on the rights of other groups). You'd have to completely ignore the rights of so many people to think arguing for any of these even approximates rational thought.
One may argue that it is acceptable to merely permit this kind of thing, in the hopes that light may find it and disinfect it. But this particular comment is blessed as a "quality contribution" by the moderators here https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9174vt/cult....
So I dunno. Is this objectionable enough for you?
No. Most of it is objectionable to me, but none is objectionable enough to ban discussions around it.
I'm saying the fact that the moderators have blessed this comment is objectionable for the many reasons I've put above.
By all means, talk about this. But promoting a laundry list of unsubstantiated ideas that are no more than a thin veneer around human rights abuses just strikes me as... irrational.
Where is "ban discussions" around it coming from, certainly it's not something I said. It's also not something that happened here. (The thread was moved to another subreddit with weeks notice, the participants voted on the name, the result was highly promoted, etc.)
My view is that there its material that few would want to be around or have their identity associated with. If guests at my home were carrying on about that, I'd politely try to get them to change the subject and failing that get them to leave. ... avoid inviting them in the future, and apologize discretely to my other gusts for having had to endure it. [And pray a fight didn't break out before I could intervene...]
Stuff like that.
2. It was the second part of said two part comment that advocated any of that, which was not well voted, and provided no support for anything in there.
3. The quality contribution round up ends up being anything that anyone reports to the moderators as a quality contribution, with little discrimination on the part of the moderators.
4. Sometimes it's not the post itself that's the quality, but the responses to it that provide the quality conversation.
And yes, I mentioned that it was bipartite, and the second part had 11 votes which is maybe not excitingly high but not extremely low either.
"Quality contributions" being barely moderated by moderators does not sound like a useful thing. How are we to know they're "quality" if the moderators don't actually test for their quality in some way?
The responses only barely disagreed, and mostly against the mandatory abortions of the mentally ill. There is maybe one comment that makes an actual attempt at most of the silly points, and the original poster of this "quality" contribution did not respond to it.
> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels.
I don't know what has caused the loss of that kind of insight now, but I hope its found again in the future.
The thread being mourned was continually full of really shockingly horrible stuff. Straight faced technobabble laden arguments for genocide and such. A reliable go-to for "oh-shit,-humanity-is-screwed" porn.
It was impossible to tell how much of it was actually awful people earnestly advancing awful ideas vs screwed up performance art with people intentionally posting the worst stuff they could think of just for shock value or to mock the fact that participants there responded so embarrassingly to so much of it. ... but I don't think that is a defense of it at all, it's an indictment.
I had previously believed (and people who knew Scott personally lead me to believe...) that the thread was created as a tarpit for trolls and people with absurdly repugnant views to waste each others time in a place where other people could ignore it-- rather than these discussions invading every other thread and making them useless to the majority of people who want nothing to do with that stuff-- who feel they morally can't just sit and pretend its okay to advance horrible policies but also don't want to waste their lives rehashing ethical arguments that most people considered settled a century ago. The "designated crap thread" approach is sometimes more effective than punting the sources outright (and also less harmful to false positives)...
This post strongly indicates otherwise and is causing me a vertigo inducing shift in how I perceive the author and his community.
I couldn't be more disappointed. And I'm only left hoping that the support of that toxicity expressed in Scott's post is an emotional retaliation to the despicable harassment he reported experiencing ... rather than an earnest position.
I feel like a lot of the HN commentary is essentially unrelated to the actual 'event' -- The 'deplatforming' trend is concerning... but that doesn't really tell us much about this particular venue. Especially since it continues to exist and hasn't in fact, been subject to deplatforming or anything similar. The connection only goes in so far as some of the same pressures probably exists, but I would be a lot more interested in hearing what went on behind some actual major deplatforming incidents. (Medium killing gab.ai's post explaining why they didn't believe their actions supported hate crimes would be an interesting candidate, since it was a meta-deplatforming, so doubly removed from most pragmatic tradeoffs...)