What a wretched, demoralizing 118-comment subthread. A white supremacy vs. Islamic extremism cage match was the last thing we needed, and of course it hopped via WWII and Nazis to capitalism vs. communism—the mother of generic ideological flamewars, whither all return. None of this is good discussion for Hacker News; it's predictable, nasty, and the essence of what we're trying to avoid. To the extent it proliferates like this here, we might as well just shut the damn place down.
Everyone: please don't.
Wait... you're saying that white supremacy is worse than islamic extremism? Is you opinion perhaps a manifestation of your perspective? I'm sure there are some people in Syria, Afghanistan, etc... that would disagree with you.
BTW, I'm not saying one is worse than the other, just that they are both bad, both a problem, and both should be removed from social media.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Perhaps you could say that racial supremacy justified some of the worst wars of the 20th century, but "germans are better than slavs" barely pattern matches to "white supremacy", and "japanese are better than koreans/chinese/etc" doesn't at all. As for justified vs caused... There's a fine line to be drawn here, but I think it's worth drawing. Would Germany and Japan have gone to war without views of racial superiority? Quite possibly. Both were in rather poor strategic situations in the 1920s, and war was an acceptable way to resolve that at the time. Would they have poked the world's largest powers with a stick without that superiority to fall back on? Perhaps not.
Again, I think that statement is shaped by your perspective. I imagine a lot of Russian, Chinese and Africans would disagree with you about that.
In absolute terms, more Russians died as a result of Nazi action than any other group.
This is not a matter of perspective. This is what actually happened.
Who's disputing this fact? Not me.
gaogao switch the convo to "racial supremacy". Not to say that it doesn't have something to do with wars of the 20th century.
It might even be seen that by making this switch and excluding non-imperialistic wars, we would be minimizing the atrocities and war crimes committed in Africa and the rest of the third world against native populations.
> Are you seriously denying that Nazis were motivated by ideology of racial supremacy?
I'm not even going to acknowledge this statement. How on earth did you made this cognitive leap?
Reckless speculation considering the latter did happen. You're fearmongering in order to drive censorship and oppression of viewpoints you disagree with.
Before Al Queda, the West's biggest fear was domestic white nationalist terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.
EDIT: It's very disturbing that so many people don't understand what the Nazi platform was all about. The supremacy of the "Aryan Race" was literally a platform of the Nazi party from the beginning. The subjugation of Jews was a part of the party platform from the beginning. The use of paramilitary squads to enforce ideological purity was a part of the party from the beginning. And it just got worse from there.
Furthermore, for a "white nationalist" movement they spent a whole lot of time killing and oppressing other "whites".
Communism is problematic to them because it tries to eliminate social hierarchies deemphasizing national identity. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is problematic to them because of its (perceived) amoral decadence and its ability to empower "undesirable" "outsider" individuals to garner power inside a nation through wealth.
If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities. What was it about those people that made them not fit the category of "German"?
The answer from clearly documented history is that the Nazis systematized the categorization of humans on their deeply flawed model of the Aryan "race", and singled out those who didn't fit for subjugation or extermination.
Conversely they also planned to further "purify" their own people by planning to subject Scandinavian populations to forced interbreeding programs upon conquering them, and kidnapping "Aryan" children from neighboring countries.
Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German. Re: disabilities, it's a mix of rabid utilitarianism (they were called "useless eaters") and a belief that disabilities stemmed from corrupted bloodlines (hence the term mongoloid -- it was a popular theory that retardation was the result of Europeans/Asian intermarriage).
What defined German ethnicity?
Clearly it wasn't the ability to speak the language, or being descended from many generations of ancestors living in Germany, otherwise the Jews and Roma both would have been considered German.
Clearly there was something else attributed to them that didn't fit the definition of "German". It was that they weren't considered racially German. Race is literally what the Nuremberg Laws were about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
Given the preponderance of clear historical evidence for the Third Reich's racially based rationale for its actions, one wonders why would anyone try to water it down to the more innocuous seeming rationale of "German ethnicity".
I'm not making that up - it was right there in their laws that I linked to.
Otherwise, why shouldn't people who had been living in Germany for generations, speaking languages closely related to German (Yiddish, German Romani), be considered German?
How can you interpret those laws as being about anything but racial categorization - unless you have an agenda to sidestep and downplay the fact the Nazis repressed and murdered people whom they saw as not being part of their own presumed "race".
See Generalplan Ost.
It's also why it's not easily dispatched by enlightenment thinking... it survived those battles back in the 20th century and ultimately had to be put down with exercises of power (often military, sometimes social, rarely diplomatic).
Fascists gained power in Italy, Germany, and Spain as a direct result of anti-communist sentiment (and in the case of Germany, a failed communist revolution). Mussolini's early writings were directly proposing nationalism as the answer to communism's failures. Everywhere fascism had success it was because it was pitted against the threat of communism. I don't know how the rise of Fascism was anything but reactionary.
But we're talking about the root causes of WWII. And one of the Nazi party's specific goals when invading Poland was to exterminate the Jews and Roma (Gypsy) populations of Europe.
Are you sure about that? Wasn't "the final solution" proposed significantly later?
Islamic jihadis do control a few middle eastern nations. But they are quite powerless in front of the west. Even having access to natural resources like oil doesn’t protect the extremists (do I even need to give examples?). The most concerning Islamic state is Pakistan as it has nukes.
But if far right folks take over Austria or Germany again, or other European states or Russia or the US, they will control massive economies, WMDs and have the ability for complete domination in a way never seen before. Let’s just say it is better to be in control of any European nation as opposed to Libya, Syria, Iraq or Iran.
Are you saying that Islamic extremists took over most of the Middle East?
White supremacism is supported by a fraction of a percentage of white Europeans. Support for Islamic fundamentalism is substantially higher in the Muslim world.
(Plenty of Europeans are opposed to large scale immigration, but you’re not conflating that with white supremicism are you?)
Edit, this is an honest question. It's my impression these wars were caused by nationalist movements. The first didn't even involve "whites" until later and it certainly had nothing to do with white supremacy.
The second world war got very white supremacy eventually but again, zero fucks to do with the cause. Hell America turned a blind eye to ALL of it until they got dragged in, that's how little it had to do with anything.
(Not some gun toting denier nazi here, it happened it was disturbing as fuck and it was a big deal, but please don't run around claiming this made up narrative)
Which ones? Both WW were caused by political disputes and nationalist views
This whole "rah rah whites" stuff is something that people in the U.S. came up with during the Progressive Era, as a supposedly-'unifying' alternative to national/ethnic identities, some of which were quite openly "disfavored" by that time especially wrt. Central Europe. (Again, WW1 was a non-trivial factor there.) People outside the Anglo world generally think of it as quite silly and misguided, not to mention racist.
British people are not French people are not Hungarians are not Greeks are not Italians are not Spanish people.
We're Europeans, but we have very distinct and different cultures and we don't regard ourselves as 'whites' - it's rare (outside radical left circles) for Europeans to speak that way.
The native people of most Mediterranean regions - Spain, Southern France, Italy, Greece and Turkey don't have pale skin - it would be odd to speak of 'whites'.
Both are not advocating any kind of racial supremacy but rather self-interest, and - like them or not - relatively common as judged by recent election results.
Second Word War, as we all know, has been mostly led by Nazis, who were, among other things, undoubtedly very very racist. However, even then they gladly paired with Japanese - most definitely not "white", Arabs - not really considered "white" by most Nazis - to achieve their goals. And they had absolutely no problem suppressing and massacring Eastern Europeans (very "white") when it suited them. Their goal was, ultimately, world domination under the aegis of the Nazi party, and their "white supremacy" was mostly "Nazi supremacy" - if you were white but not agreeing with Nazis, you were dead. So it was a standard totalitarian approach, which is no different in any totalitarian regime, racism notwithstanding. Nazis where definitely racial supremacists (though just "white" didn't go nearly far enough for them) but even if they weren't, it would end up in the same way.
And as history teaches us, totalitarian regimes like to expand, if they can, and cause wars, if they have resources for it (fortunately, North Korea has none, but even then they are trying to provoke something constantly).
> A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier
There is no white nationalist movement in Europe even close to pulling something like this off. In fact, I don't think there's even one serious "white" nationalist movement in Europe at all - most nationalist parties are specifically "nationally" nationalists - e.g. French nationalists, British nationalists, Hungarian nationalists, etc. and they couldn't care less about other "whites" as soon as they aren't French, British or Hungarian. Of course, racial movements exist too, but again - they are minuscule compared to nation-based movements.
OTOH, ISIS has already pulled off a major war in Middle East, and while it fortunately looks like they're ending up on the losing side now, it already cost major loss in life and economic damage, and it is very far from the end. Taliban in Afghanistan is far from being beaten too. They are massively in force right now, while "white nationalist uprising" is nothing but an extremely unlikely hypothetical.
Communism kills in a very real sense: it literally murders by the million and creates deadly privation where there was previously none.
Then what do you call actual radical islam that preaches death to all infidels, women honor killings and unending war-on-the-west, among other equally grotesque actions?
But do be aware that white supremacist have committed more acts of violence in the US than Muslim extremist. And this not counting lynching which is a systematic form of terrorism that lasted more than a century.
The same people who cheer blocking Al Qaeda now claim that blocking neo-nazis is suppressing conservative views, so right-wing extremism has been and is far more tolerated and prevalent than other violent extremism.
Do you have anything to support that assertion?
I'm surprised you didn't point to colonialism instead, which would be a better argument.
You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). But the current white supremacy movement has evolved in significant part from Nazi ideology. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on David Duke, for example, and you'll find such statements as "Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Hitler's birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform."
In short, if we're talking about racist movements within the US and Europe that are directly inspired by Nazi ideology, then whatever quibbles you might make about terminology, you can't deny that it's reasonable to project the dangers of the latter onto the former.
You can generalize to ethno-national supremacy. Which covers Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and US White Supremacists.
It's amazing how many people actually think this, and how discussions like this bring them out of the woodwork. A couple of years ago I got into a pointless discussion with someone on HN who went so far as to say that Hitler wasn't a racist. (No, really.)
This is why white supremacy is dangerous. The history of WWII and the rise of the Nazis is rapidly being forgotten, and a surprisingly large number of people have a massively inaccurate conception of it.
It historically and factually was not.
It played a role.
It was not the cause.
Nobody is saying Hitler wasn't a racist (wtf.)
I doubt you can point to any reputable historian of World War II who denies that the Nazi's racist ideology, and its expansionist tendencies, played a major role in the outbreak of WWII. Think Sudetenland.
And again, nobody here is denying Nazis were racist.
How can you say it played a major role in the outbreak of war when you can't even say it without tacking on the real causes with an "and" all while ignoring the USA turned a blind eye to the lot of it until Japan got involved?
Nobody here has said it didn't play a role. And it did play a major role later on in WW2 but that's not what this thread is about is it?
Did white supremacy cause WW1 and WW2. No.
Did it play a part? Yes. Why are we talking about this? Because AP minced their words and should have just said nationalist racism.
This is clearly what the comment suggests. It is playing down Nazi racism by suggesting that the Nazis just pretended to be racists when it suited their purposes. (Note the inclusion of “even Jews”, as if to suggest that even the Holocaust was not racially motivated.)
>without tacking on the real causes with an "and"
The expansionism and the racism were intimately linked. Lebensraum.
I just think it seems overly simplistic to the point of being almost nonsensical to say that WW2 was caused by white supremacism. White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China. While I'm no expert, at the very least I can say that the Wikipedia article for "Causes of World War II" seems in agreement with what I said— while racism played a role, facism/militarism and plain old nationalist expansionism were much bigger factors.
It's particularly the mention of Jews here that makes it clear that in your view, the Nazis' racism was merely a matter of expedience, not conviction.
After all, would it not have been "convenient for the cause" for the Nazis to make all of Europe's Jews "honorary Aryans", and thus save themselves the trouble of murdering six million of them? The reason that they didn't do this is - obviously - that racism and anti-Semitism were a core part of their cause.
>White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China.
A red herring, surely. We're talking about the cause of the war in Europe in this context. But in any case, there was certainly a racist component to Japanese nationalism too.
>nationalist expansionism
The Nazis' nationalist expansionism was intimately connected to their racism. Hitler invaded Poland so that racially inferior slavs could be replaced by racially superior "Aryans".
I suspect this is because carving France back up into kingdoms at that point would have left Germany the sole uncontested power of Europe. Wars and nations were just getting too big to fail. When this fear materialized with Germany and Austria-Hungary teamed up to try to take over Europe again, while Austria-Hungary were divided into their constituent nation-states, Germany was expected to pay war reparations and so was kept largely intact so wealth could be extracted.
These war reparations are ultimately what drove WW2, by breaking the backs of the Germans, making them extremely receptive to populist politics.
Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.
If today's white supremacists found power, they'd look exactly like Nazis. The enemy might be different, but the mindset of fighting that enemy would be exactly the same, and the white supremacist suddenly finding power would find no other example to take heed of than the Nazis, so we can pretty much almost assume that that's what would happen.
Sure, but it's important to realize that this is true about any supremacist ideology. There's nothing exclusive about either Nazism or white supremacism. ISIL's Islamofascism is the same old crap for example, and it too has a line of historical descent from, e.g. early-20th-c. anti-Semitism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a raging anti-Semite who met Adolf Hitler and ardently supported his most heinous atrocities.
Have you never heard of Lebensraum? Generalplan Ost?
Hi. If you downvote factual statements, please leave a comment. It's annoying if you're using downvotes and flags as "I don't like that somebody says this". Write an argument, don't abuse moderation tools.
Half the bloody point of white supremacy is that the supremacist is the one who chooses who is white enough to be in the in-group, and who is not.
The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
Meh, removing any value from descriptive terms doesn't help.
> The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
Or it's just not white supremacy, which it never was with the Nazis.
Nazism was absolutely white supremacy. That it excluded ethnic groups that you consider to be white, or stack-ranked various white ethnic groups has nothing to do whether or not it was about white supremacy. Please, pray tell, what exact role were non-whites expected to play in Hitler's Brave New World?
You are using an incredibly narrow definition of the term, to try to make.. What point, exactly?
Nationalism however is the fundamental basis behind modern sovereignty. It's an identity based on shared geography rather than appearances. Nationalism ultimately prevents the people in the nation from getting conquered by other nations. You don't want the sentiments running away on you, but a certain amount of national pride is good for a people.
Nazism hid racism behind nationalism, in order to meld the two political forces together to form a ruling coalition. This was fundamental to its success. You cannot merely say the Nazis were racist, to turn them into the bogeyman, without acknowledging that the rest of the world had a role to play in bringing them to power.
The West, collectively, brought about World War 2. We didn't listen to the lessons learned over a thousand years of grappling with warfare on the continent, we did not do what was needed at the end of World War 1. It was so obvious that Germany was going to rearm and try again that France immediately went to considerable expense to fortify their eastern border.
We left an enormous power vacuum in Germany in the name of greed. We would not make that same mistake again at the end of WW2, though honestly the spectre of nuclear war had a lot more to do with it than moral imperative.
You can argue that whatever your local xenophobic hatreds you have going on aren't technically white supremacy, because you have different historical and cultural understandings of race etc, but at the end of the day, your hating haters sure seem to hate basically the same people as our hating haters, so I'm not sure why it's worth arguing about the distinction between the two groups.
Go ahead and read that article on Paul Manafort. That's just one, mundane article—you could pick any. Understand that, true or false, it doesn't matter anymore—this is a narrative and a set of facts that around 100 million people in the United States now subscribe to.
We are way, way, way, way past removing a few thousand YouTube videos. That might have been marginally effective ten years ago. But there's been a decade of rhetoric now about how "they" control the media and will try and censor it. Sometimes it's "they" and sometimes it's (((they))).
Jews control the media, shadow governments, deep state, extreme hate against muslims, gays, etc.. This stuff is mainstream. Patrick Little ran for Senate in California, of all places, as an actual nazi and got 1.2% of the vote. That's 50,000+ people who went out of their way to vote for someone who was relatively unknown, all because his platform was based on removing Jews from the United States.
I don't know what the solution is, I really don't. But I DO know that removing videos from YouTube won't make it better. It may make it worse.
Deplatforming just removes it from the view of people who don’t want to see it anyway.
I think you're right, and I have some first-hand knowledge on the matter. I've debated QAnon types and flat earthers alike. In both cases, they often see an absence of information as some overarching conspiracy. I'm not really sure who is worse (the flat earthers are a subset of a broader "government-is-hiding-things" conspiracy), but they both follow a cult-like structure in that if you disagree with them, you're not "one of us" and are either not smart enough to understand the implications of their beliefs or are willfully blind to their "truth." I doubt YT would ever remove QAnon or flat earth videos, but if they did, I suspect the fallout would be far worse than just leaving them alone. In some cases, it's helpful to cite their own predictions (and have something to cite) to dismantle their argument! Admittedly, this isn't useful in direct debate, because they're forever moving the goalpost, but it can be helpful for illustrating deficiencies to third parties that might be sympathetic to their views but are still open to the idea that there are problems with the opposition's argument[1].
Now, I say this as a conservative with some libertarian leanings. I don't like censorship, and I think it's harmful to shield people from ideas they don't like. However, I think moderation within a community is incredibly important to its survival provided it is applied equally. Nothing is worse for reasonable discourse than having someone jump in and start slinging pejoratives, insults, and abuse for no other reason than they don't like what you've said. As an example, I've personally had someone stalk my admittedly limited social media presence across various sites in order to post screenshots "proving" some inane belief they had about me supporting some ridiculous conspiracy. They then repeatedly posted insults and diatribes across numerous unrelated comments until I blocked them. That type of behavior should be an immediate--and permanent--ban.
[1] We might be passed this point, because the number of undecided people with regards to any particular conspiracy (for or against) is diminishing. I used to think the flat earth groups were largely trolling, but I've spoken with some people who have encountered them in real life or have friends who have been duped into believing the conspiracy. I also know a small handful of people who believe QAnon. No amount of evidence is going to sway either party. And no, I don't know what the best solution is other than to continue engaging where appropriate and banning where there's abuse.
But now? Too late.
There's no winning this battle of censorship, it will never be enough for the mob. While the other half is saying it's too far. And a small percentage of crazies becomes even more convinced of a global conspiracy. And the actual extremists will use their banning to justify why they were right to be extremist in the first place.
They should have stopped at people promoting violence, spam, and other obvious illegal stuff. Jumping into being the central body that moderates what is 'acceptable speech' online is minefield riddled crazy town with very little real ROI. Which will hopefully quicken Facebook's decline.
Which is it? You're contradicting yourself here.
Would be for or against YouTube removing videos that encouraged suicide in depressed individuals?
Wait, so talking about how great heaven is now considered extremism? That's bad news for most Abrahamic religions. I suspect you are trying to pull the narrative in diametrically opposing directions - to show the videos were both very benign and super dangerous - and the narrative just tears up.
> because they were inspiring suicide attacks by teaching pretty mainstream Islamic beliefs like: martyrs go to heaven.
Wait, so if I say that good people go to heaven, and somebody believes it's good to kill infidels, I am now an extremist? I think your narrative is missing something.
Suicide / death is as extreme as things get for living organisms.
It's not bigoted to state facts you don't like. Mean, maybe, if I time it right. In fact someone calling you a bigot in this isntance actually makes them a bigot.
Talk about a useless insult.
Regardless of the effects, this was also wrong, IMHO.
If you are a supporter of radically free expression, sometimes you have to allow radicals to express themselves too.
Edit: I know there will be a contingent that disagrees with this. For many people, the ends justify the means, regardless of the corrosive effect to civil liberties. In my opinion this is a myopic view.
Setting aside the fact that this culling has nothing to do with Neo nazi content... maybe islamic extremism is a greater threat because we've had decades to implement countermeasures to a resurgence of white supremacy, whereas islamic terrorists exploit existing gaps in our society's trust model? I'm confident that had the KKK employed trucks of peace in the 50s, civil engineers wouldn't have assumed that nobody would be insane enough to drive down a pedestrian thoroughfare at full speed.
Now back to the issue at hand. This is a purge of alternative media at the behest of Vox Media, of which Comcast is the majority shareholder. This has been going on for well over a year now, the old media making demands for Youtube deplatformings and policy changes. I started listing them, but the list of crybullies is effectively a list of all media companies founded before Youtube. It is really amazing how stupid Google has been in all this, because it seems that they don't understand who their competitors are in the attention market, and how those competitors have effectively transformed them from a relatively low maintenance and legally protected platform - into a legally exposed publisher full of upset content providers. Youtube has been a loss leader for a long time, which might explain the leadership selection and the lack of corrective action for laughably stupid executive decisions... but it is well beyond the point of just being a money hole - it is in the precedent setting legal liability zone at this point. They aren't even subtle about being a publisher anymore, selectively editorializing user generated content with editor's notes under the guise of fighting disinformation.
"The term Radical (from the Latin radix meaning root), during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, identified proponents of democratic reform, in what subsequently became the parliamentary Radical Movement."
"The term political radicalism (in political science known as radicalism) denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary or other means and changing value systems in fundamental ways. "
And of course the classic Rules for Radicals book about community organizing and starting grassroots movements.
Let's not label all radical things bad, it can become a way to suppress dissent and societal change.
Yet I am reading every day now about how "hate speech" has to be banned from Youtube, but I almost never hear Islamic radicals cited as an example. Most vividly discussed usually is some spat between a left-wing loudmouth and a right-wing loudmouth (usually both Americans of course, because that's where all the world's problems are, shut up Al Qaeda, ISIS and Taliban, you are all JV team compared to a rich American youtuber that says hurtful things about a rich American media personality), and usually the latter gets all passes in the world for calling for actual physical violence, and the former gets banned.
> and I think Muslims getting radicalized on YouTube plummeted.
You think that based on what data? What about Muslims radicalized not on YouTube? If they are just radicalized in other places, but in the same way and the same numbers, what's the point?
> White supremacy is a much bigger deal with a worse tail risk than Islamic extremism.
What you mean by "white supremacy"? If you mean actual people that think White race (whatever the hell that is) is supreme and are willing to take action to ensure its power - it is demonstrably false, the number of these people are tiny, and they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years. In fact, every manifestation they do draws like 10x more counter protesters. The only power they have is the press attention they get because they are useful to agenda-pushers as a scary monster that can justify giving more control over the speech to the government or megacorps.
OTOH, many people use "white supremacy" as synonymous to "Western culture" (I even saw presentation calling things like logical reasoning, competitiveness and insistence on keeping schedule being signs of "white supremacy"). In this case, it is a bigger deal that Islamic extremism, that is true. It is huge, strong and achieved much, though of course its history, like most of cultures, is filled both with heroic achievements and disgusting atrocities.
> Don’t see why anyone would object to removal of Neo nazi content yet go along with the removal of wahabi sermons.
One could maybe justify removal of the content calling for direct violent action. Otherwise, I do not see why a Muslim sermon calling for hating infidels is worse than a sermon from a Congress member calling for attacking and publicly harassing members of the opposing party. Both are despicable, but then let's start banning Congress members too - why should they get a free pass?
And I switched the "latter" and "former" but it's too late to edit... Duh.
That's probably just because banning radical Islamists isn't very controversial.
>What you mean by "white supremacy"? If you mean actual people that think White race (whatever the hell that is) is supreme and are willing to take action to ensure its power - it is demonstrably false, the number of these people are tiny, and they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/world/white-e...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-...
What about other 92% of overall attacks and 2/3 of US attacks? Would it be insane to suggest that 92% of attacks deserve a bit more attention than 8% of attacks?
Also:
We examined attacks perpetrated by anti-immigrant extremists, anti-Muslim extremists, neo-Nazi extremists, right-wing extremists, anti-Semitic extremists, neo-fascists, white extremists, anti-Arab extremists, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Sikh extremists and incel extremists.
This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!). To add on top of that, it also for some reason puts incels into the pile, which have nothing to do with racial angle at all. Moreover:
For episodes in which the identity of the perpetrator was unknown, we made a determination about ideology based on the target or through further research. We excluded episodes with insufficient evidence of ideological motivation.
That looks like it means each time a target who has been frequent target of racist extremists in the past was attacked, and the reason for attack is not known, it was assumed it's "white supremacists", if the researches themselves deemed the motivation "sufficient", by some unknown criteria. That is a good recipe for seriously biased results. For example, a string of Jewish centre bombing threats has been proven recently to be a work of one distubred Israeli teen. Has it not been known by now, it would be listed as "white supremacist" attacks, as it's clearly would be obvious that somebody who bombs a Jewish center must be a Nazi.
And with all that, it's still 8%. Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?
You'd have to see how big the other categories were to draw any conclusions.
In recent years, it's been widely reported that white supremicists have been responsible for more violence in the USA than Islamist extremists. See e.g.
https://www.jta.org/2019/01/24/opinion/right-wing-extremist-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-...
My point, though, was not that white supremacy is necessarily more of a danger than Islamist extremism, but that you were massively understating the danger it poses in your original comment ("they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years").
> This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!)
I think you're pulling a bit of a "no true white supremacist" move here. If you want to get into that kind of thing, we could also pick over the question of just how much "Islamic" terrorism is really Islamic in its motivation.
> Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?
I think so (?)
I don't have figures, and I'm not sure where one would obtain them. But I'd say that Islamist terror attacks certainly get more press coverage than white supremacist terrorism.
To all the people here who are decrying this as “censorship”, remember that during the early 2010s, Islamic radicals were getting radicalized on YouTube by pretty benign sermons (Ex: Awlaki and his “tour of Paradise” lectures that inspired Boston 2013, fort hood and a bunch of other international attacks). YouTube removed all that out and I think Muslims getting radicalized on YouTube plummeted.
White supremacy is a much bigger deal with a worse tail risk than Islamic extremism. Don’t see why anyone would object to removal of Neo nazi content yet go along with the removal of wahabi sermons.