Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by IgorPartola on Sunday June 28, 2020 @06:29AM (#23667878)

I am not sure what you mean by racism/sexism/eugenics being false. If you mean why they are bad ideas, I can only do so much in terms of links, since I learned that these ideas are bad before the web was popular. I guess here are some things you might want to consider:

* Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Make sure to get the NC17 unabridged book for the non-sugarcoated version. * All humans are virtually genetically identical. Can’t find a good primary source at 6am, but start with this: https://www.quora.com/Do-all-humans-have-the-same-genome-seq.... Black people are no different than white people, and you won’t find anything inherently different about either group other than some external appearance. It logically follows that discriminating by skin color is arbitrary, like discriminating say by height or eye color. * Racism is bad for society. https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Negative-Effects-Of-Racism-FJ... * Racism is bad for the economy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/racism-riots-economics-.... * A much better explanation than I can write at the moment on why it’s wrong: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-racism-wrong?share=1

I am not going to spend more time Googling for you on this, but feel free to continue the research yourself. Try searching “effects of X on Y” and “morality of Z” and “why is W wrong” if you want to see those points of view. Form your own opinion, but keep one thing in mind: the often cited argument for a lot of this stuff is that “we’ve never implemented it correctly”. I hear this a lot about communism nowadays. There are a lot of setups where the idea inevitably leads to an outcome. For example, the US political and elections system inevitably leads to a two party system. It can be mathematically proven that this is the case. Similarly, ideas like racism inevitably lead to human and economic suffering, and those who try to separate the idea and it’s effect as implemented should be suspect of making arguments in bad faith. Examine their theories more closely.

Lastly, there is only so much you can learn from short form articles on the web. Read Sapiens. Read a couple or history books on WWII. Talk to a concentration camp survivor if you can find one. Talk to a Nazi solder. Talk to almost any woman in your life. I guarantee you that your mother experienced sexism, sexual harassment, and chances are outright sexual assault, since a very large percentage of women have in their lives statistically speaking.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by concordDance on Sunday June 28, 2020 @08:04AM (#23668207)

I greatly appreciate you taking the time to find things, it displays a good will and charitable nature that's often lacking in the world. :)

That said, I have done a fair bit of googling and for various reasons, which would be too much of a digression to go into, have found most of those kinds of resources unsatisfying (e.g. the idea that differences are only skin deep is trivially refutable by racists). By possible coincidence I've already looked at most of the resources you linked (e.g. Sapiens and Uncle Tom's Cabin) and the HBDers still make a more convincing case. And I think this is mostly because while the HBDers can easily read the arguments of anti-racists and come up with counters, anti-racists are not even aware of the content of HBDer stuff and so cannot argue against it.

I think the censorship of racist thought (and other outside-Overton-Window thought) has indirectly lead to anti-racist argumentation weakening due to lack of understanding of what their opponents actually think and argue.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by IgorPartola on Sunday June 28, 2020 @09:44AM (#23668644)

What you are describing isn’t a situation of refuting arguments. If I tell you that you can’t find the resources you seek because the racists have bugged all your devices and are constantly messing with your search results and reading material, I wouldn’t refute your argument. I would simply be ignoring reality or outright lying. That’s the reason why it’s so easy for a racist to come up with a counter argument to “turns out we are not genetically different): their argument needs only to appeal to a feeling, not be rooted in fact. In fact, the speed with which they come up with counter-arguments indicates mental gymnastics more than knowledge of the subject. Arguments for racism often center around specific “self-evident” truths which if you examine closely turn out to be simply circular arguments. As an example, one argument is that black people commit more crime than white people. If you look at certain statistics a certain way, you could come to that conclusion. But this ignores certain facts. For example, crime is much more strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. A poor white town is going to have just as much crime as an equally poor town occupied primarily by any race. But because white people got a bit of a head start in the US (as in were not bought and sold as property and not worked to death against their will), the median income for a black family is lower than for a white family. And of course keep in mind that most white collar crime is committed by white men who make up the majority of the C level at most corporations. We rarely prosecute that kind of crime even though it can be a lot more damaging (as in murder of one person means a murder charge. Dumping toxic waste into rivers that leads to hundreds of thousands of birth defects and genetic dresses is “white collar” so we fine the company and fire the exec, but nobody goes to prison).

Look closely, and you will find inconsistencies in these arguments. Oh, sure there are plenty of them but none of them seems to really hold up to scrutiny. Few will cite scientific studies (some will go as far as saying that science is censored so you shouldn’t trust it which is an obvious red flag for someone making shit up), and ones that do often misinterpret or misquote it. If you’d like we can try it out: find the best written argument for any of these points of view and we can together break down exactly where the lies and fabrications are.

[ Parent | on HN ]