Back around the debates when the Proud Boys were in the news, I watched a Vice segment about them.

Apparently their current leader is of Cuban descent as was most of the people in the segment. Out of the eight members in the video, six of them previously voted for Obama.

I don't know too much about them except from what I saw on Vice. Is it really a group of white supremacists?

edit: Reference: The Right-Wing Latinos of Miami: Proud Boys and Refugees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Qa1f29diE

I think they call themselves Western chauvinists (meaning something about Western culture being superior), not white supremacists.

Latino culture has lots of super right-wing adherents, and many of them are in South Florida.

They are definitely becoming more and more radicalized, but I don't know where you get this white power stuff. Their leader is a minority and many of their members are black, and other minorities.

However, I think deplatforming them has made them more radical. I think that we are going to see this more and more, by isolating people and forcing them to go into places where there are no public postings, nobody is going to see how radical they get. You are going to lose some people but the really dangerous people will wind up reinforced in their belief that they are being persecuted, and if they think they have nowhere to go and nothing to hope for, I think we are going to start seeing some real ugly violence.

I think you are right regarding white power.

Right, dangerous hipster nerds, but they were on the fringes of the mainstream. If I remember correctly, Joe Rogan had Gavin McInnes on his show around that time. He was not by any means "center-right", but at least "acceptable" in the way that Ben Shapiro is today.

There's an adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that's obviously been missing in the long winter of the past few years.

There are good reasons to believe that adage is apocryphal. How do you square that with e.g. the mere exposure theory, in which the very act of seeing something makes you more accepting of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

Interesting question.

I don't think these two concepts are in opposition. Of course, exposure to a toxic ideological viewpoint is poisonous for the recipient, and may in fact entice them to become more toxic themselves (if they are swayed by said reasoning). But a crucial part of the societal contract is to tolerate such toxic viewpoints so as to have the opportunity to redeem those who hold them. In other words, by eating a little bit of the poison ourselves, we are granted the opportunity to save that person from their own poison, by showing compassion and empathy towards them.

People who have hate in their hearts are not entirely bad people. Everyone was once a child, everyone has experienced the mystery of simply existing, almost everyone has experienced love (whether from their parents or someone else), most people enjoy art and music. Evoking our shared humanity and showing compassion for others allows us to break down their toxic ideologies and even reform them to be beacons of compassion themselves.

Perhaps the best and most compelling anecdote to promulgate this way of thinking is Daryl Davis, who, through his talents and love of music, has reformed many of the most hateful people in our country — members of the KKK. I would recommend this TED talk by him, titled "Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw. It really encapsulates the power of this viewpoint.

The crucial element here is ensuring that we have channels of communication that allow for this sort of compassionate understanding... I fear that the compression of thought foisted upon us by social media platforms and online communication tools obscures the basic reality of our shared suffering, joy, intrigue, and humanity. These important facets of communication can be lost to the aether of technology, and our true intentions are thereby belied by the incorrigibly weak substrate of written language.

As a note, I think we have discussed the topic of free speech in another thread before. It's good to "see" you again :)

> apocryphal

Apocryphal means that the origin of the story is doubtful.

I think you might mean "the adage is incorrect" here.

exposure is happening both ways

What violent conspiracy theories is the left exposing people to?

I meant something else. When groups are not in their own respective bubbles, indeed, non-extremists might be exposed to extremists' propaganda and potentially can adopt such ideas, and as a result, increase the amount of overall extremism.

On the other hand, similarly, an extremist exposed to non-extremists' propaganda potentially may be affected by it as well, decreasing the amount of overall extremism.

Or perhaps the total amount of extremism stays the same and instead it is spread out over large number of people, removing "spikes".

I do not know if it is true. But just an idea to consider - the discussed process of de-platforming removes _two-way_ communication method.

Please stop using HN for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do this. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've been around for many years and have used HN in the intended way in the past. But please stick to the spirit of the site—intellectual curiosity—in the future. We're all responsible for protecting the commons here, no matter how others are behaving.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Got it.

You know, dang, I am an old man. Born in Soviet Union, seen the scars of that brutal regime. Came here without English and money. Went to work. Went to college, then medical school in Chicago, residency in Harvard, and fellowship in NY. Started one of the first medical blogs, in 2004, that still going on. Lots of work in the hospital, big cases.

I would consider my bio full of intellectual pursuits.

Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes society makes mistakes, and these mistakes can live for hundreds of years...

Maybe I made a mistake. But maybe what you consider a failure of intellectual pursuit, is your own biases.

But point taken. I’ll limit comments.

PS Here’s an interesting idea for you (and that’s not to offend you, really): try to find and ban someone on a comment that lacks intellectual curiosity and scores political points, and has many upvotes. Surely there’s a comment like that today, somewhere?

That's a great story! There's a lot of rich experience for some great HN posts in that, too.

I didn't mean to imply that you were lacking in intellectual pursuits or depth or anything like that, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's just stock moderation language. All I have to go on are the things an account has posted, especially the recent things an account has posted.

Usually, when people are battling their political or ideological enemies in internet comments, they leave out all of the background and motivations and experiences that have led them to feel the way that they do. That's a shame, because if we included such things it would make it easier for us to relate to each other. It also means that our comments—especially flamewar comments—create a one-dimensional picture of us in the reader's mind. That of course is not an accurate picture of at all, but there's very little information transfer going on in these arguments.

I'm not sure I understood your last suggestion there but we don't consider upvotes when banning accounts. We also don't ban established accounts for just one thing they posted—we'd warn them instead. Bans are for when an account has built up a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. There are some exceptions to that, but they're probably not relevant here.

Thanks for writing such a humane response. I appreciate it.

Thanks to you too.

Snide comments tend to get such a reception, regardless of which side they are promoting. I am sure "Many colleges would find it difficult to arrange for Ben Shapiro to speak on their campuses" would be received much better than what you wrote.

In my book, there's something fundamentally wrong when one person tells another how to speak. It's dictatorial, anti human rights, even.

And just because something is well received doesn't mean that it is right, or moral, or anything, really. Countless speeches were well received before some of the most atrocious events in human history.

The right threw a pre planned riot because they didn't like the outcome of an election. The left threw riots over unarmed black men being killed with impunity for generations. One of those groups has a moral right to riot.

> One of those groups has a moral right to riot.

The trouble with morality is that if you ask someone if what they are doing is morally justified, they will pretty much always say yes.

It very quickly devolves into might makes right, which is more or less where we're headed.

Do people also have a moral right to not have their business burned to the ground, even when they had nothing to do with George Floyd's death? Asking for a friend.

I disagree heavily. The focus of this conversation seems misdirected, whether intentionally or not. It’s not about the fragility of morality as a system at all, which it of course is because it’s based on consensus. It’s about fundamental principles and upholding them, and how you prioritize those principles.

You seem to believe in upholding right to free speech, which, surely is crucial to the country. However, this other group you speak of is protesting their rights to life and liberty, which they are being actively deprived of by an oppressive regime. Isn’t it slightly unfair? What rights is the right being deprived of? Entitlement to a certain election result or a certain office? That opposes the very definition of this democracy. They have means for their voices to be heard and their issues to be heard, still, by the right’s representatives in Congress. Black people didn’t/don’t because law enforcement was/is being racist and oppressive in unfairly killing them.

To be clear, I don't think rioting is ever morally justified. Peaceful protesting is a different matter.

The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful".

Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital.

My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it."

I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that.

I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal.

> One of those groups has a moral right to riot.

My rights end where others rights starts or something to that effect.

The policeman in the car had a human right not to be executed.

People have a right not to get their homes burned to the ground.

etc.

Can you give me an example of recent moral insurrection?