I'm not shutting down the discussion, I'm adding to the discussion by offering my opinion. You're adopting a persecution complex when there isn't one to the extent you're implying.
I do agree there are the normal people who are honest about their biases but generally try to treat people fairly, and the "hyper-PC" people who make it a game of being the most "on the right side of history" to the extent that it becomes all they care about. I know those people and they are just as annoying and vitriolic as those who are openly sexist. However my point is generally that isn't not a simple "both sides" issue. The golden mean isn't a medium amount of sexism and transphobia, it's a neutral yet accepting attitude, which by default isn't anything phobic, thus leans more towards not being either than being either.
I guess you just didn't read what I wrote, that is fair, I make such mistakes all the time. If you read it you would notice that the thing I said is basically exactly what you said here, and since you disagreed with that it makes sense that I thought you wanted to shut down interesting conversations.
The anti-"isms" have a large mottle and bailey problem, so when people say they don't want you to ban racists or sexists they mean that they don't want to force everyone to tiptoe around sex or gender, it doesn't mean that they are fine with racism or sexism.
I think the level of racism and sexism on HN is roughly optimal. It isn't enough to drive people away, but discussions are still allowed. Too much and you create a racist/sexist monoculture.
For example, I would have gotten banned from most subreddits for what I said here.
My point, in my first post in this thread, was with this point, which is what I identified as what you were implying in your first post. You have a mentality that accepting racism/sexism is what causes HN to be interesting, or at least more interesting than Reddit. Your general mental frame seems to be "Reddit is always tip toeing about racism and offending people, which neuters how interesting/dynamic their discussions are, while HN explores the full range of thought and doesn't trivialize itself with those matters"
You are claiming that accepting racism/sexism causes things to be more interesting, but I'd wager it's a symptom of the general difference in culture, not a cause.
It's still possible to have a very interesting culture of discussion without racism or sexism, it just slightly narrows the scope of discussing not what is racist/sexist, but what simply appears racist or sexist. At what point, however, would discussing the history of development in nuclear physics, or compiler libraries, or any technical topic, be more interesting if racism/sexism were tolerated vs not tolerated?
I think the few cases where things which may be considered racist/sexist being tolerated making the site more interesting are cases where HN discusses caste discrimination, or the causes of the discrepant gender ratios in the tech world, or certain aspects of human behavior. But even so, what makes those discussions interesting isn't the subset of the discussions that may be sexist or racist, but rather the general analytical and investigative culture this forum has borne out of the more libertarian edge of 2000s silicon valley and internet culture.
My gripe is that a lot of people think that the capacity to tolerate sexism/racism is an inherent strength, an inability to be phased by the squeamishness and hall-monitoring style policing that affects most people, when in reality it's just their ability to justify their normal human biases with their intellect.
It's not that "accepting racism/sexism" is a symptom or a cause of the general difference in culture. It just is the culture. A logically necessary aspect of the culture. Remove it, and you've lost the culture.
You claim that this is just something that people who enjoy racist and misogynistic jokes say. That is absurd. Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, John Stuart Mill, etc. - are these people all just racists and misogynists? Norman Finkelstein, when he says that Holocaust denialism should be taught in college by Holocaust denialists - is that because he just wants to be able to make jokes about the Holocaust?
No one has tried to "shut you down." They're just disagreeing with you. Isn't that what you wanted? A vigorous, diverse dialogue? You can't praise diversity of opinions and then claim oppression when someone's opinion diverges from yours.
Perhaps you shouldn't assume things that were never said.
So yeah, although he never said it he strongly implied it. And then we resolved the differences later. Anyway, the whole point is that people go extremely hard on you, so they misread what you say and take it you are racist or sexist etc for basically nothing, that is why these things results in so boring communities. And his post is an example of such a missunderstanding, in a less accepting community I would have been banned there and never be coming back.
That was exactly my point, those things doesn't take any effort. But if you put in a lot of effort to get as far away from those things as possible then you will be boring. And such people will often accuse others of being racist or sexist even when they weren't, thus forcing the entire environment to become boring.
If I didn't agree with your here I wouldn't say "depends on how strict". But of course you here is too strict, since me even talking about that made you judge me. Thankfully this website is pretty open and not very strict, so interesting opinions are allowed here, while you seem to want to shut down interesting discussions even when they aren't racist or sexist.
> It romanticizes a kneejerk contrarian misanthropy that's just as boring.
How is diversity ever more boring than monoculture? I support diversity and therefore I am against monoculture. The important part here is to not judge people. Traditional internet forums were full of feminists etc as well, they weren't mono culture, it was very rich.