> You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see
Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.
That's a weird way to frame a truly free speech environment. Yes, speech is more limited to left-leaning speech on most accepted parts of the internet. That doesn't make a board that allows both to be right-leaning. It means that most of the internet is left-leaning.
Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.
Truly free, as in no limitation. I would include doxing, slander, and defamation to fall under "truly free speech", yes. That it not me advocating for these things, it is me calling limiting them what it is: limiting speech. We limit them because they can be very dangerous or destructive, not because they aren't speech.
You can also be a communist. You can also be an open source maximalist. You can also be a gay dog furry. You can also be trans. You can also be extremely autistic.
It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.
What is it that you feel like you gain from being exposed to white nationalism?
Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!
Someone might say the same thing about trans people. Should I be extremely uncomfortable talking to a trans person? Of course not. Many people think I should though.
As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind.
We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.
You don't have the opportunity to change their mind that's an illusion that works in their favor:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.
>But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly
You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them.
You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality.
How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?
> How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?
a lot of them. Nazis in dog costumes are an actual population on the board and get into frequent conflicts with non nazi pornographic content consumers. You just need to check out the 18+ boards and you see it almost immediately.
Discarding people rather than their views and arguments is what creates extremists. When you see people as members of a group rather than individuals then you push them towards the extremists of that group.
Edgelords that argue for sport exist of course but they too are people - and might not even believe in whatever ideologies they are meming.
You were arguing against an argument by popularity or something like that, but giraffe lady didn't say that you should be uncomfortable talking to nazis because they're near universally reviled? But because they are reprehensible, not due to how they're considered.
I think isolating white nationalists just makes them congregate on echo chambers more. There should be a balance; you should not talk to racists/people with evil views if you can't maintain boundaries with them. So I don't disagree that you should be uncomfortable
You didn't say it outright. But your words definitely contained a strong degree of innuendo that two groups were, in terms of potential for being intrinsically repulsive to others -- basically equivalent.
> Someone might say the same thing about trans people.
Sure, they might, but it'd be ridiculous.
Being a white nationalist is a choice someone makes (and continues to make every day) whereas being trans is not.
Further, white nationalism is associated with bigoted actions (including speech) whereas trans is just someone's personal identity that doesn't really affect anyone else. The two aren't remotely comparable.
I don't agree with white nationalism but I don't believe it is a choice someone makes. For the most part, you can't choose to believe something or not. Sure, you can choose to not engage in the actions and speech characteristic of white nationalists, but so can trans people stay closeted.
> dang: That doesn't work. The only things that work are to email hn@ycombinator.com or rely on randomness. The former works most of the time and the latter works some of the time.
If you're literally developing a hatred for some group of people, you're probably spending too much time in toxic online spaces. Perhaps you should consider reducing your exposure to that kind of content. It's a hazard for the soul.
(I'd have said the same thing if you said you were developing a hatred for right-leaning people or anyone else.)
And you should be uncomfortable talking to someone who is indifferent about supporting industrialized animal torture that is also destroying the climate, just because animals are "lesser" or "created by God for us to eat". But that's like, whatever, not the reprehensible evil in fashion.
Unrelated to this topic, but I don't see a logical way around this.
I guess I shouldn't talk to anyone. Almost unironically. Or should disengage from people who push into my boundaries, who would turn me into a worse person. So any white supremacist who keeps trying to "convince" me would be substantially worse than a meat eater who respects my views and doesn't push.
No. You can substitute "Black" for "white", because Black is a specific ethnicity, the one the United States created when it kidnapped millions of people from African and forcibly stripped them of their heritage and culture, and subsequently shared the defining experiences of Black culture, including Jim Crow and forcible segregation, which, along with being crimes against humanity, also helped fuse a distinct cultural identity. Saying "It's OK to be Black" is like saying "It's OK to be Polish" or "It's OK to be Irish", which are things you can absolutely say. Part of the legacy of slavery is that for a large number of Black people, it's difficult to declare an affiliation with their origins in Africa: we took their ethnicity from them in a way nobody took my ancestors Irishness.
It's not a privilege Black people get; it's perfectly linguistically coherent.
No, it is NOT ok to be a communist. Communists and white nationalists are morally equivalent, though communism to date has a much higher body count than white nationalism and their methods of execution and torture have on balance been more savage and more brutal.
on that grounds it’s also not ok to be a capitalist… maybe I’m not familiar enough with communism but I didn’t think it inherently included genocide like white nationalism tends to?
A money quote for those who can't be bothered to read: Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.
And people still want to be communists. Ideology is strange.
Is that not due to the specific regime regardless of the political ideology? Communism doesn't inherently include brutal totalitarian autocrats? we've certainly seen them under other systems as well.
> Communism doesn't inherently include brutal totalitarian autocrats?
It's a "smoking causes cancer" situation. Just because other things also cause cancer doesn't mean that smoking doesn't. Read up on the history, look at each communist country, see what they become. Smoking causes cancer.
There's just still a bunch of communists who deny it because it's uncomfortable. Just like Neo-Nazis are denying the holocaust. If they were proud of it, they wouldn't deny it. They're not, but they'd like to keep the rest of their worldview intact and pretend that it didn't happen. Don't be like that, look at the history.
Fair enough, I can agree that communism has a bad track record. Though if I were to go back to my original point there's certainly an inherent violence in white nationalism that is unacceptable and being tolerant of this is paradoxical.
There are countries that while not communist, successfully enact a blend of socialism and capitalism without any significant violence. I don't think white nationalism has any sort of validly applicable aspects that can be stretched to that effect.
> Though if I were to go back to my original point there's certainly an inherent violence in white nationalism that is unacceptable and being tolerant of this is paradoxical.
I don't think it does any more than any other form of nationalism does. Are the Baltic countries violent in your eyes? Their nationalism necessarily is hard to distinguish from ethnic nationalism, because they're very homogeneous. All they'd need to do to be white nationalists is to declare so openly. They're a pretty peaceful bunch, unless you invade them (like the Soviets found out in the Winter War).
Communism on the other hand, is necessarily violent, it cannot function without violently suppressing those who do not believe in it, and it will, always and without fail, go on an eradication trip to do so.
I think there's a notable difference though, the baltic states may be ethnic nationalists... but they're established nations. And sure, while they could claim to be white nationalists... they do not seem to want to make that association.
White nationalism universally seeks to carve out its own space at the expense of others. It's impossible to engage with the ideology without associating with violence.
This post really illustrates the expansion of terms into meaninglessness. One presumes they're referring to the Allies (who themselves would now be considered extremely racist) stopping the Nazis, who allied with the Japanese and were targeting/killing mostly Jewish and Slavic peoples. The Nazis were specifically pro-German/Aryan and whatever they thought that meant ethnically. They did not see things in today's racial terms. It's absurd to describe them as "white nationalists" because they didn't think that being "white" was good. There were a lot of "bad" "white" people in their worldview.
It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.
I would strongly recommend reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans. Most people have a rather propagandistic view of the war and this series is easily accessible for the layman and does a really good job at laying out what happened and when and why.
this is a baffling comment! white nationalists still very often hate jewish people! they are not dramatically different and still have a tendency to idolize nazis!
It's definitely not OK to a be communist. One of the most hurtful ideologies out there. Proven again and again. It's definitely not OK to be a fascist or an islamist either.
For what it's worth, you can openly be a white nationalist (or black nationalist, or any other kind of racial nationalist) on most social media, even here on Hacker News.
However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated.
I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.
I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On websites like Facebook or reddit, you're either screaming into the void or preaching to the choir.
Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.