Them: “I hate all black people, we must solve the problem of brown-ness which is pervasive in our society .”
This commenter: “You should listen closely to the complaints of these people, they have legitimate concerns and you need to become an ally to help them tackle the problems they are mentioning. They are not directing hate at you in particular so you should not be personally offended.”
This article is not good. It has its good points but the rest of it is deeply and completely flawed and it definitely has the feeling of ideological propaganda.
If you don’t know why that is the case, I will explain.
Firstly, it causes me actual physical pain to read because I have a son and society has become so default toxic towards men and assumes that they are somehow evil and guilty for....wanting sex and not knowing how to get it, or laughing at stupid jokes...
The reason this article is bad is that it is that it does exactly the things which cause the alt-right movement to get stronger and stronger, while knowing that it is doing them. It is hard for me to look at this other than a form of propaganda.
Here are the real, severe problems:
1. Categorize everyone who disagrees with you as a Nazi or alt-right. 43% of the population leans republican, call them all Nazis and you get the alt right.
2. Ignore or dismiss 100% of the counter arguments without naming what they are, just that they “must be wrong”
3. dismissing the entire validity of the alt-right by saying “there was one Nazi there”
There was a Nazi in Seattle once, he got punched in the face after ten minutes by a mob from the Internet. It doesn’t mean that everyone in Seattle is a Nazi.
What Liberals are going to have to do in order to get people like me to ever vote for them again is the following:
- admit There are extreme views on both sides and we can see how certain aspects of the Democratic Party are out of control, but that doesn’t excuse allowing Nazis, get rid of them and we will get rid of our nutcases also
- If you don’t agree with 100% of what we are saying you still are welcome. We are not going to destroy your career and reputation if you want to argue over specifics
- We are not going to use the words “whiteness” and “privilege” as a derogatory insult implicating all white people as being bad.
I work in tech, my twitter stream is filled with anti male and anti white rhetoric. I have blocked dozens of people for this reason.
- We are going to proactively eliminate bad actors with extremely racist and negative, toxic views from our own side
Until the Democratic Party and liberals admit to these things, moderate their tone, I am never, never, never coming back, and I voted for Obama twice.
It is time to stop pretending that there is only a single right answer, this article is exactly the propaganda that is driving the alt right and if it continues you are going to see it grow and I will be joining it, at this rate, I’d this continues.
(1) Most of Nassim Taleb’s math is more branding and showing off than actual science or statistics. It has been stated by people who are far smarter than Taleb that “if you can’t state it simply then you don’t understand it.” If Richard Feynman can explain physics in a relatable way, then taleb can talk about statistics in the same. He doesn’t because explaining is not his objective, personal branding is.
Taleb uses obscure, nonsensical math to show off and brow beat opponents. In my experience, working with people who are actually smart, this is not what very educated and intelligent people do.
The general public may fall for pictures of pages of obscure nonsensical calculations depicting god knows what, all I see is fraudulent personal marketing.
I say this having worked for and known CEOs who use the same tricks to lie to investors. It’s bullshit.
(2) Nate Silver runs a media opinion network. I followed his work and early on they did very rigorous analysis and had great and accurate visualizations which did seem to accurate predict results.
For whatever reason, I saw five thirty eight evolve into a bunch of media talking points and opinion mongering. The coverage on five thirty eight for the 2016 election resembled strongly that of standard news networks.
Why? Because if you want to make money on advertising you need to completely fill the airwaves with as much content as possible and opinion content is the cheapest and easiest to produce.
My opinion is that Nate slipped. His data analysis got distracted by running a media business, which focuses on advertising revenue and being likable by target demographics.
Frankly I don’t trust either of them. I also side more strongly with Taleb - predicting outcomes with random hidden variables is an exercise in chicanery.
No one wants to hear that the universe is random and that predicting it is impossible for long stretches of time. Look at the comments here, 90% of people (probably programmers) think that if they can just find the right equations then predicting the future is possible.
This commenter: “You should listen closely to the complaints of these people, they have legitimate concerns and you need to become an ally to help them tackle the problems they are mentioning. They are not directing hate at you in particular so you should not be personally offended.”