I can understand why you think the way you do and the way you construct your arguments, unlike some others in this thread, makes me believe you're genuine.
But I hope you can see that there are a large number of people who see a physical assault on the peaceful transition of power as a threat to the continuance of our government. An existential threat.
We are never going to change our minds on this and you have no right to ask us to overlook it because that's sort of like asking us to ignore an arsonist who we know set a fire, who has proclaimed the desire to set fires.
Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.
How can you possibly ask people to look past this? With a straight face?
You're one of those people, I suspect, who gets tripped up on literal definitions of things. It doesn't matter what, specifically, is an attempted coup and what isn't. People will use imprecise terminology and if you want to talk politics you may just have to grow up about that fact.
Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.
Once you only care about silencing those who would point out fascism, it becomes easy enough. Watchful moderation willing to act is necessary.
I'm unsurprised that HN is being exploited this way, but I am pleasantly surprised that there are people seeing them in operation like yourself and the others speaking up.
The truth gets buried, ultimately, not by these bad-faith arguments, but by the giant thread above consisting of those who prefer to live in the world of the 90s where Republicans and Democrats worked to further their specific interests collectively in an organized fashion, and listening to both sides made sense.
I don't know if the memo is going to get out: those Republicans are gone. Those days are gone. Once the party has turned fascist I don't think there's going back, it's not like they can turn away from their deceived or delusional voters.
HN isn't a politics forum, its only function is to provide value for YCombinator. It can't address these foundational failures in human thinking.
Haidt's work gets trotted out a lot, but it was prior to the fascist turn of the Republican party. Now Republicans live in a mostly imagined political reality.
This is the problem with concepts of polarization: when one side is completely corrupt, reporting on that corruption (that is, observing basic reality) becomes a political act easily described as 'biased.'
>I don't personally find what he's saying there to be especially problematic.
And you're right in theory; in theory it's fine to give people a chance to express their opinion. In theory the out-of-mainstream views have some insight that's worth the questionable bits.
But in practice, what Scott Alexander did was cultivate a community of racists. He provided a platform, he provided cover for them.
From a purely consequential point of view Scott Alexander's political writing has been a detriment. Surely no one would consider "My community is well known as a racist gathering spot" a successful outcome.
It's not just the cost of doing business with regard to free speech norms, it's a poor application of free speech norms reproducing basic racism.
I wouldn't say he's racist but it's almost worse. He didn't think about how this would go down, which is to say, when you court an audience that has a reputation of being overtly racist, your audience will become more and more racist, driving good people out.
I wouldn't say he's racist but it's almost worse. He didn't think about how this would go down, which is to say, when you court an audience that has a reputation of being overtly racist, your audience will become more and more racist, driving good people out.
It's not that it's hard to read his texts, and sometimes there's still some good stuff in there. It's that once someone shows bad judgment you have to think about how that manifests, and that manifests in poor thinking that's well-disguised.
Once you know a clock is broken don't use it to tell the time.
There's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the big players that are supposedly legit.