> When people refer to racist views at SSC they don't mean that literally as a rule, they're just disparaging uncomfortable views about very well defined issues in social science and the like, that have zilch to do with superiority or supremacism of any sort, naziism etc. Shooting the messenger, basically.
Do please specify what those "uncomfortable views" actually are.
> it works because we as a society have a visceral negative reaction to some labels.
Do you know why we have that reaction? Because of millions upon millions of dead, innocent humans. That is what those ideologies lead to. We learned this lesson once, and we learned it very well. We don't want that to happen again. We don't want to let those ideas spread again. We don't want to see the mass graves again they lead to again. We learned that.
It's still unclear to me what the benefit is, though. The drawbacks are obvious - I have to wear a headset, I lost the physical interfacing, both in terms of input interfaces and in terms of being able to, say, just a put an e-reader down to stop reading it. What do I gain, after giving up all that?
Yeah, but all the things mentioned are things that require my full attention for longer spans of time. I don't need separate displays for them, I need one single good display.
Regulators were definitely not asleep at the wheel. They were apparently actively defending them, for instance by attempting to sue the Financial Times for reporting on the irregularities.
It is, in fact, not useful for communication, because it does not honestly communicate anything. It exists only to undermine people who try to call you out on making bigoted remarks. It was coined by ESR, and is popular mainly with people with a strong affinity for bigotry, like him, and also libertarians.
"Kafkatrap" is a meaningless term, beyond "stop calling me a racist just for saying racist things".
Acting like it's an accepted logical fallacy is ridiculous. It's a term ESR made up because people kept rightly calling him a sexist and racist and he didn't like it and threw a tantrum.