this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Allowing racists and fascists a seat at the table under the guise of 'fairness' or 'free speech'. Reddit became polluted with far-right astroturfing in the last six years.
It is not tolerance to welcome those persons who seek to harm you.
We cannot tolerate intolerance.
That's a paradox. You cannot tolerate everything. That's why there's no such thing as not being bigoted. It's literally impossible to tolerate everything.
You just have to pick what things you're not going to tolerate. Now if only we could always agree on what that is.
Intolerance. Intolerance is the one thing you don't tolerate. It being a rhetorical paradox doesn't mean it's difficult to implement.
It absolutely is because there are things that you where you cannot tolerate both oposing viewpoints. There's also things that you do not want to tolerate.
Unless you believe it's not okay to be intolerant of murder.
I hope that helps illustrate how it's not just a rhetorical paradox. It's a conceptual one too. Much of the time, it's not tolerance vs intolerance. It's picking between two flavors of intolerance.
Well I mean if you're expanding the argument to things as well, then yeah, it becomes rather unwieldy. But if you constrain it to intolerance for people, then it remains rather simple.
Not at all. I'm not talking about just things. I'm also talking about about people.
It is not simple to determine the extent to which to tolerate different groups of people. Unless you're saying that you want to be equally tolerant of murderers, races, all religions, and people who like pineapple on pizza.
Murder falls under intolerance. Religion can exist without being intolerant, but often doesn't. The smell test really is pretty simple: if you're not actively hurting someone besides yourself, you should be tolerated. Along with that, we decide that intolerance for other reasons (ie, because of a person's genetic makeup or mode of expression) is itself harmful.
Now we can find tune and dicker about where that line of injury is, and of course there are special cases where the alleged hurt is spread around and it's hard to decide how to adjudicate that, but that's what the law and all its apparatus is for, after all.
Reddit was full of racists even back in the early 2010s. /r/Coontown was a prime example of that.
Whether or not it's tolerance isn't directly important.
The mistake that people make is assuming that tolerance is inherently good. It is to a certain degree, but there are many things that you do not want to tolerate. That's where we want to be.
However, many people think of themselves as tolerant and find it difficult to make that conceptual realization.
In the last 6 years? If anything, reddit got less tolerant of the far right since inception, it just became a bigger deal when they banned them in the last 6 years
You believe what you want to. Nothing I say is going to convince you, random internet person.
I had used reddit since the near beginning, and over time the prevalence of 'alternative facts' and other right-wing narratives has risen sharply. You also have communities like r/conservative that participate in open calls to violence and perpetuate right wing dogwhistles for maximum rage bait. The sheer slide of r/politicalcompassmemes going from people role-playing different ideologies to thinly-veiled alt-right propaganda speaks to this shift.
Catering to conservatives and right wing players results in the enshittification of the website.
I think that generally the internet got more of those types of people and they got louder, reddit used to have subreddits whose names were just slurs or subreddits blatantly dedicated to racism. The idea of a "dogwhistle" on reddit didn't exist because the racists just said and did racist things without fear of being banned.
Yeah, you're both right. There's less outright hate now, but more propaganda.
Political Compass Memes is the Fox News version of fair and balanced. It's intended to convert people with a thin veil of "both sides". And that thin veil will be enough for a lot of impressionable kids.
Well yeah, to continue with the fire metaphor, it's hard to put out a fire once you've already let it get out of hand. PLENTY of people were warning about those communities before they grew into the mob that stormed the capital, for example. Reddit only stepped in and did something about them when it became a bad look for them to let them keep shitting on the lawn.
Everyone should familiarize themselves with the paradox of tolerance if they haven't already.
what? reddit was an american "left" "look at how good of a person i am for hating on racists and pedophile" (like congrats?) circlejerk
the racists and fascists were contained in their subreddits and were ignorable
They shouldn't have even had those and they weren't 'contained'
maybe if you were actively looking for them or are very easy on the trigger of calling people racist, yeah they weren't contained I guess
Apathy toward intolerance only allows it to fester. You don't walk past a pile of embers and shrug just because nothing's currently on fire.
im sure banning those communities will end racism
Protecting minorities so our communities can be a diverse place makes them so much better though. No one claims it will end racism that is just a ridiculous straw man.
they almost always were in their own little corner
there's no protecting minorities if they choose to go to racist places
on the typical subreddits mods or even the admins themselves were fast to remove comments or posts so they were "protected"
I mean not really that's not how it was at all. Default subreddits were filled with racism. Comments and posts were not removed unless the comment was straight up saying slurs. Comments filled with less overt racism were heavily upvoted.
can you give an example?
It would be a lot easier for me to do if i hadn't deleted my reddit account. It is all over basically ever post muslims are demonized, the american military is not the evil it obviously is, mra's and anti-feminists infest the site, Moral police ranting against black lives matter, both siding between people wanting to live and the people who want to kill them, transphobia is the default and so many more hateful opinions were the default on reddit.
If you were lucky enough to never encounter them, then well, congratulations. That certainly wasn't my experience, or, I'd wager, a common experience.
I'm sure installing fire hydrants in cities will end structure fires.
well if you want to compare people to fires be my guest
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