The other user is right. Any tolerance for those ideologies gives them a foothold. It makes room for them. There can be no room, at all, for that shit. Ever. Arguing otherwise is dangerous. There is no nuance here. At all.

Over the past several days I’ve seen you draw out many good faith disagreements about racism or nazism into what seem like intentionally blurry “just asking questions” type derailments whereby you try to shift the topic of the discussion to other, emotional or tangential details and or try to misrepresent the issue at hand to make the racism or nazism seem not that bad. I really don’t think someone would do that if they were coming from a place of genuine confusion or curiosity or dialogue. I might be wrong, but taken together it really gives the impression, intent aside, that you’re trying to spin up plausible arguments for far right stuff and then sow confusion whenever people say “hey, don’t do that, it’s harmful”. I just don’t believe there’s wiggle room here. I don’t want to have a circular conversation about it, but i do want to point out directly what you’re doing, because I think it sucks, and I think that you should stop.

I just want to state very emphatically that deradicalizing people is a specific skill set and set of actions that is completely different than “being friendly to nazis”. And tolerating bigotry so that people don’t feel bad about their bigotry is just tolerating bigotry. On that note, on another post you argued heavily with multiple users that white privilege is not real and that you were being oppressed for your whiteness. I thought maybe you were very young, or confused, and tried to have empathy and explain some concepts, but here you are now also arguing that we need to be nice to nazis for the good of society so that they don’t feel oppressed. I suppose you might say that pointing this out and making you feel more oppressed would drive you further away, but a better approach, i think, would be to tell you very very directly that the things you have been saying here, in multiple places, are white supremacist talking points. And no one here is going to condone that. Stop. If you need help stopping, that is your responsibility, not the hypothetical 9 other peoples’.

RIGHT. Thank you for pointing this out.

:::

I feel like they always try to make it sound more complicated and high minded. I really don’t believe it is!

I really struggle to take seriously what these tech people say about ‘not wanting to censor’. They made a business calculation, and maybe an ideological one, and decided “we want that nazi money, it’s worth it to us.” which really tells you everything about a company and how it is likely to approach other issues, too.

I think there’s probably a lot of profit in creating the impression among (disproportionately young) users that they can, though.

I disagree with you here. I just don’t think it makes any sense. People are too complex and varied.

Fascinated by this. Especially because it seems now (ideally) someone with more time and expertise than me will now have to verify or disprove whether companies really do this.

I don’t think you can know anything about a person based on their perceived affiliation to a culture. Wars, nuclear or otherwise, aren’t fought by cultures or even countries, but by groups of powerful individuals within those things, and people are all different and have infinitely varying thoughts about things that their governments do, or that other people they share a group affiliation with do. I think it’s best to target any resentment about a specific event at the actual people who took part in making it occur, and not at people who happen identify with the same culture as the hypothetical nuclear perpetrators. The latter doesn’t make any sense to me, unless the goal is to come up with a pre-justification for cruelty or discrimination, which often has a secondary practical purpose beyond just “I’m upset about that nuclear war”.

Thanks y’all

Hey I just want to say i think this is a really good question and I’m glad you asked it. So many things get recycled into the language and we don’t know/ever get taught their original meanings. I think it’s good to look into, not just to avoid social slip ups, but because language and idioms have an impact on how we think about things. I’m glad to have these links on my radar

So there’s a big whole complex of online harassment, offline harassment, misogynistic attitudes, beliefs about dating, “strategies” for “getting” women to date or have sex with you, weird money related ideas about all of this, ideas about strategies to turn a no into a yes, etc etc, that is in the background whenever normal low stakes human interactions are happening. So it’s not the act of saying “hi, you seem cool, let’s get coffee” that is the problem. It’s the context. Tinder is making the context so, so much worse. It’s creating creating conditions that make an otherwise normal ‘hi’ seem more likely to be in bad faith, and sending a signal to malicious people that a new option for being malicious has opened up. So, even if the vast majority of people looking to meet humans this way are totally kind and earnest, it brings a certain vibe to the entire thing that will make many people, especially women who have had scary or unpleasant experiences in that vein, very uncomfortable, and cause them to think twice about that “hi”, because they know that access to their inbox has been sold, when that was never allowed before, to people who may be more likely to have bought into the aforementioned complex of bad ideas. It makes the “hi” not normal anymore.

Hey me too! High five!! It really is so maddening to watch people stay inside of and give cover to something that is so obviously not okay. If i think too hard about the people around my age in my family who will probably never leave, or stand up for themselves, or their own kids, and on and on forever, my brain breaks. Cult behavior.

deleted by creator

Thanks for linking this.

The incredible horror of tying self worth to romantic “success” and then charging people money for it, is awful on its face, but it leads to much worse things too. This is, in effect, charging money for people to have “access” to people who haven’t consented to being contacted, furthering the idea that money=access to people who can’t say no to you. Tinder is monetizing peoples’ emotional need for connection at best, which is horrible, but at worst it’s also propping up a whole complex of ideas that erode respect and consent toward potential romantic or sexual partners, and that the far end eventually leads to like, Andrew Tate shit. And why wouldn’t it work? People have had their self worth obliterated by the commodification of human beings that is mainstream heteronormative dating culture. Tech companies making themselves the mediator of human connection, romantic or platonic or in terms of activism, hobbies, groups, etc - and then charging money for us to know each other and meet each other - horrifies me daily.

I don’t think it’s any one factor. I actually think it’s dangerous to think that there iis - the idea that there is some inherent gene or trait or personality type or social condition or event that makes a person evil, has, ironically led to some evil things. The world is a complex web of cause and effect and belief and experience and different ways of reacting to emotion and different decision making and every person is located in a different relationship to all of those things. There’s no one type or person or type of environment or situation that causes bad things, just a series of complex things that are worth being nuanced and thoughtful about.

That, I can’t tell you - I tend to move to pen and paper for anything too sensitive, so I haven’t looked too deeply into that feature

Joplin!