This seems to generalise just as much as you accuse ‘people who lash out at right wing thinking’ of doing. There are plenty of people who dislike right wing ideas and comprehend that other people make different value judgements. And it’s far from clear that precisely all of them ‘have no fucking clue’—or even what that means: is this some balance fallacy nonsense?
Yeah. Otherwise, who decides? Nobody is qualified to define allowable speech and thinking. Exceptions to any attempt at sets of "allowable speech" rules are trivially produced.
Concepts like hate and lies are vague and nebulous. The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion.
Speech is thinking. Non-consensual thought control is evil. Consensual speech and discussion comprises culture - if you have a problem with what other people think and say, the ethical, moral mechanism to rectify that problem is called conversation.
People are always going to have different ideas than you. Sometimes those ideas will be repugnant to you. It is more repugnant to decide that your own thoughts are the only ones allowed.
You don't get to decide what people think and say. Other people don't get to decide that for you.
Reddit/Discord are not “open opinion” platforms. They are businesses. If they don't like what you're saying then they should kick you off, especially when advocating for violence and spreading fascism. You are free to start your own business and proceed to pick up where the conversation left off on your own platform, at least until the government comes knocking and asking about why you are supporting violence and sedition. That's the beauty of the free market.
In India, there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale. Using photos and real names. And the men describe the various ways they want to use their "property" once they buy them. If you were a Muslim in India, facing fears of state-encouraged real life violence, what sort of conversation would you like to have with these people? Are you going to look at a page like that and think: "I'm so thankful for the culture being created here."
What you say works great in a vacuum. But unfettered hate speech leads to bad places. Just ask the German Jews. Ask a Tutsi how they felt about the hateful radio shows before the genocide started. Imagine what it was like to be a black person in the US facing lynching and pogroms over the misinformation being widely spread.
But, hey, I guess just "conversation" would have solved all of those issues. Because those screaming their hateful messages are just misunderstood people who can be easily reasoned with. And who can call it hate to begin with? After all, calling a group subhuman, and wishing for their daughters to be raped, is just a cultural development no one should interfere with.
>> there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale. Using photos and real names.
What ... can you show some proof?
this is getting into dangerous territory here .... making unsubstantiated claims. These claims are quite extraordinary and require extraordinary proof.
All you have to do is copy this part of your parent comment and paste it on google/duckduckgo - 'In India, there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale' .
Ok, well, reading that I realize I "have different ideas than you" about that! Like I'm not sure that
> The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion.
No-one likes fetters, so that way of framing it makes it sound a no-brainer. But, to give a real world example, I guess most people think HN would be much worse without moderation of any kind. I'm not sure how one would test the truth of your statement. It doesn't sound obviously true to me, at least. It sounds like you are 100% certain. What evidence would it take for you to change your mind? I suspect belief in such "free speech absolutism" comes from abstract principle first, with real-world evidence a very distant second.
Seems a similar situation to, say, pacifism. I'm very anti-violence, anti-war etc, but I'm not a pure, idealist "pacifist". To say you'd never use violence, in any situation?! that non-violence is always worse - just sounds like you haven't thought so much about it. e.g. even if thugs were dragging off your loved ones? You wouldn't lift a finger? I doubt it. That would seem like your abstract principle was trumping prudence/evidence/reason etc, producing non-sensible results, in a similar way.
I don't think there are simple and good answers to any of these questions. Yours is simple but, I think, not good.
The canonical argument against your line of thinking would be Der Sturmer in Nazi Germany having enough freedom to promote the interests of the Nazi party which consequently outlawed the free press and railed up the hatred to the point of genomics (See: Popper and the paradox of tolerance). We could also look at the radio stations in Rwanda preaching Hutu Power that contributed to the genocides there, or contemporary issues like the Rohingya genocides amplified by social media.
Restrictions on free speech are universal across cultures at all levels of society including within this very community and I don’t see attempts to restrict speech which the proverbial common sense person would see as likely to cause dehumanization and derision and calls to violence as necessarily being all that impossible to do in a reasonably if not completely fair manner.
As much as I don’t like it, I think this is the best idea. This way ideas can be discussed and debated and light can be shed in areas otherwise hidden.
This naively ignores the empirical fact that (a) many people seem to be immune to light, and (b) most people debating believe light to be what's shining out of their debate-hole (rather than an emergent property arising from the debate).
Of course! Just a few years ago people called that "free speech". Now the enemies of free speech are trying to win the terminology war by convincing people that stopping "hate" and "lies" is more important than protecting the concept of open and free exchange of ideas.
If these ideologies are both extreme and irreconcilable, why is it my ideology that has to shut itself up and let their ideology flourish? If our ideas are outlandish to each other, what is the goal of conversation in the public spaces, unless one side is willing to give up their ideology? If we look at each other in disgust, why is my disgust invalid?
I belive the point they were trying to make is that noone needs to give up their ideology. Keep it but hang out in public spaces where other or opposing ideologies are present.
Even if someone does not want to change their position, they can still learn and understand why someone has an opposing or different one.
There are always spaces in which nonviolent or noncoercive interaction can exist.
Most people think they know they understand by now; the other side is perilously silly at best, or prefers they were dead in the worst case. And they're right so often that this heuristic is too useful not to act on. I don't blame anyone for banning or flaming anyone anymore, given that. And I admire anyone who can still have that unevenly prized nonviolent noncoercive conversation. Especially if it can actually be meaningful and not just a tired re-treading .
So what is right wing discourse in India? How would I distinguish it? Not to be disrespectful, I just would like to know since I have such a large number of Indian friends.
> So what is right wing discourse in India? How would I distinguish it? Not to be disrespectful, I just would like to know since I have such a large number of Indian friends.
I'm not very familiar with it, but I understand a big component is "Hindu nationalism," which seeks to turn India into an exclusively Hindu nation. That's resulted resulted in attacks and official harassment against minority Muslims and Christians.
> There are plenty of Indians who will also say the NY Times loves to publish exaggerated and negative articles about India.
I'm sure there are, but that likely-true fact doesn't shed any light on anything. For instance, Trumpers say similar things, simply because they're hostile to anything that portrays Trump in a negative light. They attack the media in order to hide the truth.
Given how attacks against relatively unbiased media are now part of the standard propaganda playbook, I don't put much stock in them unless they're very convincing. "People say" doesn't pass that threshold.
I have seen a few forgiven “extremists” subreddits before and I often have no idea what they are talking about. It’s all obscure debates and references that someone outside of the country wouldn’t understand. Last one I remember was just posts about how good India is and how Pakistan sucks.
Part 2 - https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/2.html - Tek Fog: Morphing URLs to Make Real News Fake, 'Hijacking' WhatsApp to Drive BJP Propaganda -
Part 3 - https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/3.html - Tek Fog in Action: Targeting Women Journalists, Pushing Communal Narrative on COVID, Delhi Violence -
Discussion with the journalists - https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/s4jfw7/hey_reddit_in... - Hey, Reddit India. We are the team behind the Tek Fog investigation, which uncovered the BJP-affiliated app for social media manipulation. ASK US ANYTHING
The right wing discourse is about advocating the replacement of existing democratic law in place of the vedic laws just like the olden days of pre british era. Vedas are the Hindu religious book that provides structure by which a society should be run by dividing people in to varna system(caste system).
India can never go back to vedic days, simply because there is no incentive for all Hindus. All Hindus are not the same in Hinduism. Vedic book advocates only a particular caste should have monopoly over education and only another to the right of having weapons, etc. This worked well prior to british colonilzation because people were not educated and could not see the big picture. That changed after the british rule and every one was given education which woke enough people to see the bigger picture of caste system.
The right wing advocates know that just with Hinduism they can not unite. They need another religion to hate and unite over that hate. This is where ISLAM comes in. Indian Muslims like the rest of the world can not take a joke on koran or Allah. This is very convenient for the right wing to spread hate and unite people over it. In contrast there is lot of atheist movement especially in South India where they can trash talk Hindu gods and their scriptures on public media at least for now. South India is more progressive and educated compared to North states.
I think the far more worrying trend is trying to silence anyone with different political ideologies.
Like their handpicked example of a user discussing "'destroý' Islam". Note, they added the quotes around destroy. But the actual content is reasonably thoughtful discussion of appointed supreme court judges and only claims "to end radical islam".
It’s interesting because “destroy whiteness” was and is a popular talking point in certain circles or the left. Obviously they don’t literally mean destroy white people but as always the benefit of the doubt is extended to them but “destroy Islam” immediately is interpreted as inherently violent or evil.
The main consistent principle on the social-justice-left is rooting for the underdog. By that logic, a Hindu minority in Pakistan saying "destroy Islam" is good, but a Hindu majority in India saying the same thing is bad.
Of course the side effect of that belief is that people spend a lot of time trying to prove they're underdogs, e.g. look at kids on Tumblr listing all the ways they're oppressed because they have self diagnosed ADHD/aspergers, or trying really hard to claim ancestry of an oppressed group.
Well, more like "halfway-consistent" principle. When it's them who are holding power over some underdog group, they'll happily call that group a "basket of deplorables".
When I was a mod, my policy was to let the idiots speak and the downvotes answer. People should understand that the community is showing them the door, not the mods.
I drew the line at bad behaviour, which usually came in response to unpopular opinions. In other words, I left conservative comments and deleted angry personal attacks in response to them.
Some people did not get it. We had a biweekly "where are the mods" rant. They accused mods of siding with "the Nazis". By that they meant anyone who said anything a conservative person might agree with. Guilt by association.
This is how I learned the term concern trolling, which I understand as someone listening to your arguments in order to debate them. In other words, a debate. Some people were not having it.
We get hiveminds because that's what people ask for.
The thing is those people weren't even close to Nazis. They just politely disagreed with the hivemind on finer points. All you had to do to fight them was to disagree and explain your position. You already had the crowd cheering for your side, so why should the mods give you even more of an advantage?
The risk of creating a hive mind seemed greater than the risk of being overrun by Nazis, since they got downvoted to oblivion anyway.
Social media usage in India nowadays includes calls for mass killings of Muslims[1] and there is widespread political momentum towards essentially establishing a Hindu nationalist society.
Over the last few decades India has seen significant violence against Muslims[2] so to label this sort of agitation as a "different political ideology" is, to put it mildly, bizarre.
Given the rifts that social media has managed to cause in multi-racial/ethnic/religious societies with any form of harmony going out of the window as extremism spreads uncontrolled through networks this kind of lack of response is a disaster. If you want a functioning multiracial society you should look towards Singapore rather than transplanting the typical Western discourse about 'silencing' on foreign countries.
And as to the example, if I were to suggest we "destroy Christianity" in the US by means of using the supreme court you would be unconcerned as long as I qualify that we're only going to eradicate "radical Christianity"?
I've seen users, occasionally even whole servers, get banned because of people saying things like "brb smoking a fag". I highly doubt any discussion of right wing extremism is possible in the long term on Discord, let alone it "primarily acting as a hub for the extreme right" or even being their primary platform in general.
I'd like to understand why so many young people find extremist content so persuasive and engaging. I can't stand it, and I instantly close any website that allows for extreme content.
This is well studied. The summary is that they target isolated or vulnerable people. It's the same with cults, diploma mills, and multi-level marketing schemes.
I’d be interest in those studies. I have experience with all three.
MLMs. My experience is that MLMs victimized people with high levels of trust and connection.
It often stars with a relative or church member. Or a workmate. The sort of people that are hard to say no to.
They use high pressure sales tactics, combine with exploiting social capital.
Diploma mill. People who don’t have experience with post secondary education, and high trust for authority.
I’m not aware of any network affects. It’s not like your sister in law is pressuring you to get a Ph. D from Baleful University.
I have seen legitimate schools marketed this way: “if you don’t get your kids into Yuppyville Elementary, they wont have a chance at Harvard.”
I’ve seen cults … too many.
Most mainstream religious organizations have people at the margins. People who are mentally ill. Have drug issues. Etc.
It’s hard to incorporate them into the mainstream of church life. But most churches feel they are obligated to reach out to people like that.
Para-church organizations are becoming more popular. Like knights of Columbus (they’re old). If someone wants to start up a para church org, there’s not much anyone can do to stop them. They piggy back on mainstream denominations.
Combining people with issues with unmanaged para-church orgs can be toxic, and lead to cults quickly.
I know most people on HN probably have a negative view of religion, and don’t make much of a distinction between “good religion” and “bad cult.”
But a good example is anti-vaccination ideas. Almost no major religious body rejects COVID vaccines. It’s the para church orgs doing that.
It’s the same environment that creates predatory groups like “I the leader, and like Abraham must have multiple wives … and I chose all of you as my wives.”
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I feel like you're describing the intellectual vacuum that is Reddit. I've found conversation here to be much more nuanced, at least since the start of 2021.
I've found people here to engage more and explore religion respectfully most of the time. Reddit however, I might be looking in the wrong place but respect is not something I find. Often people pick the most expressive terms they can to ensure everyone is aware of their lack of respect.
Because it's a lure of empowerment. My vote doesn't matter. Media is controlled by corporate interests. But I can bully/attack/kill some other group and make a real impact.
The above is obviously not at all my own opinion just trying to explain the rational. It used to be that you could "make a difference" at a local level. But local "sense of community" has been replaced by online communities.
This last 2 year window has been particularly frustrating for young people and blaming "others" is frequent in these situations. I think externalising things to an out-group is just human nature (which of course needs to be confronted and denied)
Normally, it would be a minority who were in the position of the extent of time we're spending online, in discussions. More people in the space, more opportunity for pervasive negative messages, and racist/extremist messages to do their insidious work.
Why to they find it engaging and persuasive? because its recruiting, and so they get responses which are positive feedback. And, it provides an "unimpeachable" blame for the problem state young minds find themselves in: its those other people. Not you: you're one of us.
As someone who was a teen on the internet in the 2000s, I think it at least partially has to do with lack of perspective or a reference point — extremism isn’t registering as extremism due to not having a measuring stick.
Additionally, anything that engages an individual’s emotions is likely to be attractive at that stage of life, thanks to teenagers on average having emotional centers that are overdeveloped relative to the rest of their brains.
A lot of this extends into a person’s early 20s as well, depending on how quickly they mature, their life experiences, etc. Personally speaking, in retrospect I didn’t have my head screwed on even remotely right until at least age 26 or so.
I have a close friend who briefly flirted with (actual) extreme right wing beliefs, and has, thankfully, settled on a less warlike disposition. The question he asked, and which was never given a straight answer, was (in paraphrase), “why are others allowed to say, and even wish and will evil things upon my identity, but I am forbidden from even mild criticism of other identities, under pain of real material loss?” It is a real question, describing a real phenomenon, and since no one “respectable” could give him a straight answer, or even acknowledge the legitimacy of the question, he turned to people who did, even as they answered wrongly.
This is it. Take abortion, one side thinks that it is extreme to kill what they perceive as children, and the other side thinks that it is extreme to limit women’s rights to what they perceive as a medical procedure.
When you get to the bottom of these things you find different axiomatic beliefs. Some of these axiomatic beliefs are not based in truth but that is not relevant to the people who hold them.
There’s also a kind of tidal motion insofar as some beliefs move from the fringes to the mainstream (e.g. lgbt rights) and other beliefs move from the mainstream to the fringes. There’s always going to be some people who disagree with that motion, indeed many elderly people hold “extreme” beliefs (overt racism, etc) they are just not politically active usually.
Honestly, because of inequality. When it becomes too difficult for people to live the life that society tells them everyone should live, people begin to lose faith in the system and that's when extremism takes root.
People will latch on to whatever 'tribe' they feel they belong to and create a scapegoat for whatever they think is the problem. Think communists vs. capitalists, ethnic group A vs ethnic group B, religion A vs religion B, vaxxed vs anti, etc...
Revolutions happen after an economic shock, not when things are going well.
Beware of trying to explain everything with a single variable (in this case, inequality). For example, the 1968 unrest in France did not happen because of an economic shock. And some economic shocks did not produce meaningful mass movements.
Young people tend to be edgy in general and they lack the experience to recognize the slippery slope potential from edginess towards dystopia. Most of the time, the edginess stays on the Internet, though, and only a tiny percentage overflows to the streets. The human civilization is trending away from the "active rioter" towards the "keyboard warrior" mode of operation. Riots used to be much worse, even in the 1980s, than they are now. Possibly the Internet acts as a surrogate channel for all that hate?
What inequality does is, IMHO, help recruit older and more experienced people to a radical movement that would otherwise fizzle out without massive support. The Yellow Vests in France were a good example. Once the lower middle class lost the ability to support their lifestyle, they lashed out in a way more destructive way that random students could.
During the 1960's the gini coefficient in France was nearly 50. Now it's in the 20's.
Considering the French protests were started by leftists literally complaining about inequality, and that inequality was much higher then than today, I think my explanation holds up.
I think any explanation should also explain all the instances of countries where protests did not happen, even though inequality was high.
The best evidence for causality would be to demonstrate some kind of "dose and response effect", which isn't easy. The dreaded word "culture" tends to creep in, because some countries seem to have a lot more riot-y history than others. (France vs. UK vs. Spain).
You're right, social mobility and overall standard of living matters as well. Also, how strong the state itself is and how decisively they can put down insurrection...
Pretty sure the government tried paying people to install toilets in their homes but most refused and all continue to go in the streets as well - the occasional concerned citizen has even been assaulted for requesting that people not do it.
This is patently false. I spent several weeks in India for work in 2015, and while I saw many strange things on my trip, this was not one of them. I spent time in four big cities, and even took a drive through some rather rural and poor areas. One would think that if it were remotely common you would at least see it once over the course of a month and a half. Everywhere I went had adequate sanitation facilities, and I did take liberties in exploring the cities and their general surrounds, so it wasn’t like I was ensconced in a wealthy bubble. One of these cities was a ‘Tier 2 city) in a relatively poor state for India (below $1000 GDP per capita PPP), and if your claim is that this is apparently happening with ‘most’ people it’s very incorrect.
As someone who was born in Africa, I can assure you that the situation is _far_ worse… just to get a taste for the crazy stories (other than many parts of Africa commonly openly defecating on the street) look up Michael Komape if you don’t want to eat breakfast today.
The problem is is that in many poor and developing countries, there’s just a basic lack of service delivery. In many townships (slums) in South Africa, where I grew up, people walk and live in their own sewage as it runs down dirt roads, and it’s rather common to see a person relieving themselves into water just a couple meters away from where children play. They don’t have access to running or clean water, a toilet, electricity, or anything of the sort, which is unsurprisingly why diarrhoeal disease is the biggest killer of African children, beating out malaria and I suppose AIDS as well. When I travelled across Africa, it was clear that this situation more or less repeats itself. Toilets are also expensive (think up to a few hundred dollars) for someone living on less than a dollar a day and who can barely feed their families: effectively they are like the homeless of the west, as their ‘house’ is merely a corrugated tin shack that barely has enough space to fit two beds.
Coming from someone who has travelled across many dirt poor countries, I think India is far out of the ‘Africa’ bracket of countries (i.e a quasi failed state with mostly impoverished citizens and no service delivery), but it’s still very poor, which is visibly clear when you visit.
Curious. I certainly must have missed the 500m Indians who did when I visited.
Although if you follow the claim to the linked source, it's a report by an NGO which I've never personally heard of (WaterAid), despite the fact that I'm heavily involved in aid work in Southern Africa, and it's also unsourced. This makes me slightly skeptical, but what's a little bit more fishy is that they didn't do any fieldwork to get to the result, and claimed that they calculated it from UN and WHO numbers. Going to those very UN and WHO numbers cited in that report, which I would trust, they define having a toilet as a proper indoor flushing toilet versus just having a standard pit latrine, which then makes that 500m number makes sense, because the vast majority of them would have used pit latrines back then (and indeed, it's a common thing to see, especially in rural areas).
Practically speaking, it's not open defecation in the way it happens in slums, as a pit latrine is just a bush toilet that you eventually pay (or force, as it is in some African countries) someone to empty and take to a disposal centre. Indeed, when I was a little boy, I helped my grandfather to build some on the farm that he owned for the farmworkers that stayed on the property. They're not that hard to build yourself, and in then rural Rhodesia (now modern day Zimbabwe) it was going to be prohibitively expensive to build flush toilets for all of them. Even on some of the farms of my extended family, bush toilets were the only option available, and bear in mind this was with a well off white minority. I'm sure they're still probably used today by the locals, although the rest of the farms have gone to waste since they were expropriated by Mugabe... but to come back to your point, I don't think I can assign epistemic credence to your claim that it's an 'established fact', given this information as well as my personal experience.
As a result, it makes sense that I didn't see any open defecation despite those numbers, because people who used pit latrines would be included in those very numbers. It's weird that I've never heard of this problem in India before though; it's quite an interesting rabbit hole because it seems there's a fair effort to try fix the problem, lots of good studies and data on it, and there's a lot of international media coverage on it unlike African countries, which would be far more receptive to it as many are doing very little about sanitation right now. I wouldn't say something like this is well known outside of the international aid space though, even though it's just the presence of basic sanitation and running water. People are surprisingly ignorant about developing countries, and organisations in the west can sometimes struggle to actually comprehend the situation on the ground.
There's a government program mentioned in the article that seems to be doing well by the looks of it due to newer numbers on Wikipedia, and according to a World Bank survey mentioned on the page it seems that most people are using them, which is good because at least there's uptake. Indeed, any industrialising country has to go through this stage: in Victorian London, there was obviously the Great Stink and infamously throwing fecal waste out of windows onto the street, and it was only with Bazalgette and building the outfall sewers that London's cholera outbreaks came to an end right at the dawn of the 20th century (Ackroyd's biography of London has a good section on this). It would be a great template for African countries to borrow and mimic, and it looks great costing wise too. Definitely a no-brainer thing, but getting the Zimbabwean (and indeed any sub Saharan) government to do anything remotely useful for its people is like herding elephants... never going to happen.
Impact is probably a big factor: sectarian, religious, or ethnic violence on India's scale has the potential to displace or harm tens of millions of people.
Quack medicine (which you'll find in just about every country) tends to have a much smaller harm radius.
Isn't it a bit silly o worry about extremist "ideology" when there are people in the US who will seriously tell you that the earth is flat, covid isn't real, and Bill Gates is satan?
100 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadConcepts like hate and lies are vague and nebulous. The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion.
Speech is thinking. Non-consensual thought control is evil. Consensual speech and discussion comprises culture - if you have a problem with what other people think and say, the ethical, moral mechanism to rectify that problem is called conversation.
People are always going to have different ideas than you. Sometimes those ideas will be repugnant to you. It is more repugnant to decide that your own thoughts are the only ones allowed.
You don't get to decide what people think and say. Other people don't get to decide that for you.
Then we should go back to protocols and open hardware and stop making corporations the new public forum.
Your opinions are safe today, but tomorrow they may not be.
Sorry, I'm out of the loop. What happened to HTTP(S) and x86?
What you say works great in a vacuum. But unfettered hate speech leads to bad places. Just ask the German Jews. Ask a Tutsi how they felt about the hateful radio shows before the genocide started. Imagine what it was like to be a black person in the US facing lynching and pogroms over the misinformation being widely spread.
But, hey, I guess just "conversation" would have solved all of those issues. Because those screaming their hateful messages are just misunderstood people who can be easily reasoned with. And who can call it hate to begin with? After all, calling a group subhuman, and wishing for their daughters to be raped, is just a cultural development no one should interfere with.
What ... can you show some proof?
this is getting into dangerous territory here .... making unsubstantiated claims. These claims are quite extraordinary and require extraordinary proof.
Here's a link among the search results: https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/indian-muslim-women-put-up-o...
> The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion.
No-one likes fetters, so that way of framing it makes it sound a no-brainer. But, to give a real world example, I guess most people think HN would be much worse without moderation of any kind. I'm not sure how one would test the truth of your statement. It doesn't sound obviously true to me, at least. It sounds like you are 100% certain. What evidence would it take for you to change your mind? I suspect belief in such "free speech absolutism" comes from abstract principle first, with real-world evidence a very distant second.
Seems a similar situation to, say, pacifism. I'm very anti-violence, anti-war etc, but I'm not a pure, idealist "pacifist". To say you'd never use violence, in any situation?! that non-violence is always worse - just sounds like you haven't thought so much about it. e.g. even if thugs were dragging off your loved ones? You wouldn't lift a finger? I doubt it. That would seem like your abstract principle was trumping prudence/evidence/reason etc, producing non-sensible results, in a similar way.
I don't think there are simple and good answers to any of these questions. Yours is simple but, I think, not good.
Courts, associations of people, etc.
The canonical argument against your line of thinking would be Der Sturmer in Nazi Germany having enough freedom to promote the interests of the Nazi party which consequently outlawed the free press and railed up the hatred to the point of genomics (See: Popper and the paradox of tolerance). We could also look at the radio stations in Rwanda preaching Hutu Power that contributed to the genocides there, or contemporary issues like the Rohingya genocides amplified by social media.
Restrictions on free speech are universal across cultures at all levels of society including within this very community and I don’t see attempts to restrict speech which the proverbial common sense person would see as likely to cause dehumanization and derision and calls to violence as necessarily being all that impossible to do in a reasonably if not completely fair manner.
Even if someone does not want to change their position, they can still learn and understand why someone has an opposing or different one.
There are always spaces in which nonviolent or noncoercive interaction can exist.
I'm not very familiar with it, but I understand a big component is "Hindu nationalism," which seeks to turn India into an exclusively Hindu nation. That's resulted resulted in attacks and official harassment against minority Muslims and Christians.
A couple weeks ago the NY Times had an article on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/world/asia/india-christia...
It seems to be of much debate. Rahul Gandhi made some controversial comments about Hindutva and BJP last year, I believe.
I'm sure there are, but that likely-true fact doesn't shed any light on anything. For instance, Trumpers say similar things, simply because they're hostile to anything that portrays Trump in a negative light. They attack the media in order to hide the truth.
Given how attacks against relatively unbiased media are now part of the standard propaganda playbook, I don't put much stock in them unless they're very convincing. "People say" doesn't pass that threshold.
[Copying an HN comment]
Part 1 - https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/1.html - Tek Fog: An App With BJP Footprints for Cyber Troops to Automate Hate, Manipulate Trends
Part 2 - https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/2.html - Tek Fog: Morphing URLs to Make Real News Fake, 'Hijacking' WhatsApp to Drive BJP Propaganda -
Part 3 - https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/3.html - Tek Fog in Action: Targeting Women Journalists, Pushing Communal Narrative on COVID, Delhi Violence -
Discussion with the journalists - https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/s4jfw7/hey_reddit_in... - Hey, Reddit India. We are the team behind the Tek Fog investigation, which uncovered the BJP-affiliated app for social media manipulation. ASK US ANYTHING
The journalists on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI7NLMLOMLw
India can never go back to vedic days, simply because there is no incentive for all Hindus. All Hindus are not the same in Hinduism. Vedic book advocates only a particular caste should have monopoly over education and only another to the right of having weapons, etc. This worked well prior to british colonilzation because people were not educated and could not see the big picture. That changed after the british rule and every one was given education which woke enough people to see the bigger picture of caste system.
The right wing advocates know that just with Hinduism they can not unite. They need another religion to hate and unite over that hate. This is where ISLAM comes in. Indian Muslims like the rest of the world can not take a joke on koran or Allah. This is very convenient for the right wing to spread hate and unite people over it. In contrast there is lot of atheist movement especially in South India where they can trash talk Hindu gods and their scriptures on public media at least for now. South India is more progressive and educated compared to North states.
Its toxic and full of hate speach against Christians and Buddhists.
Especially amongst India. Their population is huge, you would need a much larger reach to influence culture.
Insofar as Indians are using Reddit, they aren't in /r/india.
Like their handpicked example of a user discussing "'destroý' Islam". Note, they added the quotes around destroy. But the actual content is reasonably thoughtful discussion of appointed supreme court judges and only claims "to end radical islam".
Let's see where you end up.
Of course the side effect of that belief is that people spend a lot of time trying to prove they're underdogs, e.g. look at kids on Tumblr listing all the ways they're oppressed because they have self diagnosed ADHD/aspergers, or trying really hard to claim ancestry of an oppressed group.
I drew the line at bad behaviour, which usually came in response to unpopular opinions. In other words, I left conservative comments and deleted angry personal attacks in response to them.
Some people did not get it. We had a biweekly "where are the mods" rant. They accused mods of siding with "the Nazis". By that they meant anyone who said anything a conservative person might agree with. Guilt by association.
This is how I learned the term concern trolling, which I understand as someone listening to your arguments in order to debate them. In other words, a debate. Some people were not having it.
We get hiveminds because that's what people ask for.
https://nitter.net/IamRageSparkle/status/1280892535024619522
https://teddit.net/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kic...
The risk of creating a hive mind seemed greater than the risk of being overrun by Nazis, since they got downvoted to oblivion anyway.
Over the last few decades India has seen significant violence against Muslims[2] so to label this sort of agitation as a "different political ideology" is, to put it mildly, bizarre.
Given the rifts that social media has managed to cause in multi-racial/ethnic/religious societies with any form of harmony going out of the window as extremism spreads uncontrolled through networks this kind of lack of response is a disaster. If you want a functioning multiracial society you should look towards Singapore rather than transplanting the typical Western discourse about 'silencing' on foreign countries.
And as to the example, if I were to suggest we "destroy Christianity" in the US by means of using the supreme court you would be unconcerned as long as I qualify that we're only going to eradicate "radical Christianity"?
[1]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/24/india-hindu-event-...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Muslims_in_In...
Primarily? No, not even close.
MLMs. My experience is that MLMs victimized people with high levels of trust and connection.
It often stars with a relative or church member. Or a workmate. The sort of people that are hard to say no to.
They use high pressure sales tactics, combine with exploiting social capital.
Diploma mill. People who don’t have experience with post secondary education, and high trust for authority.
I’m not aware of any network affects. It’s not like your sister in law is pressuring you to get a Ph. D from Baleful University.
I have seen legitimate schools marketed this way: “if you don’t get your kids into Yuppyville Elementary, they wont have a chance at Harvard.”
I’ve seen cults … too many.
Most mainstream religious organizations have people at the margins. People who are mentally ill. Have drug issues. Etc.
It’s hard to incorporate them into the mainstream of church life. But most churches feel they are obligated to reach out to people like that.
Para-church organizations are becoming more popular. Like knights of Columbus (they’re old). If someone wants to start up a para church org, there’s not much anyone can do to stop them. They piggy back on mainstream denominations.
Combining people with issues with unmanaged para-church orgs can be toxic, and lead to cults quickly.
I know most people on HN probably have a negative view of religion, and don’t make much of a distinction between “good religion” and “bad cult.”
But a good example is anti-vaccination ideas. Almost no major religious body rejects COVID vaccines. It’s the para church orgs doing that.
It’s the same environment that creates predatory groups like “I the leader, and like Abraham must have multiple wives … and I chose all of you as my wives.”
HN is more tech focused, so I get its not what folks are here to discuss (generally).
The above is obviously not at all my own opinion just trying to explain the rational. It used to be that you could "make a difference" at a local level. But local "sense of community" has been replaced by online communities.
Normally, it would be a minority who were in the position of the extent of time we're spending online, in discussions. More people in the space, more opportunity for pervasive negative messages, and racist/extremist messages to do their insidious work.
Why to they find it engaging and persuasive? because its recruiting, and so they get responses which are positive feedback. And, it provides an "unimpeachable" blame for the problem state young minds find themselves in: its those other people. Not you: you're one of us.
And it's just as much a problem of visibility and perception as it is one of reality.
Additionally, anything that engages an individual’s emotions is likely to be attractive at that stage of life, thanks to teenagers on average having emotional centers that are overdeveloped relative to the rest of their brains.
A lot of this extends into a person’s early 20s as well, depending on how quickly they mature, their life experiences, etc. Personally speaking, in retrospect I didn’t have my head screwed on even remotely right until at least age 26 or so.
I have a close friend who briefly flirted with (actual) extreme right wing beliefs, and has, thankfully, settled on a less warlike disposition. The question he asked, and which was never given a straight answer, was (in paraphrase), “why are others allowed to say, and even wish and will evil things upon my identity, but I am forbidden from even mild criticism of other identities, under pain of real material loss?” It is a real question, describing a real phenomenon, and since no one “respectable” could give him a straight answer, or even acknowledge the legitimacy of the question, he turned to people who did, even as they answered wrongly.
You may be in groups (or hold opinions) that others out there consider extremist, but to you feel very natural in the circles you associate with.
When you get to the bottom of these things you find different axiomatic beliefs. Some of these axiomatic beliefs are not based in truth but that is not relevant to the people who hold them.
There’s also a kind of tidal motion insofar as some beliefs move from the fringes to the mainstream (e.g. lgbt rights) and other beliefs move from the mainstream to the fringes. There’s always going to be some people who disagree with that motion, indeed many elderly people hold “extreme” beliefs (overt racism, etc) they are just not politically active usually.
I think we often mistake the symptom for the disease.
Charlemange (supposedly) had people killed for eating meat on holy days. We would be outraged by even a 5 dollar fine.
Openly seeing gay/transgender people would be considered extreme by normal society just 30 years ago.
People will latch on to whatever 'tribe' they feel they belong to and create a scapegoat for whatever they think is the problem. Think communists vs. capitalists, ethnic group A vs ethnic group B, religion A vs religion B, vaxxed vs anti, etc...
Revolutions happen after an economic shock, not when things are going well.
Young people tend to be edgy in general and they lack the experience to recognize the slippery slope potential from edginess towards dystopia. Most of the time, the edginess stays on the Internet, though, and only a tiny percentage overflows to the streets. The human civilization is trending away from the "active rioter" towards the "keyboard warrior" mode of operation. Riots used to be much worse, even in the 1980s, than they are now. Possibly the Internet acts as a surrogate channel for all that hate?
What inequality does is, IMHO, help recruit older and more experienced people to a radical movement that would otherwise fizzle out without massive support. The Yellow Vests in France were a good example. Once the lower middle class lost the ability to support their lifestyle, they lashed out in a way more destructive way that random students could.
Considering the French protests were started by leftists literally complaining about inequality, and that inequality was much higher then than today, I think my explanation holds up.
The best evidence for causality would be to demonstrate some kind of "dose and response effect", which isn't easy. The dreaded word "culture" tends to creep in, because some countries seem to have a lot more riot-y history than others. (France vs. UK vs. Spain).
https://img.etimg.com/photo/msid-65207066,quality-100/graph....
As someone who was born in Africa, I can assure you that the situation is _far_ worse… just to get a taste for the crazy stories (other than many parts of Africa commonly openly defecating on the street) look up Michael Komape if you don’t want to eat breakfast today.
The problem is is that in many poor and developing countries, there’s just a basic lack of service delivery. In many townships (slums) in South Africa, where I grew up, people walk and live in their own sewage as it runs down dirt roads, and it’s rather common to see a person relieving themselves into water just a couple meters away from where children play. They don’t have access to running or clean water, a toilet, electricity, or anything of the sort, which is unsurprisingly why diarrhoeal disease is the biggest killer of African children, beating out malaria and I suppose AIDS as well. When I travelled across Africa, it was clear that this situation more or less repeats itself. Toilets are also expensive (think up to a few hundred dollars) for someone living on less than a dollar a day and who can barely feed their families: effectively they are like the homeless of the west, as their ‘house’ is merely a corrugated tin shack that barely has enough space to fit two beds.
Coming from someone who has travelled across many dirt poor countries, I think India is far out of the ‘Africa’ bracket of countries (i.e a quasi failed state with mostly impoverished citizens and no service delivery), but it’s still very poor, which is visibly clear when you visit.
But, it’s actually not. It’s a well known established fact.
> “In 2015, one report estimated that 522 million Indians defecated in the open and in fields.” [0]
[0]: https://newrepublic.com/article/153549/indias-futile-war-ope...
Although if you follow the claim to the linked source, it's a report by an NGO which I've never personally heard of (WaterAid), despite the fact that I'm heavily involved in aid work in Southern Africa, and it's also unsourced. This makes me slightly skeptical, but what's a little bit more fishy is that they didn't do any fieldwork to get to the result, and claimed that they calculated it from UN and WHO numbers. Going to those very UN and WHO numbers cited in that report, which I would trust, they define having a toilet as a proper indoor flushing toilet versus just having a standard pit latrine, which then makes that 500m number makes sense, because the vast majority of them would have used pit latrines back then (and indeed, it's a common thing to see, especially in rural areas).
Practically speaking, it's not open defecation in the way it happens in slums, as a pit latrine is just a bush toilet that you eventually pay (or force, as it is in some African countries) someone to empty and take to a disposal centre. Indeed, when I was a little boy, I helped my grandfather to build some on the farm that he owned for the farmworkers that stayed on the property. They're not that hard to build yourself, and in then rural Rhodesia (now modern day Zimbabwe) it was going to be prohibitively expensive to build flush toilets for all of them. Even on some of the farms of my extended family, bush toilets were the only option available, and bear in mind this was with a well off white minority. I'm sure they're still probably used today by the locals, although the rest of the farms have gone to waste since they were expropriated by Mugabe... but to come back to your point, I don't think I can assign epistemic credence to your claim that it's an 'established fact', given this information as well as my personal experience.
As a result, it makes sense that I didn't see any open defecation despite those numbers, because people who used pit latrines would be included in those very numbers. It's weird that I've never heard of this problem in India before though; it's quite an interesting rabbit hole because it seems there's a fair effort to try fix the problem, lots of good studies and data on it, and there's a lot of international media coverage on it unlike African countries, which would be far more receptive to it as many are doing very little about sanitation right now. I wouldn't say something like this is well known outside of the international aid space though, even though it's just the presence of basic sanitation and running water. People are surprisingly ignorant about developing countries, and organisations in the west can sometimes struggle to actually comprehend the situation on the ground.
There's a government program mentioned in the article that seems to be doing well by the looks of it due to newer numbers on Wikipedia, and according to a World Bank survey mentioned on the page it seems that most people are using them, which is good because at least there's uptake. Indeed, any industrialising country has to go through this stage: in Victorian London, there was obviously the Great Stink and infamously throwing fecal waste out of windows onto the street, and it was only with Bazalgette and building the outfall sewers that London's cholera outbreaks came to an end right at the dawn of the 20th century (Ackroyd's biography of London has a good section on this). It would be a great template for African countries to borrow and mimic, and it looks great costing wise too. Definitely a no-brainer thing, but getting the Zimbabwean (and indeed any sub Saharan) government to do anything remotely useful for its people is like herding elephants... never going to happen.
Quack medicine (which you'll find in just about every country) tends to have a much smaller harm radius.