> There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance.
My experience has been with people who don't think that education is bad, but modern universities. I know many people who are smart, self-driven, industrious people who like learning things - who aren't interested in going to a public university. (they're more than happy to avail themselves of YouTube videos, Coursera courses, GitHub projects, work on things with friends, and so on)
Given the state of modern universities, with so many of them pushing the murderous ideology that is neo-Marxism, I can't blame them. A few more generations of this and we'll have our own Cultural Revolution, except with even more than the tens of millions of deaths that China did with theirs.
Given your claims of "white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed [...] extremely bigoted shit" being both completely inconsistent with my experience, and the specific things that you are claiming are present, it seems far more likely that you've been banned for the kinds of social authoritarianism (trying to control the speech and thoughts of others) that is particularly popular among a certain political faction lately than those things actually being prevalent and accepted.
> can civilly and safely debate whether intelligence is statistically correlated to race and gender
Why would you not want to debate that? If it's not true, or there's no evidence for it, then you have an actual argument for fighting people who believe in it. If it's true, then you have a new societal issue to discuss. Either way, you win.
You seem to be making a case against scientific inquiry and intellectual discussion.
> However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
This is anti-intellectualism. What possible reason would there be to not debate ideas, of any kind? Bad ideas get analyzed, exposed, and proponents of such are forced to either change their position or be exposed as dogmatic.
Again, they are not bringing racial and gender disparties up for idle conversation; usually what comes after is what they want society to do about it. All you have to do is say "okay, for the sake of argument what you say is true. What happens next?" and then you see intentions. A lot aren't good.
This is disgusting - it implies that you should pick and choose your friends based on political affiliation, which not only is extremely (and intentionally) divisive, but also provides no room for guiding these individuals back to a more moderate political stance.
Without being friends (or at least interacting with) with those who have been ostracized by society, how, exactly, do you propose to try to get them to change their minds?
I'm also curious as to how they plan to enforce this constraint - Cabal appears to be completely decentralized, correct?
> pick and choose your friends based on political affiliation
I think this is the saddest part of what's been happening recently. We don't need to separate ourselves from people with different viewpoints. I'm lucky enough to be friends with people on the left and the right, but I think that's only because we stay away from politics. In fact, it's something that used to be a Christian ideal - to be able to maintain a courteous friendship with someone you are fundamentally at odds with (See: Song of Roland, Christian & "Saracen" Knights).
It's not often something I see folks right of center doing, but it seems like a ton of people left of center have been distancing themselves from people with whom they disagree too strongly. It's too bad. We need to open up to more discourse, not less.
Is there a difference? The reasons we hold our opinions are fundamentally just another set of opinions. Unless you're talking about something more fundamental - in that case, yes, we can still be friends when our first principles are opposed. It's just harder.
I think it comes down to just how tolerant we're willing to be. It's easy to be tolerant when the stakes are low; who cares if someone is doing something somewhere else that makes us uncomfortable? The Christian ideal is to be tolerant of someone who is actively doing us harm.
> The Christian ideal is to be tolerant of someone who is actively doing us harm.
That seems like a foolish ideal that has the end result of you being marginalized, with people who would do harm to you and others gaining control of society. Frankly, it sounds like just another system of control invented by religious leaders.
People who actively do us harm should be swiftly and firmly disabused of the notion that what they're doing will ever be tolerated. Anything less is folly.
Tolerance doesn't mean you never resist. Tolerance means you're willing to have a conversation, and you can be friends in spite of fundamental differences.
Christians who live up to the ideal are willing to have a civil relationship with anyone. That's the point. That's tolerance.
It means you actually know the other person, and you're not making (possibly misinformed) assumptions about them. The next step in the relationship may very well be to 'firmly disabuse them', but it's not the first step.
I don't think that's the definition of "tolerance" that most people think of. To me, it means to allow someone to do something that you don't agree with or thing is harmful. Not to get to know them and then convince them not to do it.
Getting to know them and convincing them not to do it implies that you will not tolerate their actions, but have wisely decided that a soft touch is likely to get you better results.
> yes, we can still be friends when our first principles are opposed. It's just harder.
If someone tells me they think I’m fundamentally a lesser person than them because of skin color, just because that’s how god made us, that’s not a fruitful base for a good relationship.
Keep in mind the quote was about Nazis. Being able to stay friends with a Nazi is not something many people can do, such as non-whites and non-christians.
Trying to change the mind of someone who believes you deserve to die is painful at best and not worth the time.
> They are being deplatformed because their speech is violent and damaging—in many cases it’s literal incitement to violence.
I challenge you to provide any concrete evidence for this claim - in particular, that (1) the majority of their speech specifically consists of calls to violence (not just "violent" because that term has been twisted recently to mean a wide range of things that a certain political party disagrees with) (2) that the behavior of the tens of millions of people in this political party are at all correlated with the several hundred people who stormed the capitol and (3) that this was significantly worse than the Antifa and BLM riots that we had throughout the entirety of 2020.
My experience has been with people who don't think that education is bad, but modern universities. I know many people who are smart, self-driven, industrious people who like learning things - who aren't interested in going to a public university. (they're more than happy to avail themselves of YouTube videos, Coursera courses, GitHub projects, work on things with friends, and so on)
Given the state of modern universities, with so many of them pushing the murderous ideology that is neo-Marxism, I can't blame them. A few more generations of this and we'll have our own Cultural Revolution, except with even more than the tens of millions of deaths that China did with theirs.