I know nothing about this topic. In particular, I haven’t heard of Michael Bailey and Kevin Hsu before.
But I do know that there are terrible arguments on both sides of every issue—even issues where there is also healthy discourse and very good arguments.
Are Michael Bailey and Kevin Hsu the least-bad arguers for their position? Or are they especially well-known / famous / widely-respected figure-heads of that side of the debate? If so, you should say that somewhere.
Otherwise it sounds (to non-knowledgeable ears like mine) like you were just searching for an idiot on that side of the aisle, and hey you found one, and now you can call them out for their idiocy and spread guilt-by-association to everyone else who has wound up reaching similar conclusions.
Hmm, my two-sentence summary attempt for this post would be: "In recent drama-related posts, the comment section discussion seems very soldier-mindset instead of scout-mindset, including things like up- and down-voting comments based on which "team" they support rather than soundness of reasoning, and not conceding / correcting errors when pointed out, etc. This is a failure of the LW community and we should brainstorm how to fix it."
If that's a bad summary, it might not be Duncan's fault, I kinda skimmed.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
There's certainly something to that. But in the other direction, there's the Claudette Colvin vs Rosa Parks anecdote, where (as I understand it) civil rights campaigners declined to signal-boost and take a stand on a case that they thought the general public would be unsympathetic to (an unmarried pregnant teen defender), and instead waited for a more PR-friendly test case to come along. We can't know the counterfactual, but... (read more)
I want to say loud and clear that I don't think the only two options are (1) "saying X in a way that will predictably and deeply hurt lots of people and/or piss them off" and (2) "not saying X at all". There's also the option of (3) "saying X in a way that will bring anti-X-ers to change their mind and join your side". And also sometimes there's (4) "saying X in a kinda low-key way where anti-X-ers won't really care or take notice, or at least won't try to take revenge on things that we care about".
My sense is that there's safety-in-numbers in saying "obviously Tiananmen Square is a thing... (read more)
we are talking about the book’s provenance / authorship / otherwise “metadata”—and certainly not about the book’s impact
A belief that "TBC was written by a racist for the express purpose of justifying racism" would seem to qualify as "worth mentioning prominently at the top" under that standard, right?
And it would be quite unreasonable to suggest that a post titled “Book Review: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is somehow inherently “provocative”, “insulting”, “offensive”, etc., etc.
I imagine that very few people would find the title by itself insulting; it's really "the title in conjunction with the first paragraph or two" (i.e. far enough to see that the author is not going to... (read more)
Hmm, I think you didn't get what I was saying. A book review of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is great, I'm all for it. A book review of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which treats it as a perfectly lovely normal book and doesn't say anything about the book being a forgery until you get 28 paragraphs into the review and even then it's barely mentioned is the thing that I would find extremely problematic. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't that seem like kind of a glaring omission? Wouldn't that raise some questions about the author's beliefs and motives in writing the review?
... (read more)Do you view those facts as evidence that I’m
I don't think my suggestions are getting pushback; I think that my suggestions are being pattern-matched to "let's all self-censor / cower before the woke mob" and everyone loves having that debate at the slightest pretense. For example, I maintain that my suggestion of "post at another site and linkpost from here, in certain special situations" is next-to-zero-cost, for significant benefit. Indeed, some people routinely post-elsewhere-and-linkpost, for no reason in particular. (The OP author already has a self-hosted blog, so there's no inconvenience.) This seems to me like a prudent, win-win move, and if people aren't jumping on it, I'm tempted to speculate that people are here for the fun signaling not the boring problem-solving / world-optimizing.
Imposing restrictions on our prolific writers
That's not a useful framing. The mods have indicated that they won't impose restrictions. Instead, I am trying to persuade people.
Sorry, what? A book which you (the hypothetical Person A) have never read (and in fact have only the vaguest notion of the contents of) has personally caused you to suffer? And by successfully (!!) “advocating for racism”, at that? This is… well, “quite a leap” seems like an understatement; perhaps the appropriate metaphor would have to involve some sort of Olympic pole-vaulting event. This entire (supposed) perspective is absurd from any sane person’s perspective.
I have a sincere belief that The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion directly contributed to the torture and death of some of my ancestors. I hold this belief despite having never read this book, and having only... (read more)
My comment here argues that a reasonable person could find this post insulting.
The US presidential election is now just 2 months away! There's a (IMO) plausible argument that we might have a disputed election that leads to large-scale political violence; for details see
I don't think it's likely, but I do think it's likely enough to make it worth some contingency planning (for US residents like me).
Like most of us, I'm not in any position to actually do anything about this problem, i.e. to reduce the probability of large-scale political violence from a... (read more)
That’s helpful, thanks!