Concentration of far-right extremists on PPR

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This is entirely your problem. This is Politics, Philosophy, and *Religion*. Discussion of Christianity, including by Christians is to be expected here.

The problem is that it's pretty hard to argue with people who base their claims on something that's not intersujbectively verifiable like "faith".

Duh!

Of course this is my problem, however I don't post in their myopic and childish threads to shout them down. I ignore them.

If they were to show the same courtesy when someone posts something they may find stupid or offensive then discussion might flow, until that time I will continue to laugh at them quietly to myself rather than feed their childlike ego's by entering into their entirely moronic and myopic debate.

Sometimes infrequent posters have very good insights. A lack of being distinctly memorable doesn't mean that they aren't a significant part of PPR.


Interesting. In another thread recently, your position was the one supported by the conservatives, and the liberals wanted some form of censorship.

Prolificness is a major factor in being remembered and it's also a major factor in shapping a web forum's factor or "tone". Having 3-4 people who make soft-spoken rational posts ever week or two will leave much less of a mark on a forum's tone then having 2 people who yell out racist screeds 8 times a day. As merited as the infrequent poster's ideas may be, by the very fact of their infrequency they will be less well-remembered.



While I consider myself an Olof Palme style social democrat I do have some left-libertarian sympathies which shades over into my opinions on censorship. I generally agree with this philosophy - just subsitute "censorhsip" for "ignore them" and "racist" for "creationist" and it sums up my approach:



http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008 ... augh_1.php

Is it just me, or did the maturity level in here just drop sharply? Oh, I should have known when I saw the OP byline, high schools are out for the week...






See, I'm using the techniques of am internet troll, but it's OK, I'm not trolling because I'm doing it for a higher purpose, and he did it first...
Now if I really wanted to capture the true je ne sais quoi of a Master P original, I would have had to come up with some "clever" new terms to stigmatize my ideological opposites and sprinkle some unqualified opinions in there, but I think I've made my point.

I think it's a mix of libertarian (social more than economic) from some posters and conservative from other posters. And strident atheist (though I like that about this place).

I'm an agnostic leftist, but I'm not very vocal with my views on the 'net. I think there needs to be at least one vocal leftist around here to encourage other (maybe less strident) leftists to post. If there was a bona fide Marxist, I'd put forward my socialist views more. Instead, I mainly talk about space stuff and ancient civilisations.

Not to be too melodramatic about it, but it kind of reminds me of stories about Japanese Ronin, masterless samurai who were considered fair game for anyone to attack due to their lack of social standing and perceived inferiority. Because they were under pervasive threat of attack and had to constantly defend themselves, those that survived for any length of time tended to be some of the greatest swordsmen of the era.

Here we have a similar situation where posters holding certain views are subject to attack by a segment of the forum that views them as "fair game" because they personally find said views repugnant, and who have expressed a willingness to fight as dirty as they are able because they feel that their targets "deserve it". Some people can't handle that sort of relentless assault and leave or minimize their posting, while those that survive tend to be driven, strong debaters with the courage of their convictions and a tough skin. It's forum Darwinism in action, only the strong survive when it comes to advocating unpopular beliefs here, and so can have an impact on the forum out proportion to their number.

This is a common AS related fallacy; black and white all or nothing thinking. There is no homogeneous left or right wing, there are many factions splitting different ways on different issues; I myself generally hold right views on property rights and economics, while my views on civil liberties fall more to the left. To the person who can't see shades of gray, it's a real quandary where to place us odd shaped folks that don't really fit any specific labels. Look at the way the OP insists on labeling and stigmatizing certain people based on their views, he's trying to make the pegs fit HIS set of holes now matter what their actual shape.

Master_Pedant,

Currently there has been a higher concentration of those Nasty-Iniquitous-Reprobate-Repugnant-Rancorous-Nocuous-Evil-Far-Right-Extremist-Anti-Censorship-Terrorists™, but do you really have a problem with people expressing views which you find offensive? If you do have a problem with people expressing offensive views, can the offensiveness travel in only one direction, namely from Right to Left, or do members of the Evil-Right™ not have permission from the Righteous-Left© to take offense at the stances and declarations in opposition to them?

Readers beware. Just because someone is the lone voice in the wilderness, doesn't automatically make them right. (or perhaps the term "correct" would be better in that sentence, because it can be read both ways. ) Being able to shout the loudest/longest/rudest alone isn't enough to actually enough to qualify as genuinely correct, even if it fits the credentials for a metaphor based on wildlife. It just puts people in a position to force their views on everyone else.

I think it's great that this thread basically started out with the assumption that a lot of people disagree with the OP because a lot of people are stupid. That's probably how all the best discussions start.

Is it not a well known phenomenon that people tend to notice more readily those with opinions which disagree with their own? I think it has a name and everything, but I can't remember what it is.

So, the most shrill voices that appellate their opposition with reprehensible labels aren't necessarily genuinely correct? Never would have guessed that.

Probably when posters started using terms like "Aboreal Africans" or "NAACP = Nigerians Against All Caucasian People". Or maybe it was when people started posting gleefully when all the racism drove a poster off the site. Who knowns?



Either you're really ill-informed enough to think that I'm in high school rather than a high school graduate in University or you're making a really poor one-liner implying that I have the maturity of a high school student. Which is kinda ironic as it was when I was in high school that I bought in to the notion that being the "lone voice of civility" on a forum saturation with loudmouth ignorance was a good strategy.



That "higher purpose" being to satirize the non-censoring methods a particular poster uses to point out racists and deal with them? Keep doing God's work, Dox47.



That you're eager to jump on people who are "MEAN" to ultraconservative racists but are next to silent on the issue of hate speakers on WP? Or that it's not enough for somebody to agree with libertarians in asserting that censorship of hate speech is bad, but they also must shut their traps instead of applying the best alternative to censorship - pointing out hate speech and criticizing it? As I said, keep doing the good work.



If you read the original post you'd realize a described several exceptions to the trend, including Awesomelyglorious (who, while his opinions on economic organization are pretty radical, his tendency to spout racist nonsense isn't - which is why I don't include him on the WP far-right).

As for the "lumping together of views", I distingushed in the poll question what type of bend the forum could have and even suggested to Ancalagon that my sample may be biased because the ignorantly fanatical tend to speak out most. Quite frankly, while "left" and "right" are theoretical fictions like many abstract labels, that doesn't diminish their power in analyzing the current climate on WP where "EcoPhreaks", "aboreal Africans", and "NAACP = Nigerians Against All Caucasian People" represent a significant portion of the editorializing on these forums.



My main comment on this is, while bombast can come from "both sides" or "all multiple sides" if you want a more nuanced view of forum politics, there's a difference between calling out conservatives and criticizing the disgusting aspects of their ideology and using terms like "aboreal Africans".

As for Dox47's comemnts on "everyone else is doing it" doesn't make it a moral rationale, I have this to say:

If it's possible to have a consistent rational conversation on the forum, then so be it. If, however, any political issue will be charge with slurs (racial or otherwise), then it's pretty stupid to sign a one-way "non-aggression pact". Civility is not an intrinsic virtue, it has value only insofar as it is instrumental in achieving various ends like an equal, rational exchange of ideas. If one faction or coalition of factions for concious or unconcious reasons decide to use all the bombast and the other side sits idley by, then that's pure strategic stupidity. I refuse to be the Alan Colmes of Wrong Planet.



I don't think I used the term "stupid" in the OP, though to be a racist entails a fair degree of wilful idiocy. I'm more of the opinion that the outright racists or people who undermine the issue of racial tension are immoral, though.

Just to avoid confusion, by OP, I meant "Original Poster", rather than "Original Post", so what I wrote was a reflection of my reaction to the entire first page.

Yeah, you didn't out-and-out use the term "stupid", but the following things you did say left me with the impression that you started this thread with the idea that those who disagree with you politically probably do so because they are not all that intelligent:



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Can you see why I came away with that feeling?

I don't think the rapid right is "stupid" in the sense of lacking intellectual ability, rather I think they're just horribly ignorant and intellectually lazy when it comes to complex policy issues. I see this as a neccessary effect of the far-right's use of anti-intellectual populism to motivate their grassroots.

"Intellectual" in the first quote doesn't refer so much to native intelligence as it does towards an inclination to look towards researched and informed solutions to policy problems. The far-right, with it's extreme anti-intellectualist values, lacks that inclination.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 17 Oct 2010, 9:39 am, edited 2 times in total.