Extra News Feed is a Medium-based publication of essays on politics, society and technology, including pieces by Yonatan Zunger.
HN commenters link it mostly for Zunger's 'Tolerance is not a moral precept', calling it the best essay on the tolerance paradox.
Something I'm slowly coming to realize is that unless you have a logically defensible moral position, it's hard to argue with people that disagree. Terms like reasonable are so flimsy it's hard to use it as a model to communicate with people that don't already agree with you.
The successful operation of a principle like "reasonableness" requires an intake filter to suss out whether people joining the department roughly agree on what it means. If someone doesn't agree with your definition of reasonableness, it becomes a bludgeon wielded by both sides that can't be affixed to a definitive state of the world and the winner will necessarily be side that can exert more political force.
Element three is more concrete. "[3)] No one is special."This is the classic statement that all are equal before the law regardless of position in the department, which is the only way to grant popular legitimacy to rules.
"[4)] Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being reasonable." I feel this rule is a symptom of the lax definition of reasonableness. The reason people become offended when someone accuses them of being unreasonable, is because the standard is so loosely defined that someone can (reasonably, ha!) believe themselves reasonable when others do not.
I read an interesting article the other day where the author took a moral position and reasoned it through [0], showing how it was legally reasoned through in high profile situations. This kind of cooperative principle is…
The “end state” is much more likely a North/Central American Confederation than any secession within the US. Maybe even South America, which would lead to a somewhat less US-centric Confederation. Four closely-related languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French) with a common history of Western European culture and colonialism against a backdrop of rich Indigenous cultures…that pretty much covers the whole of the Americas. That’s a pretty small hill to climb to achieve the integration of 700M+ people over two continents.
NB (from HN search):
The Texas secessionist sites have been linked to Russian interests.
https://extranewsfeed.com/how-russia-created-the-most-popular-texas-secession-page-on-facebook-fd4dfd05ee5c
And I believe the Silicon Valley guy who was pushing the Calexit movement actually moved to Russia.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11217187/from-his-home-in-russia-calexit-leader-plots-california-secession
Basically, Eurasia is jealous of the Americas’s relative peace and prosperity.
The best response I read to these sorts of posts (of which there have been quite a few over the last 10 years) was the comment that this was settled with the US Civil War…the bloodiest in US. And for the rest of the US, that’s basically the end of the story.
The CalExit dynamics would probably, in the best case for those pushing it, go something like this:
Uncle Sam: Sad to see you go. We’ve been through a lot. When we bought you less than 200 years ago from Mexico, you…
> There is a notion that Googles usefulness has made it a utility.
This is a fantastic argument against Silicon Valley - that the institutions that it created have too much power.
However, that is not the argument being made in this subthread. Having this argument requires consideration of the institutions that it replaced, and whether or not the concentration of so much market influence in a corporation is a good thing. That's the problem at hand, not the particular politics of such a corporation.
> YouTube is targeting conservative ideas. The Sandy Hook conspiracy theories are perhaps an example of good censorship. At which point in the future will Google censor the next genocide?
I am of the understanding that the problem Sandy Hook conspiracies is not their content, but their presentation - my understanding is that they libel, and accuse victims of the shooting of conspiracy and murder. This is, by many definitions, harassment, and is against the TOS.
> The article I linked about Nazis are to explain the idea that censoring bad things can sometimes backfire.
If we really want to go down that tangent, may I remind you that this strategy of dealing with Nazis backfired spectacularly in 1933? We allowed them to speak, and big surprise, that did not stop them from suppressing the speech of their opposition, as soon as they seized power. Not that anything else could be expected from a movement that is built on no foundation but violence.
Tolerance is not a suicide…
Like you, I don't think it's an entirely trivial issue to figure out what should or shouldn't be defended. An article that tremendously helped me shape my thinking on this is "Tolerance is not a moral precept"[1]
In a nutshell - tolerance is a mutual agreement, and the protections of tolerance only apply to those who would uphold those protections. If you deliberately step outside these bounds - "gay people are evil" clearly doesn't tolerate gay people - you have lost the right to be tolerated.
I disagree with the ACLU on protecting neo-nazis on those grounds. They have positioned themselves outside of civil society, with the deliberate goal of destroying that society.
Does that mean we should restrict neo nazi speech? I honestly don't know. I do believe we shouldn't protect it, and I do believe we should shun people who subscribe to those ideas, but does that mean we should make it illegal? It's a very tough question.
It's not what I'm arguing, either. But I am arguing that Sam disingenuously conflates two things, and to make it more interesting would like to get rid of speech that harms his business interest while he's OK with speech that has provably caused physical harm over and over.
He's unhappy with his ethics being questioned, and dresses it up in a free speech argument. That is what I dislike about this.
[1] https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376
As someone who's never worked for Google, I recognize the name Yonatan Zunger.
- He's the guy who posted the bizarre and really popular conspiracy theory about the President of the United States secretly plotting a coup: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5
- He's the guy who posted this incredibly misleading, and astoundingly viral, tweet about children which ICE seized from their parents being missing and unaccounted for - https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/999827396046995456 - which lead people to believe they'd been ripped from their families and vanished, when they'd actually been reunited with family members who didn't want to be found. This was particularly irresponsible since the fix for this would literally be imprisoning more kids rather than reuniting them with their family members.
- He's the guy who wrote a popular piece opposing the idea of tolerance: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376
- I'm pretty sure I caught him posting other dubious misinformation and conspiracy theories too.
> Can you cite some sources there?
this was in my inbox straight from medium staff pick, so I'm using this one I know having had a lot exposure:
https://extranewsfeed.com/to-our-fellow-jews-in-the-united-states-in-israel-and-around-the-world-ff421a1d325d
"Any Jew, anywhere, who does not act to oppose President Donald Trump and his administration acts in favor of anti-Semitism"
There ya go, this guy just associated non vocal Jews to Nazis, even if with a convoluted wording that avoided the label directly, but called them anti-semite, and I'm not gonna repeat the point of the Nazi 'spectrum' again, but you know where it's gonna go: once the real Nazi's have all been punched, the bar will lower and lower until you can scream racist at someone and have it ostracized, mediatically or otherwise.
(ok this fall shorts of "all white man" but I guess you're smart enough to draw the parallels)