That’s a really idealistic position to hold, and I gotta say that I disagree with your conclusion. There are some opinions that we must not tolerate in society for it to work, and I’d say this is one of those positions - it’s the whole paradox of intolerance - if you have a bar that lets nazis hang out there, you end up with a nazi bar.
I’m not saying that there aren’t regular, reasonable people who have genuine concern based in the wellbeing of kids who feel uncomfortable about gender affirming care, of course those people exist and it’s great that there are people willing to talk to those individuals and try to help them realise why their concerns are unfounded. But I have to say that I feel like your position, that we should engage in good faith with people purporting extreme hateful ideology, is extremely harmful. If you want to do it, sure, go ahead, but tone policing people is really unacceptable imo.
I wasn’t looking for an argument really, I was curious about your position and the limits it went to, so I asked my initial question, then I was just subsequently explaining why I disagreed with your position - maybe not very well though, sorry about that.
The majority of the commenters online aren’t good faith regular people with a few concerns that they want to talk about. A good chunk of them are genocidal. They’re long past the ability of being talked down from their positions, especially online. So all having a reasonable discussion accomplishes is giving people a platform and opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric that gets people killed.
Hate can coexist with feelings other than malice. Most hate movements grow out of some sense of victimisation and protecting some ideal. That doesn’t make them any less detestable or tolerable.
I absolutely believe that lobbing insults and judging people for spreading hateful ideology is very useful. Ridicule and shame are probably the most powerful weapons we have against hateful ideologies, because it discourages people who might otherwise give their beliefs consideration from engaging and interacting with them. Ideally, we would make all social media absolutely intolerant towards them so that anyone sharing racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. is generally completely excluded from the online community. I think that’s a very effective method to reduce the spread of hateful ideologies online.
Tone policing is when you scold people for their “tone”, i.e. being rude/impolite/insulting/dismissive etc. For example if you tell people that they shouldn’t tell nazis to fuck off and die because that’s rude or whatever, that’s tone policing.
I don’t think you read what I wrote, or if you didn’t you ignored my point.
I don’t believe you really can change the opinion of people who believe this shit, over the internet. That’s my entire point. Trying to change the minds of those people is wasted effort. The best you can do is prevent the ideology spreading to people who do not already believe in it, and “oh let’s just hear them out” is the exact opposite of how you do that.
It’s possible to deprogram these people, but only in real life with someone you know. You can never do that for a stranger, it just doesn’t work - there has been research into this, you can search the backfire effect if you’re interested.
That’s a really idealistic position to hold, and I gotta say that I disagree with your conclusion. There are some opinions that we must not tolerate in society for it to work, and I’d say this is one of those positions - it’s the whole paradox of intolerance - if you have a bar that lets nazis hang out there, you end up with a nazi bar.
I’m not saying that there aren’t regular, reasonable people who have genuine concern based in the wellbeing of kids who feel uncomfortable about gender affirming care, of course those people exist and it’s great that there are people willing to talk to those individuals and try to help them realise why their concerns are unfounded. But I have to say that I feel like your position, that we should engage in good faith with people purporting extreme hateful ideology, is extremely harmful. If you want to do it, sure, go ahead, but tone policing people is really unacceptable imo.
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I wasn’t looking for an argument really, I was curious about your position and the limits it went to, so I asked my initial question, then I was just subsequently explaining why I disagreed with your position - maybe not very well though, sorry about that.
The majority of the commenters online aren’t good faith regular people with a few concerns that they want to talk about. A good chunk of them are genocidal. They’re long past the ability of being talked down from their positions, especially online. So all having a reasonable discussion accomplishes is giving people a platform and opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric that gets people killed.
Hate can coexist with feelings other than malice. Most hate movements grow out of some sense of victimisation and protecting some ideal. That doesn’t make them any less detestable or tolerable.
I absolutely believe that lobbing insults and judging people for spreading hateful ideology is very useful. Ridicule and shame are probably the most powerful weapons we have against hateful ideologies, because it discourages people who might otherwise give their beliefs consideration from engaging and interacting with them. Ideally, we would make all social media absolutely intolerant towards them so that anyone sharing racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. is generally completely excluded from the online community. I think that’s a very effective method to reduce the spread of hateful ideologies online.
Tone policing is when you scold people for their “tone”, i.e. being rude/impolite/insulting/dismissive etc. For example if you tell people that they shouldn’t tell nazis to fuck off and die because that’s rude or whatever, that’s tone policing.
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I don’t think you read what I wrote, or if you didn’t you ignored my point.
I don’t believe you really can change the opinion of people who believe this shit, over the internet. That’s my entire point. Trying to change the minds of those people is wasted effort. The best you can do is prevent the ideology spreading to people who do not already believe in it, and “oh let’s just hear them out” is the exact opposite of how you do that.
It’s possible to deprogram these people, but only in real life with someone you know. You can never do that for a stranger, it just doesn’t work - there has been research into this, you can search the backfire effect if you’re interested.
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