[ryan_lane]

The point of alt-right is to act as a bridge between extremist views and modern conservative views. Most alt-right sites have a mix of reasonable articles, conspiracy theories, and somewhat extreme articles. The comment sections of these sites often lead to more extreme information, with the sites actively allowing it, and often encouraging it. The YouTube recommendation loop is a good example of how this works.

Sending traffic to any alt-right site helps recruit people to extremism.

[djsumdog]

Fine, but Quillette is still hardly the publication you think it is. I've never read anything hateful or right-wing on their site. Their articles always seem reasonable.

I think there's another side of this; the fear of ideas. Brenden O'neil does a great talk on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA

[ryan_lane]

You're emphasizing what I'm saying. They have a mix of articles that range from slightly conservative leaning, to promoting eugenics. Since you find their posts to mostly be reasonable, the ones that are a little more right also seem reasonable, and with enough of that, the ones that are even more right become more reasonable too. It's meant to slide people further and further to the right, making them even more receptive to the extremely far right stuff that's in the comment sections. You're the target audience.

[mistermann]

> promoting eugenics

Can you provide an example?

[mistermann]

-2, yet no replies. As per usual.

-- Perhaps such questions "should not even be dignified with a reply"? Whereas, hateful and unsubstantiated (beyond meme-level of "eeeeeeeverybody knows") assertions are "dignified by default", provided they are directed at the proper "subculture-specific outgroup du jour" that is.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-phrase-I-am-not-even-going-to-d...

[>> Is the phrase 'I am not even going to dignify that with a response' a response?]

[> Yes, it is a response. It's a way of saying that you are wrong while simultaneously cutting off any possibility of having you defend your views. There are times when it is socially appropriate to say this, as for example when someone makes an outrageous, false statement designed to be hurtful. But there are other times when it's just a manipulative tool.]

-- Or, is it perhaps "not worth their time", due to the assertion being "self-evident", not unlike how many things in life 'are(!)' "self-evident" (again, within specific subcultures). Like, say, "black people 'are' violent", "Mexicans 'are' lazy", "Jews 'are' greedy", and so on?

https://www.google.com/search?q=racial+sterotype+examples

-- Or, is it perhaps a lack of depth in domains such as psychology and neurology, where one can easily learn that there is often a stark difference between objective/shared reality, and perception of reality - which is of course, highly susceptible to invalid/inaccurate data in one's custom mental model of reality, as a result of "Occam's Razor rules-of-thumb", stereotypes, memes, propaganda, and many other complex psychological phenomena?

https://www.google.com/search?q=difference+between+reality+a...

-- Or, is this an example of an imbalance between ego and self-confidence?

https://www.google.com/search?q=imbalance+between+ego+and+se...

-- Or, are the downvoters unable to formulate a reply? As in, their subconscious, System 1 mind instantaneously produces an answer to the very complex question of whether Quillete "is(!), for a certain exceptional* definition of "is")" "promoting eugenics", but their conscious, System 2 mind is unable to* even produce a post-hoc rationalization for the answer?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kahneman-excerpt-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)

https://www.skepticink.com/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rati...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_intuitionism

-- Or, is it something else?

So many (timeless) questions, so few answers.

So much emotional passion to "do the right thing" and "spread the good word" (educate the small-minded, unthinking(!) others), so little interest in whether one's assessment of the situation is actually accurate.

[ryan_lane]

I linked to the rationalwiki article which has a number of examples, including eugenics, but ok.

[mistermann]

The rationalwiki link was in reply to a different assertion: "A hate site is making it to the front page now?"

I will also explicitly note for the record that I also challenged (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23139467) that assertion, in that thread, but you decided to not defend it.

Are you thinking at a level where you care about such distinctions (mixing and matching your assertions and supporting evidence)? Well I am, just so you know for future reference. Regardless, I could easily decompose that assertion as well, but "a hate site" gives you way too much wiggle room. I prefer to stick with your more recent, more precise assertion, which just so happens to be the one that we are actually discussing in this sub-thread, before you (knowingly or not) made an attempt to rhetorically alter the context of the discussion, which is more commonly referred to as moving the goalposts, a claim that is typically levelled at "alt-righters" by people from your culture.

The assertion you have made in this thread, and haven't even attempted to defend (in case you didn't notice), is:

"They have a mix of articles that range from slightly conservative leaning, to promoting eugenics."

For efficiency, let's simplify it a bit, to make what you are asserting more clear:

"They have articles that promote eugenics."

The first challenge I would issue to you, just as I would issue to someone asserting that "Black people are violent", is: choose the best example of an article that does this, and make your best logical, evidence-based case for your assertion. Don't offload it to some lazy, third party "rational"-ist. Either think for yourself, or admit explicitly that you are doing little more than spreading hate-filled rumours and slurs, that you haven't even bothered to think through yourself.

This is the easy challenge, but I suspect you lack the vigour or devotion to your cause (of spreading hate) to even tackle that one. I infer this from a particular phrase you used: "...but ok", in conjunction with a change in the "tone" (roughly, projection of confidence) of your latest comment in comparison to your previous comments. My intuition tells me that you (at least subconsciously) realize that you've been caught in an act of deception. The "...but ok" rhetorical phrase is typically deployed (extremely effectively) in highly partisan environments, but the lackluster way in which you seem to use it now suggests that you intuitively sense you've lost that partisan edge in this case. But who knows, all of this is 100% pure speculation on my part, but good fun.

A harder challenge is this...taking your assertion:

"They have articles that promote eugenics."

Please define the precise meaning you intend to convey in that sentence, as it applies to the context of this discussion. Your words have the potential to affect the beliefs of all people who read them, which also has subsequent potential negative downstream consequences that affect (in unknowable ways) the interactions of people in our highly connected societies. So, if you are projecting a framed representation of reality into people's minds, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to ask what it is you mean, precisely.

"They have" - what does this mean, precisely? Articles are hosted on that site, no dispute there. But are you also implying that everyone associated with that site ("they") is also a proponent of every distinct idea contained in every single article? If not, then what is it that you are implying?

"promote eugenics" - once again, what does this mean, precisely? And for both words?

When you say "promote", do you mean "consciously advocating for", as well as "exerting effort towards shaping the thinking of readers"? And if not, then what?

And "eugenics" - what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean "practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior"? Or maybe that they are advocating for selective breeding? Or maybe you mean they are promoting the idea that "white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them"? Or perhaps for "marriage prohibitions by members of unfit races, as well as forced sterilization"? Are these the ideas that you assert they are "promoting", in whole or in part? And if not, then what?

Anyways, hopefully you see the general idea of what I'm getting at here. I have no particular expectations or demands about how you should respond to the above, I just think there is tremendous fun and great utility in examining how different people think about different things, as well as seeing if a person is able and willing to examine their own mind (typically: not a chance in hell).

Of course, it's also fun to shitpost hateful untruths about your personal outgroup, but my understanding of the HN Guidelines is that that sort of thing is generally considered undesirable here, although actual enforcement of the guidelines does suggest that there is a "fair amount" of flexibility on the matter, particularly depending on the outgroup in question.