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by roenxi 1387 days ago
>> Who are they? > People. Me. Others. I don't have a list.

>> I can find people who are willing to call ~30% of any country neo-nazis > Irrelevant.

I mean, the vibe I'm picking up here is they are the ones who decide, but not them?

Who are these they?

> I don't understand why that would be relevant. Again, long documented history.

There is a long documented history of the US being the Great Satan, or technically Shaytân-e Bozorg, based on a long history of documented problems. I'm not sure how to communicate with "them", but how do we make the call on whether "they" agree or disagree with that epithet? Pretty open and shut case I suppose, the US has done some pretty evil things as a group. Do "they" have a preference for booting the US or Iran off the internet, or are they sanguine about this and only worried about micro-scale harassment rather than macro-scale problems?

Things are done that are substantially worse than what Cloudflare has just acted on. And I suspect "they" will agree on a lot of it. And be wrong on a lot of it, because "they" are famously unreliable sources of information. Why aren't they going to act on all that stuff? It would be irresponsible to ignore it.

I don't think your stance is fundamentally workable, and suspect it hasn't made a serious attempt at engaging with the sheer diversity of human experience and perspective out there. Particularly when it comes to in-groups redefining words to shut people in other in-groups.

1 comments

You're focusing a lot on "they", and I don't really get why. You can instead focus on the argument being made and at that point it'll be a lot easier to engage. If you're trying to say that we shouldn't make decisions based on the feelings of vague interest groups, ok, but I wasn't making the argument that we should.