[tovej]

This problem is a societal one, it mostly harms you indirectly by creating spaces for hateful ideas to spread, 4chan's harm is through the capacity to organize and strengthen hateful and harmful political movements. More socially conscious people not visiting the site only serves to create a stronger echo chamber.

[ranger_danger]

This is how oppression starts. First it's "let's only get rid of the most offensive content", then "let's suppress opinions we don't like".

[aguaviva]

This is how oppression starts

More often though it starts with wave after wave of logical fallacy.

As applies to your critique above, for example:

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

[Etherlord87]

A slippery slope argument is not necessarily a slippery slope fallacy. Which you should understand after reading the article you linked.

[aguaviva]

In this case it plainly is though, if we just think about what they're saying.

[Etherlord87]

Plainly to you, but not to me. What isn't obvious to everyone, isn't really obvious. You didn't care to explain what kind of stopping mechanisms are there, that make it not a slippery slope.

Rowan Atkinson gives some nice examples here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUezfuy8Qpc

I'd say rather than there being *a risk* of descending too low on that slippery slope, we already have plenty of evidence this already happened. I'm from Poland and recently a party in ruling coalition proposed criminalizing hate speech on the Internet. Fortunately, precisely the slippery slope rhetoric, supported by evidence from countries like UK, seems to be enough of a backlash to stop politicians from following such ideas.

[aguaviva]

For starters -- the commenter wasn't actually suggesting that this kind of content needs to be suppressed.

In order to have a slippery slope, you need something to extrapolate from. But the commenter wasn't providing that.

[tovej]

Would you please tell me one example where oppression has started with criticizing nazis.

[ranger_danger]

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

[tovej]

This is an armed resistance group, not an academic clique, and the violence was a reaction to attacks (e.g. beatings, assassination attempt).

It's also not an example of oppression, even though it is violent.

[matheusmoreira]

The fact you think some ideas are "harmful" is exactly why humanity needs sites like these. We don't trust people like you to determine which ideas are "harmful" and which aren't, which ideas are worth spreading and which aren't. We want to see for ourselves, thank you very much.

We are especially interested in the ideas that people deem offensive enough to suppress. Are they actually wrong or are they just socially unacceptable? Whatever the truth is, it can't be learned from a place that suppresses discussion of it. Declaring the matter as settled and suppressing any opposing viewpoint is the very definition of an echo chamber.

[tovej]

You're saying national socialism is not harmful? /pol/, /b/, and tons of other boards constantly spawn threads glorifying nazi germany and vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed.

Violent far-right groups use these threads as a pool for recruitment. These far-right groups cause real societal harm through violent crime and shifting the view on violent policies against minorities.

I am not using an abstract moral argument when I say these ideas cause harm, I'm arguing based on objectively observed effects that the loose ethical norms of a liberal democratic society would unambiguously deem harmful.

[matheusmoreira]

> You're saying national socialism is not harmful?

Everything with the word "socialism" in it is harmful.

> vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed

Unfiltered hate like that is a property of humanity itself. It is not at all exclusive to the so called internet hate machine. If you look closely, you'll find that plenty of "virtuous" people are capable of just as much hate, if not more. I've personally witnessed it.

[tovej]

If you're not answering the argument, that's fine. But let's acknowledge that you did not answer the argument and are now just spouting the rhetoric of the far-right movement I'm describing.

[matheusmoreira]

I won't acknowledge anything. Your argument was not convincing. It was actually the perfect example of an attempt to suppress socially unacceptable views.

You singled those people out as "harmful" because they call for the deaths of "other ethnicities and women". Implicit in your world view is the idea that these people wouldn't also do such things. The idea that these groups are the blameless and virtuous victims, deserving of special protection against these "harmful" words and ideas. That's the part of your argument that I chose to attack.

I chose to attack that idea because I've personally seen people from these "virtuous" groups post some of the most concentrated, unfiltered and unabashed hate speech I've ever seen. I witnessed them call for deaths of entire groups, including those I'm part of, with a clean conscience. I was there when they laughed at the very few people who tried to hold them accountable for it. Not only did they not suffer any consequences, people actually made excuses for such behavior and treated it as though it was justified. Their openly hateful behavior actually empowered them.

I will never forget that as long as I live. I straight up archived those social media threads to ensure the internet never forgets. I even posted those archives here years ago when people asked me for examples. If I cared enough I bet I could even dig up those archive links from my post history.

I didn't care to dig up those links because I've yet to see a single person get outraged by this sort of behavior when it comes from these groups. I have no reason to believe you will be the exception.

They post things like "KILL ALL MEN" verbatim and people make excuses for it. Well, I'm not interested in hearing excuses today. I decided to try and make you realize that hate is a normal human emotion instead. My argument to you is that hate is a perfectly normal human emotion. It's part of the human condition. It's not at all exclusive to 4chan's politics board, oh no. People hate. Everyone hates. Even people on this very site will hate and openly call for the deaths of other humans if presented with a juicy enough target. Don't doubt it, for I have seen it happen.

By the way, dang has rate limited my account to about 5 posts every 2 hours because I would get into too many arguments just like this one. He's actually right and when I contacted him about it I asked him to keep the account rate limited. So you will excuse me if I don't reply further to this thread.

[tovej]

I understand that this issue seems to create a strong emotional reaction in you. That does not excuse you from the consequences of those strong emotional reactions.

I feel like you have massively extrapolated the argument from what the original point was. My response was about how "avoiding 4chan" does not shield you from the effects that 4chan has (including harm). I don't know which groups you belong to (because you don't mention them), but we clearly agree that violent rhetoric is bad, so why are we disagreeing? It seems you have the exact same point of view as me in the general case of hateful rhetoric, but simply feel that some groups are more important (because you belong to them, perhaps? this is the feeling I get).

Also, let's not kid ourselves, violent crime (including murder) and oppression towards women and minorities are well-documented and studied real-life issues. Violence towards men by "virtuous" groups (leftists?) does not even register on the scale when compared to them. The online violent rhetoric towards women is also at several orders of magnitude higher than violent rhetoric towards men. There is a clear disproportionate aspect to this issue that your emotional reaction is not taking into account.