The Alt-Right Playbook: Never Play Defense

What Hacker News said

Cites KozmoNau7 · 2019-03 · on “By Working Together, We Can Win Against Hate”

I completely disagree. These people are already on openly visible platforms, such as 4chan and 8chan, where the Christchurch terrorist was radicalized. By giving their hate and propaganda exposure on mainstream (social) media, you give them a platform to spread their ideology to more people. You have to realize that these people do not care about the truth, they do not care about debates, all they care about is being heard and seen. Debating them does not work, it only gives them more exposure. [LINK] The only way to deal with people who use these sorts of tactics is to deny them the "debate", deny them a platform and deplatform them from whichever platforms they already have. Shut off their

Cites some_furry · 2020-04 · on “FAQ Off: An Open Source Project to Defeat Harassment Mobs and Disinformation”

> All these tools for "taking control of the narrative" will be used by your enemies. The alt-right already takes control of the narrative. [this video] Even if this platform ever "took off" enough to be used by bad people, the only thing that would happen is we'd have a level playing field.

Cites thaumaturgy · 2020-07 · on “The Four Quadrants of Conformism”

Isn't it funny how things like this are never written by the boring types? It's always those wild, maverick, enlightened types seeking to describe themselves and, along the way, describe others, but mostly to describe themselves in flattering terms, with just a light veneer of modesty. (The self-assessed MBTI INTJs are just fantastically entertaining at this.) "All great ideas come from us," beams the self-described aggressively-independent-minded, "and if we aren't allowed to champion horrible ideas, why, the world just won't be able to get on without us." There are so many coarse assertions in this argument, without any solid foundations or evidence or even thoughtful observation. Right fr

Cites asmor · 2023-06 · on “Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely”

This seems very naive to me. There are enough people yelling "OK Groomer" at me on certain platforms that I know the signal to noise ratio is bad enough that engaging is at best a waste of time and at worst throwing more soundbites than I can debunk or bystanders can dead so I lose the debate (for any bystander) by default. See "Never Play Defense" from the alt-right playbook: [this video] And as an aside - HN is not guilt free on this topic too. There's a general tendency for comments to go right past the topic even outside this. For instance, every remote work thread turns into a generalized remote vs onsite debate, without the specifics of the article being weighed in. Even worse, HN also has

Cites Terr_ · 2023-11 · on “The impossibility of rationally analyzing partisan news”

Alas, it seems that in practice humans are often motivated by something "short, quippy, and wrong" [0] over something with more details like demarcating areas of ambiguity. So the "better" sources have an uphill fight to be influential. [0] [this video]

Cites cassepipe · 2024-07 · on “The Right Kind of Stubborn”

Could we say that biologically/culturally receptive to performed dominance and being dominant has nothing to do with rationally understand the world. I think this is the whole point of the jock/geek binary opposition in culture even though, as all oppositionnal pairs in culture, they are often porquenolosdossed : Some people can perform dominance and do master rationality quite well and some can do neither. Maybe we don't notice it either because they don't fit the cultural mental map or because they are not part of our social milieus (too high or too low status) ? [this video]