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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

    We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

    I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.


  • “A deradicalising effect”

    I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

    I think you are unaware (or much more likely willfully ignoring) that communities are primarily dominated by a few active users, and simply viewed with a varying degree of support by non-engaging users.

    If they never valued communities enough to stay with them, then they never really cared about the cause to begin with. These aren’t the radicals you need to be concerned about.

    “And those people diffuse back into the general population”

    Because that doesn’t happen to a greater degree when exposed to the “general population” on the same website?




  • As an atheist this is just a grossly superficial reading of Christianity.

    Christianity isn’t about being non political it’s about political expediency. Christians were told to obey the government for survival (i.e no needless rebellion, unlike prophesied in Judaism), there is no part of the Bible that says that you can’t enforce Christian morality if you are in power. (“Judge not yadda…yadda”- that’s about hypocrisy, it is infact encouraged to judge and purity test others, Christian or not).

    Infact moral systems require some obligation to to follow them, as much as people want to circle-jerk about how they don’t obligate others to do what they think is right, nobody actually believes this. The sheer fact that you believe something to be good or bad means that there is some property that makes this distinction relevant, this property is the obligation to do good and not do bad. People who assert that they don’t think others have this obligation as well are engaging in special pleading that only they are obligated to do good and not do bad. In other words, individual moral relativity is universally rejected, the few people that claim to ascribe to it would object to being stabbed as a good action simply because the perpetrator felt it was.

    “I don’t believe Christians should be able to point at it and say ‘yeh, but that’s not my Jesus’”

    I agree. If people don’t believe in Jesus as described in the Bible, they shouldn’t characterise it as “Jesus”.

    Your objection on the other hand is ridiculous. If someone identifies as X, and it is physically impossible for others that identify as X to force them to stop identifying as X (not exactly sure how you think people can “do something” greater than repudiating them, which you already characterised as insufficient), then the problem of categorisation falls on the observing third-party. Well it always was the problem of the third-party, the unreliability of self-reporting is simply more obvious in this case.

    “If I was Christ, I’d be pretty darn upset right now”

    Seems weird that the purported Son of God would not be more explicit in social critique. Jesus as described would probably be far more conservative than any public figure nowadays. I don’t remember him advocating for democratic voting, freedom of speech, LGBT rights, or universal education.

    He probably would be upset, just not in the same way you are.