this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
196 points (99.5% liked)
Programming.dev Meta
2365 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!
This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.
Links
Credits
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.
My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:
I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.
The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.
Honestly you sound really naive. You seem to be under this delusion that people who hold intolerant ideas are only doing so out of honest ignorance and they can simply be convinced otherwise. Have you ever interacted with an anti-vaxxer? A covid-denier? A religious fanatic? A slavery apologist? The world is absolutely filled to the brim with incredibly unreasonable people who will ignore all evidence for things that don't fit their world view. They aren't looking to be convinced otherwise.
How do you plan on "respectfully asking" a homophobe to stop hating gay people, for instance? What if they just want to post about how much they wish gay people would die, what argument do you think would sway someone dedicated to their religion? Since its just speech and not action, they should be free to hate as much as they want according to you.
Your whole point doesn't make any sense either, the idea that people would jump ship to make threads accounts if they were defederated is absurd. The fediverse is an incredibly niche corner of social media, the only reason you would specifically search out for communities here is if you were disatisfied with corporate social media (like threads) to begin with.
You’re positing we not try to convince people who hold wrong worldviews?
No, I'm saying some people won't let themselves be convinced either way and that should be taken into account. You didn't respond with how you would convince homophobic people not to hate gays for instance, it sounds like you want people to waste their breaths arguing with the unreasonable just so you can maintain some moral high ground of being oh-so-much-more tolerant than the rest.