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I've removed this post as it was just a copy-pasted article. Please remember:
In other words, this is a place for discussion. If you'd like to discuss this essay, you may link to it, even quote from it, but then you have to do the work of offering some evaluation or insight of your own. There is no minimum word count, but "low effort" is something that is often evidenced by a low word count.
On a somewhat meta point, this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it? I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.
As Naraburns points out in another comment, if you want to stick to spaces where white nationalists are not allowed to attempt persuasive arguments in favor of our positions, you are welcome to try everywhere else on the entire internet. Can you let us have this one teeny-tiny space where we can actually have a respectful and open dialogue with people, allowing them to weigh our arguments without multiple layers of reinterpretation and misrepresentation by media gatekeepers? I do hope that’s not too much to ask.
It is too much to ask if those discussions crowd out everything else.
Just on a practical level if white nationalist talk floods the forum, it will cease to be an interesting forum to non-white nationalists.
There's a genuinely difficult problem here when it comes to creating an open discussion forum. If everything is allowed, at least some percentage of that everything will be vile. Many people don't want to be in a space where vile discussion occurs, and therefore will avoid it.
If there's a position that, by virtue of being included, will automatically lead to other positions self-excluding, then including that position may actually reduce the range of potential discussions. How to handle positions like that?
I can already hear the complaint - isn't this just giving a veto to the censorious and intolerant? And certainly it doesn't seem like a good thing to optimise for just having as many people as possible. The goal of the Motte isn't to get as many people as possible, so it definitely makes sense to just go ahead and let 'normies' feel uncomfortable if that's the price of attracting intelligent people with controversial ideas. However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas. So there should be a line, it seems to me?
The line shouldn't be placed at zero, where everything that offends anyone in the majority is banned. But neither should it be at one hundred, where literally everything is permitted including the guy who just likes to scream 'DIE N---ER DIE'. Where should the line be? If we want to curate a healthy, vibrant garden of ideas - where are the borders?
I know this will be interpreted as a call to censor. That's honestly not where I'm trying to go. My preference is to try to maximise the interchange of interesting ideas. It's just that how to do that isn't an easy question. It isn't resolved by just picking an an absolute principle like 'everyone is welcome full stop' and standing on that.
You keep saying that, and keep refusing to back it up. If there are "intelligent" people with "controversial" opinions, who believe that merely being on the same forum as people with views they find vile creates some kind of "association" I very much doubt their intelligence, or the amount of controversy around their opinions. Maybe you can find me a unicorn that is both intelligent and controversial, and who doesn't want to post at The Motte because of the vileness of the views here (I'd love to meet them), but 99.9% of the time this will be the domain of the establishment-adjacent.
The line has been the same pretty much since the start of the community. All ideas are allowed, as long as you're civil. Given that the 'DIE N---ER DIE' dude was never allowed to post here, why are you acting like it's an open question?
Define 'intelligent and controversial'. As I just noted, there are certainly people I would describe as intelligent who cut down on their engagement with or quit the Motte as a result of the last year or two's decline.
It's possible to redefine 'intelligent' on the fly, such that everyone the Motte lost was a thinker not worth keeping. But I would say that's inherently a value judgement, and a very questionable one to boot. It's possible to define the Motte's Overton Window in a way that excludes, say, the Schism crowd but keeps the white nationalists and anti-semites. It's also possible to define it in a way that includes the Schismers but excludes the white nationalists and anti-semites. But it may not be possible to define it in a way that keeps both.
As I recall, the schism originally schism'd not over white nationalism, but over the moral approval of lethal self defense. That's a DAMNED slippery slope you're suggesting we set upon.
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Plenty of intelligent people wouldn't want to hang out here, it's the idea that they're both intelligent and controversial part that I don't buy, and the fact that you went for the Schismers as your example proves my point.
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Almost all people just don't want to be around ebil nazis, and this includes almost all very intelligent people, even those with controversial opinions. They're are incorrect/wrong to do so, but it's still true. Most very intelligent people are establishment-adjacent, too!
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