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Comment by thesimpsons1022 | Hacker News Reader

i'm not saying he is one but just to run with your argument, what if that person is a nazi?

Then it is still up to those people to make their decisions. This is probably hard to get for many people but the best way to address a problem is not by polarization and fomenting an 'us versus them' mentality but by engaging and dialog. If you want Thiel to chance his stance write to Thiel, don't try to cause others to severe their connections with Thiel in order to isolate him.

The best way to get someone that according to you is doing something wrong to change their way is by talking to them and arguing with them. The worst way is to isolate them, it will only cement their relationship with the party that you object to stronger because that will be all that remains.

and if i don't care about Thiel changing his position? i honestly dont care if it cements his positions. i'd rather stand up to bullies and racists than make them feel good and tacitly support them in order to potentially convince them one day.

this is just another billionaire wanting his buddy to win so his racist policy against hiring Asians isn't prosecuted.

Almost exactly to this point, my wife sent me this story this morning:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-...

It's about the intellectual evolution of Derek Black, the son of the creator of the infamous white-power website Stormfront. He grew up believing in and advocating for a lot of very foul ideas. As the article describes it, the key turning point was when someone in his college - even knowing Derek's politics and history - invited him to a weekly Shabbat dinner:

Matthew decided his best chance to affect Derek’s thinking was not to ignore him or confront him, but simply to include him. “Maybe he’d never spent time with a Jewish person before,” Matthew remembered thinking.

The story seems to have a happy ending, with Derek's political about-face. The lesson in here seems incredibly apropos - rather than push out people who have wrongheaded views, pull them in closer and challenge their ideas. Use love instead of hatred.

Did you vote for President Obama when he was against gay marriage in 2008? According to your argument, you should say no, but here begins the failings of your moral signaling. Did you stand up to him or justify your vote with: He does not mean it or he was not a Republican?

Are you going to vote for Hillary, who has said she was against gay marriage as recent as 2012. According to your hero plan, you should not have anything to do with her, ever.

> what if that person is a nazi?

There are no unpersons who still participate peacefully in the political process, and it's best to keep it that way—Nazis included, as hard as that is to stomach.

No-platforming isn't just morally wrong, it's tactically wrong too: it only "works" when your group is in power. The moment you lose power, you'll be wishing you hadn't pushed so hard to shut up dissenters.

The more odious someone's political beliefs are, the more important it is they remain in the company of the sober and reasonable: it's the only chance society has to bring them back into the fold without bloodshed.

I don't know why people are downvoting you, but that's a perfectly reasonable question. In fact, I'd argue that it's the most logical and important question to ask in response to the parent comments. It makes a lot of sense to look at the extremes and make sure that our reasoning holds up in those situations, too. (That's a technique that you would think most engineers would understand intuitively, but alas.)

i also find it silly to downvote me for a question. I didn't even take a side or necessarily disagree. also, whenever you ask a question like that people misinterpret as calling that person a nazi or hitler when you are simply bringing up a thought experiment.

Then it is our privilege and responsibility as free-thinking individuals to make that judgment.

It's possible to respectfully and courteously disagree with even the most heinous beliefs. Characterization that prevents discourse is a danger to both the sides.

isn't vilifying and characterization just as much of free speech as the original idea? if you vilify an ethnic group and I vilify you, why is your speech supposed to be protected while mine isn't. respect isn't a given.

With the resource depleteion going the way it is and the planet severly overpopulated - I have been convined for some time that we will see in our lifetimes genocides on a scale that would make Eichmann say - "dude you are overdoing it".

So I have no problem with nazis or other military ideologies - they just arrived at the future first.

At the end it will be us vs them by whatever criteria - it may be trekkies putting whovians in the gas chambers for all we know. I just hope that when the dust settles I will be among the right "us".

So these of my believes make me not care about other peoples ideologies - we are all doomed.

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