Extremism Researchers Confront The Unseen Toll Of Their Work | Hacker News Reader

Extremism Researchers Confront The Unseen Toll Of Their Work

npr.org

69 pointseverybodyknows102 comments

> Charlie Winter, a London-based terrorism researcher, was dining with friends one recent evening when the conversation turned to whether it is ethical to eat meat. Someone brought up slaughterhouse conditions, Winter said, and he instantly grew uneasy. He stayed for a while longer, squirming, and then finally left the room. That word — "slaughterhouse" — had conjured images of one of the most gruesome ISIS videos he'd come across. The militants had filmed a mass execution in a slaughterhouse, casting their prisoners as the animals.

I wonder if watching gruesome animal slaughter videos would eventually produce the same reaction. Given how much the industry wants to keep their treatment of animals secret [1], I can't imagine the effect is benign.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag "Supporters of ag-gag laws have argued that they serve to protect the agriculture industry from the negative repercussions of exposés by whistleblowers."

“As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

> in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis.

Which is more than a little ironic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism

Where's the irony?

Articles that seem relevant to the topic:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L214

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Treblinka

“As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”

Pythagoras

Source? Because pythagoras never wrote anything down. That was kinda his thing.

This is fake, unless it is from the greek pythagoras who was a athletic trainer, in which case your attribution is still dodgy.

My source: the pythagoren sourcebook.

It's attributed to Pythagoras through Ovid but I couldn't find exactly where. It doesn't seem to be in the Metamorphoses.

For the laymen, note that Ovid lived about 500 years after Pythagoras, so you can still be skeptical about this attribution.

Tigers and bears don't seem to have any emotional strife about their position in the food chain. Don't think we should feel too bad about it either. There are real concerns to address about sustainability though.

Bears also don't have any emotional strife about killing cubs to increase their odds of mating. Perhaps looking to them for moral guidance is not the best idea.

But that’s part of the point. We owe animals humane treatment because of what we are, not because of what they are.

To be clear, holding tigers and bears to a different moral standard is human exceptionalism. I’m fine with that, but many people seem to feel we should treat animals humanely because they’re the same as us.

Either animals are moral entities, or they're not.

If they are, we owe them moral treatment, but then they are subject to being held accountable for their own moral failings.

If they're not, then they can't be said to accrue any moral failings, and we don't owe them moral treatment.

Hard disagreement, if something can feel pain and suffering then we should be striving to overcome the need to inflict that on them.

Also, just because we don't "owe" it to them doesn't mean we shouldn't. Being nice or doing good in the world isn't something that should be earned by the recipients, it should be the default for how we treat each other if we're REALLY trying to progress and move forward as sentient beings.

> it should be the default for how we treat each other

What should be included in the set of "each other"? You're suggesting we include entities that are totally amoral, who happily destroy other sentient beings in the most painful ways, and who are incapable of reform. There is no imaginable social contract that could possibly include such monsters.

Surely there must be some element of symmetry as a condition of such a set membership. It's implied by the very phrase "each other".

I think trying to figure that out is the exciting part, and I'd prefer to err on the side of generosity.

Many rodents eat their own babies when stressed, and many animals practice rape. Following nature for ethical concerns is sketchy at best.

How do you know? There's no experiment I can think of to confirm this.

IMO, the correct 'null hypothesis' wrt mammals is that they think and feel like humans do, except where we've managed to prove otherwise.

We're not tigers or bears, so I never really understood this line of thought.

We're all part of the same natural world, we have more in common than we have differences. The world we're all born into doesn't seem to particularly care about suffering -- it's baked into its very fabric, we're all going to suffer and die.

If you are going to survive, you have to kill every day, be it plant or animal; it's just the way it is. You can say that plants matter less than animals, and make up some justification about consciousness and suffering, but that is simply our own personal bias. There is no way to know if the universe cares more about thinking or non-thinking things, or if they share the exact same intrinsic value. All such moralizing is on very shaky ground and comes down to human bias and not much else.

The animal kingdom is absolutely brutal. And not in the "predators kill prey" sort of way. I just watched the documentary "The Lions of Sabi Sands" on the recommendation of someone here, and the level of violence that exists in animal societies is something I think most would find shocking.

This hardly operates as a justification for human brutality towards animals. Most aspects of human society are less horrible than the natural state of affairs and an argument from nature that would should relax our standards seems highly suspect, both from an intuitive and logical perspective.

Doesn't it, though? The point of human society is to make life nicer for its humans, not for the state of nature that comes into contact with it.

"The point of human society is to make life nicer for its humans."

How do you figure this? Why not "The point of human society is to make the world more aesthetically pleasing?" Or "The point of human society is to make life nicer for all conscious beings?" Or "The point of human society is to make life nicer for all great apes?" or "The point of life among higher animals (of which human beings are a cohort) is to make life nice for all higher animals?"

Its hardly a settled point _what_ the point of human society is or even where "society" should have its limits defined.

The Absolute Truth is that the point of Life is to become conscious enough to discover that the point of life is to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless. But imagine how conscious you have to be to get there! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PjZB9CoFfs

While I'm sympathetic with the idea this seems like a lot of woo to me.

See if you can be radically open minded about it and notice the implicit metaphysics of your anti-woo default position

There isn't one damn thing that is implicit about my metaphysics.

When you say something is "woo" you're implying that reality is physical, which is your implied metaphysics. The Truth is that reality is _not_ physical, but you have to do a lot of metaphysics to get there, look into the video I linked.

Indeed!

Ref Katharine Hepburn, in "The African queen":

"Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above."

Pythagoras was infamous for being a lunatic in everything - you can't even exclude his area of sanity mathematics given his erroneous insistence on rationality in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Most people would be rapidly desensitized. Recall that not too many decades ago, people routinely butchered their own animals, and many still do in much of the world.

Sure, but there's a difference between how the animals are/were kept, killed, and butchered in small farms vs a dedicated meat factory.

That's about the fairest argument, and I say this as an unrepentant meat eater, hunter, and fisher.

It's not just that the animal is dead, it's that the animal spent its entire existence in terrible conditions.

Thanks for saying this. "Repentant" meat eater here. Every time I eat meat, it came from an animal that enjoyed being alive and didn't want to die. More people should hunt and fish, and know what it's like to take the life that you're going to eat. I think people would feel a sense of obligation to the animal's quality of life, in light of the sacrifice they are making.

Sorry it's slightly off topic, but wanted to thank you for creating common ground. If I try to make it topical, I think conversations like this between different points of view overall reduce extremism.

Maybe but ... my grandfather use to raise 3 cows a year. One for him, one for my family and one for my mom's sister's family.

I got to see them kill the cow. Cut it open and remove the gut sack and then later got to see them process it at the butcher. I still eat meat.

I guess that's the same as witnessing it on an industrial level, day after day.

It takes a certain level of awareness to even be capable of making that distinction though.

It depends. I don't think seeing animals killed would affect me too much.

I do think seeing animals suffer would definitely help to change my behavior.

I always wonder if people were tougher before, when death, blood, violence were much more common (< 100years ago: famines, wars, diseases, life conditions, crimes in general).

Surely the average person back then were confronted to a much more difficult life than the modern average first world country inhabitant, did nobody talk about it ? Did they just plow through it all ? Were they less prone to complain ? It seems like today you can't go more than a week without a "x" gave me ptsd article[0]. I used to be on chans back in the days, and I saw my fair share of isis videos, they're awful there is no doubt about that but I never felt any of what these people are describing, anyone with the same experience ?

[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-york-daily-news-journ...

We keep inventing new names for old problems. Shell shock (WWI), battle fatigue/combat stress reaction (WWII), Gross Stress Reaction (Korea and Vietnam), and soldier's heart (Civil War) continue a long trend. You can even read descriptions of such problems in the Iliad.

PS: Nostalgia was apparently the term used in the 1700’s.

The other point worth making is one from the article -- people have varying levels of tolerance and recovery ability.

A comment which bounces off one person may well cause serious damage to another.

There's some research indicating that being around people who have shared similar experience matters a lot. Basically, it's not trauma if it happens to a big enough % of people. It's just a normal (if unlucky) life experience.

When the British went and whacked Argentina they found that the soldiers who hopped on a plane and 12hr later were surrounded by people who will never have to make a life and death decision and are complaining about how they "literally got ptsd" from firing a rifle had PTSD type problems at a much higher rate than soldiers who got a 2wk boat ride surrounded by people who had been through the same stuff.

It seems that nowadays it is more common to get one of those ailments. While back in the day you got soldiers heart from marching day in day out while eating rats and nothing else. Or being bombarded for more than 24 hours by artillery. Or living through the hell that war is with millions and millions dying around you.

Opposed to firing a AR-15 and getting PTSD

It’s not just about direct combat, being constantly alert for danger for long periods is inherently unhealthy. That might focus on IED’s, shelling, snipers, or just starting at the jungle looking for hidden soldiers but war is stressful. And such long term stress can cause seemingly mundane triggers.

Even going back to Roman legions you can read accounts where the expectation of future combat causes problems for people in fortifications.

PS: One change is explosives can cause brain injuries that are less obvious, but tend to get lumped into the same general category. That really started with WWI, but it’s still a real issue.

It is, but watching an isis video in your comfy air-conditioned London office while being payed the average african annual wage each month is a far cry from war. That's what I was talking about. I completely understand a soldier or a victim of a crime being traumatised.

It’s clearly not the same thing, but these jobs really are stressful. The article’s repeated mentions of taking a break is meaningful in that context because these people can be on edge for long periods. The flight or fight response did not evolve to deal with internet videos.

People working in slaughter houses often learn to separate themselves from what’s going on, people that don’t learn that end up quitting. However, these researchers need to stay engaged and actually think through the details.

Among law enforcement it is not the jobs that have the highest risk that always have the highest turnover. People dealing with extremely unpleasant images and video for most of their day apparently have on staff psychologists and high burnout.

> It seems that nowadays it is more common to get one of those ailments.

Is it? It seems to me that PTSD is just more common than what people once thought, and that, nowadays, it's treated more seriously.

It's not like military trauma was unknown "back in the day" - https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/what/history_ptsd.asp

> During World War I, treatment was varied. Soldiers often received only a few days' rest before returning to the war zone. For those with severe or chronic symptoms, treatments focused on daily activity to increase functioning, in hopes of returning them to productive civilian lives. In European hospitals, "hydrotherapy" (water) or "electrotherapy" (shock) were used along with hypnosis.

Those soldiers who marched day in, day out, while eating rats, or who were bombarded more than 24 hours by artillery, or who saw millions die around them? They probably brought PTSD back home with them.

Seeming to be more common doesn't necessarily mean it is more so. Furthermore, it could well be like a situation with helmets: the introduction of helmets caused head injuries to go up, not down... because people who would have died without with the helmet were now merely injured.

I remember seeing a program that claimed this is because soldiers today are trained to kill against their natural instinct.

So traditionally only 20% of soldiers could actually kill, which would explain the low casualty rates in older battles pre-ww2.

Then after ww2 they figured out how to train soldiers to just react and kill, resulting in 6 in 10 soldiers killing.

And those who kill but wouldn't normally are much more susceptible to PTSD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology

Wikipedia, so buyer beware. Seems like a controversial subject like that I can't help but think that a single edit like this changes the whole tone of the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killology&diff=78...

Somehow it must be considered the difference between draft and volunteers and professional soldiers, however.

And also background (both cultural and previous civil occupation) when seeing the matter at the international level.

The old assumption (right or wrong) was that populations of hunters and shepherds were more familiar with slaying than more agricultural ones.

And of course is an entire different thing to kill an animal (let alone a human being) with a knife or a sword (or similar) and - say - pulling a trigger of a firearm from 300 yards away or dropping a bomb/firing a missile from 10,000.

"I remember seeing a program that claimed this is because soldiers today are trained to kill against their natural instinct. So traditionally only 20% of soldiers could actually kill, which would explain the low casualty rates in older battles pre-ww2."

That's a good observation, and not one that I thought of, but it does bring up the question of organized combat in the other 95% of human history. It would surprise me if a Roman got much choice in the matter from his friendly local Centurion.

People are raised in bubble wrap compared to the past. We used to live on less than a dollar a day, surviving plagues, wars & reasonably extreme religious/political doctrines. It was rough.

We have the luxury of living in a time and place when getting fat is more likely than starving and the most challenging conflict you might have is being excessively lonely or fighting an ideological fight with a university professor or managing bills and relationships over a pay packet.

I doubt you can get PTSD firing an AR-15 but if you take the above person with zero framework for how truly horrible life can be and dump them in a warzone, it gets a bit much. Maybe if we teach our kids how rough life can be, a trade of guaranteed survival of a cow's species and a reasonable quality of life for an individual cow is worth it's price in meat. Are we as humans promised anything better?

Have you noticed how frankly fucked up people "used" to those kinds of stress were and are? Many of the ancient barbaric practices are themselves institutionalized trauma modeled as norms. What is the difference between "can't stop your son from being molested by their socially superior tutor and pedestray" but normalization in institutions?

To look to it as "strength" itself is a sheltered and deeply irrational delusions and frankly utterly messed up.

To make matters worse the whole notion is deeply unoriginal and always wrong and yet it reoccurs.

"We know how larger populations of agrarians with their stable but lesser nutrition were beaten by smaller populations of nomadic hunter gatherers and civilization never developed." Oh wait....

Yeah regression to the mean of the past would be a bad idea. But integrating knowledge or self-knowledge of the things we have exiled can be useful.

"I always wonder if people were tougher before, when death, blood, violence were much more common (< 100years ago: famines, wars, diseases, life conditions, crimes in general)."

I actually think this is a fairly unique circumstance in modern days. In this case, these are people who are exposed to daily violence that they cannot do anything about and are asked to mentally analyze the degree of violence and circumstances of this violence. People are being forced to engage with and analyze horrific stuff they have to see for hours a day.

Before this, we saw similar trauma with police investigators tasked with analyzing horrific crimes. The Farming Of Bones covers the long, generational trauma of the Parsely Massacre in Dominican Republic/Haiti before that.

I highly doubt that your exposure to 4chan gore was equivalent to the scale of consistent, hours-a-day exposure of these folks.

> people were tougher before

Sort of, in exactly the same way that people were "tougher" before the invention of antibiotics and would suffer through, live with, and routinely die from diseases instead of seeking treatment.

What actually happened, of course, is that we started looking at issues like PTSD as real mental health conditions that can be treated and discussed, instead of irrelevant mental issues we were supposed to "get over" or ignore. Basically, your attitude sounds like someone claiming that PTSD doesn't really exist, and people shouldn't claim to have it. And that doesn't seem very informed, honestly.

Now, I know you'll reply that lots of people who claim to have PTSD or other mental health conditions probably don't. Which is true. But the same is true of all sorts of other conditions, and we don't tend to see posts like yours talking about people not being "tough" because they whine senselessly to their doctor for an hydrocodone or Ambien prescription.

Tough in this case equates to traumatized. If you traumatize a child with everyday violence, typically they become violent and inured to seeing violence. Plenty of militaristic societies in the past courted this deliberately, or quasi deliberately (the trauma was referred to as "toughening them up" etc).

It's tough to tease out the causation in mental health epidemiology. Are there more PTSD cases because people are "less tough" as you say? Or are there more PTSD cases because it's more broadly understood by clinicians and patients? Or maybe there are events occurring which are likely to produce more PTSD?

I think it's safe to say there is a mixture of causes, and we should always shy away from a single causal explanation like "tougher before".

Playing around on a chan is not the same thing as researching these things for a living.

It's probably a sign of good mental health if someone is disturbed by violent imagery. I am worried about people who aren't disturbed by violent imagery.

Personally, when I was younger I perused a ton of violent and disturbing imagery online. I was curious and I thought I was "tough-minded"!

It turns out that I just had difficulty accessing my emotions. Now I literally begin to tear up watching Netflix shows. I much prefer myself now since I can be emotionally available for the people I care about. I shudder to think what I would be like if I never outgrew my puerile obsession with being a "tough guy".

As for "tough guys" I have noticed how quickly they leave the room when difficult situations arise. I also notice how easy it is for them to alienate people in their lives. I am beginning to wonder if "toughness" is really just an excuse not to grow up.

Toughness is not the same as courage, courage requires you to be emotionally invested in the suffering of others, which often means you will be affected by images of suffering.

> It's probably a sign of good mental health if someone is disturbed by violent imagery. I am worried about people who aren't disturbed by violent imagery.

idk, some people lose their shit at the slightest sight of blood or violence, you can't count on them to save the day when things go south. And I'm not talking about getting robbed at gun point or the like, simply cutting a finger while cooking or breaking a leg while hiking. I saw people get in worst conditions than the victims just at the sight of blood, emergency services had to treat them before the victims.

I wasn't really thinking about toughness in the "tough guy" sense. You can be tough and emotional, I don't see how these are mutually exclusive. ISIS victims' stories hit me way harder than the images.

Longer ago, if you didn't adapt well to combat, you probably died. A fair percentage of green troops won't shoot to kill, and they suffer fairly high casualty rates.

Anecdotally, it seems to me that my acquaintances who were actual combat veterans in WW II, Korea and Vietnam were much less enthusiastic about the military than those who served in peacetime or were in non-combat roles.

This reminds me of the psychological toll on content moderators at facebook and youtube, and previously was known to happen to police prosecuting specific murders or child sex abuse or in lawyers managing such cases.

It takes a toll on these people in a very specific manner. Someday, I hope we can identify the full extent of the harm as its own traumatic exposures, treat it appropriately, and view those showing such videos to be the psychological danger it is turning out to be.

I'm sorry folks have to confront this graphic imagery so often. If you could use ML to classify killing in a scene better, you could do the public and the researchers a favor. Use the classifier to limit the impact of a terrorist video before it is spread to social media and give researchers a chance to organize and consent to watching certain sections of the video when and if needed.

When will this ML-fueled fantasy end? You can’t use machine learning for most of these tasks. Not now, maybe not ever. And the fact is: real people are being paid shit wages to watch ISIS beheading videos right now. Today. As we sit and sip our coffee. So what can we do /right now/ to help solve this problem?

So much this. I often wonder if the people clever enough to propose a ML solution in a random comment on the web have an idea of how ML/AI/nested IFs work. (or rather how anything works)

I disagree that there isn't information in those images that could be used to filter out some of these scenes. You have blood, impact wounds, bodies going limp, and other factors. It's something you can work on right now, in addition to other remedies, to reduce the quantity and impact of the trauma.

That still would require massive human resources to categorize the training data, and then more human resources to continually quirk the algorithm on identifying traumatic media. I don't personally see a way to avoid using humans here, so it's important that we identify and deal with the damage done to people in an empathetic and humane manner.

Humans (researchers) are already doing the work. What I'm suggesting is that you add a classifier so that in the future, some of the work is done for you by the machine.

You can rest assured that many people in the ML world are way ahead of you. If ML could be effectively used, it already would be.

There are a couple papers from 2017 where they talk about getting some effective results, but there is a lack of datasets around this topic and that the area is less studied. Can you point to the efforts that have been made here?

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rahuls/pub/caip2011-rahuls.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02578.pdf

Yes, and I'm responding that that still requires human labor and trauma, therefore it is still important to classify these responses as harm and treat these jobs as dangerous to the psychological wellbeing of the people participating in them now- give them access to healthcare related to their workplace hazard.

The link on their full site, which I found a bit easier to read: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/20/762430305/it-gets-to-you-extr...

I wonder if this isn't happening, at a much lower volume, to the population at large. I have a single device connected to Twitter, the ipad on my nightstand.

I don't know how my personal feed developed, but Twitter is nothing but a violent diarrhea of hate and I frequently pick it up, look at the first page, and move on to something else.

It's nowhere near the same thing as watching ISIS videos constantly, but I wonder if we're poisoning ourselves with an unending stream of hate?

I think this is part of the answer to free speech absolutists. Even someone who isn't ideologically bought into this stuff is traumatized and damaged simply by exposure as a researcher. It is not possible to treat this content, even the textual hate screed rather than graphic form, as part of "the marketplace of ideas". It has effects.

> I think this is part of the answer to free speech absolutists.

You can't argue with them, they'll say "don't like it, don't watch it".

It's the people who do like it that I worry about.

Everything has cause and effect. What's your point, that we should police the content adults are allowed to watch? Call the police on people watching 2girls1cup?

We're not gonna throw out one of the core tenants of modern democracy because some people get sick if they get too much exposure to it.

The problem is that pretty much anything can have effect. With your approach you would have to ban everything to the level of people with lowest resistance.

First you ban torture videos, then murder videos, then animal slaughter, then violent porn, then violent video games, then violent movies, then all movies where gun is shot (see shooting ar-15 gave me ptsd) and you have banned all action movies. And you still can't be sure if there isn't anything even more benign which would have "an effect" on someone.

You had the impression that free speech arguements were based upon speech not having an impact?

Funny the whole reason why speech is protected is because it /does/ have an impact. If it didn't spending any time on it would be irrational as declaring a need for underwear color regulation. The point of free speech is that we cannot trust the would be regulators not to abuse things to make their own ladder to power, that peaceful transitions of power end better than violent ones, and those who make peaceful change impossible are faced with violent ones.

I wonder if the ISIS fighters themselves suffer from PTSD from taking part in such slaughter. Does strong ideology protect against brain trauma?

I suspect the answer is no but they rationalize until it either strengthens the ideology to cover up because they refuse to admit mistakes, and they convince themselves that their shaking hands are from fervor or they become disillusioned and break free with PTSD with added rightful guilt.

Addrenaline and immediacy of threat do help a bit though - drone piliots apparently have more PTSD from killing compared to cockpit gunners being shot at before they pulled the trigger.

Sorry guys, but I don’t understand. As a society, we are fighting extremism by... censoring it, not addressing their points. Manifestos of killers are always hidden, the reasons why they killed never addressed, and we go as far as banning all authors whose work describes why the extremist became extremist (see Jordan Peterson’s book banned in NZ), thereby ensuring the population never understands the terrorist. Why?

“We don’t discuss with extremists” is a fairly strong assertion. It comes from an “us vs them” attitude.

For example, men who start being upset with women being promoted about 2,7x fewer experience and men who get upset being managed by women who grossly misrepresent their competency and drives their department to irrelevancy, start researching feminism. They regularly found that most feminist science is bollocks. Studies about rape are manipulated to show rates as high as 650x higher than more decent sources, for example by only using voluntary responses from a non-random group, by conflating rape and the presence of alcohol (so a dinner with one’s boyfriend including wine entered the category that the study reported as “rape... or sex without consent”), by conflating rape and not-woman-initiated-sex, or other techniques to overinflate victimization. Same techniques apply to wage gap (conflate gross gap with same-work gap, conflate full-time-with-overtime vs full-time, conflate the quality of work of people who are passionnate and/or are forced to earn more, vs the quality of work of people who don’t commit to their job), I’ve seen in also in the legal and social domain. A study that concludes that women are victims has like 60% chances of not having been seriously peer-reviewed and 99% chances of having a major, fatal flaw that discredits it.

Ok, so can we denounce a bad scientific paper? Can we denounce repeated news articles that are repeatedly false?

No, because “it’s fake news”. I was once literally told (by a magistrate friend of mine), “Everyone knows women are oppressed, so if that’s not want your counter-analysis concludes, you are the one who’s wrong”. And we go as far as firing them, which didn’t happen to me because I resigned before they discovered that I had The Doubt.

So we have large swathes of people, who were pointing out something entirely correct, who are excluded from society “because we don’t discuss with terrorists”.

Some of them commit bombings. Their frequency increases, mostly as a result of the increasing rate of divorce in the 80’s, which means boys are only surrounded by women (mother, teacher, psychologist) who claim literally false science, and who publicly hate men and everything masculine.

How are we, as a society, going to sort that out, if there is no place where this can get discussed? Are we voluntarily going to say, “ok, bombings will repeat, because it is very important that nobody knows the motives of bombers, and nobody resolves those problems, and nobody even will resolve the false science that is outright plain false”? Is that seriously the path we are taking?

But more important is the pathways: Learning about the absurd mistakes of feminist science is leading most users into neighbour areas (yes, studies on racism), and is procuring a steady stream of new recruits for what you call “extreme movements”. Wouldn’t it be better to tap the leak while it’s still time?

How do we address the underlying selfishness that causes this?

What do you mean with selfishness? I have always been more generous in both time and money in my life than most of the group. Dozens of thousands of dollars to charities. I’ve also greatly helped my god-daughter in a very feminist way, and stood up for others way more than I ever stood up for myself in my life. So shut your fucking mouth, I’m so upset of having ever contributed to charities which now end up working against males.

I assume you claim than when being unfairly treated, asking for coming back to fairness is selfishness. So justice is selfishness? Which is the first step in showing your bold accusation is plain anti-male hate, but anyway, I won’t change your bad ethics.

However to answer your question, to resolve selfishness problems, you could stand up for me after I’ve stood up for others. You could stand up for me even if I hadn’t gave first, but just because I’m a human and deserve it? You could show solidarity for men when needed. And I’m not asking for the moon, I ask to be able to work even more and be paid for the work I do! If the group considers that unfair things done to me are as unfair as unfair things done to any other member of the group, then you’ll never have to try to limit my place in society.

Howeve, when shown absolutely no consideration at all by you, and not being considered as a mere human, and feeling deprived of my basic rights to provide to society and be rewarded for the sweat I give, then I feel a sentiment of abandon and urgency, which close to provokes the effect we were trying to avoid: bombings. Well, that’s the effect I was trying to avoid, and I have no feeling that you were trying to avoid that. Perhaps you’d be happy that you provoke me into terrorist attacks just to gain attention, because it would confirm the prejudice you have about « selfish people », aka, I assume, males that you see as selfish because tHeY aSk To bE pRoMoTeD.

notice that all of that only exists to _you_ and that _I_ have no idea what you're on about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqNRUILvHc

The argument of being alone.

We’re millions. We make websites and books and movies and demonstrations. There are also millions who are not willing to engage politically, but who are battered husbands, and not a single battered husband shelter.

But we are heavily censored. Youtube said it’s their #1 goal to censor us. We have no access to freedom of press either.

So apparently you live in a bubble.

Can you please stop posting these YouTube links to HN? It's gotten a bit excessive, and users have been complaining.

That doesn't surprise me at all. I actively try to avoid echo chambers so I go out of my way to find forums and communities of people with very different opinions. I'll go looking for antivax groups, religious forums, flat-earther blogs and try to see how they view the world.

Since I'm fairly left-leaning I also often end up reading far-right content. It's not like it's hard to find on the web these days. I often end up incredibly depressed after doing that though. Flat-earthers are wrong but they're often innocuous. Sure, there are conspiracy theories lurking everywhere but they're not really preaching hate or intolerance usually. You have a minority of extremists and then plenty of people who just don't know any better but don't seem to be bad people on their own.

The far right stuff is different. It's just dripping with hate and lack of empathy. It's almost always about putting other people down to feel better about themselves. Empathy is weakness, moderation is treachery, the opposition are "degenerates" and "Non Player Characters" who are depersonalized and considered sub-human. The most vile acts will be brushed away if it serves their objectives. It's not people who "don't know any better", it's people who want to feed on hate. It's frankly terrifying to me.

And before somebody tries to tell me that the far-left is as bad, I really don't think it is, or at least not nearly at the same scale. I've seen hate speech and calls for violence on communist forums for instance, and of course the atrocities committed by socialist and communist regimes are often downplayed, but it's not nearly at the same scale or with the same violence in my experience.

People who grew up in the soviet union might disagree with your self image.

>> People who grew up in the soviet union might disagree with your self image.

What is it you mean by that? I do not necessarily disagree with you, I am not sure I understand the direction you're taking.

That claiming that left-leaning somehow is less draconian or violent seems in contradiction with left-leaning ideologies applied to reality.

The Soviet Union was a rigidly authoritarian regime. We're not really talking about economics here.

What else does parent mean by left leaning then?

>And before somebody tries to tell me that the far-left is as bad, I really don't think it is, or at least not nearly at the same scale.

It isn't politically correct on HN to imply that there is any difference between the extremism of left-wing versus right-wing politics, unless it's to argue that the left is even worse.

> unless it's to argue that the left is even worse.

That's highly debatable, at best.

> The far right stuff is different. It's just dripping with hate and lack of empathy.

One could say the exact same thing about left-leaning arguments. I frequently see use of population-level trends and statistics to bulldoze over individual experience and variance, which to me screams "hate and lack of empathy." The person fielding that argument doesn't see the humanity in the other, they're just a number.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a human problem. Not an any one side of the political spectrum problem.

>One could say the exact same thing about left-leaning arguments. I frequently see use of population-level trends and statistics to bulldoze over individual experience and variance, which to me screams "hate and lack of empathy."

You could have said that leftists lack empathy for the rich, or white men, or picked any number of common arguments (often spurious) used to discredit the morality of leftist ideology. Mention Mao and Stalin and mass graves - that's a common tactic.

But the use of statistical analysis being exactly as hateful as the racist and anti-semitic dialogue of the extreme right because analyzing trends among populations requires counting people in aggregate?

I mean... that's not even wrong.

Also, I'm pretty sure the extreme right employs the same tactics when trying to argue the inherent differences in IQ between races and genders, or the predisposition of black people towards criminality and violence, or the inherent dangers of multiculturalism or ethnic mixing. I doubt they consider the experience of every individual Muslim before trying to convince people that Islam is a violent religion that cannot coexist with Western democratic values.

So the false equivalence you're trying to draw here just makes the right look even worse. Both sides use statistical analysis to try to prove their point, but only one side is also shooting up synagogues and black churches.

If you really want to avoid the echo chamber, you might find some thoughtful, center-right reading.

You might not know it but there’s a long tradition of intellectual conservatism that despairs of the alt-right fringe as much as you do.

I have a unique line of work that exposes me to both sides of the extremes pretty frequently, and personally I have a rather apolitical neutral outlook. From my perspective, the amount of dehumanizing rhetoric from both sides scares the shit out of me.

Anecdotally, I'd say that the extremity of the deeply alt right is indeed worse in their fixation on hatred, but I'd also say that there's a greater fraction on the far-to-moderate left routinely spewing dehumanizing rhetoric about anyone with even remotely right leaning views.

On balance, it's hard for me to say one side is superior, except that the extremes are obviously bad. There's some very real concern among conflict professionals that cut their teeth in places like Bosnia in the 90's about America today, and frankly, I understand the fears there.

People do terrible things and being exposed to it in concentrated form will make you less happy by some amount related to what you're exposed to, the concentration and your personal tolerance. Water is wet. More news at 11.

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