Facebook Comments About Whites, Men and Americans Will Face Less Moderation
forbes.com
forbes.com
I've had three male friends commit suicide, two succeeded. My uncle committed suicide.
Why are slurs towards men is acceptable these days ? How are these policies acceptable ?
- https://luskin.ucla.edu/kaplan-explains-rising-suicide-rates... - https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-sil...
Great passage from The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Will_to_Change/G28L...
Maybe not directly slurs, but the overall social toxicity towards men _certainly_ does. And depending on how you define a slurs I think it does.
I read your passage and it falls on deaf ears. I have seen nothing but lip service by anyone trying to end patriarchy or similar, with respect to actually trying to change the male lived experience.
I was the victim of serious domestic violence in a heterosexual relationship. I, a white man, was _at best_ told I'm sorry, that's terrible. I was at a particularly vulnerable place in my life, and I was led and manipulated there by my ex. When I was at my most vulnerable the abuse ramped up very quickly and made it virtually impossible to become less vulnerable. Many times I was advised(by progressives and feminists mind you, I was in one of the most liberal enclaves in the country), to man up or not to be her bitch. Often implying that I should fight back (usually said in a half joking way). That felt pretty close to a slur to me, because restraint was likely what kept me from arrest and took an immense amount of self-control: Knowing that I was about to endure violence and having to not protect myself for fear of causing injury to the other party was absolutely numbing and dissociating. No one offered me help, shelter, real advice, anything. Most people seemed to think it something to joke about.
I very much consider myself a feminist and a progressive, and I was honestly shocked by all of this.
When I reached out for help to domestic violence institutions I was met with nothing but apologies, there were no services for men. Just like when I was in college and reached out about my severe depression; there were plenty of resources available, just for people who weren't straight white men.
I eventually was able to get out of that situation, but not before enduring significant levels of trauma. It gave me a severe episode of major depression, and I can only imagine what it is like for men who are married or have kids with an abusive spouse. I can easily see how that would lead to suicide.
Further, in my experience since this, bringing this up to women I'm seeing, even the most progressive among them, is a sure way to find myself single again. Society wants me to bottle up such an emasculating experience; all the talk about equality towards men from feminists feels like it is just that, talk.
It seems to me that baked into a lot of the perceived privilege of straight white males is that most people see a disproportionate number of them in highly successful positions. Even if you come from a place where there are plenty of poor, uneducated white people, you still see a huge number of powerful rich white people in the news, in the movies, running corporations, etc. Treating white men as a monolith is hugely detrimental towards social harmony in this country. Poor whites have it tough relative to anyone who isn't poor, full stop, (but I'll say that poor minorities generally have it even worse) and I think until we recognize, trumpet and act upon the reality that _poverty_ is the biggest aspect of privilege, we will continue to see a lot of resentment towards the progressive movement.
What gender controls the purchasing power in the average household? The median one?
and also constantly angle to appeal to potential purchasers.
Still, I don’t understand how policies like this can be seen as anything other than racism, by definition. And I don’t understand how racism can be defended as a good thing. Maybe that’s just my privilege.
A good example I can give is if someone said “men rule the world” that is an objective truth and a problem we need to solve. Men have and continue to be extremely overrepresented in positions of power. Now if another person were to say “Jews rule the world” that is an ignorant and hurtful statement with a terrible history. Race/sex/religious/etc blind moderation would say either both statements are ok or neither are. But one statement is far more hurtful because of the historical connotation of it and what it implies. Two statements can have the same wording, but mean two fundamentally different things because of the history and struggle of that group. It’s not necessarily racist to allow certain statements about some groups and not others because it might mean something different depending on what group it’s directed towards.
And what would the solution look like? 50% men and 50% women in all professions? Including nursing, plumbing, construction etc.? And how would you achieve that? Using a quota? Forcing certain men/women taking more/less qualified positions than they are? And who and what defines power? CEOs? Highly paid jobs?
> It’s not necessarily racist to allow certain statements about some groups and not others because it might mean something different depending on what group it’s directed towards.
How many such groups are you going to cater to? And who gets to be the judge of what is ok to say in one group vs another and between ranking those groups?
There are so many technical problems with these kind of thinking I can’t imagine how this ends well for anyone.
> There are so many TECHNICAL problems
I think this is the very problematic root of everything you said. There is no algorithm or equation to solve these problems. Equality is not a solved problem. We’re never gonna sit down one day and say “as of this morning we hit our equality metric, we did it everyone.” This is a soft science. It’s about debate and humanity. There are no easy answers, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem worth solving.
I didn’t say it is hard. My opinion was the problem is not even defined well. For example are we going to aim for 50% men and 50% women (or an equal spilt among all possible subdivisions of groups e.g LGBTQI/black/latinos/asians/212 nationalities etc) in every field no matter what the outcome is and how would we go about achieving this? It’s not an easy/hard problem it’s a definition problem. Also are we just going to act as if such equality only matters in tech industry and a few other places of power? And if so why?
I am not saying we should give up but we have NO idea how to define equality and what the outcome is going to look like let alone how to achieve it. For example is the outcome equal subdivision among all genders, classes, races, nationalities and their cross products? Or just in race dimension? And who chooses the appropriate dimensions? For example if it is in just one dimensional problem then what about people who are mixed?
Not to say it has been tried in different forms in Soviet Russia and other places which didn’t go so well. If we are going to try this again we better at least know how and what the end result will look like.
The argument you are responding to is that equality is hard, and explicitly racist policies make it harder, not easier.
>We’re never gonna sit down one day and say “as of this morning we hit our equality metric, we did it everyone.”
Which is to say, Facebook will have this policy of "low priority" for addressing "hateful" content directed at whites, men, and Americans in perpetuity? I genuinely don't understand your argument because on the one hand you admit this is a "soft", and largely arbitrary, metric but on the other you still claim that it's something that can even be "solved" at all (for some sufficient-yet-undefined definition of "solved").
The point of studying history is to learn generalizable lessons from it. That sort of hyper-specific take is simply failing to learn from it.
Think of the school yard situation where Nick is bullied for his leg, Tony yelling, “You walk funny!”, punches down and isolates and separates Nick from the group. Inclusion (more so, not being rejected) is strongly important to most humans.
If Nick shouts back “Tony, your straight legs are like everyone else”; it doesn’t hold much strength, power or bite. It’s because Nick is punching up. Tony remains comfortably part of the hegemonic group part of the majority with no loss of anything really.
I think this is an evolution in distinctions on this, earlier framing was that any racially insensitive comments were all collectively racism; the current framing seems to be some comments are racially insensitive and are a bit awkward while others shift power, divide and exclude; and the later is being defined as the more contemporary definition of racism.
In short if the type of slur is not biting at you it’s likely because your power or position or inclusion as “one of us”, is not at risk or in question and it’s hence much easier to brush off.
For people who fit well into the majority, much of this can be very invisible; hence so many comments from people with privilege often confirming to each other; I can’t see a problem here, I don’t feel this.
If he'd like, he could smirk when Tony launches a personal attack, pointing out - if asked - how insecure he is, and that he wishes him recovery.
Perception dominates everything.
Obviously im failing to grapple with the content. However, it is time we look at race as a technology of control- and if the "above" class is taught sticks and stones while the "below" class is taught that words and silence are violence - are we not re-entrenching the same oppressive binaries? (Oh right i forgot what the point was)
Uh, if you look at classical antisemitism of the 20th century (or its contemporary offshoots, very much alive in some Islamic countries), it operated along the same lines of thinking, only without using the word "majority".
Antisemites chose a few rich and connected Jews, pointed fingers at them and screamed "See, Jewish plutocrats control the world! It is a Jewish hegemony!" They absolutely saw their activity as a desirable "punching up" to the nefarious world masters.
Of course, the vast majority of Jewish people were neither plutocrats nor powerful, and the vast majority of whites today isn't in positions of power either.
This practice of taking an entire ethnic group as a whole and treating them the same based on a few negative examples is pure, unadulterated bigotry. It is dismaying to see how it took vigorous root in the West again. It is evil and it is going to have evil consequences.
However, another aspect of racism is that it disempowers the speaker. Someone blaming "the whites" for their situation is putting themselves in the same exact position as someone blaming "the blacks" for their situation. Even if there is some truth to what they are saying, they're adopting a very simplistic model of the world that will practically lead to more failure.
In a sense such feel good simplistic explanations have become the bulk of modern politics, but this isn't a good thing.
Hate speech is now allowed on Facebook, as long as you hate Men, Whites, or America.
“We know that hate speech targeted toward underrepresented groups can be the most harmful, which is why we have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious,”
This seems rather vague. That chart presumably was measuring individual instances of hate speech on the platform. That means that a plausible explanation is simply that there are more instances of "white trash", "cracker" and a gay slur, than hate speech against blacks, Jews, and transgender people. Or perhaps that the former is more reported than the later. Either way, that hardly seems like a Facebook policy failure.
I also make a special note of the cultural shift to slide gays in with whites and poor whites in the text. Their position now replaced in print with transgender people.
shrug I suppose we'll all just muddle through.
Also what does it mean to consider it "lower priority"? They set a 0< niceness for the process that scans the database for "white trash"?