The Data of Hate

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/seth-stephens-davidowitz-the-data-of-hate.html?_r=0

by _pius • 12 years ago

90 112 12 years ago

nytimes.com

line-zero• 12 years ago

"Why does hate exist?"

Good question. I wish we knew so that we could end it.

jqm6• 12 years ago

Why would anyone register for a site like this?

Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move?

I guess white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated? Or maybe they just don't care.

I sometimes picture a secret room at the FBI with poor clerks running around trying to avoid being buried under ever growing lists of suspicious people being spit out of printers with the advent of the internet.

With all the druggies, the communist sympathizers, the insurance fraud researching, the radical environmentalists, the anarchists, the bomb curious, the pedo interested, the racial supremacists.... heck, they probably barely have time to watch all the Muslims any more. It was probably a whole lot easier when they only had a few people to keep an eye on.

fennecfoxen3• 12 years ago

You "guess that white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated" but the article explores how that's probably not exactly the case. "[...] Economists Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt found that Ku Klux Klan members were actually better educated than the typical American."

jqm6• 12 years ago

http://www.nber.org/papers/w13417.pdf

So they were. In the 1920's. Not the people registering on Stormfront.

Incidentally... sticking reference to this paper in the article without noting the time period it researched is a bit duplicitous.

tinco5• 12 years ago

The article itself says white supremacist beliefs and education level are positively correlated. It's a mistake to think that someone who is intelligent is naturally capable of making good or even ethical decisions.

Deriving good decisions from our surroundings is much too complex for our rational thought to be working on constantly. This is why we derive most of our decisions not from careful consideration but from experience, upbringing, instinct and our peers.

jqm6• 12 years ago

Read comment below.

A paper showing supremacists in the 1920's were more likely to be educated (not intelligent, educated, which makes sense... the KKK was a prominent social organization in some parts of the country at that time and the locally wealthy and movers and shakers who could afford education belonged.) This doesn't tell us much about the intelligence of supremacists today. I am still guessing supremacists today are less intelligent than average.... because, supremacy is a stupid philosophy. That's my gut feeling.

Edit: Response to the below... I guess I should clarify... There are probably a good number of intelligent people who hold racist views.

The specific people I'm talking about though are people who would join a supremacist organization or register on stormfront. I believe most of these are probably not particularly intelligent.

What you say about feeling that people disagree with you are stupid makes sense. But I maintain most people who overtly hold a supremacist philosophy enough to join a supremacist organization, in this day and age have not carefully considered the issue nor the reality of their situation and are thus probably more emotional, reactionary, and...... less intelligent. I've known people like this and I bet you have too.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Why would they fear the authorities? They're white.

Ahahaha ha h... :(

jqm6• 12 years ago

A fair point. There probably are a number of off duty police officers among the membership for that matter.

And the same haircut works for both!

morgante5• 12 years ago

Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move?

You're being downvoted unfairly. I think this is actually a very legitimate point.

In fact, someone in this thread shared links to Stormfront and I refused to visit them out of fear that I'll end up on a list of white supremacists at the FBI.

cookiecaper2• 12 years ago

Such lists would be meaningless if they contained anyone who wandered onto the site. I assume they'd have to be more discerning than that (for instance, logging people with an account, or even better, logging people that have an account and post supportive content).

blendergasket5• 12 years ago

I find it really interesting that at a micro level on forums like this there is the same goodness and kindness to one another. People doing each other favors, people encouraging one another, etc. I mean, I guess it makes sense. People are essentially the same no matter what weird, dark beliefs they hold, but it just always boggles my mind that, out of some fundamental goodness and bond with their fellow human, someone will go out of their way to help someone else find some article or another on why all Jews should be shot or why Anders Breivik was a hero or whathaveyou.

fennecfoxen3• 12 years ago

As it turns out, human beings are generally amazing and wonderful creatures, even when they're members of an unfavored group. (Even when they've selected that group themselves, and the group is unfavored for a damn good reason. Notwithstanding that they're celebrating some very terrible things.)

Primates. Go figure. :P

msoad• 12 years ago

That's very true. They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them.

I'm non-White and was in Montana for a while. At first interaction it was obvious some people didn't even like talking to me but when I was breaking the ice and forcing some conversation they were very good people. Even interested in learning about my background.

thaumasiotes• 12 years ago

They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them.

From the article:

The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience [whites] that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live.

The more nonwhites they know, the more likely they are to go to stormfront. They say ignorance is bliss.

markburns• 12 years ago

I think this is just about in-groups and out-groups. If you're reasonably liberal-minded, you probably count the human race as a large in-group. They are favoured over animals, and then even more so over plants. A lot of people probably have groups that go family > friends > group/organisation > race > human race > pets > animals > plants.

I put 'race' in here. It's a hard to define concept, and I don't necessarily agree that it exists, but don't have time for that level of discussion right now. However, it's a useful generalization. A lot of people do have a tendency to group together according to race. For most people that's probably a lot to do with familiarity and commonality though than any strong racist feelings.

The only difference with the intentionally racist groups, is where on this spectrum they consider their out-group to lie. Put in these terms, I think it's easier to conceptualize. Personally, and I don't want to get political about this, but as a vegetarian, I feel my boundary includes animals. I don't want this to sound like a holier-than-thou argument, it's hopefully an objective judgement.

I find it difficult to conceptualize including pets in the in-group, but excluding animals we use as food. It makes no sense to me, and just feels like a hard-wired level of compassion that I have. I cannot on an emotional level process the concept of desiring killing animals. But on a logical level, I can see people that do think like that, and I respect people's choices. Now in my ideal world, people would naturally want to think like me, but I have no desire to waste my time trying to convince people otherwise.

Now, if you take a view that just humans are separate from animals and that we don't have a spectrum of care towards living things around us, then it's very difficult to conceptualize racist attitudes as rational or at all fair in any way.

I'm not entirely convinced of his argument that there are not necessarily economic factors in this. I can afford to be a vegetarian, (financially, socially, etc) and I'm not in a position of desperate need, or war or any situation where I need to reconsider my position. I do know for sure though that in times of crisis, this in-group is bound to shrink.

I think the general tendency of liberal thinking to be about sharing with society as a whole, vs more right-wing tendencies to look after your own is also just about where you fall on this spectrum of care to those around you.

If you're anxious or under stress or impoverished, or in any other situation that would make you feel under attack or that you have to protect your own, then I think you are pretty likely to tighten your in-group to a smaller circle.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

For tens of thousands of years we lived as tribes of hunter and gatherers. We are biologically programmed to form groups and hate other groups that are perceived as an enemy to our group. Evolutionary psychology is complicated and speculative, but it's quite clear we have evolved an ability to form strong feelings of hate towards other groups.

I like this quote from HPMOR:

Because the way people are built,... the way people are built to feel inside -...is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise...
You grew up in a post-World-War-Two society where 'I vas only followink orders' is something everyone knows the bad guys said. In the fifteenth century they would've called it honourable fealty... Do you think you're, you're just genetically better than everyone who lived back then? Like if you'd been transported back to fifteenth-century London as a baby, you'd realize all on your own that burning cats was wrong, witch-burning was wrong, slavery was wrong, that every sentient being ought to be in your circle of concern?

danso• 12 years ago

Love the closing line.

That said, I have to be skeptical about this assertion:

The states with the most members per capita are Montana, Alaska and Idaho. These states tend to be overwhelmingly white. Does this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate?...Probably not. Since those states have a higher proportion of non-Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a group that attacks Jews and nonwhites.
The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live....Among this age group, California, a state with one of the largest minority populations, has a membership rate 25 percent higher than the national average.

California is a HUGE state. Just because it's diverse overall doesn't mean that there aren't certain pockets that are very non-diverse...and being close to "The Others", while not mingling with them, may even exacerbate the tendency towards bigotry.

I don't think people in New York are naturally more tolerant in some genetic sense...if you're someone with a preoccupying hatred of a certain race or group, your biological stress levels will go haywire, as on any given subway ride, you can pretty much expect to be sitting or standing next to someone of that group. Chances are, you just get over it, especially if your workplace and neighborhood are equally diverse. And if you don't get over it, chances are the city life won't be for you.

It's often not so much a conscious choice to be tolerant versus intolerant...if something "scares" you at first, but you see it every day, and most days, your interactions are benign or even net positive, your body/mind is going to logically reason, "Meh, these people aren't bad at all".

And if you have a certain fear implanted in you, and never get a chance to confront it on an every day basis? What kind of logical process, absent first-hand, everyday experience, would reverse that fear?

IvarTJ• 12 years ago

Your thoughts match up with Anders Breivik living in a part of Oslo, a city with a large portion of early-generation immigrants from non-western areas, which was predominantly white.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_End_and_West_End_of_Oslo

gwern• 12 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't his manifesto discuss how he was radicalized in part by the minorities in Oslo when he was living there?

tinco5• 12 years ago

A shame he didn't go deeper. The analysis here is very superficial, basically consisting of him browsing the forum for a while and doing some number crunching on profile data. A bit disappointing for a NYT article, even if it is just on their website.

It would have been much nicer if he did a proper data analysis of forum posts. If we've ruled out social economic class and education, what big factor remains? I suppose it would be friends and family. Perhaps a linguistic analysis could reveal how connected these people are to each other. Perhaps some psychological analysis could reveal something about their personalities other than "a perfectly nice and intelligent young woman".

If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it. From my experience, people who post on forums are just the tip of the iceberg of the people who share their opinions and beliefs. For every person who voices an opinion there could be hundreds who share it.

Perhaps you could use the linguistic analysis to track their beliefs to key influencers.

sethsd4• 12 years ago

Hey, thanks for comment. I'm a bit skeptical of the whole linguistic analysis thing, for various reasons. But I could be convinced otherwise (Also this would bias the analysis away from people who just register and lurk) ... Another thing I looked at was Facebook profiles. But this part was cut due to space. Here's what I found:

Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs?

Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends.

Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too.

- Seth

henrymercer10• 12 years ago

"Why do some people feel this way?...And I can honestly offer the following answer: I have no idea."

Do you actually not know? Or are you asking rhetorically? The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, not sure why they would be hard to figure out.

clarkm2• 12 years ago

Eh, I don't think the number of Facebook friends is a meaningful comparison here. At least, not without additional controls. If a user takes the time to seek out such niche likes on Facebook, they also probably take the time to seek out friends to add. I know Facebook doesn't have the massive fake user problem that plagues Twitter, but still, I'd wager that fake profiles, inactive accounts, and users from countries with low Facebook usage skew the average significantly.

You can't really tell if they are "social [media] pariahs" unless you compare them to a representative sample. You could control for the average number of likes, and compare that to the average number of friends. Or even better, you could compare them to several groups of users who like other fringe topics (from all parts of the political spectrum) and see if they're significant outliers. In fact, this is going on my idea list. :)

tinco5• 12 years ago

Thanks a lot for making an account and taking part in the discussing, and my apologies for bashing your article a bit. Obviously the topic is very interesting and I'm very happy you made the article.

I would actually be wary of the lurkers, I suppose there is a significant amount of people who are 'interested' in stormfront without actually sharing the belief who have accounts there.

The Facebook statistic would be very interesting if it had been of the average Stormfront user. There's a chance the sort of person who has extreme opinions on their FB just has more friends, with only 100 out of 200.000 it's hard to tell.

It's funny you are skeptical of the linguistic analysis thing while you opened the article with a quote from a girl who was impressed by the linguistic analysis of that NYT quiz ;) You can make this sort of analysis without any specific knowledge at all, a very generic n-gram analysis could give you anything from common phrases used by stormfront users to linking their identities across mediums (i.e. stormfront to twitter/facebook).

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it.

That is interesting. It would be nice if there was a source for these ideas (well besides human nature) and if it was curable. We want to think these people a basically good but sick. Something happened to them and they became like this. If we could only prevent or even undo that.

Could it be for example that by default people are racist and will automatically dislike others from different groups (social, religious, national, intellectual, professional).

Hate of "others" is used for group cohesiveness.

Maybe it isn't them that are "abnormal" but us, who maintain that we don't have these beliefs, biases and stereotypes (at least rationally). Wouldn't that be scary...

Historically and geographically maybe instead of a sea of tolerance with island of hatred, it is the other way around. A sea of hatred and division with islands of tolerance.

It is also interesting that we often attribute craziness to these people. I do it all the time. They are mentally sick, they are hallucinating etc etc. But if you read manifestos of killers and how these people behave towards each other, how they function in real life, you might find they are are disturbingly "normal". That that is really disturbing to me at least.

asuffield• 12 years ago

I don't think there's any innate racism, but people do tend to be hostile towards those who they see as "not of their own tribe". This view of the problem would suggest that racism is the result of people having a very narrow world-view, where they don't recognise many other people as being "like them".

This would seem to be a solvable problem. We can break down communication barriers. The internet is already transforming the world in this way, and we've already come so far in the past few decades. Surely we can keep going, until nobody lives in a small corner of the world that's isolated from the rest of us.

kijin2• 12 years ago

Very interesting idea, and I think there are large grains of truth in what you said.

I don't think humans are racist by default, but rather that the way in which most societies have evolved so far are conducive to racism. Most communities around the world are either ethnically homogeneous, or if they're not, they have active conflict among ethnic groups in adjacent regions/towns/villages/neighborhoods. It's easy to be an armchair racist when there's no Jew within a hundred miles of you. It's also easy to be a practicing racist when other ethnic groups are threatening to kill you.

Historically, it has been very unusual for people of different ethicities to live together in the same block (let alone the same building) unless one ethnicity was regarded as superior politically and/or economically. Only in the modern world do Africans, Caucasians, Chinese, Indians, and Native Americans even have a chance to live as equals in close proximity. It is a rare phenomenon indeed.

But people do get used to it. At first there's conflict, but then a new generation is born who have never experienced ethnic homogeneity. The kids grow up playing with all the other neighborhood kids, unless bigoted adults tell them not to. This is the generation that can finally overcome racism. Not because they're better people, nor because they're better educated, but simply because their best buddy is red, their girlfriend is yellow, and their favorite football star is black. When these kids become leaders, and their racist parents die off, that's what a non-racist community looks like. History is made, one funeral at a time.

So the source of racist ideas is not some crazy dude with a funny moustache, but the very existence of homogeneous or segregated comunities. It is no coincidence that the places with the highest Stormfront membership rates are also the places with the lowest ethnic diversity. The geography and demographics of Montana breeds racists. Hawaii, on the other hand, is a rather unsuitable place for a person to grow up to become a racist. Even in other parts of the world, relatively homogenenous countries like Japan and Korea tend to be incredibly racist.

The only way to combat racism is to make people live together.

tinco5• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if it is accurate, but I think of someone who is hateful as someone who was hurt. This is also why I think it's so hard to fight hate, as even if you mend a wound, the memory of hurt lasts and fosters hate. How do you make someone forgive and forget?

hawkharris• 12 years ago

Hate speech can be a good thing. When someone verbalizes hatred, he or she gives us a chance to push back and question underlying prejudices. This is always better than a heckler's veto of racist or sexist ideas. Drowning out the hurtful speech doesn't address the root causes of ignorance, fear and anger.

cpa• 12 years ago

Although I think you're right, that is definitely not what's happening on Stormfront. There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together.

blendergasket5• 12 years ago

Yeah, I agree with this. On the internet it's so easy to get sucked into an echo chamber and completely cloister oneself in some belief system or another. Then every other perspective is the foolish mainstream media who are only there to feed the sheeple or some agenda of the enemy. I think these echo chambers breed/cater to a sort of messianic paranoia.

bootload• 12 years ago

There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together.

Not quite, "... Two weeks ago, the boneheads thought they’d got their man. For a decade, the pseudonym “Andy Fleming” has been troubling Australia’s far right and neo-Nazis – “boneheads” to their opponents – by writing about them. His blog Slack Bastard carries the work of a man who has acquired enormous amounts of intelligence, so much so that it rivals police knowledge. ..." [0]

[0] 'Hunting Australia’s neo-Nazis' Martin McKenzie-Murray ~ http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/society/2014/04/05/h...

colanderman2• 12 years ago

I bet there's a handful of good trolls on the site too.

astrodust2• 12 years ago

Don't forget that organizations like Stormfront give people purpose, something people often struggle to find in places like Montana.

We all want to be part of something bigger. Some turn to open source, contribute to the community. Others build wild conspiracy theories and focus their energies in that.

clarkm2• 12 years ago

give people purpose, something people often struggle to find in places like Montana.

I'm not sure what this means?

bhaumik• 12 years ago

Discussion around this article: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1051922/

Germany's win today: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1052081/

"Yes. I like Argentina also because they're mostly white, and they sheltered the heroes of our race after the Zionist take-over of Europe. But I was for Germany all the way. I loved how they utterly crushed Brazil in their own house. I don't like that they have to have an African on their team and it's obvious he is there because of affirmative action.. I also don't like how the German team had to hug Merkel and her Zionist lackeys but regardless, I'm happy for the German victory especially right in the house of one of the biggest mongrel countries in the world aka Brazil. It is left unsaid, but it almost feels like a big white hand slapping the face of every white-hating zionist and mongrel out there."

hiddentao• 12 years ago

And in looking through the discussion around this article (see link in parent) they seem to view separation of ethnicities (into homogenous countries) as the solution to their problems.

blendergasket5• 12 years ago

Yeah. That's interesting. I guess their ancestors shouldn't've formed empires. I imagine it'd be sort of hard to keep a racially separated empire.

DonGateley• 12 years ago

Interesting. That was precisely Stalin's solution to minimizing threats to his order throughout the Soviet empire and like it or not he was nothing if not rational. (Except, of course, for his assessment of Hitler's ambitions.)

middleclick• 12 years ago

So much hate, wow. How do these people manage to live their lives with all this hate? I am guessing it would be very heavy?

colanderman2• 12 years ago

That's not even just hate, that reads like someone desperate for acceptance. They touched on every hate-able aspect of the match they could. Pitiful.

Reminds me once of an article about how socially difficult it is to break out of hate groups; such that at some skinhead convention, and anti-hate group distributed white-nationalist T-shirts, which, upon washing, revealed a message offering help breaking away from the WN scene... and it actually saw results.

kamaal• 12 years ago

Hate isn't an event. Its a process these people undergo over years. If you browse their history and activities over the internet, like say on twitter. You will generally see they go in search of new stories to justify their theories almost every day.

Over years they build a case around what they believe and why that's true.

If anything their belief in what ever they want to, just grows stronger by the day.

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

It sounds so stilted. Almost as if someone was trying to figure out, "What would a white supremacist say?"

noname123• 12 years ago

I'm glad an "Internet Developer [in] Jew York City" is one example that the author picked to profile. I personally believe that the current "sensitivity training" and "diversity-based" US K-12/college education based on African American literature, history classes on MLK and slavery is misdirected.

Instead I propose a curriculum where we teach our children the dark side of humanity and allow both white, blacks and asians express our racial and other prejudices openly and honestly. Then to encourage and train everyone to come up with a plan of their own to overcome whatever perceived prejudices in athletics, academics or artistic outlets offered in schools.

Instead of suppressing the human nature to discriminate and giving people a sense of their own agency to either confront their bullies, or to subvert the majority power or to overcome in a round-bout way the limitations imposed on them, we allow people to feel entitled to an abstract idea of "fairness" and "justice" which never existed in American society. And we end up with one hand, "diversity HR Managers," "social justice campaigners" who resort to the ideals of civil rights to rally people, but are actually oppressing people by feeding them a false sense of moral superiority. On the other hand, the "banally evil" professionals who pay lip service to "go along with it" but actually just operates business as usual.

Instead of acting "shocked" and "indignant" every time about racism, we should openly acknowledge it in ourselves and concede that it'll never go away. I believe ironically, the benefit of not suppressing that speech and shaming sites such as Stormfront will help the discriminated people to find power in themselves to overcome than the other way around ("white lady" going into the hood for Teach for America to rescue all the poor inner city kids).

incision2• 12 years ago

The maps alone [1] seems to sum up so much of my experience with prejudice over the years. I grew up in and around and still live near DC which is near/at the bottom of the scale here.

First, it wasn't until I found my way onto the Internet regularly and into online games in particular in the second half of the 90s that I witnessed hate for Jews outside of history lessons. Suddenly, mixing in real-time with a not terribly diverse crowd from all the country the very word 'Jew' was an insult and heard regularly.

Next, in the early 2000s as my career got underway I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country.

At the time, the staff in our group was better than half black with middle management comprised of a black man, hispanic man and an orthodox Jew. We had several people come who were particularly about who they were willing to take direction from and at least one who was sent packing mid-project for his very strong opinions on ethnicity.

Finally, as we move through tourist season in DC I've already had my summer dose of tourists talking about how 'wasting money educating negros is killing the country' and Obama's birth certificate.

I guess I should be very glad to have been born into such a melting pot.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/13/sunday-review/...

blendergasket5• 12 years ago

This map reminds me just how split the state I live in, Washington, is. Living in Seattle it's hard to imagine we come in at the second highest category.

Stratoscope• 12 years ago

...I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country.

As someone who grew up in a cheaper part of the country, I was tempted to be offended by that comment (and particularly by the subsequent suggestion that people from cheaper parts of the country were more likely to be prejudiced).

I felt like you were pre-judging me based on where I was born - something I had as little control over as the color of my skin or my religious and cultural background.

But then I realized you're probably not always aware of your own prejudices, any more than I am. So no worries, we are all still learning how to get along and respect each other.

HCIdivision17• 12 years ago

Sorry, I wish the downvote button wasn't so close to upvote. This chain's interesting, not... Not.

incision2• 12 years ago

'As someone who grew up in a cheaper part of the country, I was tempted to be offended by that comment (and particularly by the subsequent suggestion that people from cheaper parts of the country were more likely to be prejudiced).'

I appreciate that you've show restraint from that snap judgment and given me the benefit of the doubt then.

'I felt like you were pre-judging me based on where I was born - something I had as little control over as the color of my skin or my religious and cultural background.'

That's not at all my intent.

Even though I'm noting some after the fact correlation (as opposed to presumption) between requests for cheaper professional services talent and those incidents it would be a pretty silly to pre-judge based on it.

In fact, I think that sort of negative-bias thinking is a common and costly mistake in both anecdotal observations or reported statistics. Even if something is 'more likely' the positive outcome is often even more likely.

The context of these charts is a pretty good example. It would be foolish for someone to focus on the suggested 10-12.5% for some state rather than the 87.5-90%.

It's particularly important in the case of human interactions where a default posture of respect and consideration regardless of the perceived odds costs little if anything at all.

'But then I realized you're probably not always aware of your own prejudices, any more than I am.'

Sure.

I tend think prejudices and predilections are something we all have, but the key is try and be as aware and objective as possible - to treat people as individuals in spite of those notions.

jqm6• 12 years ago

I think the eventual solution to racism will be love.

OK, maybe not love, but at least lust. We tend to take a very narrow time view of a few hundred years. However I can't but imagine in the US in two or three hundred years it will become increasingly harder to tell races apart.

Look at countries like Brazil. Look at the amount of interracial marriage going on right now in the US as opposed to 50 years ago. That I suspect is the future and I don't know how racism survives it.

lmz• 12 years ago

However I can't but imagine in the US in two or three hundred years it will become increasingly harder to tell races apart.

So instead of various diverse races you prefer a single mass of people with no distinct race?

thesteamboat• 12 years ago

That's more or less what I already believe -- that is I already agree with the statement "race is primarily a social construct". Of course some sub-populations have different genetic factors which may have some handwavey amount of effects, but I'd argue that 1) having multiple distinct "races" is primarily caused by group dynamics among humans rather than genetic variation, and 2) these constructs are generally harmful and we'd be better off not having them.

jqm6• 12 years ago

I don't have a preference. Just stating what will almost certainly happen.

It's happened all throughout history before. In fact, I'm guessing most members of stormfront might be a bit surprised if they had a DNA test done.

We are all product of generations of rape and pillage and countless secret affairs behind tents. But now we can move about faster and communicate better.

wyager• 12 years ago

So instead of various diverse races you prefer a single mass of people with no distinct race?

I personally wouldn't mind. Society gains nothing from distinct physical characteristics, except the ability to visually identify individuals.

dsuth• 12 years ago

That's pretty much inevitable, over a long enough timeline.

QuantumChaos8• 12 years ago

Even though they take their views to ridiculous extremes, sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews.

Exactly the same people and groups who claim that White people desiring to live among other White people is stupid and immoral, also believe that Israel being a Jewish nation is non-negotiable. Only the far-left (e.g. Norman Finkelstein and Chomsky in some moments) are consistent in criticizing Jewish identity and White identity in the same terms.

The mainstream claim that these two concepts are completely distinct and incomparable, and yet there is no obvious difference. The only way that this discrepancy can be seen as something other than hypocrisy, is if either (1) Jewish identity is entirely defensive, i.e. a reaction to prejudice from the society in which Jews happen to live, or (2) Jewishness is an entirely separate category, incomparable to race or ethnicity (I don't include religion because I don't think that the concept of Jewish identity solely as a religious identity stands up to scrutiny).

In response to (1), I don't see this as the full picture as Jewishness is allowed to be celebrated in its own right. The idea that Israel should be Jewish merely for the physical protection of Jews, rather than the protection of Jewish identity, is not consistent with how Israelis or their liberal supporters describe Israel.

In response to (2), the only way that Jewishness can be rendered incomparable to Whiteness, is to accept that the most extreme views against Whites are true. Namely that (unlike every other cultural or ethnic identity), Whiteness is an identity of racial supremacism and oppresion. Some people (again, on the far left) truly believe this. But I find it a ridiculous assertion, and most people simply are too brow-beaten to dig this deep in to anti-racist discourse.

morgante5• 12 years ago

sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews.

No, they don't. Don't legitimize their nonsense.

Also, Israel is not meant to be solely Jewish. It's just majority Jewish, just like other nations are majority Christian/white. That's a security measure, not an expression that Jews are inherently superior to other races—most Jews I know (including Israelis) support the inclusion of other people in their communities.

Please don't bring Stormfront to HN.

QuantumChaos8• 12 years ago

No, they don't. Don't legitimize their nonsense.

I share this critique, and I outlined it in my post, so I'm not legitimizing them, but rather outlining what things I think they are correct about.

I simply do not believe that Israel as a Jewish state is a "security measure". Almost no one thinks of it in these terms, neither Israeli Jews or American Jews (Einstein did, but he was in a minority). Israeli's (and American Jews) typcially describe Israel is existing for the protection of Israel identity, religion and culture, not the physical protection of individual Jews.

You say that most Jews support the inclusion of other people in their communities, and yet the Prime Minister of Israel said "If we don't stop their [African asylum seekers] entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state ... This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity."

Please don't bring Stormfront to HN.

I will bring my own beliefs to HN, feel free to deal with it however you like.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/20/israel-netanyah...

philwelch5• 12 years ago

"White identity" is a historically incoherent concept advanced almost exclusively by neo-Nazis. "Whites" are descended from an entire continent of rival nations, all of whom historically hate each other.

A better analogy would be, I dunno, Croats? No one begrudges the Croats their national identity.

QuantumChaos8• 12 years ago

First, people certainly will begrudge Croats their national identity, when they get around to it. I'm sure you're familiar with the battle against English identity or Swedish identity (at least when they are defined in the same way as Jewish identity is).

Furthermore, I think that you are simply defining anyone who talks or thinks about White identity as a "neo-Nazi". Jews are given space where they can think about and consider their identity. Whites are only permitted to feel shame about theirs.

The onus is on you to explain why people with common appearance, ethnic background, language and culture, do not form a well defined group simply because they are more numerous than Jewish people are as a group. Or why, the European disapora, having intermingled in the US for 500 years, must completely give up their identity and accept anyone from the world as like them, simply because they don't originate from a single country.

protonfish• 12 years ago

I don't like how the word "hate" has been co-opted to mean "racist." I hate caraway seeds and bullies and I believe my feelings are justified. (Seriously, why put rock-hard seeds that taste like turpentine into food?) Somebody could be racist without feeling hatred at all. In fact, it is these cold-hearted sociopaths that disturb me the most. Hatred can be a proper, constructive reaction to cruelty and corruption. Don't let racists take that away from us and don't let them hide their true agenda with a normal human emotion.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

The kind of people who hang out on the Stormfront website are the kind of people who cram all kinds of point-of-view pushing into articles on Wikipedia, "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." Basically, you would be wise to assume that any article on Wikipedia that pertains to any topic related to "race" (broadly construed) or immigration or the history of Fascist or neo-Nazi movements is skewed at present toward the Stormfront point of view,[1] although of course there are Wikipedians who are trying to clean up that mess.[2] People who gain their "knowledge" of the world from websites like Stormfront seem to end up like the unfortunate victims of early lobotomies performed by inserting icepicks into their skulls: permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position. I can only hope that such a toxic website will diminish in influence as people who know better about those issues take care to promote understanding those issues better early and often among all the young people coming up in the next generation.

AFTER EDIT: I guess I would learn something if I asked why this was downvoted, not seeing any comment in reply here. I'll note for the record that some of the arguments given in this very thread for why it is a "valid critique" or "human nature to discriminate" as part of thinking about the issues Stormfront brings up get into our HN community from developers and other smart people who haven't studied history or social science much getting their knowledge of these topics from Wikipedia articles that have been subtly corrupted by Stormfront-supporting Wikipedians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropo...

barry-cotter• 12 years ago

I didn't downvote you.

Point of view pushing is inescapable.

permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position

This is the normal state of affairs. Most intellectually curious people never break out of the first paradigm they are exposed to. Most people never get that far because they're not intellectually curious. At some point you have to trust somebody or something because it fits with what you know of the world, and makes sense. It's a pity some people stop with stormfront but they'll never have any political influence so I'm not too worried.

I have to say that coming from you I find this amusing. Anytime you and yummyfajitas have a discussion you not so subtly accuse him of being a racist and pretend you've addressed his points by dumping a list of references on the thread.

By the way saying it's "human nature to discriminate" is completely defensible. You may disagree with the connotations, but any introductory social psychology textbook will do. You must know that too, because you're part of that journal reading group at your local university, right?

cookiecaper2• 12 years ago

I've flagged this article because it's not really apropos to HN, but we'll never have a truly sympathetic or constructive discussion with others when we openly editorialize their beliefs as "bigotry" or "hatred". Even if they are wrong, framing the discussion in these terms just ensures that no constructive or beneficial dialogue can occur between the parties. Any time you see words like this used, especially in the abundance used in this article, you should understand that there are likely rhetorical and political forces at work intent on discounting the other side (i.e., this is the language of propaganda, not true journalism).

I do have a question in that vein, if anyone is still reading these comments. At what point does a group cross the rubicon such that it's an acceptable implementation of journalistic ethics to slap these kinds of labels on their fundamental beliefs and statements? Isn't journalism supposed to convey events and groups in a neutral context, without favoring one side or the other? I understand almost no organizations like that exist anymore, but hypothetically speaking, I guess. Where is the line of demarcation between a group that still deserves a fair airing of beliefs and the respect of journalistic ethics and a group that doesn't?

Newspapers obviously do not have an obligation to publish rants by any and every madman who comes along, but once they start to gather a significantly-sized following, isn't there a duty to archive and catalog the events in a neutral manner, for the accuracy of the historical record if nothing else? Isn't that what journalism is supposed to be about? I'm just curious how this works and is considered within the industry. I'll be honest, from a distance, it seems that the new journalistic ethics are "If it supports your boss's beliefs, run with it and make it positive; if it tears down your boss's opponents, run with it and make it as damning as possible".

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