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It has been a little while now that this fledgling community has been around and it remains one of my favorite stories about communities. A splinter of a much larger community took it upon themselves to challenge the rest and make a move to a new home. Shedding the shackles that were being placed on them was a bold move, but one that has been fantastic.
The community here is great, but here is my question. Overall, we are amazingly tolerant of others, of the choices they make, and of their beliefs. I would then be curious, if we are such a tolerant group, how do we address intolerance in our ranks? I recently came across what I can only say filled me with pity and sadness. I find it saddening that in this day and age, and especially in this group, there are still such hate-filled people.
But this poses a question: how does a group that is tolerant deal with intolerance within it's ranks? Does our acceptance of others extend to accepting someone that has thoughts and beliefs which are far from the norm within this community, or is there a limit placed on how far from our own values a member of the community may be?
(Score: 2) by Koen on Sunday April 13 2014, @08:38PM
Well, this *is* real life. Not all of the internet is like a game of WoW, where you can be an gnome which hates & kills orcs.
Nobody takes such "implying" seriously. Don't feed the troll and all that jazz.
- There is no vendetta from Slashdot going on here. Are you paranoid?
- Yes, there are racists among all groups, also among minorities. Them being wrong does not make you right.
- The third category smells very much like hypocrisy, given that you also wrote "Do not allow the Brown (sometimes-) menace to invade your neighborhood -- your life may depend on it!"
Anyway, your conclusion that everybody who does not agree with you belongs to these categories is nothing but a strawman attack.
I do not know any Mexicans, I'm on the wrong continent for that. However, where I live the same rhetoric exists against other groups (Turks, Moroccans...). Nobody chooses their skin-color or their nationality (well, one can change the latter - but there is no point since all nationalities are equally good/bad/imaginary), so it not something to be proud or ashamed about. Believing that some group (white Americans, christian Europeans, whatever) has more rights between some lines on a map than a group who has another color or who just immigrated later than your ancestors is just an illness (you seem to agree with that, since you call your racist ranting "therapy" yourself), nationalism & patriotism (and religion too) are mental pandemics.
Should we hate you for being a racist? No, that does not help.
Should we tolerate your off-topic (on a technical/scientific/nerd website) racist trolling? If we do, this site will become yet another hatefest. If that happens, there will be no more insightful posts (except occasionally from you when you want some karma) because the community will have left.
Should we ban you? I don't think so, because then we also have to ban Anonymous Coward. I think modding you down to "troll, -1" will do. We should also be able to mod journal entries down to keep them from the list on the front page.
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 13 2014, @09:13PM
Pardon me, that's a fallacy: slippery-slope if I'm not mistaken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Koen on Sunday April 13 2014, @10:59PM
I think that dismissing every slippery-slope argument as being a fallacy is a fallacy.
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 13 2014, @11:42PM
I think I didn't dismiss every slippery-slope argument as a fallacy, just the one in the message I replied to (do you really want to imply otherwise or was it just a tongue-in-cheek reply?)
And I dismissed it on the ground of "non sequitur". Tolerating offtopic racist trolling does not necessary lead to SN becoming a hatefest; for this to happen, other condition must be satisfied (as in "additionally required, not necessary sufficient"):
* an abundance of this type of messages: I've seen only one;
* not exist other means to deal with it; given the "abundance", modding as a troll seems sufficient to me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Koen on Monday April 14 2014, @12:47AM
Yes, my reply was tongue in cheek. Your argument is correct.
I agree that modding as troll is sufficient, as per my post above.
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 14 2014, @03:26AM
Thanks for the confirmation and my apologies for wasting some of your time by "stating the obvious"
(in my defense, I invoke the Poe's law [wikipedia.org]: "on Internet, nobody can see your smile"...
except, probably, NSA... which, dealing with such serious matters as national security, doesn't have any interest to allow for such an interpretation anyway)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Koen on Monday April 14 2014, @08:48AM
You don't need to apologize, I was being facetious.
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]