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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Quick Question: You are worried about right-ring rabbit holes, NYT.

If I watched a bunch of NYT, Vox, and other such videos, are you _sure_ I wouldn't be sucked into a Left-wing rabbit hole?

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You're trying to make a "both sides" argument about this: a "left-wing rabbit hole" is not equivalent to a "right-wing rabbit hole" in terms of content.

There is no cosmic balance between left-wing and right-wing. What are the consequences of the left-wing rabbit hole vs the right-wing rabbit hole? Not all viewpoints are equal or even valid.

>You're trying to make a "both sides" argument about this: a "left-wing rabbit hole" is not equivalent to a "right-wing rabbit hole" in terms of content.

Really? Why? Because conservative/right = bad, and liberal/left = good?

Because the deep-right youtubers are white supremacists?

That's a cyclical argument if I ever saw one - plus adding the weasel term "deep-right".

Yeah, white supremacists are scum. Why mention them though?

We were talking about right/conservative youtubers here (in fact my question asks exactly about right/conservative). Where does the "deep right" come in?

Are the ones shown in the screenshots "white supremacists"? E.g. Shapiro, Watson, Peterson, for a few I recognize. Have they shown any such tendencies?

Or does being concervative/right automatically means one can be labelled "deep-right" and thus "white supremacists"?

What word would you prefer I use? I was trying to avoid painting the right wiht that brush by using it, but I'll not use that term then. The guy in the article watched a lot of Stefan molyneux videos and he's a white supremacist. That's what the article was about, that's why I brought up white supremacists. You go down that youtube rabbit hole and you just get the "race realists" eventually. That's the topic of the article.

I'm not a native English speaker, but isn't there a huge difference between "race realists" and "white supremacists"? Isn't a "race realist" someone who argues that there are significant genetic differences between races while a "white supremacist" is someone who argues that whites should rule over the other races?

The word "significant" is doing a heck of a lot of work there. Statistically significant? Maybe, but even if that were the case, the actual, plausible consequences are really subtle - they're there of course, but most "race realists" like to talk about other things - go figure! "Significant" in an everyday sense? No way - that's so wildly implausible (keep in mind, we're only talking about what the innate difference might be, after screening out all of the environmentally-caused divergence!) that one can safely say that people who argue that this is what's going on, really are just parroting white-supremacist memes. I.e. they might not be white supremacists themselves, but they're ideologically-possessed memebots who are spreading a white-supremacist memetic infection.

Yes, you are right. This is just a re-definition of language so that you can't talk about it without being labeled a white supremacists.

Correct, believing some races are inherently superior does get you labeled a white supremacist because there's functionally not much of a difference between the two.

Barely a difference . Race realism is the same thing, sugar-coated to avoid openly admitting your racism and belief that some races are inherently superior .

I think there is a fundamental difference though. At some point the far right will start to promote really hateful messages such as anti-gay, anti-jew, anti-woman, etc. At the far left end, on the other hand, the hate is stared at the capitalist system and public figures benefiting from it.

Far left is just as dangerous as far right. Just google how many deaths can be attributed to far left ideologies (communism, marxism, etc.)

> At the far left end, on the other hand, the hate is stared at the capitalist system and public figures benefiting from it.

Or violence against different thinking individuals.

Think third wave feminists. Antifa. BLM. Berkeley Riots.

Right now, the extreme left is much more dangerous than the extreme right (not to mention the similarly lumped not-so-extreme right), because people like you think they will do no “real” wrongs.

That’s a huge mistake to make.

At the far-left end:

A. Millions murdered based on class: independent farmers [0], intellectuals, defined as anyone wearing glasses [1], entrepreneurs, professionals. Generally anyone perceived as better off than their neighbor was at risk of being labeled 'enemy of the people' by said neighbour and deported overnight into the Gulag [2]. Or executed on the spot.

B. Millions deported based on ethnicity. Entire populations were moved around USSR in the '30s, including Balts, Poles, Romanians, Tatars or Koreans, based simply on their ethnicity, partly as an attempt to forcefully disassociate them from their cultural legacy.

C. Millions murdered due to breakdown of basic economic structures. The great famine of Ukraine in '32/'33, and Mao's great famine of the '59/'63 stand out as marvels of far left ideology implemented by force in the economic sphere.

All in all, an estimated 100 million people lost their lives in the name of far left ideology [6]. It is repugnant to gloss over recent history and pretend there are no hideous monsters to be found.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#Democrati...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_in_the_Soviet_Uni...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao%27s_Great_Famine

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...

This is off topic since I (and parents) was specifically talking about youtube creators. But sure, lets change the subject for a minute and talk about the general ramification of far left and far right policies.

I could go hat for hat and mention all the murders and genocieds far right regimes have conducted, regimes like Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, etc.

But I could also go through all the disasters caused by capitalism like the Bhopal disaster in 1984, or—the elephant in the room—global warming.

My third option would be to list all the social issues caused by unhindered capitalism, issues like the housing crisis, or the worker conditions in the late 19th to early 20th century.

But all this is conflating the fact that I would be blaming bad policies enacted by ignorant, greedy, or even malicious people in the name of a political or economical ideology, which is to say (at least in the case of Franco and Pinochet) I’m confusing capitalism with fascism, something I see quite a lot in the above comment. My point is that none of these (with the notable exception of global warming) are the necessary consequences of far left or far right policies.

Sure you could take me on this and claim that both far right and far left people are capable of performing horrible things, and you would not be wrong. And then again, I must point out that this is off topic, we are specifically talking about youtube creators, of which you can find numerous example of far right creators spreading hate towards a large generalized public while on the far left you at worst find this hate spread towards public figures that represent far-right ideologies.

NYT is not a left wing outlet. Left-wing mass media, produced by a large capitalist conglomerate, if you think carefully is an oxymoron.

Ummm...NYT is not bi-partisan?

Would you consider New York to be left wing? I would.

Sssh - they don't want you to think about these things.

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