This reply is disappointingly short and again does not address the core question raised by Shakeel.
The letter of intent states that the grant was approved. Why doesn’t FLI do more due diligence before approving a grant? Since you havent stated the opposite, I assume that the latter is genuine (that would be nice to clarify, too). Is that a usual process? How often, by percentage, does it happen that you approve a grant and then later reject it?
If you see the wikipedia page now, do you think, as a first guess, it would be ok to give $100k to such an organization?
Where you aware of Nya Dagbladet before?
Were you aware that Nya Dagbladet publishes horrific, racist content, or do you disagree with the characterization that they publish horrific, racist content?
what kind of media project was it that you initially wanted to fund?
Minor meta-question: what is the 2 axis voting supposed to represent here? People feel this was a good contribution to the discussion but disagree with the claim that Per Shapiro was never paid by Nya Dagbladet? I would’ve expected the opposite—the factual claim is probably true but not very relevant.
“I would normally angrily downvote you, but I do want to indicate support for you continuing to engage here and think it is good for other people to be able to see your response so I will vote up and disagree”
How does that address Shakeel’s concern? I would’ve thought someone submitting articles to a far-right website would know it’s a far-right website regardless of payment.
It doesn’t seem that hard to believe that someone could see a far-right website and not notice that they occasionally publish crazy anti-semitic content (e.g. if I look at their front page, many of the articles seem kooky to me, but none seem racist). To be honest, given that the last name Shapiro seems to mostly be used by people with Jewish ancestry, I’d be kind of surprised if his brother knew about that content before submitting (altho I suppose anything is possible).
Overall I think any reasonable person should have an intuition that the site is dodgy after skimming a few articles, and the Nazi articles are just irrefutable proof if you want to question that initial impression.
> To be honest, given that the last name Shapiro seems to mostly be used by people with Jewish ancestry, I’d be kind of surprised if his brother knew about that content before submitting
I’d guess Shapiro knows he has some strange bedfellows but cares more about pushing anti-vax and right-wing populist view points than avoiding Nazis (unclear if he knows about that specific editorial ofc)
I do suspect neither knew initially about the explicit support for a bona fide nazi terror org (NRM), I only found it out in an article JWS dug up. Pretty clear it’s a pro-Russian site though.
I would expect Tegmark to know more about the paper if his brother had worked there than if his brother had published some articles there (especially if his brother had published in a bunch of other places as well). However, it may also be that his brother has only published to that one site.
But would he describe the paper that way to his brother, who he knows is left-center? He’d likely want to tell Max that it isn’t an extreme paper, and if he were a right-winger, he’d likely believe it.
It’s also possible that Max wasn’t cognisant that his brother had published in that paper and so they may have not thought to talk about it, from what I can tell, Per has worked for a lot of more prominent publications than that.
Not being paid for it doesn’t make it okay. They still promote holocaust revisionism, vaccine denialism, and the white replacement conspiracy theory. One could make the argument that it actually makes it worse: he believed in the cause so much he was willing to work for free. (I’m personally agnostic as to whether it makes it worse or not, but again, it doesn’t make it okay)
The fact that this reply has positive karma and positive agreement karma is baffling.
My brother never worked there. He published some articles there, but they’ve never paid him anything.
This reply is disappointingly short and again does not address the core question raised by Shakeel.
The letter of intent states that the grant was approved. Why doesn’t FLI do more due diligence before approving a grant? Since you havent stated the opposite, I assume that the latter is genuine (that would be nice to clarify, too). Is that a usual process? How often, by percentage, does it happen that you approve a grant and then later reject it?
Has anyone at FLI looked at the swedish wikipedia page of the org?
If you see the wikipedia page now, do you think, as a first guess, it would be ok to give $100k to such an organization?
Where you aware of Nya Dagbladet before?
Were you aware that Nya Dagbladet publishes horrific, racist content, or do you disagree with the characterization that they publish horrific, racist content?
what kind of media project was it that you initially wanted to fund?
Minor meta-question: what is the 2 axis voting supposed to represent here? People feel this was a good contribution to the discussion but disagree with the claim that Per Shapiro was never paid by Nya Dagbladet? I would’ve expected the opposite—the factual claim is probably true but not very relevant.
“I would normally angrily downvote you, but I do want to indicate support for you continuing to engage here and think it is good for other people to be able to see your response so I will vote up and disagree”
How does that address Shakeel’s concern? I would’ve thought someone submitting articles to a far-right website would know it’s a far-right website regardless of payment.
It doesn’t seem that hard to believe that someone could see a far-right website and not notice that they occasionally publish crazy anti-semitic content (e.g. if I look at their front page, many of the articles seem kooky to me, but none seem racist). To be honest, given that the last name Shapiro seems to mostly be used by people with Jewish ancestry, I’d be kind of surprised if his brother knew about that content before submitting (altho I suppose anything is possible).
Overall I think any reasonable person should have an intuition that the site is dodgy after skimming a few articles, and the Nazi articles are just irrefutable proof if you want to question that initial impression.
> To be honest, given that the last name Shapiro seems to mostly be used by people with Jewish ancestry, I’d be kind of surprised if his brother knew about that content before submitting
I’d guess Shapiro knows he has some strange bedfellows but cares more about pushing anti-vax and right-wing populist view points than avoiding Nazis (unclear if he knows about that specific editorial ofc)
Eh I agree tbh but there’s a gap between “dodgy” and “horrific[ally] racist”, which was “Shakeel’s concern” that you mentioned.
I do suspect neither knew initially about the explicit support for a bona fide nazi terror org (NRM), I only found it out in an article JWS dug up. Pretty clear it’s a pro-Russian site though.
I would expect Tegmark to know more about the paper if his brother had worked there than if his brother had published some articles there (especially if his brother had published in a bunch of other places as well). However, it may also be that his brother has only published to that one site.
But would he describe the paper that way to his brother, who he knows is left-center? He’d likely want to tell Max that it isn’t an extreme paper, and if he were a right-winger, he’d likely believe it.
It’s also possible that Max wasn’t cognisant that his brother had published in that paper and so they may have not thought to talk about it, from what I can tell, Per has worked for a lot of more prominent publications than that.
Not being paid for it doesn’t make it okay. They still promote holocaust revisionism, vaccine denialism, and the white replacement conspiracy theory. One could make the argument that it actually makes it worse: he believed in the cause so much he was willing to work for free. (I’m personally agnostic as to whether it makes it worse or not, but again, it doesn’t make it okay)
The fact that this reply has positive karma and positive agreement karma is baffling.