I didn’t downvote it, though probably I should have. But it seems a stretch to say ‘one guy who works for a weird organization that is supposedly EA’ implies ‘congregation’. I think that would have to imply a large number of people. I would be very disappointed if I had a congregation of less than ten people.
JoshYou also ignores important hedging in the linked comment:
Bennett denies this connection; he says he was trying to make friends with these white nationalists in order to get information on them and white nationalism. I think it’s plausible that this is somewhat true.
So instead of saying
We’ve already seen white nationalists congregate in some EA-adjacent spaces.
It would be more fair to say
We’ve already seen one guy with some evidence he is a white nationalist (though he somewhat plausibly denies it) work for a weird organization that has some EA links.
Which is clearly much less worrying. There are lots of weird ideologies and a lot of weird people in California, who believe a lot of very incorrect things. I would be surprised if ‘white nationalists’ were really high up on the list of threats to EA, especially given how extremely left wing EA is and how low status they are. We probably have a lot more communists! Rather, I think the highlighting of ‘White Nationalists’ is being done for ideological reasons—i.e. to cast shade on more moderate right wing people by using a term that is practically a slur. I think the grandparent would not have made such a sloppy comment had it not been about the hated outgroup.
I also agree that it’s ridiculous when left-wingers smear everyone on the right as Nazis, white nationalists, whatever. I’m not talking about conservatives, or the “IDW”, or people who don’t like the BLM movement or think racism is no big deal. I’d be quite happy for more right-of-center folks to join EA. I do mean literal white nationalists (like on par with the views in Jonah Bennett’s leaked emails. I don’t think his defense is credible at all, by the way).
I don’t think it’s accurate to see white nationalists in online communities as just the right tail that develops organically from a wide distribution of political views. White nationalists are more organized than that and have their own social networks (precisely because they’re not just really conservative conservatives). Regular conservatives outnumber white nationalists by orders of magnitude in the general public, but I don’t think that implies that white nationalists will be virtually non-existent in a space just because the majority are left of center.
I didn’t downvote it, though probably I should have. But it seems a stretch to say ‘one guy who works for a weird organization that is supposedly EA’ implies ‘congregation’. I think that would have to imply a large number of people. I would be very disappointed if I had a congregation of less than ten people.
JoshYou also ignores important hedging in the linked comment:
So instead of saying
It would be more fair to say
Which is clearly much less worrying. There are lots of weird ideologies and a lot of weird people in California, who believe a lot of very incorrect things. I would be surprised if ‘white nationalists’ were really high up on the list of threats to EA, especially given how extremely left wing EA is and how low status they are. We probably have a lot more communists! Rather, I think the highlighting of ‘White Nationalists’ is being done for ideological reasons—i.e. to cast shade on more moderate right wing people by using a term that is practically a slur. I think the grandparent would not have made such a sloppy comment had it not been about the hated outgroup.
I also agree that it’s ridiculous when left-wingers smear everyone on the right as Nazis, white nationalists, whatever. I’m not talking about conservatives, or the “IDW”, or people who don’t like the BLM movement or think racism is no big deal. I’d be quite happy for more right-of-center folks to join EA. I do mean literal white nationalists (like on par with the views in Jonah Bennett’s leaked emails. I don’t think his defense is credible at all, by the way).
I don’t think it’s accurate to see white nationalists in online communities as just the right tail that develops organically from a wide distribution of political views. White nationalists are more organized than that and have their own social networks (precisely because they’re not just really conservative conservatives). Regular conservatives outnumber white nationalists by orders of magnitude in the general public, but I don’t think that implies that white nationalists will be virtually non-existent in a space just because the majority are left of center.