Up next: "the YoungCons didn't even start posting articles until FlyWf started calling people on racist on 2p2. Coincidence?! Maybe, maybe not, but you all could really improve your tone when talking to white people, look what happens! So much arguing and unpleasantness."

When literal Neo-Nazis have White House offices, I wouldn't put Nazi slogans outside the range of garden-variety racists.

OK, I'm still a little bit confused here.

• Why should we even care to distinguish between "Garden Variety" R-word-ers -vs - "White Supremacist" R-word-ers?
  
  
• Are we being told to be "civil"/whatev for tactical reasons, as in we're hurting Team #Librulz if we aren't -vs- are we being told to be "civil"/whatev because that's just the way good peeps should act as G.P.
  
  
• If we're being told to be "civil"/whatev for tactical reasons, has anyone linkeed some studies, or at least even sketched out some rationalizations, that the tactic (a) everyone being "civil"/whatev actually produced better outcomes than (b) everyone not being "civil"/whatev and (c) some peeps being "civil"/whatev, and some not.

Also, let's talk practicality for a second here. Team #Librulz doesn't have the party discipline to engage in tactics (a) and (b) above. No matter how much proponents of tactics (a), or proponents of tactic (b), try to hector the rest of team #Librulz into employing their favored tactic, as a practical matter, it's always going to end up being tactic (c) for Team #Librulz.

That being said, what do proponents of tactics (a) or (b) realistically hope to accomplish by all this hectoring and tone policing of their own fellow Team #Librulz members? The reality is that some members of Team #Librulz are always going to use the "civil"/whatev tactic, and some members of Team #Librulz are always going to do otherwise. All this internal self-facing hectoring and tone policing does, and all it can ever do, is paralyze and schism Team #Librulz itself.

I've been working on a chess set design lately, influenced by both Hartwig and Graham. You'll hate it.

(This is very preliminary)

I like the king and queen. The rook looks like a chimney-stack and the pawn is pretty perfunctory, honestly, don't dislike it but you're not doing much. The knight is awful. Nothing recognisably descended from that knight design will be something I like.

Edit: I mean I like the bishop. Derp.

I think the aim is that if they aren't full blown white supremacists, then we should not protest them or oppose them as much, and by not as much, they mean not at all.

Oh but also the full blown ones are so far gone that we should not bother with them either.

That's about the size of it.

Like the point here is not that I care that people are accusing Palin or youngcons of being a white supremacist, which is why I find your "tone policing" accusation baffling. I find your whole post truth approach to this baffling, in fact. I don't think the discussion on this reflects reality; am I supposed to shrug and not care? I assume we don't disagree that conspiracy posting should be criticized, we disagree over whether this issue constitutes conspiracy posting.

The claim from youngcons is that the quote was this:

I haven't posted this before because I assumed that everyone knew this, it's in basically every article referencing the controversy. I assume the response is going to be that this isn't a particularly quotable quote. I agree, which may by why the editor decided not to go with the clickbait title.

fighting like the poles? rofl do you actually believe that ****?

like what redneck idiot in america knows **** or gives two ****s about poland? and what on earth is "stunning" about those 14 words?

just total bull****, you really can't see through that?

Could you elaborate on the consequences of believing this conspiracy theory, granting for argument that there is one? Because with some, I can point to shot up pizza parlors or stoking widespread racial animus or disbelief in science, but I am not seeing anything like that here.

And the alternative is what?

My best guess at what happened is this:

1. The writer had that quote as the headline to the piece, or featured prominently anyway, and used the "14 words" thing as clickbait.
2. Someone edited the piece, was like "that quote is not interesting", demoted it in the piece and altered the title, but forgot to change the metadata.

Have a go at making a conspiracy version anything like that simple. The author submits a piece with a title of "14 words" that never elaborates on what the words were? Wouldn't the editor ask? Is the editor also a closet Nazi?

This is what I mean by post truth. Does it just not matter what is true?

I think it's paranoid and paranoia begets more paranoia. The right didn't just jump straight into mainlining pizzagate, there were steps along the way.

so what is it about the tag "14 words" that makes it clickbait? because people just want things explained in 14 words or less? or because it's a common white supremacy slogan and a huge part of SP/YC's target audience is a bunch of alt right white supremacists who are very familiar with it?

You cited another example of a YoungCons article with that very trait early on!

REALLY? We've just spent several pages going over how common "x words" titles are as clickbait. What makes it clickbait is that it makes people click to find out what the words were.

It's just standard Buzzfeed-esque clickbait formula to throw numbers in wherever possible.

You'll Never Guess What These 7 Celebrities Are Doing Now!
These 13 Steps To Investing Success Are Putting Financial Advisors Out Of Jobs!
etc

It's clickbait like this is clickbait the same way "this one weird trick to lost belly fat" is clickbait. It promises some enticing thing that's inevitably bull**** and deceptive based off the title.

Given that the article title was seemingly changed but not the meta data, it seems like they had an idea for a title that eventually didn't pan out. (Assuming the trump article doesn't have a fourteen word quote that it focuses on)

Or perhaps the article was titled something about fourteen words and it was brought to their attention that a white supremacy speech from trump that highlights fourteen words is a little on the nose.

This seems very similar to people hyperventilating about trump tweeting that stupid wrestling meme. I mean, where he got it from is absolutely a scandal. But trump meming is such a yawn.

that is dumb as **** but i'll concede the point-

moving on from that, it's just a coincidence that it happened to be 14 completely innocuous words of admiration for poland, family, and god?

considering the source, what in the world would lead you to give the benefit of the doubt to sarah palin and youngcons in this situation? be specific.

How on earth did we get to the stage where anyone has to defend truth. As if somehow you're the one being a bit odd and finding yourself on the back foot

It's quite extraordinary

It's a ludicrous posture to behave as if you're defenders of truth. This isn't the sort of case where the truth is known. ChrisV claiming he's just a staunch defender of the truth is simply assuming the conclusion. It's a trite fallacy. We are entirely in the world of judgement and probability, not some plainly observable truth. Get real guys. Of all the bad arguments that one isn't the dumbest but it's certainly the most self serving.

Post truth? Maybe I have missed this one in philosophy, but I don't think there is an objective, irrefutable means by which one can prove covert intentions, and I am also unfamiliar with an objective, universal standard by which one can be "racist" but not a "white supremacist". The latter seems inherently subjective and semantic. There is not even an objective standard to establish that Trump's speech, written by a Neo Nazi, was racist! The only thing that approaches an objective standard to establish racism that some conservatives agree with is the list of words you can't say, and granting them that is a massive rhetorical and political victory for conservatives!

No I didn't.

Well, because there are very plausible alternative explanations and I think it's a priori unlikely that either Palin or that youngcons writer are literal neo-Nazis. It's extremely likely that they are racists, but we're talking about how they view themselves. Do you think it's likely that either of them privately consider themselves devotees of Nazism?

This process of starting to think that your political enemies are not merely lacking in empathy and wrong about things but are actually secret Bond villains is deeply paranoid. You see it on the right, Obama wasn't just wrong about things, they thought he actually hated America and was actively trying to turn it into a socialist wasteland. Paranoia like this is how you get there.

Merely lacking in empathy? Yo, we can point to a lot of things where Palin and the Young Cons both are working on the political marginalization of minority groups. They actually are villains, doing villainous things in real life beyond one tweet/article!

I'm sure this has been posted

http://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-w...logan-14-words

But it doesn't seem like anything other than a case of clickbait having a coincidental number - that wasn't even used in the end, and a wanna be political celeb trying to suck up to trump.

Trump has given plenty of speeches that were neo-nazi-esque in nature, why would this particular one be the one that let this specific right wing news source, and no other one, let loose with the neo-nazi slogans? Be specific.

Knowledge is a red herring here

Valuing truth means not claiming unjustified degrees of certainty. It also means trying to avoid exaggerating in the direction that suits us - that's hard cognitively but at least we normally recognise that it's better.

Again, this is nothing to do with Palin so if you're claiming that your side are meeting the above standard I have no quarrel.