Credit to @bontchev
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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It was going so well until it started talking about white privilege and the Holocaust...
The both-sidesing was already telling. Sometimes the only “controversial or alternative viewpoints” are just idiotic conspiracy drivel and should be presented as such (or not at all)
I'm still of the opinion all of these viewpoints should be heard out at least once even if you dismiss them immediately
The problem with that is that bad faith actors engage in bad faith arguments for a reason. They just want a few people to hear them. It doesn't matter that the majority of people who hear them see through their lies. It matters that they reach that small audience. To let that small audience know they're not alone. The goal is to activate, engage, and coalesce that small audience. This is what the alt-right does. This is what they've done since the 1920s. We have 100 years of evidence that you can't just "Hear out" the Nazis' opinions without harm coming to real, legitimate people. The best way to deal with bad faith actors is to deplatform them before they've achieved a platform
Also, it's cheap to speak total bullshit, but it takes time, effort, and energy, to dispel it. I can say the moon is made of cheese, you can't disprove that. And you can go out and look up an article about the samples of moon rock we have and the composition, talk about the atmosphere required to give rise to dairy producing animals and thus cheese.
And I can just come up with some further bullshit that'll take another 30 minutes to an hour to debunk.
If we gave equal weight to every argument, we'd spend our lives mired in fact-checking hell holes. Sometimes, you can just dismiss someone's crap.