When the conceptual category has no specific members

Not level-headed unemotional reporting but useful information anyway.  From New York Times journalist rage quits Substack over inability to censor everything he deems 'hate speech' and 'extremism'  by Jordan Schachtel.  The subheading is Major publication tried to hoax Substack into proactively censoring newsletters. 

Stripped of its noise, I might characterize the facts as:  

Casey Newton is a left leaning journalist who hosts a podcast in concert with The New York Times.  He has a Substack account with 173,000 subscribers.  

Newton has accused Substack of hosting numerous Nazi and Antisemitic accounts and making money from those accounts.  Accounts which are also in breach of Substack's terms of service which preclude calls for acts of violence.  

Newton presented his evidence to Substack who refused to suppress any of the accounts.  In response, Newton has shut his account and moved it to another less well known platform.

That's about it.  Another left wing journalist wanting to pressure publications to censor opinions they don't like.  

And the evidence about the Nazi accounts?

“Over the past few days, the Platformer team analyzed dozens of Substacks for pro-Nazi content,” he [Newton] writes. “Earlier this week, I met with Substack to press my case that they should remove content that praises Nazis from the network. Late today, we submitted a list of accounts that we believe to be in violation of the company’s existing policies against incitement to violence. I am scheduled to meet with the company again tomorrow.”

[snip]

In fact, all of these apparent “nazi platforms” had a grand combined total of about 100 readers, and none of them had a single paid subscriber, according to a letter from the cofounders of Substack.

To put it bluntly, the whole “Nazi problem” on Substack is a hoax, through and through.

Substack apparently has more than a million accounts or newsletters.  Of the million newsletters, Newton had suspicions about "dozens" of them.  We don't how many he ended up claiming to Substack were violent Nazi newsletters, but however many newsletters there were, they had fewer than 100 readers.  Assuming four readers per newsletter, out of a million newsletters, two dozen aroused his suspicion sufficiently to lodge a formal complaint.

Substack requires that the newsletter must be an inciter of violence in order to be removed and Newton apparently was unable to make that case to Substack.

It would appear that all the so-called violent Nazi newsletters were merely competing newsletters with opinions different from those held by Newton.  A freedom apparently unacceptable to Newton.  Newton appears to be the authoritarian and totalitarian abuser of human rights that he accuses others of being.

All of which leads me to the following thought.

Decades ago, I read an argument to the effect that one of the distinct gifts of the ancient Greeks was their ability to conceptualize.  For example, the author argued that while other contemporaneous cultures had words for red, yellow, blue, black, etc., only the Greeks had the word for the concept of "color."  

It seemed an intriguing argument and I could not at the time refute it.  Indeed, I still am insufficiently knowledgeable of ancient languages to refute it.  My strong suspicion is that it is an attractive and appealing idea as an argument but that real research likely would shackle it with definitional issues and chain it with clarifications.

Regardless, that idea of a culture with a language that is a mix of the specific (red, blue, yellow) and conceptual (color) has always intrigued me.  It is an interesting idea and seems like it should have merit.

Which is a long way around to a different idea.  In language there are specific words and there are conceptual words.  The concept word (ex. color) contains the specific words (red, yellow, blue, etc. which make up the concept)

Woke journalists and Mandarins demonstrate the opposite condition as the old argument about concrete and conceptual words.  The Mandarins have the concepts without having the specifics which make up the concept.  

The Mandarin Class, the Woke obsessives, the Social Justice Jacobins are all obsessed with the idea that there are hordes of Nazis and White Supremacists out there.  They are always talking about them and invoking them in order to abridge human rights, especially those of speech and assembly and religion.  

But "Nazis" and "White Supremacists" are conceptual words for specific and real people.  Specific and real people who are never named by the Mandarin Class, the Woke obsessives, the Social Justice Jacobins.  The authoritarians never name the individuals and leave us only with the abstract concept.

As if there were not really any real Nazis and White Supremacists.

Obviously there are some small number of non-mentally ill people who might self-identify as either a Nazi or White Supremacist.  In a nation of 330 million they must exist.  There is so much freedom and variance that there are of course some Nazis and White Supremacists out there.  But vanishingly few it seems.

Because they are never named.  Never identified.  They are merely a concept.  The boogey-man used to frighten children.

It reminds me of the incident up in Virginia in 2022.  I don't recall, the Governor's race perhaps?

Anyway, the Democratic candidate's campaign thought it would be a clever idea to round up some young volunteers, dress them in khakis and white shirts, give them tiki torches and send them as "White Supremacists" to attend a campaign rally for the Republican candidate.  The obvious intent was to smear the Republican as being supported by Nazi's and White Supremacists.

In the end, it all ended in an embarrassment of mockery.  Political zeal to score points far outstripping the capacity to pull off such a deception.

The poor young Democratic zealots roped into being tiki torch bearers on behalf of White Supremacy either did not have the thespian skills or could not conceptualize how Nazi White Supremacists might carry themselves at a rally.  

They milled about in a bedraggled and befuddled fashion, half-heartedly lifting their tiki torches.  It seems like they struggled to even get out a few cardboard slogans.  They obligingly lined up for journalists to take pictures, but that was about it.

The headlines "White Supremacists Support X" were run at the same time as the headlines "Democratic Candidate Y Pulls Dirty Trick."  No one was fooled, just fun and games in the rough and tumble of retail politics.

Because there were no real Nazis and White Supremacists available and they couldn't even muster up a convincing facsimile.  It was a pale shadow of the attempt by Jussie Smollett to conjure up a white racist attack.  An effort so bad it generated a Dave Chappelle skit seen more than thirty million times.  

The most laughable aspect of the charade?

The Democratic campaign simply could not let go of their DEI convictions even during their effort to conjure up some white supremacists with tiki torches.  There were the half dozen sacrificial campaign volunteers in their white shirts, khakis, and tiki torches.  One overweight white woman, one African American man, and four white men, one of whom looked suspiciously Hispanic.  Nazi White Supremacists - I don't think that concept means what they (the Mandarin Class, the Woke obsessives, the Social Justice Jacobins) think it means.