@cemerick Nerds are *definitely* a persecuted class, even if not in your immediate vicinity, and the particular things these articles are criticizing are nerd things, not bad-people things: polyamory, looking "ugly" (probably code for "Jewish"), being a "sex nerd girl", and talking about ideas one disagrees with (which pretty much covers all of science and most of the rest of philosophy).

Online Nazis are pretty happy to talk about black people who commit crimes too, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't invent ways to be generous toward those black people when the Nazis are accusing them of things they plausibly didn't do.

Especially if you're black yourself. You're enough of a nerd that someone who thinks a "sex nerd girl" is therefore a "repulsive person" would kill someone like you, too, if they got a chance. Unless they had to look you in the eye while you died, maybe.

More generally, I think this kind of dogpiling viciousness is the kind of birdsite pathology that the Fediverse is better without.

@radehi I'm not endorsing any article's or person's takes/opinions, just the apparent words from the horses' mouths.

None of this has anything to do with Twitter vs not-twitter, and it's not dogpiling. The context and characters surrounding massive frauds are topical.

But really, which nerds are persecuted? The ones that make absurd bags in finance, or the ones that make absurd bags in adtech, or maybe the ones making just moderate bags in defense? I can't 🤔 hard enough

@cemerick The apparent words from what may or may not be the mouth of one of the horses mouth are pretty clear that the horse doesn't consider itself an HBD horse; even Gawker says, "WorldOptimization, who occasionally outlines more progressive views on her blog, doesn’t appear to ascribe [sic] to the HBD outlook."

Generally the nerds who are persecuted for being nerds are the ones who aren't making absurd bags, maybe because they have social or mental problems, or because they live in a country where nobody makes absurd bags, or maybe because they're still kids. You've probably met people whose lives are very difficult because they were nerds, even if you didn't realize it. Hopefully you will never be one of them.

Stepping back, though, your implicit premise seems to be that people who are making bags of money can't be persecuted; bigotry against them cannot exist. If that were true, it would commit you to the position that there is no racism in the US against Asian-Americans (who on average earn more than white people), no anti-Semitism in the world (since Jewish people are on average less poor), and no anti-US hatred (for the same reason).

But we know none of these are true; just today we saw the US Libertarian Party publishing this classic anti-Semitic poster edited to show Sam Bankman-Fried: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/libertarian-party-shares-antisemitic-meme/

In fact, a situation where some group of people is making bags of money merely shows that whatever bigotry exists against that group *isn't currently dominant in society*, at least not so dominant that those people couldn't overcome it. The bigotry may still exist, and group members can still suffer from it. Often it grows, fed by envy for those bags of money.

So, again, I caution you not to uncritically accept every accusation leveled at this group, especially if they're being criticized for nerdiness rather than fraud, as in these cases.

Maybe they're racist or something, but so far the evidence to support that hypothesis is at best extremely thin.