Only caveat I’d add is to differentiate between A racist/homophobe/misogynist/whatever, and someone who just expressed an ignorant viewpoint. Whether or not there’s actual malicious thinking behind things is important in figuring out if you can reason with someone or not.

Quickest example I can give off the top of my head: I’m gay, and one of my best friends is a straight man who, when I met him, had some reasonably-significant issues with his own masculinity, probably stemming from being short and slim and the resulting treatment he’d often get from both women and other men (which also lessened as we got older and out of the early 20s). That occasionally extended to things like worrying that other people would perceive him as gay because of hanging out with a bunch of LGBTQ+ people and women from work, or his slightly defensive reaction when I told him he looked good one day where he had a particularly nice outfit on and had styled his hair well, as if I’d propositioned him. Both things are a little insulting, but he also was never one of the types who views us as basically child-molesting mentally-ill deviants who don’t deserve equal rights.

We got closer, enough that he was willing to open up on the subjects, and I was able to explain how that kind of thing looked from my perspective and, in turn, kinda figured out where it was coming from on his end, but it was always from a place where he just didn’t understand why what he was saying or doing was wrong or hurtful, not because he intended to cause hurt. And he’s significantly better about that sort of thing now in general, because it made him do some introspection, and he got better at doing that for other things as well. And in all fairness, I learned a bit, too; I knew short guys often got made fun of for it, but being average size myself it wasn’t something I really had to deal with and I didn’t understand just how pervasive and wearing it is, so now I better understand how he might have gotten there in the first place.

@Kupo_Knight posted an article recently that I think is very relevant here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism

Reporting their content means the content can be moderated which means us normal folks don’t have to suffer the displeasure of reading hateful garbage

EDIT: oops, lack of comment collapsing confused me. I misunderstood! Sorry!

The problem with this assessment is that we’ve tried the approach of reasoning with people like this and all it does is allow them to proselytise. They don’t want a polite debate, they want a pulpit.

A neo-Nazi who’s stuffed in a box talking to other neo-Nazis is a neo-Nazi who’s not infesting some other place trying to spread shit about “race realism”. They’ll find it a lot harder to “march on Washington” when it’s just a couple hundred Nazis and not a couple hundred Nazis plus thousands of others they’ve radicalised.

Sunlight’s a shitty disinfectant. I prefer bleach.