There are some interesting ideas in what you wrote, but unfortunately, the whole comment is written in a mindkilling way. Yeah, that's probably your point, so... uhm...
he clearly understands the dynamics of racial privilege, the concept of minstrelsy, and how those relate to contemporary social justice struggles in macro and micro (American belly dancers), but seemingly none of the people he is communicating with do.
Well, one way to deal with people who don't understand what you are trying to tell them, is to explain. It's not the only way -- for example, you could also also bully them into submission -- but it is the way that most LW readers probably prefer. So, if this cause is so important to you, what don't you write an article here, explaining what Arthur Chu gets and we don't? And by explaining, I mean... explaining.
If Less Wrong had been around in the 1820's it would have supported slavery.
More likely, it would discourage object-level debates about slavery (both for and against), so that Americans from both North and South could debate about something else: rationality, etc.
By the way, libertarians are not exactly supporters of the status quo. (By which I am not suggesting that libertarians are most frequent here; but this is what LW is frequently accused of.)
When discussing existing oppressive social structures such as patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism, attempting to dispassionately argue causes this phenomenon at best, and at worst actively silences the people victimized by such structures.
How about other oppressive social structures?
Let me give you an example. Every time I go to a LW meetup to nearby Vienna, I cross a line that 25 years ago would get me killed. And I usually remind myself about the fact, and how happy I am to be able to go to Vienna like no big deal, when so many people got killed for trying.
There is a memorial to all those killed people, on a border between Slovakia and Austria. I happen to visit it about once in a month; not for political reasons, it just happens to be on my favorite walking path in nature. You know, countries usually protect their borders to prevent other people from getting in. But socialist countries protected their borders to prevent people from running away. In socialism, people were considered property of their country. When they tried to escape their masters, that was a similar kind of crime as when a black person tried to run away from their master. And if they succeeded to run away, their families were punished instead. To legally leave the socialist country, e.g. on a vacation, you had to leave hostages at home. It happened when I was a child; in happened in a place I still live. The second most frequent cause of death on borders of socialist countries were allegedly the suicides of soldiers who couldn't bear anymore the moral burden of having to kill all those innocent people.
So, according to your arguments, what exactly it is that I am supposed to do about it? How exactly am I supposed to react to you? From my point of view, you are a blind and evil person. Should I scream "Freedom!", try to accuse you of random bad things, say you should be banned from LW, say that LW is a horrible website if it does not ban you immediately? Should I even use lies to support my case, because the most important thing is to win, and to destroy all those murderous socialism-sympathisers? Because otherwise I am dishonoring the memory of the millions who were tortured and murdered in the name of... things you defend, kind of. Is that the right thing to do?
The thing is, I understand this is not how it "feels from inside" to you. Which makes things a lot more complicated. Welcome in the real world, where the good things are not achieved by sorting people into the "good" ones and the "evil" ones, and then attacking the "evil" ones by whetever means available.
The public debate is rife with fallacies, half-lies, evasions of counter-arguments, etc. Many of these are easy to spot for a careful and intelligent reader/viewer - particularly one who is acquainted with the most common logical fallacies and cognitive biases. However, most people arguably often fail to spot them (if they didn't, then these fallacies and half-lies wouldn't be as effective as they are). Blatant lies are often (but not always) recognized as such, but these more subtle forms of argumentative cheating (which I shall use as a catch-all phrase from now on) usually aren't (which is why they are more frequent).
The fact that these forms of argumentative cheating are a) very common and b) usually easy to point out suggests that impartial referees who painstakingly pointed out these errors could do a tremendous amount of good for the standards of the public debate. What I am envisioning is a website like factcheck.org but which would not focus primarily on fact-checking (since, like I said, most politicians are already wary of getting caught out with false statements of fact) but rather on subtler forms of argumentative cheating.
Ideally, the site would go through election debates, influential opinion pieces, etc, more or less line by line, pointing out fallacies, biases, evasions, etc. For the reader who wouldn't want to read all this detailed criticism, the site would also give an overall rating of the level of argumentative cheating (say from 0 to 10) in a particular article, televised debate, etc. Politicians and others could also be given an overall cheating rating, which would be a function of their cheating ratings in individual articles and debates. Like any rating system, this system would serve both to give citizens reliable information of which arguments, which articles, and which people, are to be trusted, and to force politicians and other public figures to argue in a more honest fashion. In other words, it would have both have an information-disseminating function and a socializing function.
How would such a website be set up? An obvious suggestion is to run it as a wiki, where anyone could contribute. Of course, this wiki would have to be very heavily moderated - probably more so than Wikipedia - since people are bound to disagree on whether controversial figures' arguments really are fallacious or not. Presumably you will be forced to banish trolls and political activists on a grand scale, but hopefully this wouldn't be an unsurmountable problem.
I'm thinking that the website should be strongly devoted to neutrality or objectivity, as is Wikipedia. To further this end, it is probably better to give the arguer under evaluation the benefit of the doubt in borderline cases. This would be a way of avoiding endless edit wars and ensure objectivity. Also, it's a way of making the contributors to the site concencrate their efforts on the more outrageous cases of cheating (which there are many of in most political debates and articles, in my view).
The hope is that a website like this would make the public debate transparent to an unprecedented degree. Argumentative cheaters thrive because their arguments aren't properly scrutinized. If light is shone on the public debate, it will become clear who cheats and who doesn't, which will give people strong incentives not to cheat. If people respected the site's neutrality, its objectivity and its integrity, and read what it said, it would in effect become impossible for politicians and others to bullshit the way they do today. This could mark the beginning of the realization of an old dream of philosophers: The End of Bullshit at the hands of systematic criticism. Important names in this venerable tradition include David Hume, Rudolf Carnap and the other logical positivists, and not the least, the guy standing statue outside my room, the "critical rationalist" (an apt name for this enterprise) Karl Popper.
Even though politics is an area where bullshit is perhaps especially common, and one where it does an exceptional degree of harm (e.g. vicious political movements such as Nazism are usually steeped in bullshit) it is also common and harmful in many other areas, such as science, religion, advertising. Ideally critical rationalists should go after bullshit in all areas (as far as possible). My hunch is, though, that it would be a good idea to start off with politics, since it's an area that gets lots of attention and where well-written criticism could have an immediate impact.