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People started “compromising” on those principles when they realised it wasn’t the 1700s any longer, that the internet had given anyone with a computer access t

People started “compromising” on those principles when they realised it wasn’t the 1700s any longer, that the internet had given anyone with a computer access to the sort of message amplification Goebbels could only have dreamed of, and that democratic society was being damaged by contextless application of principles intended to protect it. The parallels with certain other principles written for a time of flintlocks that have unintended consequences in an era of assault weapons should not be ignored.

alexandercrohde 8y ago
Well this would be scary if it were true, but the premise of America's democracy is that it's not. If it really were true that there was some "evil words" that would spread through the whole population like wildfire like some virus, then sure, free speech would be a bad system. You allude to WWII almost as though you're insinuating the root cause of the WWII was insufficient political correctness.
- bonaldi 8y ago
  And America’s democracy is in robust health, is it? “Fake news” sourced to state-sponsored actors not currently a subject of concern there? Oh, and speaking of viruses, anti-vaxxers aren’t still a thing there, are they? I’m sure the good speech will have cancelled out the bad on that subject already. As for WWII, do I think the weaponisation of the first broadcast communication medium had a huge hand in the rise of Fascism in Germany? Yes, I do.
  - froasty 8y ago
    Then it's clear that you're entirely ignorant of the history of radio in Germany, in particular its contribution to the rise of the Nazis. Before 1933, German radio broadcasting was conducted by 10 regional broadcasting monopolies, each with a Weimar representative. Their radio had a distinctly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slant up to the Nazi victory in 1933. If anything radio hindered the rise of Hitler. https://www.princeton.edu/csdp/events/Petrova04042013/Petrova04042013.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/csdp/events/Petrova04042013/Petrov...
    - bonaldi 8y ago
      Can I suggest you read at least the abstract of your cites? “This negative effect [of four years of anti-Nazi messages] was fully undone in just one month after Nazis got control over the radio in 1933 and initiated heavy radio propaganda.” (Emphasis added)
      - froasty 8y ago
        Clearly literacy, as well as history, eludes you. By March of 1933, the Nazis had risen to power. The Nazis did not weaponize radio and then rise to power. They rose to power and then took over radio. And just how did they manage to dismantle the Weimar democracy and take over all forms of mass media so easily? Because for years prior, those in control of the German government had justified every violation of fundamental law, order, and governmental restraint in order to pinion the ability of political enemies to operate freely in the name of democracy and propriety. Yet, it turns out that, as your kind apparently never learns, power changes hands and the tables are turned against you. And yet now you have no tenable defense against being silenced--your opinions are the ones deemed too pernicious to allow to exist in a "free" society (as every society claims to be!). Your protestations are now "fake news" and, all-too-suddenly, you find yourself, your allies, and countless other innocents in a railway car to places like Kolyma or Auschwitz.
        bonaldi 8y ago
        You are again failing to read your own cites. "Radio propaganda helped Nazi to enroll new party members and encouraged denunciations of Jews leading to their deportation to concentration camps and caused open expressions of anti-Semitism." The weaponisation of radio by the Nazis, which naturally had to occur after they took power, is what drove the rise of fascism in Germany. You're really going to struggle to make the case that propaganda in no way supported the Nazi state here. And I guess the Germans must also be in that group that "never learns", what with their strict controls on Nazi speech. Still, they seem to be doing better at avoiding fascist leadership than the soi disant land of the free.
        8y ago
froasty 8y ago
"The people have their own opinions! We must shut them up for the sake of democracy!" Next you'll tell me that fighting in the war room is prohibited. Speaking of prohibition and the past, let's talk about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the Inquisition: "[...] Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhort the episcopate and the whole body of the faithful to be on their guard against heretical writings, whether old or new; and one of the functions of the Inquisition when it was established was to exercise a rigid censorship over books put in circulation. The majority of the condemnations were at that time of a specially theological character. With the discovery of the art of printing, and the wide and cheap diffusion of all sorts of books which ensued, the need for new precautions against heresy and immorality in literature made itself felt, and more than one pope (Sixtus IV. in 1479 and Alexander VI. in 1501) gave special directions to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Magdeburg regarding the growing abuses of the printing press; in 1515 the Lateran council formulated the decree De Impressione Librorum, which required that no work should be printed without previous examination by the proper ecclesiastical authority, the penalty of unlicensed printing being excommunication of the culprit, and confiscation and destruction of the books. The council of Trent in its fourth session, 8th April 1546, forbade the sale or possession of any anonymous religious book which had not previously been seen and approved by the ordinary; in the same year the university of Louvain, at the command of Charles V., prepared an “Index” of pernicious and forbidden books, a second edition of which appeared in 1550." It's almost as if the printing press had given anyone with paper access the sort of message amplification that John Wycliffe and Jan Hus could only dream of, and that Catholic society was being damaged by contextless applications of principles intended to protect it. The parallels with certain other principles written for a time of longbows that have unintended consequences in an era of muskets should not be ignored. It always astounds me that hysterical moralists today believe that they would be the ones resisting despots and authoritarian regimes, when it's clear that it was precisely those same hysterical moralists in different times wearing different costumes that would, on the drop of a dime, passionately support and install them for the sake of their own naïve sense of moral propriety.
- bonaldi 8y ago
  Smashing analogy! Oh, except that society was in fact negatively affected by the early unfettered press, and accordingly came up with all sorts of methods of regulating and managing it. It’s where we get libel laws, for one thing. You print something provably false about someone, and you’re going to face consequences for it. This is clearly us heading to a similar point online. Cowering behind common carrier exemptions and appealing to fundamentalist understandings of “free speech” aren’t going to wash for much longer. Speech has consequences. It astounds me that it’s so often the supposedly pro-market right who get outraged when market forces sock it to publishers of dross like InfoWars

alexandercrohde 8y ago

Well this would be scary if it were true, but the premise of America's democracy is that it's not. If it really were true that there was some "evil words" that would spread through the whole population like wildfire like some virus, then sure, free speech would be a bad system. You allude to WWII almost as though you're insinuating the root cause of the WWII was insufficient political correctness.

bonaldi 8y ago
And America’s democracy is in robust health, is it? “Fake news” sourced to state-sponsored actors not currently a subject of concern there? Oh, and speaking of viruses, anti-vaxxers aren’t still a thing there, are they? I’m sure the good speech will have cancelled out the bad on that subject already. As for WWII, do I think the weaponisation of the first broadcast communication medium had a huge hand in the rise of Fascism in Germany? Yes, I do.
- froasty 8y ago
  Then it's clear that you're entirely ignorant of the history of radio in Germany, in particular its contribution to the rise of the Nazis. Before 1933, German radio broadcasting was conducted by 10 regional broadcasting monopolies, each with a Weimar representative. Their radio had a distinctly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slant up to the Nazi victory in 1933. If anything radio hindered the rise of Hitler. https://www.princeton.edu/csdp/events/Petrova04042013/Petrova04042013.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/csdp/events/Petrova04042013/Petrov...
  - bonaldi 8y ago
    Can I suggest you read at least the abstract of your cites? “This negative effect [of four years of anti-Nazi messages] was fully undone in just one month after Nazis got control over the radio in 1933 and initiated heavy radio propaganda.” (Emphasis added)
    - froasty 8y ago
      Clearly literacy, as well as history, eludes you. By March of 1933, the Nazis had risen to power. The Nazis did not weaponize radio and then rise to power. They rose to power and then took over radio. And just how did they manage to dismantle the Weimar democracy and take over all forms of mass media so easily? Because for years prior, those in control of the German government had justified every violation of fundamental law, order, and governmental restraint in order to pinion the ability of political enemies to operate freely in the name of democracy and propriety. Yet, it turns out that, as your kind apparently never learns, power changes hands and the tables are turned against you. And yet now you have no tenable defense against being silenced--your opinions are the ones deemed too pernicious to allow to exist in a "free" society (as every society claims to be!). Your protestations are now "fake news" and, all-too-suddenly, you find yourself, your allies, and countless other innocents in a railway car to places like Kolyma or Auschwitz.
      - bonaldi 8y ago
        You are again failing to read your own cites. "Radio propaganda helped Nazi to enroll new party members and encouraged denunciations of Jews leading to their deportation to concentration camps and caused open expressions of anti-Semitism." The weaponisation of radio by the Nazis, which naturally had to occur after they took power, is what drove the rise of fascism in Germany. You're really going to struggle to make the case that propaganda in no way supported the Nazi state here. And I guess the Germans must also be in that group that "never learns", what with their strict controls on Nazi speech. Still, they seem to be doing better at avoiding fascist leadership than the soi disant land of the free.
        8y ago

froasty 8y ago

"The people have their own opinions! We must shut them up for the sake of democracy!" Next you'll tell me that fighting in the war room is prohibited. Speaking of prohibition and the past, let's talk about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the Inquisition: "[...] Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhort the episcopate and the whole body of the faithful to be on their guard against heretical writings, whether old or new; and one of the functions of the Inquisition when it was established was to exercise a rigid censorship over books put in circulation. The majority of the condemnations were at that time of a specially theological character. With the discovery of the art of printing, and the wide and cheap diffusion of all sorts of books which ensued, the need for new precautions against heresy and immorality in literature made itself felt, and more than one pope (Sixtus IV. in 1479 and Alexander VI. in 1501) gave special directions to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Magdeburg regarding the growing abuses of the printing press; in 1515 the Lateran council formulated the decree De Impressione Librorum, which required that no work should be printed without previous examination by the proper ecclesiastical authority, the penalty of unlicensed printing being excommunication of the culprit, and confiscation and destruction of the books. The council of Trent in its fourth session, 8th April 1546, forbade the sale or possession of any anonymous religious book which had not previously been seen and approved by the ordinary; in the same year the university of Louvain, at the command of Charles V., prepared an “Index” of pernicious and forbidden books, a second edition of which appeared in 1550." It's almost as if the printing press had given anyone with paper access the sort of message amplification that John Wycliffe and Jan Hus could only dream of, and that Catholic society was being damaged by contextless applications of principles intended to protect it. The parallels with certain other principles written for a time of longbows that have unintended consequences in an era of muskets should not be ignored. It always astounds me that hysterical moralists today believe that they would be the ones resisting despots and authoritarian regimes, when it's clear that it was precisely those same hysterical moralists in different times wearing different costumes that would, on the drop of a dime, passionately support and install them for the sake of their own naïve sense of moral propriety.

bonaldi 8y ago
Smashing analogy! Oh, except that society was in fact negatively affected by the early unfettered press, and accordingly came up with all sorts of methods of regulating and managing it. It’s where we get libel laws, for one thing. You print something provably false about someone, and you’re going to face consequences for it. This is clearly us heading to a similar point online. Cowering behind common carrier exemptions and appealing to fundamentalist understandings of “free speech” aren’t going to wash for much longer. Speech has consequences. It astounds me that it’s so often the supposedly pro-market right who get outraged when market forces sock it to publishers of dross like InfoWars