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> You are no less censored if your boss threatens your livelihood than if your government threatens your freedom or Twitter bans your account. Of course I'm le

by lodi 8y ago

> You are no less censored if your boss threatens your livelihood than if your government threatens your freedom or Twitter bans your account. Of course I'm less censored by my boss than by my government. My boss doesn't have a monopoly on my potential sources of income, but my government does have a monopoly on my citizenship; I simply can't move to another country without the permission of both governments. My boss can't persuade me with anything but a temporary lack of income; my government can (legally!) persuade me with a long list of effective arguments, ultimately ending in a gun barrel.

da_chicken 8y ago
If you're vaporized in an nuclear explosion, are you more or less dead than if you suffer an aortic dissection? No. You're still dead. If the government threatens you with political imprisonment, are you more or less silent than if your boss threatens you with termination and legal proceedings? No. You're still unable to voice your opinion. Don't mistake the amount of power brought to bear to coerce with the outcome of acquiescence. Dead is dead. Silent is silent. The ideal of free speech says that restricting the flow of ideas is harmful and immoral in and of itself. Yes, we need additional protection against government tyranny. That's why it is illegal. But "it's not against the Constitution" doesn't make an action right or just. "It's not illegal according to the Constitution" is perhaps the weakest defense I can possibly think of. If that's the best thing you can say about your actions, you're not really endorsing yourself. Congratulations. You haven't done something so stupendously wrong that we wrote it down a couple hundred years ago and made everybody working in one country's government promise not to do it anymore. If we're to judge you by the strictest letter of a document explicitly intended to proscribe one government's power, you're doing great. And we just nevermind that if you were acting on behalf of the government, it would be illegal? We just ignore the ideal of free speech in lieu of a single embodiment of it? It's like a CS student saying, "It doesn't segfault on compile. I deserve an A." Well, not segfaulting during compile is the bare minimum. Well done. You wrote a program that's syntactically valid and results in a binary output file. It might be incorrect, it might be insecure, it might be buggy, it might be incomplete, it might be less efficient than bogosort, it might perform trivial work, it might even be completely useless, but at least it does so within the basic rules of the OS! You managed not to do something illegal. That doesn't mean you're doing something right.
- lodi 8y ago
  False equivalence. Let me paraphrase your argument a little bit: "If you suffer a sunburn, are you more or less injured than being run through with a katana? No. [In both cases] you're still injured." But of course you can be more injured or less injured. The entire point is that injury isn't a binary measure, and neither is freedom/censorship. --- Let me put it another way... imagine the most oppressive possible regime, and then imagine the most liberal utopia but with one added restriction: you can't say "purple fuzzy dishwasher". That's the only restriction. Absolutely everything else is permitted but that one phrase is illegal, and immediately punishable by a million-dollar fine. Keep in mind that the most-oppressive regime also disallows the phrase "purple fuzzy dishwasher", and in their case it's punishable by torture and then death. If your definition of censorship doesn't meaningfully differentiate between the two societies, then it's completely useless. You could only use it to conclude that "all people are censored", since there are always possible material repercussions to things we could say.

by lodi 8y ago

da_chicken 8y ago

If you're vaporized in an nuclear explosion, are you more or less dead than if you suffer an aortic dissection? No. You're still dead. If the government threatens you with political imprisonment, are you more or less silent than if your boss threatens you with termination and legal proceedings? No. You're still unable to voice your opinion. Don't mistake the amount of power brought to bear to coerce with the outcome of acquiescence. Dead is dead. Silent is silent. The ideal of free speech says that restricting the flow of ideas is harmful and immoral in and of itself. Yes, we need additional protection against government tyranny. That's why it is illegal. But "it's not against the Constitution" doesn't make an action right or just. "It's not illegal according to the Constitution" is perhaps the weakest defense I can possibly think of. If that's the best thing you can say about your actions, you're not really endorsing yourself. Congratulations. You haven't done something so stupendously wrong that we wrote it down a couple hundred years ago and made everybody working in one country's government promise not to do it anymore. If we're to judge you by the strictest letter of a document explicitly intended to proscribe one government's power, you're doing great. And we just nevermind that if you were acting on behalf of the government, it would be illegal? We just ignore the ideal of free speech in lieu of a single embodiment of it? It's like a CS student saying, "It doesn't segfault on compile. I deserve an A." Well, not segfaulting during compile is the bare minimum. Well done. You wrote a program that's syntactically valid and results in a binary output file. It might be incorrect, it might be insecure, it might be buggy, it might be incomplete, it might be less efficient than bogosort, it might perform trivial work, it might even be completely useless, but at least it does so within the basic rules of the OS! You managed not to do something illegal. That doesn't mean you're doing something right.

lodi 8y ago
False equivalence. Let me paraphrase your argument a little bit: "If you suffer a sunburn, are you more or less injured than being run through with a katana? No. [In both cases] you're still injured." But of course you can be more injured or less injured. The entire point is that injury isn't a binary measure, and neither is freedom/censorship. --- Let me put it another way... imagine the most oppressive possible regime, and then imagine the most liberal utopia but with one added restriction: you can't say "purple fuzzy dishwasher". That's the only restriction. Absolutely everything else is permitted but that one phrase is illegal, and immediately punishable by a million-dollar fine. Keep in mind that the most-oppressive regime also disallows the phrase "purple fuzzy dishwasher", and in their case it's punishable by torture and then death. If your definition of censorship doesn't meaningfully differentiate between the two societies, then it's completely useless. You could only use it to conclude that "all people are censored", since there are always possible material repercussions to things we could say.