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There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Those are memetic viruses with established body counts and should be studied, if at all, in the manner one

There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Those are memetic viruses with established body counts and should be studied, if at all, in the manner one studies smallpox.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Banning Nazi content is easily the most obvious way to create real Nazis amongst the youth, who being young are attracted to anything taboo, or who may believe that there's some big conspiracy to cover something up so "it must be true, they don't want us to know". This is a dark line of thinking.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread. And when society permits it to be mainstream politics, you're one solid resistance movement away from genocide.
  - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
    > Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. > When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread. There's a lot of certainty in the way you are saying it. I'm not saying you are wrong, but do you have any references? Truly curious, I always see these things as hard to measure/understand, so super interested to know info that would help remove that for me.
    - mola 7y ago
      Science won't help you here. Ofcourse his argument is no more than a hypothesis, but you can't really disprove it because of scale. You might find a model that shows this dynamic, but it won't be a proof, And vice versa. Because we already witnessed major genocide, and a huge bloody war caused by such extreme ideologies, some people think we can't just let it play out again so we can gather more data for our scientific accuracy. I don't know if censorship is the answer. But because our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice. *By true honest dialog I mean actual dialogs between people that try to convince each other with the goal of understanding where there is agreememt. And where there isn't one, where it stems from, and how it can be mitigated by some synthesis of opinions. This, as opposed to one sided commentary that it's goal is only to discredit the other side by focusing on disagreements and inducing fear and radicalization in your intended audience.
      - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
        I'm not asking for double blind control studies. I'm just asking anything to provide evidence. Well rounded arguments with lots of accurate and well thought out examples (i.e. statistics, objective trends, etc) maybe books or theories supported by certain segments of the social sciences, etc. Same goes for your statement: > our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice. (censorhip) Can you please tell me why this time it is so different than say the election between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine? I'm truly interested in hearing the concrete reasons for censorship being the 'no other choice' option. Again, not saying anyone is wrong, just interested to hear how much of what is stated is based on subjective truth vs objective truths.
  - food_eater 7y ago
    Thank god we have so many liberals out there ensuring the public doesn't think the wrong thoughts and protecting us from ourselves.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    > There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. You're missing my point. Those most likely to be radicalised are already isolated. If we scrub content about Nazi ideology from Internet Archive (and everywhere else), these people will find it elsewhere and likely be even more radicalised than they otherwise would be. Nobody is arguing it should be mainstream politics, only that it should be archived and preserved as lessons to the future generations.
    - concordDance 7y ago
      Importantly: if you scrub it almost everywhere then you can't argue against it, because you'd need to actually articulate the WtongThink in order to argue against it. So when an impressionable young thing like my past self happens to stumble across well articulated arguments (as opposed to straw arguments) for the bad thing, they will have no where to go to be set straight.
- orf 7y ago
  Ahh yes, of course, the large monolithic monoculture called "the youth" is naturally stupid enough to be "attracted to anything taboo" without thinking or questioning it. That's why they sure are attracted to other taboo things like incest and necrophilia. No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people. Things are a lot more nuanced than "banning bad, because kids dumb".
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Political ideology is NOT like incest and necrophilia at all. It is our history and needs preservation. I never said kids were dumb, but they absolutely are curious, and forbidden knowledge is an incredible lure. The absolute majority will realise it's messed up, but there will always be that few who become radicalised from what they see. Rather than burying our past we should and need to teach them why it's wrong. This trend of rewriting history is extremely worrisome.
  - food_eater 7y ago
    Weird how you argue that people aren't stupid enough to fall for nazi bullshit, yet you still didn't argue against banning it. So which is it? Are people capable of making rational decisions or do people need to be protected by those with the (current) correct ideology?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - fromthestart 7y ago
    You think the archtype of the edgy, rebelious youth is fictional? If you were too far removed from those groups of kids in high school, perhaps you should spend some time on 4chan. >No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people. It absolutely does, because edginess is appealing to many teenagers/young adults. Not only that, but laws to this effect against blanket "hate speech" are regularly used by white supremacists and the like as evidence of, for example, Jewish people using laws to unfairly elevate themselves with the priveleges of a protected class while simultaneously suppressing thought that can lead to dissent. Holocaust denial laws lead to increased suspicion with the justification that scepticism is banned to preserve a false narrative and prevent the lie from being discovered. It's easy to see how preposterous this is while the atrocity is relatively fresh in our collective consciousness, but what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all survivors have been dead for some time and people rightly start to wonder why investigation of an event is illegal? This is a weird form of puritanical censorship and the unintented consequences to society are far worse than any imagined benefits. You have no right to control thought in your image. Edit: also, your hyperbolic mention of incest and necrophilia doesn't quite support your claims, as sexual arousal is quite strongly linked with taboo for many people, as evidenced by the wealth of voyeur, BDSM, and even incest pornography. It seems like these kinds of authoritarian proposals tend to come from sheltered minds.
fromthestart 7y ago
There are people who would put Das Kapital the same category of unacceptable speech as others would Mein Kampf. You have no right to quarantine information like you would a virus, because there is no way to agree on which information is "bad". Further, even overall hateful or dangerous content can have meritful parts - not everything Hitler said or did, for example, was unreasonable or evil. Another example, what about the Unabomber Manifesto? Yeah, he was a terrorist and he wrote some arguably hateful things about liberalism/leftism, but there was also a wealth of thoughtful observations regarding the human condition in his work. All information should be free for study by anyone.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  And they would be wrong. Liberation literature is not in the same category as hate screeds. I don't buy the moral abdication you're selling. You know what's evil - it's the stuff full of race hate and misogyny. There is no moral equivalence.
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    Would a pamphlet against immigration be allowed? Would a pamphlet against abortion be allowed? Would a pamphlet against [Islam|Christianity| Judaism|Hinduism] be allowed? Would a pamphlet against Israel be allowed? Would a pamphlet against affirmative action be allowed?
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    > Liberation literature is not in the same category as hate screeds. Just as one man's Freedom Fighter is another's Terrorist, this really depends on perspective. Das Kapital is kinda negative about capital holders, after all. > You know what's evil - it's the stuff full of race hate and misogyny. There is no moral equivalence. Is it all the stuff full of racial hatred and mistreatment of women? Because you're going to have a hell of a time banning the Torah, Bible and Koran - to say nothing of other religious texts.
  - journalctl 7y ago
    It’s amazing how if you try to make a progressive political point here, you tend to get criticized. But when it comes time to judge the morality of things like racism or misogyny, suddenly it’s impossible to know the morality of any idea ever.
narrator 7y ago
So... people are stupid and easily manipulated. Democracy is just a skinner box run by all the god like people who know better than all the stupid sheep, right?
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  People are smart but there's a problem with smarts - it's surprisingly easy to talk yourself into something you can't talk yourself out of. High intelligence makes this worse, if anything. Some ideas need to be quarantined because by the time you start doing the "are we the baddies" skit, you've already built Dachau.
  - narrator 7y ago
    So the smart people or the dumb people need to make the determination as to what are the bad ideas? Or the REALLY SMART PEOPLE like you make that determination? Face it, you're never going to get away from the "benevolent" overseer who figures the truth out for everyone else. The fundamental flaw is that you're always trying to put everyone on different levels of intellectual responsibility and whenever you do that you fall into an elitist model of governance, which is what the first amendment was specifically designed to prevent.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    Please confirm that you want to globally eradicate Islam from public awareness. That's what you said but I'm not sure if it's what you mean.
  - concordDance 7y ago
    You have a point. I once talked myself into a pretty racist view and have been struggling ever since to get out. :(
jumpman500 7y ago
Well this is a super elitist point of view. I'm okay with the public understanding and misunderstanding information. There's value in their interpretation. Civilization goes on and history should be preserved as accurately as we can. We should protect children, but adults have the right to know what other adults think and say.
justcorrect 7y ago
Yep, that's why I want to ban all anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-freedom speech and literature in America. These hate viruses have no place in our Democratic Republic, nor in a civil society. Or do you have a different OPINION on what's hateful?
dragonwriter 7y ago
> There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Sure there is. If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints.
- tastroder 7y ago
  > If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints. Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education. For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.
  - La1n 7y ago
    Exactly, people act like restricting access (or in this case voluntarily not storing something) will also remove all the surrounding information about it. I didn't need to read pro-slavery propaganda to know slavery is bad, and I didn't need to read every type of propaganda to know or learn how propaganda works. Edit: Also this thread is full of people (including me to be fair) not providing any sources to whatever they feel is true.
    - concordDance 7y ago
      And I didn't need to read pro-atheism propaganda to know that atheism was bad. Thankfully, at some point my "question everything" principles eventually lead to me investigating that. (Unfortunately it also lead to me investigating other ideas which are far less popular than atheism in the modern day, so I guess you might have a point)
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > I didn't need to read pro-slavery propaganda to know slavery is bad OTOH, one might need to read original pro-slavery propaganda to know that the myth, long adopted in many US states’ education systems as its own revisionist propaganda, that the Confederacy was not centrally about slavery and racism, was a lie.
lopmotr 7y ago
You do realize you're describing quite a lot of popular books such as the Quran and the Communist Manifesto, right? You want to quarantine them to research labs only? How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Have you run out of real problems to worry about? Or are you just too young and naive to realize that ideas aren't simply good and evil and that, alone, they don't cause people to do things? Nazism, for instance, came about because the people were being oppressed as a result of losing WWI and it was a rebellion against that oppression. It wouldn't work without the oppression. The idea itself is not the problem.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  >How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Catholics used to attack Evangelicals. You see the Evangelicals had dangerous ideas that had to be eliminate lest the common folk would be lead astray. People have always been afraid of ideas. This nonreligious religiosity is novel but we've seen this play before.
  - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
    Yeah but for me, and probably many other people, it really felt like we were just on the verge of moving past all that. Up until about, say, 5-10 years ago. Now it feels like we took a sharp turn off a cliff, into some kind of feverish madness.
    - lopmotr 7y ago
      I'd say so too. I somehow tuned out religious fear of ideas, perhaps because I didn't really think of those people as even pretending to pretending to be intellectually honest. But now non-religious people from my own generation and younger are behaving that way too. Even intelligent and supposedly non-nutty people like computer programmers.

There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Those are memetic viruses with established body counts and should be studied, if at all, in the manner one studies smallpox.

cameronbrown 7y ago

Banning Nazi content is easily the most obvious way to create real Nazis amongst the youth, who being young are attracted to anything taboo, or who may believe that there's some big conspiracy to cover something up so "it must be true, they don't want us to know". This is a dark line of thinking.

JulianMorrison 7y ago
Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread. And when society permits it to be mainstream politics, you're one solid resistance movement away from genocide.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  > Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. > When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread. There's a lot of certainty in the way you are saying it. I'm not saying you are wrong, but do you have any references? Truly curious, I always see these things as hard to measure/understand, so super interested to know info that would help remove that for me.
  - mola 7y ago
    Science won't help you here. Ofcourse his argument is no more than a hypothesis, but you can't really disprove it because of scale. You might find a model that shows this dynamic, but it won't be a proof, And vice versa. Because we already witnessed major genocide, and a huge bloody war caused by such extreme ideologies, some people think we can't just let it play out again so we can gather more data for our scientific accuracy. I don't know if censorship is the answer. But because our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice. *By true honest dialog I mean actual dialogs between people that try to convince each other with the goal of understanding where there is agreememt. And where there isn't one, where it stems from, and how it can be mitigated by some synthesis of opinions. This, as opposed to one sided commentary that it's goal is only to discredit the other side by focusing on disagreements and inducing fear and radicalization in your intended audience.
    - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
      I'm not asking for double blind control studies. I'm just asking anything to provide evidence. Well rounded arguments with lots of accurate and well thought out examples (i.e. statistics, objective trends, etc) maybe books or theories supported by certain segments of the social sciences, etc. Same goes for your statement: > our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice. (censorhip) Can you please tell me why this time it is so different than say the election between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine? I'm truly interested in hearing the concrete reasons for censorship being the 'no other choice' option. Again, not saying anyone is wrong, just interested to hear how much of what is stated is based on subjective truth vs objective truths.
- food_eater 7y ago
  Thank god we have so many liberals out there ensuring the public doesn't think the wrong thoughts and protecting us from ourselves.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. You're missing my point. Those most likely to be radicalised are already isolated. If we scrub content about Nazi ideology from Internet Archive (and everywhere else), these people will find it elsewhere and likely be even more radicalised than they otherwise would be. Nobody is arguing it should be mainstream politics, only that it should be archived and preserved as lessons to the future generations.
  - concordDance 7y ago
    Importantly: if you scrub it almost everywhere then you can't argue against it, because you'd need to actually articulate the WtongThink in order to argue against it. So when an impressionable young thing like my past self happens to stumble across well articulated arguments (as opposed to straw arguments) for the bad thing, they will have no where to go to be set straight.
orf 7y ago
Ahh yes, of course, the large monolithic monoculture called "the youth" is naturally stupid enough to be "attracted to anything taboo" without thinking or questioning it. That's why they sure are attracted to other taboo things like incest and necrophilia. No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people. Things are a lot more nuanced than "banning bad, because kids dumb".
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Political ideology is NOT like incest and necrophilia at all. It is our history and needs preservation. I never said kids were dumb, but they absolutely are curious, and forbidden knowledge is an incredible lure. The absolute majority will realise it's messed up, but there will always be that few who become radicalised from what they see. Rather than burying our past we should and need to teach them why it's wrong. This trend of rewriting history is extremely worrisome.
- food_eater 7y ago
  Weird how you argue that people aren't stupid enough to fall for nazi bullshit, yet you still didn't argue against banning it. So which is it? Are people capable of making rational decisions or do people need to be protected by those with the (current) correct ideology?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fromthestart 7y ago
  You think the archtype of the edgy, rebelious youth is fictional? If you were too far removed from those groups of kids in high school, perhaps you should spend some time on 4chan. >No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people. It absolutely does, because edginess is appealing to many teenagers/young adults. Not only that, but laws to this effect against blanket "hate speech" are regularly used by white supremacists and the like as evidence of, for example, Jewish people using laws to unfairly elevate themselves with the priveleges of a protected class while simultaneously suppressing thought that can lead to dissent. Holocaust denial laws lead to increased suspicion with the justification that scepticism is banned to preserve a false narrative and prevent the lie from being discovered. It's easy to see how preposterous this is while the atrocity is relatively fresh in our collective consciousness, but what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all survivors have been dead for some time and people rightly start to wonder why investigation of an event is illegal? This is a weird form of puritanical censorship and the unintented consequences to society are far worse than any imagined benefits. You have no right to control thought in your image. Edit: also, your hyperbolic mention of incest and necrophilia doesn't quite support your claims, as sexual arousal is quite strongly linked with taboo for many people, as evidenced by the wealth of voyeur, BDSM, and even incest pornography. It seems like these kinds of authoritarian proposals tend to come from sheltered minds.

fromthestart 7y ago

There are people who would put Das Kapital the same category of unacceptable speech as others would Mein Kampf. You have no right to quarantine information like you would a virus, because there is no way to agree on which information is "bad". Further, even overall hateful or dangerous content can have meritful parts - not everything Hitler said or did, for example, was unreasonable or evil. Another example, what about the Unabomber Manifesto? Yeah, he was a terrorist and he wrote some arguably hateful things about liberalism/leftism, but there was also a wealth of thoughtful observations regarding the human condition in his work. All information should be free for study by anyone.

JulianMorrison 7y ago
And they would be wrong. Liberation literature is not in the same category as hate screeds. I don't buy the moral abdication you're selling. You know what's evil - it's the stuff full of race hate and misogyny. There is no moral equivalence.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  Would a pamphlet against immigration be allowed? Would a pamphlet against abortion be allowed? Would a pamphlet against [Islam|Christianity| Judaism|Hinduism] be allowed? Would a pamphlet against Israel be allowed? Would a pamphlet against affirmative action be allowed?
- DuskStar 7y ago
  > Liberation literature is not in the same category as hate screeds. Just as one man's Freedom Fighter is another's Terrorist, this really depends on perspective. Das Kapital is kinda negative about capital holders, after all. > You know what's evil - it's the stuff full of race hate and misogyny. There is no moral equivalence. Is it all the stuff full of racial hatred and mistreatment of women? Because you're going to have a hell of a time banning the Torah, Bible and Koran - to say nothing of other religious texts.
- journalctl 7y ago
  It’s amazing how if you try to make a progressive political point here, you tend to get criticized. But when it comes time to judge the morality of things like racism or misogyny, suddenly it’s impossible to know the morality of any idea ever.

narrator 7y ago

So... people are stupid and easily manipulated. Democracy is just a skinner box run by all the god like people who know better than all the stupid sheep, right?

JulianMorrison 7y ago
People are smart but there's a problem with smarts - it's surprisingly easy to talk yourself into something you can't talk yourself out of. High intelligence makes this worse, if anything. Some ideas need to be quarantined because by the time you start doing the "are we the baddies" skit, you've already built Dachau.
- narrator 7y ago
  So the smart people or the dumb people need to make the determination as to what are the bad ideas? Or the REALLY SMART PEOPLE like you make that determination? Face it, you're never going to get away from the "benevolent" overseer who figures the truth out for everyone else. The fundamental flaw is that you're always trying to put everyone on different levels of intellectual responsibility and whenever you do that you fall into an elitist model of governance, which is what the first amendment was specifically designed to prevent.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Please confirm that you want to globally eradicate Islam from public awareness. That's what you said but I'm not sure if it's what you mean.
- concordDance 7y ago
  You have a point. I once talked myself into a pretty racist view and have been struggling ever since to get out. :(

jumpman500 7y ago

Well this is a super elitist point of view. I'm okay with the public understanding and misunderstanding information. There's value in their interpretation. Civilization goes on and history should be preserved as accurately as we can. We should protect children, but adults have the right to know what other adults think and say.

justcorrect 7y ago

Yep, that's why I want to ban all anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-freedom speech and literature in America. These hate viruses have no place in our Democratic Republic, nor in a civil society. Or do you have a different OPINION on what's hateful?

dragonwriter 7y ago

> There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Sure there is. If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints.

tastroder 7y ago
> If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints. Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education. For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.
- La1n 7y ago
  Exactly, people act like restricting access (or in this case voluntarily not storing something) will also remove all the surrounding information about it. I didn't need to read pro-slavery propaganda to know slavery is bad, and I didn't need to read every type of propaganda to know or learn how propaganda works. Edit: Also this thread is full of people (including me to be fair) not providing any sources to whatever they feel is true.
  - concordDance 7y ago
    And I didn't need to read pro-atheism propaganda to know that atheism was bad. Thankfully, at some point my "question everything" principles eventually lead to me investigating that. (Unfortunately it also lead to me investigating other ideas which are far less popular than atheism in the modern day, so I guess you might have a point)
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > I didn't need to read pro-slavery propaganda to know slavery is bad OTOH, one might need to read original pro-slavery propaganda to know that the myth, long adopted in many US states’ education systems as its own revisionist propaganda, that the Confederacy was not centrally about slavery and racism, was a lie.

lopmotr 7y ago

You do realize you're describing quite a lot of popular books such as the Quran and the Communist Manifesto, right? You want to quarantine them to research labs only? How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Have you run out of real problems to worry about? Or are you just too young and naive to realize that ideas aren't simply good and evil and that, alone, they don't cause people to do things? Nazism, for instance, came about because the people were being oppressed as a result of losing WWI and it was a rebellion against that oppression. It wouldn't work without the oppression. The idea itself is not the problem.

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
>How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Catholics used to attack Evangelicals. You see the Evangelicals had dangerous ideas that had to be eliminate lest the common folk would be lead astray. People have always been afraid of ideas. This nonreligious religiosity is novel but we've seen this play before.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  Yeah but for me, and probably many other people, it really felt like we were just on the verge of moving past all that. Up until about, say, 5-10 years ago. Now it feels like we took a sharp turn off a cliff, into some kind of feverish madness.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    I'd say so too. I somehow tuned out religious fear of ideas, perhaps because I didn't really think of those people as even pretending to pretending to be intellectually honest. But now non-religious people from my own generation and younger are behaving that way too. Even intelligent and supposedly non-nutty people like computer programmers.