5 ms·

This trend is one of the reasons why I do not shy away from voicing unpopular opinions, on this site and elsewhere. In the Netherlands there is a monument [1] a

This trend is one of the reasons why I do not shy away from voicing unpopular opinions, on this site and elsewhere. In the Netherlands there is a monument [1] at a location where the Germans executed members of the resistance. The monument consists of a brick wall with the following text on it: Een volk dat voor tirannen zwicht, zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen, dan dooft het licht... This loosely translates to People who yield to tyrants will not just lose their lives and goods, they will lose their soul... Giving in to the cancel mob is not an option since that only makes them stronger. Assuming that you're convinced your ideas are just as valid as those espoused by the mob, just different, I see no reason for people to shut up in the name of keeping the peace. Speak your mind, enter discussions with those who are not of like mind. If you are met by nothing but shouted epithets, slurs and attempts to silence you consider this: if the shouters really were convinced they were on the right path they would not need to shout. They would meet your opinions with arguments of their own, they would speak as they are spoken to. Don't let yourself be silenced. [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M._van_Randwijk https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M._van_Randwijk

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
> Speak your mind Since you asked. Sometimes I stay quiet because every infight in "The Left" is wasted airtime that allows my political opponents to look calm and normal. Sometimes it's a matter of priority. If I talk about gun control a lot, I'm going to turn off lots of people. I wish the whole Democratic party would stop talking about gun control. I don't think it makes the biggest difference. If they talk about it, they will probably lose voters who would otherwise support issues I care about more. So how does this relate to the book? I don't know. I haven't read the book. I heard it's bad. Let's do an "if by whiskey". If the book is bad... If it's complete misinformation, cherry-picked facts twisted to match bad-faith conclusions, and it's only going to hurt trans people... Then yes, I'm going to stand up brave and say "The publisher should refuse to carry this book, because it is full of harmful lies." Because it is damned expensive to get people to read the truth once they've bought the lies. As a capitalist, I don't want to sell the book about why Nazis are good if it means I have to waste a bunch of money writing a book that refutes it, which many of the readers will not read. Of course, now we've invoked the Streisand Effect. It's far too late for effective good-faith censorship. Censorship at this point means that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am part of the same `#trans` hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. If the book is bad, then it's too late to censor it. But I wish it had been censored sooner, within the publisher, because I think it's a very bad look for a publisher to (following your analogy) publish Nazi propaganda that they could choose to just not publish. If a book comes out to rebut this one, will it make the same headlines? Will it hit the front page of HN? Is this the replication crisis, but for the Twitter age? And before that book gets published, how much damage is done by people accepting un-rebutted misinformation? If the book is good... If it's mostly true, if it's good-faith concern, and not whataboutism and concern _trolling_, then it still really sucks that people are going to read this headline, maybe even read the book, and come off thinking that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am now part of the same hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. What's my unpopular opinion? People lack nuance. Especially online. In my opinion the book is dangerous because the median person will spend at most 1 minute per day thinking about trans people. If that whole minute is, "Wow, trans people want children to mutilate themselves and separate them from their parents," then I have lost something. Because now I am vaguely associated with something that we can all agree is terrible. Even if we don't agree whether it's related to me, or how often it happens. I am sure it has happened at least once, I'll grant you that. My unpopular opinion is that I _shouldn't_ care about this book. I _shouldn't_ feel threatened by free speech. The fact that I come here and write long wordy whiney liberal diatribes about this, I think says that something is wrong about how little rationality is really floating around, even in a space like Hacker News. I should be relaxing in my backyard while I take my estradiol pill, not typing away and wondering if someone's going to accuse me of hurting children one day. Free speech works great if everyone is a rational actor who doesn't commit to big ideas without big evidence. Are most people rational most of the time? Consider that the lottery still exists. What about the book? I think people should read it. Don't believe the headline. That's kinda the problem, is that if you have 1 minute per day to think about trans people, please don't spend it on 1 headline that _heavily suggests_ we're _associated_ with monsters. I don't think the author deserves any sales, so please pirate the book, read the whole thing, _and fact check it_. And once the truth has gotten its shoes on, what do I want you to think? I want you to think, "Wow, it _is_ terrible what happened to those children. Those individual doctors _are_ bad. Those individual trans people in the book _are_ bad. But the fact that ReactiveJelly is trans has _nothing_ to do with _any_ of this. What's she gonna do, kick them out? Become Blaire White and constantly emphasize the bad people in a desperate bid to keep her own head above water? Become Contrapoints and write nuanced 2-hour liberal diatribes that no moderate will ever watch? Sit in her backyard and take her pill while quietly accepting that every minority is going to keep catching flack for the crimes of the worst people who happen to share their hashtag?" I hope I don't sound agitated. That would, of course, mean that I'm wrong. /s
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  You reason why you think the book is not worth reading, which is fine with me. Reasoning why other people should not read the book is fine as well. As far as I'm concerned you're free to picket in front of the book store with a sign "don't buy this book", all of this falls under freedom of expression which is - barring illegal actions - a given as far as I'm concerned. What is not OK is to call for a book to be banned so others can not read it even if they want to. There are many books out there which espouse ideas which I do not hold with but I will not call for them to be banned. I will not go too far into the whole 'trans issue' since that is a minefield which can not be negotiated without having a current map which is likely to try to send me ways I'd rather not tread. What little experience I have with the phenomenon tells me that people who were 'born in the wrong body' just want to be accepted for what they are without being forced into a cheerleader role for a team. The book - which I have heard about, having listened to several interviews with the author as well as having read Douglas Murray's "The Madness of Crowds" - calls for caution in performing irreversible operations on children, something which I whole-heartedly support. As far as I know - from having listened to the author as well as several others lecturing on the subject - the large majority of children who present as 'trans' end up as gay or lesbian, at ease in their own bodies. To me this makes it clear that a call for caution needs to be heard, given the irreversibility of sex change operations and the negative effects of puberty blockers.
- slowmovintarget 6y ago
  Free speech produces rational actors. You rationalizing censorship because the book says something you don't like, or because you might become associated with it, or because it might change what people think to a perspective you disagree with is the EXACT reason why freedom of speech is important. You have it. The society in which you live held it as a value. It allowed you to make the choices you've made. It is not rational to say "it's ok for me to have freedom of speech, but it is not OK for 'that author' or 'people with that idea' to have it." Free speech "works great" regardless of the degree of rationality of the general public, because it allows the rational to speak. It permits ideas to be expressed, digested, rejected. It lets people think. It allows them to further develop their thinking skills. Again, freedom of speech produces rational actors. Social media, in the form of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the like are cancerous to our society. They amplify extreme positions. They do this deliberately with algorithms, or as a secondary effect of their primary goal, capturing attention. Sensationalism garners more attention than reason. It makes people care about things that are immaterial... like hashtags. Your Twitter handle is not you. Your posts are not you. Your speech is speech. That any one of those may, at some point be associated to a hashtag that only exists in these ephemeral, harmful swamps of societal outflow should matter little. You haven't lost anything real. But to say that someone should not be allowed to publish, that a book should be banned, that some person should be silenced because someone else doesn't like what they might say, that is damaging to the entirety of society. It denies the advances of the last three thousand years of political philosophy. The idea that censorship is OK is dangerous. It should be discussed, argued against, and proven, once more, wrong, with speech. The simplest reason in favor of this stance, is that it let's you be you. You'd never have even been allowed to make the choices you've made in a society that wasn't steeped in the idea of freedom of speech. Such a society wouldn't have produced estradiol, let alone made it available to anyone. Our horror at the terrible things people say is the required price for our freedom to say the important things that ought to be, that must be, said. Freedom of speech is too important to a civil society to allow anyone's discomfort to have any weight in an argument over restricting it.

ReactiveJelly 6y ago

> Speak your mind Since you asked. Sometimes I stay quiet because every infight in "The Left" is wasted airtime that allows my political opponents to look calm and normal. Sometimes it's a matter of priority. If I talk about gun control a lot, I'm going to turn off lots of people. I wish the whole Democratic party would stop talking about gun control. I don't think it makes the biggest difference. If they talk about it, they will probably lose voters who would otherwise support issues I care about more. So how does this relate to the book? I don't know. I haven't read the book. I heard it's bad. Let's do an "if by whiskey". If the book is bad... If it's complete misinformation, cherry-picked facts twisted to match bad-faith conclusions, and it's only going to hurt trans people... Then yes, I'm going to stand up brave and say "The publisher should refuse to carry this book, because it is full of harmful lies." Because it is damned expensive to get people to read the truth once they've bought the lies. As a capitalist, I don't want to sell the book about why Nazis are good if it means I have to waste a bunch of money writing a book that refutes it, which many of the readers will not read. Of course, now we've invoked the Streisand Effect. It's far too late for effective good-faith censorship. Censorship at this point means that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am part of the same `#trans` hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. If the book is bad, then it's too late to censor it. But I wish it had been censored sooner, within the publisher, because I think it's a very bad look for a publisher to (following your analogy) publish Nazi propaganda that they could choose to just not publish. If a book comes out to rebut this one, will it make the same headlines? Will it hit the front page of HN? Is this the replication crisis, but for the Twitter age? And before that book gets published, how much damage is done by people accepting un-rebutted misinformation? If the book is good... If it's mostly true, if it's good-faith concern, and not whataboutism and concern _trolling_, then it still really sucks that people are going to read this headline, maybe even read the book, and come off thinking that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am now part of the same hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. What's my unpopular opinion? People lack nuance. Especially online. In my opinion the book is dangerous because the median person will spend at most 1 minute per day thinking about trans people. If that whole minute is, "Wow, trans people want children to mutilate themselves and separate them from their parents," then I have lost something. Because now I am vaguely associated with something that we can all agree is terrible. Even if we don't agree whether it's related to me, or how often it happens. I am sure it has happened at least once, I'll grant you that. My unpopular opinion is that I _shouldn't_ care about this book. I _shouldn't_ feel threatened by free speech. The fact that I come here and write long wordy whiney liberal diatribes about this, I think says that something is wrong about how little rationality is really floating around, even in a space like Hacker News. I should be relaxing in my backyard while I take my estradiol pill, not typing away and wondering if someone's going to accuse me of hurting children one day. Free speech works great if everyone is a rational actor who doesn't commit to big ideas without big evidence. Are most people rational most of the time? Consider that the lottery still exists. What about the book? I think people should read it. Don't believe the headline. That's kinda the problem, is that if you have 1 minute per day to think about trans people, please don't spend it on 1 headline that _heavily suggests_ we're _associated_ with monsters. I don't think the author deserves any sales, so please pirate the book, read the whole thing, _and fact check it_. And once the truth has gotten its shoes on, what do I want you to think? I want you to think, "Wow, it _is_ terrible what happened to those children. Those individual doctors _are_ bad. Those individual trans people in the book _are_ bad. But the fact that ReactiveJelly is trans has _nothing_ to do with _any_ of this. What's she gonna do, kick them out? Become Blaire White and constantly emphasize the bad people in a desperate bid to keep her own head above water? Become Contrapoints and write nuanced 2-hour liberal diatribes that no moderate will ever watch? Sit in her backyard and take her pill while quietly accepting that every minority is going to keep catching flack for the crimes of the worst people who happen to share their hashtag?" I hope I don't sound agitated. That would, of course, mean that I'm wrong. /s

Yetanfou 6y ago
You reason why you think the book is not worth reading, which is fine with me. Reasoning why other people should not read the book is fine as well. As far as I'm concerned you're free to picket in front of the book store with a sign "don't buy this book", all of this falls under freedom of expression which is - barring illegal actions - a given as far as I'm concerned. What is not OK is to call for a book to be banned so others can not read it even if they want to. There are many books out there which espouse ideas which I do not hold with but I will not call for them to be banned. I will not go too far into the whole 'trans issue' since that is a minefield which can not be negotiated without having a current map which is likely to try to send me ways I'd rather not tread. What little experience I have with the phenomenon tells me that people who were 'born in the wrong body' just want to be accepted for what they are without being forced into a cheerleader role for a team. The book - which I have heard about, having listened to several interviews with the author as well as having read Douglas Murray's "The Madness of Crowds" - calls for caution in performing irreversible operations on children, something which I whole-heartedly support. As far as I know - from having listened to the author as well as several others lecturing on the subject - the large majority of children who present as 'trans' end up as gay or lesbian, at ease in their own bodies. To me this makes it clear that a call for caution needs to be heard, given the irreversibility of sex change operations and the negative effects of puberty blockers.
slowmovintarget 6y ago
Free speech produces rational actors. You rationalizing censorship because the book says something you don't like, or because you might become associated with it, or because it might change what people think to a perspective you disagree with is the EXACT reason why freedom of speech is important. You have it. The society in which you live held it as a value. It allowed you to make the choices you've made. It is not rational to say "it's ok for me to have freedom of speech, but it is not OK for 'that author' or 'people with that idea' to have it." Free speech "works great" regardless of the degree of rationality of the general public, because it allows the rational to speak. It permits ideas to be expressed, digested, rejected. It lets people think. It allows them to further develop their thinking skills. Again, freedom of speech produces rational actors. Social media, in the form of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the like are cancerous to our society. They amplify extreme positions. They do this deliberately with algorithms, or as a secondary effect of their primary goal, capturing attention. Sensationalism garners more attention than reason. It makes people care about things that are immaterial... like hashtags. Your Twitter handle is not you. Your posts are not you. Your speech is speech. That any one of those may, at some point be associated to a hashtag that only exists in these ephemeral, harmful swamps of societal outflow should matter little. You haven't lost anything real. But to say that someone should not be allowed to publish, that a book should be banned, that some person should be silenced because someone else doesn't like what they might say, that is damaging to the entirety of society. It denies the advances of the last three thousand years of political philosophy. The idea that censorship is OK is dangerous. It should be discussed, argued against, and proven, once more, wrong, with speech. The simplest reason in favor of this stance, is that it let's you be you. You'd never have even been allowed to make the choices you've made in a society that wasn't steeped in the idea of freedom of speech. Such a society wouldn't have produced estradiol, let alone made it available to anyone. Our horror at the terrible things people say is the required price for our freedom to say the important things that ought to be, that must be, said. Freedom of speech is too important to a civil society to allow anyone's discomfort to have any weight in an argument over restricting it.