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Most people take your view, but I would be very careful to claim that it's actually impossible to not have limits on freedoms. There are some who believe that t

Most people take your view, but I would be very careful to claim that it's actually impossible to not have limits on freedoms. There are some who believe that the state should not exist at all; those types would not concede the ground that there exist any reasonable restrictions on fundamental natural rights. Whereas a statist (i.e. someone who is not an anarchist) would basically always concede that there are limits on rights. To use US jurisprudence as an example, even the very pro-2A supreme court justices have ruled that the state has a compelling interest in reducing gun violence and thus is allowed to take guns away from violent felons, etc. Personally, I take the former position; I think it's better to have a society where property rights (which includes the right of self-ownership i.e. owning your own body) and other natural rights (speech, self defense [technically these are just derived from property rights but I digress]) cannot be infringed upon for any reason. I am very heavily in the minority with that position, and I'm aware of that fact. --- Anyway, switching back to the original topic of censorship of supposed "disinfo", if you don't buy a natural rights argument at all, then from a utilitarian perspective I think it's still a bad idea. In places like Saudi Arabia or Iran, the idea that women should be able to choose what clothing to wear or not wear would be considered harmful to society and worthy of censorship. In Turkey the idea that the Armenian genocide occurred could be considered worthy of censorship. In America the notion that we should not have warrantless wiretapping of all communications between private citizens could be considered dangerous to society, etc etc. It always starts with a "good" reason. It never ends with one.

timmytokyo 6y ago
>I think it's better to have a society where property rights and other natural rights cannot be infringed upon for any reason. So hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons? (I realize this is not a practical concern today, but I'm trying to find out if anyone truly believes there are no lines to be drawn on property rights.)
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Nuclear weapons present a threat to other people and a threat of violating their property rights, and threats are illegal.
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    By what measure do you put nuclear weapons on one side and other weapons on the other?
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      The scope of the effects. Firearms can be pointed, explosives have a damage/kill radius. It is not permissible to arrange so that a person is brought within the range of effects of a weapon without their consent. In the case of explosives, that means you need enough property to contain the effects. In the case of nuclear weapons, it basically requires an entire planet.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  That is a difficult issue. One potential resolution I see is to say that if you see someone making his own nuclear weapons without telling anyone about it, this is strong enough evidence that he's going to try to do something terrible (i.e. it looks like a crime in progress) that you would be justified in using force to stop him. How does this generalize and fit into the framework of property rights in general? What makes, say, manufacturing guns not strong enough evidence of trying to do something terrible? Is it mere history, or is it the defensive uses of guns, or does the magnitude of the terribleness matter, or something else? (In practice, I think purifying U-235 takes huge facilities and no one can do it in their backyard—it's probably a few orders of magnitude more expensive and complex.) Also, if it's 100% established that this one guy making the nukes is a trustworthy pacifist who won't use them, but the problem is he won't keep them in a particularly secure location, can one defensibly call his actions illegal? ("Planning to be neglectful"? How about someone who will guard them as heavily as he can, but that's just not heavily enough?) There would be a lot to explore there, but I think it may be possible to resolve the issue of nuclear weapons while keeping a pure system of property rights.
  - confidantlake 6y ago
    >One potential resolution I see is to say that if you see someone making his own nuclear weapons without telling anyone about it, this is strong enough evidence that he's going to try to do something terrible (i.e. it looks like a crime in progress) that you would be justified in using force to stop him. Only 2 nuclear weapons out of the 10,000s made have ever been used. Almost no one announces they are building a nuclear weapon, it is usually done in secret. So this argument does not really hold. What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework.
    - waterhouse 6y ago
      > Only 2 nuclear weapons out of the 10,000s made have ever been used. Almost no one announces they are building a nuclear weapon, it is usually done in secret. So this argument does not really hold. The entities that have, so far, made nuclear weapons are nation-states. I think most people would agree with the following statements on that: (a) it's hard to prevent nation-states from making them (not for lack of trying), (b) many of them already made them long ago (U.S., Russia, France, China, etc.) and we're not trying to say that was illegal, (c) the concept of "illegal" at the level of nation-state actors is ... to say the least, very different in implementation, and possibly in concept, from that of "illegal" at the level of individuals. Many people think that nations making more nukes is bad, and some are in favor of disarmament treaties, but I don't think they believe international law either does or should mandate disarmament for all nations. Some would say it's hypocritical for the nuclear club to try to prevent other nations from developing nukes; I suspect others agree it's hypocritical but also don't want those nations to develop nukes. The question in this case was, "So, hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons [personally]?" It would be impractically difficult for one person to make nuclear weapons by himself, without essentially buying or stealing all the important stuff from elsewhere. And if it were easy for one person to make nukes, then probably no ideological system could resolve that easily. There might be some middle ground of possible scenarios that's important to resolve—e.g. if a company wants to make a nuke to use for, I dunno, their own Project Orion or mining a mountain or doing an interesting underwater experiment, then should that be illegal? We may end up facing the "one madman can create a superweapon" scenario with biotech. Perhaps, by that time, everyone will have their own hazmat suits and their houses will have UV decontamination chambers to fight off SARS-COV-5 or whatever. > What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework. Yep, I cheerfully admit this is what I'm doing. At least I stated it as "I think it may be possible to resolve the issue" after mentioning problems with my proposal, instead of asserting "my ideological framework resolves this easily". Though I probably should have made the "how would an individual get access to nukes anyway, and if that were easy, then what would any legal system be able to do about that?" point first.
nvusuvu 6y ago
We may have the freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean that Youtube has to give you a megaphone?
- disgrunt 6y ago
  Why should YouTube have a megaphone to give in the first place? Last I checked, there are still laws on the books to handle companies with >90% market shares. [0] [0]: https://www.statista.com/topics/2019/youtube/ https://www.statista.com/topics/2019/youtube/
  - uoaei 6y ago
    Good, so we agree that this is not an anti-censorship issue but an anti-trust issue. Private entities can't censor anything, anyhow. Independently and freely choosing which sentiments to platform on a private service is not censorship, no matter how far anyone tries to stretch the definition of the term.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      Yes, but back then we had the party organ of the American Nazi Party and the party organ of the International Workers of the World, and a couple more in between. You could buy them, and you know what you would get. Now you just have Youtube. That is a problem.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      I just checked a couple of definitions in case my memory was failing me, but I don't see any definition of censorship that limits it to governmental action. YouTube can and does censor content on their platform, I don't understand why so many people seem have trouble with that word. All it means is (quoting Webster) "to examine in order to suppress ... or delete anything considered objectionable"
      - uoaei 6y ago
        The way it's being used in public discourse is not necessarily the dictionary definition of the term. You have to meet people where they are when it comes to rhetoric, not try to force them to follow your version of what means what.
mkolodny 6y ago
> I think it's better to have a society where property rights (which includes the right of self-ownership i.e. owning your own body) and other natural rights (speech, self defense [technically these are just derived from property rights but I digress]) cannot be infringed upon for any reason In this YouTube situation, property rights and freedom of speech are mutually exclusive. Either the owners of YouTube have the right to censor whatever they want on their platform/property, or people have freedom of speech and YouTube can't remove speech from their platform/property. In this situation, you can't protect both property rights and freedom of speech - you can only protect one.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  The bigger conversation isn't really about YouTube, it's that some people want these ideas suppressed from everywhere and some people don't. Youtube just happens to be more flexible than the government, but don't think for a second they're all going to draw the line if the government passes a law prohibiting saying those things. Legally enforced censorship is what many of them ultimately want. On the other side of the coin, the anti-censorship people also want the government to prohit Youtube/FB/etc. from censoring their ideas. That's just as anti-freedom.
  - AgentME 6y ago
    Why would YouTube want legally-enforced censorship? The existence of that would make more work for them and would open them up to liability. YouTube is specifically pushing back at propaganda coming from the government here, so I don't know how it makes any sense to assert that it's evidence they really want to allow government propaganda.
- tux1968 6y ago
  If enough people demanded it though, we could make it socially unacceptable for Youtube to use their property rights in the pursuit of censorship. The problem really isn't the law, it's public opinion. We've lost sight of how important freedom of speech is, and we are by and large cheering on censorship where it hurts those we disagree with. It's short sighted and will ultimately cost us a lot more than it gains us... but it feels good for now.
kyralis 6y ago
Property rights inherently derive from the state. Unless you subscribe to "might makes right", the idea of property rights is inherently a social construct which the state is a formalization of. Limitations on rights is precisely the foundation of any society. To claim otherwise is just the semantic game of "oh, I don't mean those rights".
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Property rights inherently derive from the state. This is not true, property rights are the human incarnation of territoriality which is exhibited by many species. > Unless you subscribe to "might makes right", the idea of property rights is inherently a social construct which the state is a formalization of. The state is a formalization of a particular social construct that is not identical to property rights. > Limitations on rights is precisely the foundation of any society. Do you have any support for this statement? It seems to contradict your earlier assertions and despite that I'm not sure how it would be true on its own. > To claim otherwise is just the semantic game of "oh, I don't mean those rights". Well, I don't think its a meaningless semantic argument for people to discuss what specifically is referred to by "rights." If you think people have a right to steal food out of other people's homes then I can see why you would think the government was a necessary limitation on that "right." But I think its a reasonable response to say "there is no right to steal food from other people" and then we can discuss what is and is not a right, which is much closer to a necessary conversation than a game (when conducted by sincere interlocutors).
  - Volundr 6y ago
    > This is not true, property rights are the human incarnation of territoriality which is exhibited by many species. And those species lose their territory as soon as a bigger, meaner creature wants it. Their "right" to their territory is only as strong as their personal ability to protect it. No one else will help them. Unless that's what your advocating for when you talk about property rights, then rights absolutely do come from the state. Most of us think property rights mean what's mine is mine no matter who wants it, not that I lose it as soon as someone takes it from me or hires someone to do so.
aaroninsf 6y ago
Anarcho-Libertarianism does not as far as I know have an answer to a basic real-world problem: Humans are social and always form affinity groups. Groups have more power (by any definition) than individuals. Absent enforcement, groups will invariably infringe at will on the rights of individuals or minorities. QED a defining purpose of any "state" is to defend individuals' liberties, on their behalf, against such actors. There are many mechanisms and descriptions of this activity, but, the bottom line is always the same. This is as true for the "free market" as it is for the "free market of ideas" or the contemporary ordering of law and punishment. The state has to be the ultimate authority, to prevent smaller aggregations from stripping minorities and individuals of their own liberty. No proposed alternative system has so far demonstrated stable viability. That the examples we live within are terrible does not mean they are not also the least bad viable alternatives. Personally I may think this is a shame, but, oh well. Heinlein loved to portray rationalist societies in which ad hoc aggregations formed just long enough to enforce a purported majority-recognized rational moral order, without need for formal constitutional law or persistent institutions with formal institutional memory. When I was 15 I thought this was how things should be. At 50 I am certain that it shall never be so, not with the limitations of our actual evolved embodiment.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > QED a defining purpose of any "state" is to defend individuals' liberties, on their behalf, against such actors. Not actually demonstrated. you should say "QED a state is a group organized to infringe at will on the rights of individuals and minorities."
munchbunny 6y ago
Most people take your view, but I would be very careful to claim that it's actually impossible to not have limits on freedoms. There are some who believe that the state should not exist at all; those types would not concede the ground that there exist any reasonable restrictions on fundamental natural rights. How are you defining "freedoms" and "fundamental natural rights"? This sounds good in theory, but once you start enumerating what they are for the purposes of encoding them in law, or if not a law, then some form of social contract other than "might makes right", the counterexamples immediately flood in, and for good reason.

timmytokyo 6y ago

>I think it's better to have a society where property rights and other natural rights cannot be infringed upon for any reason. So hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons? (I realize this is not a practical concern today, but I'm trying to find out if anyone truly believes there are no lines to be drawn on property rights.)

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Nuclear weapons present a threat to other people and a threat of violating their property rights, and threats are illegal.
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  By what measure do you put nuclear weapons on one side and other weapons on the other?
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    The scope of the effects. Firearms can be pointed, explosives have a damage/kill radius. It is not permissible to arrange so that a person is brought within the range of effects of a weapon without their consent. In the case of explosives, that means you need enough property to contain the effects. In the case of nuclear weapons, it basically requires an entire planet.
waterhouse 6y ago
That is a difficult issue. One potential resolution I see is to say that if you see someone making his own nuclear weapons without telling anyone about it, this is strong enough evidence that he's going to try to do something terrible (i.e. it looks like a crime in progress) that you would be justified in using force to stop him. How does this generalize and fit into the framework of property rights in general? What makes, say, manufacturing guns not strong enough evidence of trying to do something terrible? Is it mere history, or is it the defensive uses of guns, or does the magnitude of the terribleness matter, or something else? (In practice, I think purifying U-235 takes huge facilities and no one can do it in their backyard—it's probably a few orders of magnitude more expensive and complex.) Also, if it's 100% established that this one guy making the nukes is a trustworthy pacifist who won't use them, but the problem is he won't keep them in a particularly secure location, can one defensibly call his actions illegal? ("Planning to be neglectful"? How about someone who will guard them as heavily as he can, but that's just not heavily enough?) There would be a lot to explore there, but I think it may be possible to resolve the issue of nuclear weapons while keeping a pure system of property rights.
- confidantlake 6y ago
  >One potential resolution I see is to say that if you see someone making his own nuclear weapons without telling anyone about it, this is strong enough evidence that he's going to try to do something terrible (i.e. it looks like a crime in progress) that you would be justified in using force to stop him. Only 2 nuclear weapons out of the 10,000s made have ever been used. Almost no one announces they are building a nuclear weapon, it is usually done in secret. So this argument does not really hold. What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    > Only 2 nuclear weapons out of the 10,000s made have ever been used. Almost no one announces they are building a nuclear weapon, it is usually done in secret. So this argument does not really hold. The entities that have, so far, made nuclear weapons are nation-states. I think most people would agree with the following statements on that: (a) it's hard to prevent nation-states from making them (not for lack of trying), (b) many of them already made them long ago (U.S., Russia, France, China, etc.) and we're not trying to say that was illegal, (c) the concept of "illegal" at the level of nation-state actors is ... to say the least, very different in implementation, and possibly in concept, from that of "illegal" at the level of individuals. Many people think that nations making more nukes is bad, and some are in favor of disarmament treaties, but I don't think they believe international law either does or should mandate disarmament for all nations. Some would say it's hypocritical for the nuclear club to try to prevent other nations from developing nukes; I suspect others agree it's hypocritical but also don't want those nations to develop nukes. The question in this case was, "So, hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons [personally]?" It would be impractically difficult for one person to make nuclear weapons by himself, without essentially buying or stealing all the important stuff from elsewhere. And if it were easy for one person to make nukes, then probably no ideological system could resolve that easily. There might be some middle ground of possible scenarios that's important to resolve—e.g. if a company wants to make a nuke to use for, I dunno, their own Project Orion or mining a mountain or doing an interesting underwater experiment, then should that be illegal? We may end up facing the "one madman can create a superweapon" scenario with biotech. Perhaps, by that time, everyone will have their own hazmat suits and their houses will have UV decontamination chambers to fight off SARS-COV-5 or whatever. > What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework. Yep, I cheerfully admit this is what I'm doing. At least I stated it as "I think it may be possible to resolve the issue" after mentioning problems with my proposal, instead of asserting "my ideological framework resolves this easily". Though I probably should have made the "how would an individual get access to nukes anyway, and if that were easy, then what would any legal system be able to do about that?" point first.

nvusuvu 6y ago

We may have the freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean that Youtube has to give you a megaphone?

disgrunt 6y ago
Why should YouTube have a megaphone to give in the first place? Last I checked, there are still laws on the books to handle companies with >90% market shares. [0] [0]: https://www.statista.com/topics/2019/youtube/ https://www.statista.com/topics/2019/youtube/
- uoaei 6y ago
  Good, so we agree that this is not an anti-censorship issue but an anti-trust issue. Private entities can't censor anything, anyhow. Independently and freely choosing which sentiments to platform on a private service is not censorship, no matter how far anyone tries to stretch the definition of the term.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Yes, but back then we had the party organ of the American Nazi Party and the party organ of the International Workers of the World, and a couple more in between. You could buy them, and you know what you would get. Now you just have Youtube. That is a problem.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    I just checked a couple of definitions in case my memory was failing me, but I don't see any definition of censorship that limits it to governmental action. YouTube can and does censor content on their platform, I don't understand why so many people seem have trouble with that word. All it means is (quoting Webster) "to examine in order to suppress ... or delete anything considered objectionable"
    - uoaei 6y ago
      The way it's being used in public discourse is not necessarily the dictionary definition of the term. You have to meet people where they are when it comes to rhetoric, not try to force them to follow your version of what means what.

mkolodny 6y ago

> I think it's better to have a society where property rights (which includes the right of self-ownership i.e. owning your own body) and other natural rights (speech, self defense [technically these are just derived from property rights but I digress]) cannot be infringed upon for any reason In this YouTube situation, property rights and freedom of speech are mutually exclusive. Either the owners of YouTube have the right to censor whatever they want on their platform/property, or people have freedom of speech and YouTube can't remove speech from their platform/property. In this situation, you can't protect both property rights and freedom of speech - you can only protect one.

lopmotr 6y ago
The bigger conversation isn't really about YouTube, it's that some people want these ideas suppressed from everywhere and some people don't. Youtube just happens to be more flexible than the government, but don't think for a second they're all going to draw the line if the government passes a law prohibiting saying those things. Legally enforced censorship is what many of them ultimately want. On the other side of the coin, the anti-censorship people also want the government to prohit Youtube/FB/etc. from censoring their ideas. That's just as anti-freedom.
- AgentME 6y ago
  Why would YouTube want legally-enforced censorship? The existence of that would make more work for them and would open them up to liability. YouTube is specifically pushing back at propaganda coming from the government here, so I don't know how it makes any sense to assert that it's evidence they really want to allow government propaganda.
tux1968 6y ago
If enough people demanded it though, we could make it socially unacceptable for Youtube to use their property rights in the pursuit of censorship. The problem really isn't the law, it's public opinion. We've lost sight of how important freedom of speech is, and we are by and large cheering on censorship where it hurts those we disagree with. It's short sighted and will ultimately cost us a lot more than it gains us... but it feels good for now.

kyralis 6y ago

Property rights inherently derive from the state. Unless you subscribe to "might makes right", the idea of property rights is inherently a social construct which the state is a formalization of. Limitations on rights is precisely the foundation of any society. To claim otherwise is just the semantic game of "oh, I don't mean those rights".

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> Property rights inherently derive from the state. This is not true, property rights are the human incarnation of territoriality which is exhibited by many species. > Unless you subscribe to "might makes right", the idea of property rights is inherently a social construct which the state is a formalization of. The state is a formalization of a particular social construct that is not identical to property rights. > Limitations on rights is precisely the foundation of any society. Do you have any support for this statement? It seems to contradict your earlier assertions and despite that I'm not sure how it would be true on its own. > To claim otherwise is just the semantic game of "oh, I don't mean those rights". Well, I don't think its a meaningless semantic argument for people to discuss what specifically is referred to by "rights." If you think people have a right to steal food out of other people's homes then I can see why you would think the government was a necessary limitation on that "right." But I think its a reasonable response to say "there is no right to steal food from other people" and then we can discuss what is and is not a right, which is much closer to a necessary conversation than a game (when conducted by sincere interlocutors).
- Volundr 6y ago
  > This is not true, property rights are the human incarnation of territoriality which is exhibited by many species. And those species lose their territory as soon as a bigger, meaner creature wants it. Their "right" to their territory is only as strong as their personal ability to protect it. No one else will help them. Unless that's what your advocating for when you talk about property rights, then rights absolutely do come from the state. Most of us think property rights mean what's mine is mine no matter who wants it, not that I lose it as soon as someone takes it from me or hires someone to do so.

aaroninsf 6y ago

Anarcho-Libertarianism does not as far as I know have an answer to a basic real-world problem: Humans are social and always form affinity groups. Groups have more power (by any definition) than individuals. Absent enforcement, groups will invariably infringe at will on the rights of individuals or minorities. QED a defining purpose of any "state" is to defend individuals' liberties, on their behalf, against such actors. There are many mechanisms and descriptions of this activity, but, the bottom line is always the same. This is as true for the "free market" as it is for the "free market of ideas" or the contemporary ordering of law and punishment. The state has to be the ultimate authority, to prevent smaller aggregations from stripping minorities and individuals of their own liberty. No proposed alternative system has so far demonstrated stable viability. That the examples we live within are terrible does not mean they are not also the least bad viable alternatives. Personally I may think this is a shame, but, oh well. Heinlein loved to portray rationalist societies in which ad hoc aggregations formed just long enough to enforce a purported majority-recognized rational moral order, without need for formal constitutional law or persistent institutions with formal institutional memory. When I was 15 I thought this was how things should be. At 50 I am certain that it shall never be so, not with the limitations of our actual evolved embodiment.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> QED a defining purpose of any "state" is to defend individuals' liberties, on their behalf, against such actors. Not actually demonstrated. you should say "QED a state is a group organized to infringe at will on the rights of individuals and minorities."

munchbunny 6y ago