9 ms·

Or, just a different sort of integrity than you had in mind.

by genericuser314 5y ago

EGreg 5y ago
I wonder if you can always say this about anything, replacng the operative word “integrity” here with whatever
- rackjack 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_discord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_discord
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    I honestly think that is the cause of half of arguments that occur, not that the same people wouldn't disagree even if they paid attention to this, but it's certainly where they seem to get stuck.
gruez 5y ago
And that sort of integrity is... what? Only supporting speech that you agree with?
- dessant 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't post canned arguments to HN. They point to super-repetitive/generic places, and those usually get nasty, as indignation rushes in to fill the curiosity vacuum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Ah, this again. People who are intolerant only to the intolerant are intolerant, period. And if they consider themselves tolerant, they are also a hypocrites.
    - rusk 5y ago
      Ah good old bastardised Voltaire
    - dessant 5y ago
      I think many people are perfectly content with being called intolerant, if that's what it takes for others to understand nuance. There is nothing wrong with not supporting hateful jerks and bigots.
      - krona 5y ago
        Toleration doesn't imply support. That's the whole point of toleration.
        dessant 5y ago
        Allowing these groups to use your software and platform literally supports their operation. And again, it's perfectly fine to call this intolerance.
        dragontamer 5y ago
        Well yes. But if say Nazi Germany were annexing Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and finally France, should the USA do something about it? Because popular opinion in the 1940s (even after France's collapse into pro-German "Vichy France") was "Stay neutral and don't join the war". That is to say, we were "tolerating" the events and trying to keep our hands clean of it, and we ultimately only joined after Pearl Harbor forced our hand. ----------- Its not hypothetical. There were other groups who "tolerated" the Nazis. IIRC, its a common criticism of the Catholic church for not going more anti-Nazi than they did (they were more neutral as well). Hard to criticize them IMO when the US tried to be neutral for so long though! Eventually, there's a line that is crossed and we must become "intolerant" of other people's actions. Nazi Germany is perhaps the last example where the country truly unified itself against that threat, but... even as late as 1941 (well after the fall of France), USA was nominally neutral in the conflict. Was that the correct move? Should we have "Become intolerant" of the Nazis sooner? --------- Don't believe me? Look up Charles Lindberg (yes, "Spirit of St. Louis" pilot for the first Trans-Atlantic flight). Look up the speeches he gave for the "American First Committee", a popular antiwar group in 1940 and 1941. USA was 100% willing to give up on France and Britain back then, and it was incredibly popular despite the atrocities that continued in Europe. It all of course changed when Japan made a strategic blunder on December 7th, 1941. But remember: USA was largely reacting to Hitler's rise with a big "should we even care" ?? If it weren't for Japan, I don't think we would have joined the war in earnest. -------- "Tolerance", keeping neutral, etc. etc. is the wrong answer sometimes. I think we can all look back with shame upon the US's reluctance to kick Hitler's ass. Like, we Americans make fun of Chamberlain's appeasement, but its not like our country did much about the situation until a few years later.
  - gkls 5y ago
    Formulated in 1945, right after millions of people had been murdered ... But I'm sure that Popper was actually thinking about defending 55 genders when he/she/ze/they formulated it. The timing was just a coincidence!
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      What's the claim here? That the lessons of 1945 are irrelevant?
      - habx10 5y ago
        That would be difficult to answer. It appears that the tolerant people have flagged the comment.
        dang 5y ago
        Please don't create accounts to post flamewar comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Darmody 5y ago
    The questions is, who decides who is intolerant? In this scenario Democrats will claim Republicans are being intolerant and vice versa.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      I think philosophers have done an amazing job [1] already but in the end each individual and community will have to decide for themselves; there's really no alternative. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/
    - tptacek 5y ago
      I don't know, and in the airless vacuum of a message board debate, that's a good question to noodle about. But in the case of Gab, it's not hard to make the call. Maybe it's more difficult in the case of "Truth" or Parler or MeWe or whatever, but we can all be pretty clear on the intolerance baked into the site on which the Tree of Life shooting was planned and cheerled. Gab is a site where even the person who posts inspirational cat and landscape photos turns out, if you scroll down far enough, to be an overt white supremacist. The laws shouldn't be different for sites like Gab than they are for sites like Twitter. But in communities based on free association, it's praiseworthy not to associate with Gab. This whole thing about who draws the lines as to what's acceptable speech is like saying "who decides what a legitimate political party is?" It's a good question. But regardless of the answer to it, we can all agree that the American Nazi Party is not a legitimate political party (or, if it is, we need to change our definition of "legitimacy").
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - tootie 5y ago
      This kind of thinking requires you to absolutely set aside the human ability to make "reasonable" judgments. That free speech is so unassailable that nobody is justified in declaring an expression or utterance to be dangerous. Our justice system is built on setting standards of proof like "reasonable doubt" with the implicit expectation that humans can, in fact, make reasonable judgments and those judgments can be of what is and isn't within their legally protected freedom. As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view. I think the consensus for what is unreasonable is actually quite a bit narrower than that (no one has ever been deplatformed for climate denial). A lot of pro-Trump forums have devolved into exhortations to violence that lead to a deadly insurrection. No digital platform out there wants to be responsible for something like that and it's not just because of politics.
  - young_unixer 5y ago
    I don't know, I see plenty of users unironically defending ideologies like communism in Mastodon. They seem to tolerate some specific kinds of intolerance.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  Are you saying you disagree with the US Constitution and Supreme Court? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- varelse 5y ago
  Free speech starts at home, wouldn't you agree? https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-truth-social-free-speech-app-terms-1245408/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
  - gruez 5y ago
    1. What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps. 2. being a hypocrite is bad, sure, but I don't see how it's a "get out of jail free card" when it comes to having integrity. If your principle is "always tell the truth", and you encounter a pathological liar that calls other people out for lying, does that mean you can suddenly start lying to the guy and still claim you're a man of integrity?
    - nuerow 5y ago
      > What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps. It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies. Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality. What this particular political group advocates has absolutely nothing to do with the typical right-wing political tropes of fiscal conservatism, small government, individual freedom. In fact, some of the policies they advocate goes completely against some of these core right-wing values.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies. That doesn't answer the question. Even they're both doing the same unsavory things, it doesn't follow that you can accuse one of them of being a hypocrite because the other is a hypocrite. >Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality. I feel like this violates the HN guidelines: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. For the record, I went with the generic "right wing" label because I wasn't sure whether a more precise label (eg. alt-right) would apply to both. A quick skim of wikipedia confirms this. The page for gab straight up says it's far-right/alt-right, but the page for truth social only has a passing mention of it being "alt-tech" in the reception section. You're trying way too hard to ascribe malice where there isn't any.
- howinteresting 5y ago
  There's an idea floating in some internet circles that because you aren't tolerant of some speech you disagree with, you're assumed to not be tolerant of all speech you disagree with. It is quite obviously fallacious.
  - gruez 5y ago
    The definition of integrity literally includes "consistent and uncompromising adherence". >Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. It's hard to say you're consistent and uncompromising, if you make exceptions and compromise when it's convenient/beneficial for you.
    - howinteresting 5y ago
      Strong is not the same thing as absolute. One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >Strong is not the same thing as absolute "strong" is a modifier for "moral and ethical principles and values", not for "consistent and uncompromising adherence". If you swore to support and defend the constitution, and then subsequently violated it to torture terrorists, I doubt you'd be called a man of integrity. This applies even if your other "strong ethical values" is "protecting the american people", or that you think that "terrorists are really bad people so they totally deserve it". >One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible. I have a feeling that's not the ethical value that OP was talking about, nor was it the ethical value f-droid founders had in mind when creating it.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- threatofrain 5y ago
  Freedom of speech should include the freedom to not speak on behalf of others. And then there’s freedom of association, which one might consider far more fundamental — it’s what you lose when you go to jail.

Or, just a different sort of integrity than you had in mind.

EGreg 5y ago

I wonder if you can always say this about anything, replacng the operative word “integrity” here with whatever

rackjack 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_discord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_discord
- guerrilla 5y ago
  I honestly think that is the cause of half of arguments that occur, not that the same people wouldn't disagree even if they paid attention to this, but it's certainly where they seem to get stuck.

gruez 5y ago

And that sort of integrity is... what? Only supporting speech that you agree with?

dessant 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post canned arguments to HN. They point to super-repetitive/generic places, and those usually get nasty, as indignation rushes in to fill the curiosity vacuum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Ah, this again. People who are intolerant only to the intolerant are intolerant, period. And if they consider themselves tolerant, they are also a hypocrites.
  - rusk 5y ago
    Ah good old bastardised Voltaire
  - dessant 5y ago
    I think many people are perfectly content with being called intolerant, if that's what it takes for others to understand nuance. There is nothing wrong with not supporting hateful jerks and bigots.
    - krona 5y ago
      Toleration doesn't imply support. That's the whole point of toleration.
      - dessant 5y ago
        Allowing these groups to use your software and platform literally supports their operation. And again, it's perfectly fine to call this intolerance.
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        Well yes. But if say Nazi Germany were annexing Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and finally France, should the USA do something about it? Because popular opinion in the 1940s (even after France's collapse into pro-German "Vichy France") was "Stay neutral and don't join the war". That is to say, we were "tolerating" the events and trying to keep our hands clean of it, and we ultimately only joined after Pearl Harbor forced our hand. ----------- Its not hypothetical. There were other groups who "tolerated" the Nazis. IIRC, its a common criticism of the Catholic church for not going more anti-Nazi than they did (they were more neutral as well). Hard to criticize them IMO when the US tried to be neutral for so long though! Eventually, there's a line that is crossed and we must become "intolerant" of other people's actions. Nazi Germany is perhaps the last example where the country truly unified itself against that threat, but... even as late as 1941 (well after the fall of France), USA was nominally neutral in the conflict. Was that the correct move? Should we have "Become intolerant" of the Nazis sooner? --------- Don't believe me? Look up Charles Lindberg (yes, "Spirit of St. Louis" pilot for the first Trans-Atlantic flight). Look up the speeches he gave for the "American First Committee", a popular antiwar group in 1940 and 1941. USA was 100% willing to give up on France and Britain back then, and it was incredibly popular despite the atrocities that continued in Europe. It all of course changed when Japan made a strategic blunder on December 7th, 1941. But remember: USA was largely reacting to Hitler's rise with a big "should we even care" ?? If it weren't for Japan, I don't think we would have joined the war in earnest. -------- "Tolerance", keeping neutral, etc. etc. is the wrong answer sometimes. I think we can all look back with shame upon the US's reluctance to kick Hitler's ass. Like, we Americans make fun of Chamberlain's appeasement, but its not like our country did much about the situation until a few years later.
- gkls 5y ago
  Formulated in 1945, right after millions of people had been murdered ... But I'm sure that Popper was actually thinking about defending 55 genders when he/she/ze/they formulated it. The timing was just a coincidence!
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    What's the claim here? That the lessons of 1945 are irrelevant?
    - habx10 5y ago
      That would be difficult to answer. It appears that the tolerant people have flagged the comment.
      - dang 5y ago
        Please don't create accounts to post flamewar comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Darmody 5y ago
  The questions is, who decides who is intolerant? In this scenario Democrats will claim Republicans are being intolerant and vice versa.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    I think philosophers have done an amazing job [1] already but in the end each individual and community will have to decide for themselves; there's really no alternative. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I don't know, and in the airless vacuum of a message board debate, that's a good question to noodle about. But in the case of Gab, it's not hard to make the call. Maybe it's more difficult in the case of "Truth" or Parler or MeWe or whatever, but we can all be pretty clear on the intolerance baked into the site on which the Tree of Life shooting was planned and cheerled. Gab is a site where even the person who posts inspirational cat and landscape photos turns out, if you scroll down far enough, to be an overt white supremacist. The laws shouldn't be different for sites like Gab than they are for sites like Twitter. But in communities based on free association, it's praiseworthy not to associate with Gab. This whole thing about who draws the lines as to what's acceptable speech is like saying "who decides what a legitimate political party is?" It's a good question. But regardless of the answer to it, we can all agree that the American Nazi Party is not a legitimate political party (or, if it is, we need to change our definition of "legitimacy").
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tootie 5y ago
    This kind of thinking requires you to absolutely set aside the human ability to make "reasonable" judgments. That free speech is so unassailable that nobody is justified in declaring an expression or utterance to be dangerous. Our justice system is built on setting standards of proof like "reasonable doubt" with the implicit expectation that humans can, in fact, make reasonable judgments and those judgments can be of what is and isn't within their legally protected freedom. As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view. I think the consensus for what is unreasonable is actually quite a bit narrower than that (no one has ever been deplatformed for climate denial). A lot of pro-Trump forums have devolved into exhortations to violence that lead to a deadly insurrection. No digital platform out there wants to be responsible for something like that and it's not just because of politics.
- young_unixer 5y ago
  I don't know, I see plenty of users unironically defending ideologies like communism in Mastodon. They seem to tolerate some specific kinds of intolerance.
Pyramus 5y ago
Are you saying you disagree with the US Constitution and Supreme Court? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
varelse 5y ago
Free speech starts at home, wouldn't you agree? https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-truth-social-free-speech-app-terms-1245408/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
- gruez 5y ago
  1. What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps. 2. being a hypocrite is bad, sure, but I don't see how it's a "get out of jail free card" when it comes to having integrity. If your principle is "always tell the truth", and you encounter a pathological liar that calls other people out for lying, does that mean you can suddenly start lying to the guy and still claim you're a man of integrity?
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps. It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies. Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality. What this particular political group advocates has absolutely nothing to do with the typical right-wing political tropes of fiscal conservatism, small government, individual freedom. In fact, some of the policies they advocate goes completely against some of these core right-wing values.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies. That doesn't answer the question. Even they're both doing the same unsavory things, it doesn't follow that you can accuse one of them of being a hypocrite because the other is a hypocrite. >Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality. I feel like this violates the HN guidelines: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. For the record, I went with the generic "right wing" label because I wasn't sure whether a more precise label (eg. alt-right) would apply to both. A quick skim of wikipedia confirms this. The page for gab straight up says it's far-right/alt-right, but the page for truth social only has a passing mention of it being "alt-tech" in the reception section. You're trying way too hard to ascribe malice where there isn't any.
howinteresting 5y ago
There's an idea floating in some internet circles that because you aren't tolerant of some speech you disagree with, you're assumed to not be tolerant of all speech you disagree with. It is quite obviously fallacious.
- gruez 5y ago
  The definition of integrity literally includes "consistent and uncompromising adherence". >Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. It's hard to say you're consistent and uncompromising, if you make exceptions and compromise when it's convenient/beneficial for you.
  - howinteresting 5y ago
    Strong is not the same thing as absolute. One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Strong is not the same thing as absolute "strong" is a modifier for "moral and ethical principles and values", not for "consistent and uncompromising adherence". If you swore to support and defend the constitution, and then subsequently violated it to torture terrorists, I doubt you'd be called a man of integrity. This applies even if your other "strong ethical values" is "protecting the american people", or that you think that "terrorists are really bad people so they totally deserve it". >One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible. I have a feeling that's not the ethical value that OP was talking about, nor was it the ethical value f-droid founders had in mind when creating it.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
threatofrain 5y ago
Freedom of speech should include the freedom to not speak on behalf of others. And then there’s freedom of association, which one might consider far more fundamental — it’s what you lose when you go to jail.