3 ms·

The propagandists have confused you and many others on this topic. Telling lies or BS is absolutely not censorship. When something is not allowed to be said or

The propagandists have confused you and many others on this topic. Telling lies or BS is absolutely not censorship. When something is not allowed to be said or published, or is soft-censored by muting its distribution...that is censorship. One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the truth is called? "Lies".

duxup 5y ago
I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc. I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.
- baumy 5y ago
  I'm not sure what's complicated about this. People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is. > I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc. You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship. The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies. Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I understand the Galileo reference, what is the example today then?
    - baumy 5y ago
      Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value in steering the conversation in that direction. But asking for a specific example is rather missing the point - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the merits of any individual controversial claim or figure. We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will be looked back at years from now as times when the truth was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that something is a lie or BS. For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
- LordFast 5y ago
  "I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it." He's saying Galileo was censored during the time Galileo was alive.
  - duxup 5y ago
    What exactly is being censored like Galileo today?
    - bduerst 5y ago
      Galileo's book was censored by the church because it insulted the pope. I'm not certain if that exists much today. Similar censorship would be curtailing mockery of public authority figures.
    - MarkLowenstein 5y ago
      Everyone who uses Twitter has seen the little ! triangle saying a tweet has "misinformation". Or read about people suspended for discussing - Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ - Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud - Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above] I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.
bduerst 5y ago
Misinformation and lies can directly cause harm - i.e. scaring/deluding people into not getting a vaccine for COVID-19. Any blatantly incorrect speech where the expression alone can kill others should be evaluated for censorship. Even the founding philosophers of free speech agreed that expression should be curtailed when it would cause harm to others. Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.

duxup 5y ago

I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc. I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.

baumy 5y ago
I'm not sure what's complicated about this. People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is. > I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc. You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship. The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies. Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
- duxup 5y ago
  I understand the Galileo reference, what is the example today then?
  - baumy 5y ago
    Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value in steering the conversation in that direction. But asking for a specific example is rather missing the point - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the merits of any individual controversial claim or figure. We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will be looked back at years from now as times when the truth was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that something is a lie or BS. For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
LordFast 5y ago
"I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it." He's saying Galileo was censored during the time Galileo was alive.
- duxup 5y ago
  What exactly is being censored like Galileo today?
  - bduerst 5y ago
    Galileo's book was censored by the church because it insulted the pope. I'm not certain if that exists much today. Similar censorship would be curtailing mockery of public authority figures.
  - MarkLowenstein 5y ago
    Everyone who uses Twitter has seen the little ! triangle saying a tweet has "misinformation". Or read about people suspended for discussing - Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ - Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud - Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above] I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.

bduerst 5y ago

Misinformation and lies can directly cause harm - i.e. scaring/deluding people into not getting a vaccine for COVID-19. Any blatantly incorrect speech where the expression alone can kill others should be evaluated for censorship. Even the founding philosophers of free speech agreed that expression should be curtailed when it would cause harm to others. Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.