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Yeah. Otherwise, who decides? Nobody is qualified to define allowable speech and thinking. Exceptions to any attempt at sets of "allowable speech" rules are tri

Yeah. Otherwise, who decides? Nobody is qualified to define allowable speech and thinking. Exceptions to any attempt at sets of "allowable speech" rules are trivially produced. Concepts like hate and lies are vague and nebulous. The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion. Speech is thinking. Non-consensual thought control is evil. Consensual speech and discussion comprises culture - if you have a problem with what other people think and say, the ethical, moral mechanism to rectify that problem is called conversation. People are always going to have different ideas than you. Sometimes those ideas will be repugnant to you. It is more repugnant to decide that your own thoughts are the only ones allowed. You don't get to decide what people think and say. Other people don't get to decide that for you.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Reddit/Discord are not “open opinion” platforms. They are businesses. If they don't like what you're saying then they should kick you off, especially when advocating for violence and spreading fascism. You are free to start your own business and proceed to pick up where the conversation left off on your own platform, at least until the government comes knocking and asking about why you are supporting violence and sedition. That's the beauty of the free market.
- echelon 5y ago
  > Reddit/Discord are not “open opinion” platforms. They are businesses. Then we should go back to protocols and open hardware and stop making corporations the new public forum. Your opinions are safe today, but tomorrow they may not be.
  - vba616 5y ago
    >Then we should go back to protocols and open hardware Sorry, I'm out of the loop. What happened to HTTP(S) and x86?
tigerInATurvy 5y ago
In India, there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale. Using photos and real names. And the men describe the various ways they want to use their "property" once they buy them. If you were a Muslim in India, facing fears of state-encouraged real life violence, what sort of conversation would you like to have with these people? Are you going to look at a page like that and think: "I'm so thankful for the culture being created here." What you say works great in a vacuum. But unfettered hate speech leads to bad places. Just ask the German Jews. Ask a Tutsi how they felt about the hateful radio shows before the genocide started. Imagine what it was like to be a black person in the US facing lynching and pogroms over the misinformation being widely spread. But, hey, I guess just "conversation" would have solved all of those issues. Because those screaming their hateful messages are just misunderstood people who can be easily reasoned with. And who can call it hate to begin with? After all, calling a group subhuman, and wishing for their daughters to be raped, is just a cultural development no one should interfere with.
- ngc248 5y ago
  >> there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale. Using photos and real names. What ... can you show some proof? this is getting into dangerous territory here .... making unsubstantiated claims. These claims are quite extraordinary and require extraordinary proof.
  - throwawaywat251 5y ago
    All you have to do is copy this part of your parent comment and paste it on google/duckduckgo - 'In India, there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale' . Here's a link among the search results: https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/indian-muslim-women-put-up-on-auction-again/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/indian-muslim-women-put-up-o...
- known 5y ago
yesenadam 5y ago
Ok, well, reading that I realize I "have different ideas than you" about that! Like I'm not sure that > The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion. No-one likes fetters, so that way of framing it makes it sound a no-brainer. But, to give a real world example, I guess most people think HN would be much worse without moderation of any kind. I'm not sure how one would test the truth of your statement. It doesn't sound obviously true to me, at least. It sounds like you are 100% certain. What evidence would it take for you to change your mind? I suspect belief in such "free speech absolutism" comes from abstract principle first, with real-world evidence a very distant second. Seems a similar situation to, say, pacifism. I'm very anti-violence, anti-war etc, but I'm not a pure, idealist "pacifist". To say you'd never use violence, in any situation?! that non-violence is always worse - just sounds like you haven't thought so much about it. e.g. even if thugs were dragging off your loved ones? You wouldn't lift a finger? I doubt it. That would seem like your abstract principle was trumping prudence/evidence/reason etc, producing non-sensible results, in a similar way. I don't think there are simple and good answers to any of these questions. Yours is simple but, I think, not good.
faeriechangling 5y ago
>who decides Courts, associations of people, etc. The canonical argument against your line of thinking would be Der Sturmer in Nazi Germany having enough freedom to promote the interests of the Nazi party which consequently outlawed the free press and railed up the hatred to the point of genomics (See: Popper and the paradox of tolerance). We could also look at the radio stations in Rwanda preaching Hutu Power that contributed to the genocides there, or contemporary issues like the Rohingya genocides amplified by social media. Restrictions on free speech are universal across cultures at all levels of society including within this very community and I don’t see attempts to restrict speech which the proverbial common sense person would see as likely to cause dehumanization and derision and calls to violence as necessarily being all that impossible to do in a reasonably if not completely fair manner.
vba616 5y ago
Would you put up with unfettered, unwanted speech by someone with a loudspeaker outside your home? Even if they were on public property?

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Reddit/Discord are not “open opinion” platforms. They are businesses. If they don't like what you're saying then they should kick you off, especially when advocating for violence and spreading fascism. You are free to start your own business and proceed to pick up where the conversation left off on your own platform, at least until the government comes knocking and asking about why you are supporting violence and sedition. That's the beauty of the free market.

echelon 5y ago
> Reddit/Discord are not “open opinion” platforms. They are businesses. Then we should go back to protocols and open hardware and stop making corporations the new public forum. Your opinions are safe today, but tomorrow they may not be.
- vba616 5y ago
  >Then we should go back to protocols and open hardware Sorry, I'm out of the loop. What happened to HTTP(S) and x86?

tigerInATurvy 5y ago

In India, there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale. Using photos and real names. And the men describe the various ways they want to use their "property" once they buy them. If you were a Muslim in India, facing fears of state-encouraged real life violence, what sort of conversation would you like to have with these people? Are you going to look at a page like that and think: "I'm so thankful for the culture being created here." What you say works great in a vacuum. But unfettered hate speech leads to bad places. Just ask the German Jews. Ask a Tutsi how they felt about the hateful radio shows before the genocide started. Imagine what it was like to be a black person in the US facing lynching and pogroms over the misinformation being widely spread. But, hey, I guess just "conversation" would have solved all of those issues. Because those screaming their hateful messages are just misunderstood people who can be easily reasoned with. And who can call it hate to begin with? After all, calling a group subhuman, and wishing for their daughters to be raped, is just a cultural development no one should interfere with.

ngc248 5y ago
>> there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale. Using photos and real names. What ... can you show some proof? this is getting into dangerous territory here .... making unsubstantiated claims. These claims are quite extraordinary and require extraordinary proof.
- throwawaywat251 5y ago
  All you have to do is copy this part of your parent comment and paste it on google/duckduckgo - 'In India, there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale' . Here's a link among the search results: https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/indian-muslim-women-put-up-on-auction-again/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/indian-muslim-women-put-up-o...
known 5y ago

yesenadam 5y ago

Ok, well, reading that I realize I "have different ideas than you" about that! Like I'm not sure that > The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion. No-one likes fetters, so that way of framing it makes it sound a no-brainer. But, to give a real world example, I guess most people think HN would be much worse without moderation of any kind. I'm not sure how one would test the truth of your statement. It doesn't sound obviously true to me, at least. It sounds like you are 100% certain. What evidence would it take for you to change your mind? I suspect belief in such "free speech absolutism" comes from abstract principle first, with real-world evidence a very distant second. Seems a similar situation to, say, pacifism. I'm very anti-violence, anti-war etc, but I'm not a pure, idealist "pacifist". To say you'd never use violence, in any situation?! that non-violence is always worse - just sounds like you haven't thought so much about it. e.g. even if thugs were dragging off your loved ones? You wouldn't lift a finger? I doubt it. That would seem like your abstract principle was trumping prudence/evidence/reason etc, producing non-sensible results, in a similar way. I don't think there are simple and good answers to any of these questions. Yours is simple but, I think, not good.

faeriechangling 5y ago

>who decides Courts, associations of people, etc. The canonical argument against your line of thinking would be Der Sturmer in Nazi Germany having enough freedom to promote the interests of the Nazi party which consequently outlawed the free press and railed up the hatred to the point of genomics (See: Popper and the paradox of tolerance). We could also look at the radio stations in Rwanda preaching Hutu Power that contributed to the genocides there, or contemporary issues like the Rohingya genocides amplified by social media. Restrictions on free speech are universal across cultures at all levels of society including within this very community and I don’t see attempts to restrict speech which the proverbial common sense person would see as likely to cause dehumanization and derision and calls to violence as necessarily being all that impossible to do in a reasonably if not completely fair manner.

vba616 5y ago

Would you put up with unfettered, unwanted speech by someone with a loudspeaker outside your home? Even if they were on public property?