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> they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance. Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you? If your expression is promoting violence,

• sejje 4y ago
  I hope you're in charge of maintaining the list of vulnerable groups. Expect death threats, whether or not they're legal.
• gonehome 4y ago
  The issue is that when we abandon the general principle it immediately becomes a question of what speech is ok to ban and this can be weaponized by rivals. People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position. The free speech principle is about setting the bar such that everyone agrees on the right for everyone else despite that meaning it will protect speech nearly everyone agrees is terrible. It draws a real distinction between speech and actual violence and it’s an important one. The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong. Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech. I think policy like cloudflare’s approach where they try to make distinctions between application level and infra level tools is generally better than capricious enforcement. Still, this issue is a real one and a result of the local max we’re trapped in because of incentives that lead to our centralized tech stack. We need better tools.
  • TimPC 4y ago
    Porn is speech according to the Supreme Court. The minute we ban child pornography we no longer support unlimited free speech. So pretending that’s the line we are still holding is a rhetorical device rather than a helpful contribution to the discussion on free speech. In practice nowhere in the world supports unlimited free speech and we all draw a line somewhere the question is where we draw the line.
    • cies 4y ago
      > we all draw a line somewhere the question is where we draw the line. A secular amen to that, brother!
    • kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Almost no one is a free speech absolutist. Instead everyone is arguing where the line should be drawn. The issue one group has is that the other thinks drawing a line over there isn't actually drawing a line at all.
    • gonehome 4y ago
      CSAM is an extremely narrowly carved out exception by the Supreme Court (for good reasons imo) and there were arguments about even that at the time. There are also some other restrictions too (mostly around targeted harassment of individuals). Few things rise to this level imo.
  • cies 4y ago
    > The issue is that when we abandon the general principle it immediately becomes a question of what speech is ok to ban and this can be weaponized by rivals. The question of what speech is ok to ban is THE question. I think we all agree there's a line somewhere. I think it's more than one line, it's a bunch of line. Private expression, public expression, public expression for monetary gain (ads), public expression without age-wall, ... > People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position. No need to imagine, it's what I currently see happening.
  • wizofaus 4y ago
    >The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong. But they're always right about when to limit physical activity (violence etc.)? It's just as conceivable that we'd be better off as a society if certain forms of physical violence by private citizens weren't illegal vs certain actions of "verbal" activity (publishing child pornography, or classified military secrets) being permissible by law.
    • gonehome 4y ago
      I'd argue this is more about defaults. Speech defaults to free and is well protected with extremely rare/narrow exceptions, violence defaults to controlled. Some forms of violence of private citizens are not illegal (self-defense), but I think we're better off in a society where violence is default illegal. Speech and violence are pretty different things.
      • wizofaus 4y ago
        But violence is just physical interaction that we define as harmful by intent - a hug might be well be painful to someone but you can't be prosecuted for it. A solid punch in the arm might cause no measurable harm at all to particular individuals but it's still considered assault. Yet if you intentionally cause permanent mental health damage to another through repeated intentionally offensive and/or disparaging speech, why should you should get a free pass?
  • salawat 4y ago
    >Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech. Damnit, companies should have no recognized "right to speech". Citizen's United is a bloody scourge. A corporation is a vehicle for risk distribution, and should have never been allowed to become anything more. Theoment we started inferring rights to legal fictions we started going stark raving mad.
    • gonehome 4y ago
      Citizen's United is a more nuanced issue when you read about the legal arguments (maybe you have, but often people don't know the details). I had seen a lot of people say negative things about it, but when I read about it I thought the way it was decided made sense.
• bandyaboot 4y ago
  Could someone explain to me why the mass downvoting of the above comment is not hypocritical? I believe it is, but would be interested in hearing opposing thoughts.
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Because Hackernews is read by humans, humans are still emotional herd animals, and the guidelines to downvoting are guidelines, not rules which can get you banned for downvoting what you disagree with. Voting has very little to do with anything in these discussions, and it has been that way for years now.
    • bandyaboot 4y ago
      Whether or not it is against the rules or can get you banned isn’t really relevant to whether it’s hypocritical in the context of this discussion. Immature undergrads shouting down speech they disagree with on campus has been going on for years too, no?
  • Levitz 4y ago
    The paradox of tolerance explains how in an open society, when one ideology dismisses rational thought and discussion and opts to, instead, silence opposition, society must be intolerant of that ideology in order to be tolerant itself, because if it allows intolerance then it will become less tolerant itself. That is the paradox. In order to be as tolerant as possible you must not be as tolerant as possible. This formulation is very often misquoted, interpreted to mean that a tolerant society must repress bigoted beliefs. That leads to no paradox at all, the term "tolerance" is used with different meanings in order to misconstrue a formulation. In doing so, people misquoting are being what the first, correct formulation warns us about. It is a quite ironic phenomenon, people use an argument of authority that actually states the complete opposite of what they want. I don't think it is hypocritical to support the correct formulation and, thus, silence people positing the incorrect one. Not that I downvoted him, not that I can, not that I would, I believe these matters to be better left out in the open, but I don't think it's hypocritical.
• LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  Why would you say that you support freedom of speech?
• Levitz 4y ago
  >Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you? Well for starters you are quoting him wrong and by the formulations that you, yourself are using, you, yourself, ought to be silenced through violence. When Popper talks about tolerance he is talking about tolerance of ideas not tolerance as in yay oppressed groups, it's not a paradox unless you use that meaning. Even the Wikipedia article points to this. As long as you can talk about things you ought to use that, it is when a group tries to forcefully silence other that that group, specifically, has to be repressed through violence, because otherwise they are able to impose their intolerance of ideas upon the system and will eventually overtake it.
• afpx 4y ago
  The Popper quote, I’m guessing: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” As long as there are more tolerant than intolerant, then everything’s ok, right? Why does a society create intolerance? maybe we should remedy that.
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Society creates intolerance out of a few simple social mechanisms: typification, legitimation, institutionalization, and reification. Let me explain. Typification is the psychological process of simplifying human behavior into causal chains. It is an expression of the desire to deacribe, compress, and explain human actions without an infinite number of edge cases and suffers from the bias variance tradeoff as it is an inherently predictive activity. Legitimation turns the descriptive rules of typified behavior into normative rules of how people ought to behave eg: that person didn't meet my expectations, therefore their behavior is wrong. Instutionalization codifies these normative behavioral rules into social systems eg: justice, educational, scientific, medical, &c. And finally reification externalizes the process entirely and frames it instead as a natural product of facts and reality (either secularly or religiously, or a combination of both). The end result is a subjective internalization of such an externalized reality used to justify legitimation at the individual and/or institutional levels. Intolerance arises as a reaction to the breaking of such behavioral norms in that either specific behaviors or their embodiment in groups of people are incompatible with the internalized norms. Rather than adjust ones norms, the behaviors or people embodying the violated norms are sought to be extinguished. At this point you should have a working model of the process and can begin to imagine what it would look like to throw a spanner into the works. Note: I've purposely skipped over essentialism and some other topics that could be useful in understanding the process well enough to disrupt it, but this comment is already getting too long.
• chroma 4y ago
  Three problems with that: 1. Every time you restrict what people are allowed to say or write, you are in effect restricting what people are allowed to hear or read. I read and listen to many things I disagree with. Sometimes I even find the content abhorrent. But I don’t want the government saying what I can and can’t read. 2. Who decides? Any government body with such powers is ripe for abuse. And do you expect such officials to be unbiased in their application of the law? My bet is that each administration would use it as a cudgel against their political opponents. 3. What about religious texts like the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah? All of them contain commandments to do violence to women, children, and animals. All of them command the reader to kill homosexuals. Hell, all of them are pro-slavery. By any sane reading of your proposed law, they’d be banned. And if you carve out an exception for them, you realize that such restrictions are impossible to apply objectively. The original proponents of free speech weren’t dogmatic, they were pragmatic. They simply thought the world would be better off if government agents couldn’t arbitrarily restrict what people were allowed to read.
  • rnk 4y ago
    If someone is advocating for people to kill you, if they are saying swat them, say they are at this location send attackers over there - in the hope they get hurt... That's just not acceptable. That's what's been happening with that group that cloudflare blocked. Cloudflare said they felt incredibly conflicted, they understood the danger. Is there any advocation of violence that you think should be blocked? F that guy, lets roll over there and kill is just fine? I think people who believe there is nothing that justifies that aren't someone who is vulnerable.
    • chroma 4y ago
      That's not what was on kiwifarms. I've read that odious forum for years and their whole shtick is, "Look but don't touch." They do gather identifying information, and they do archive what people have said and done, but the moderators heavily discourage users from interacting with any of the "lolcows". Doing so is one of the few things that will get you banned from the forum. If you want to attack a site that does encourage physically threatening people, then you'll want to go after places like doxbin. That said, I disagree with Cloudflare's decision (especially since they still provide services for godhatesfags.com and host copies of ISIS's English propaganda magazine), but I don't think there should be a law forcing them to provide services to kiwifarms. But to get at your point about legality: the definition of a true threat is quite narrow. In Watts v United States[1], a draft protestor said, "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." The Supreme Court deemed that threat to be legal under the first amendment. Posting someone's address (which is already public info in most tax records) is usually unethical and immoral, but it's not a crime and I'm fine with that. There are many immoral acts which are not criminal, such as cheating on one's spouse or lying about serving in the military. We can use other methods to discourage such behavior (such as shunning). Passing a law against something means that men with guns will come to people's homes and put them in cages. That's one hell of an escalation, and I'm not willing to endorse that unless the perpetrator is extremely dangerous. 1. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/707/watts-v-united-states https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/707/watts-v-uni...
• pstuart 4y ago
  I'm kind of with you, specifically on the intolerance of intolerance. But actually making it illegal is worrisome -- because that goes both ways (cue "religious freedom"). The best compromise today seems to be deplatforming, which in a sense is nothing new as we've long had the saying "power of the press belongs to those that own it". The rabid hate speech of the right has done serious damage to the fabric of this country, and it is couched in such a way that making it illegal would be dangerous AF. It bothers me to no end that free speech absolutists that refuse to recognize that some speech should not be amplified.
  • salawat 4y ago
    >power of the press belongs to those that own it The problem is, you're advocating for essentially the weaponization of the middle box. Networking works, because everyone in the middle cooperates to get messages from A to B. No one is wealthy enough to individually backbone their own network connection beyond much more than a local municipality. To hell with that in short. The General Purpose computer combined with desktop publishing and internetworking puts the power of the press in everyone's hands. The problem is, some groups don't agree with other group's use of it, and want to pressure everyone else to cut off unpopular group's access to the technologically facilitated medium. These people are nothing short than the most brazen tyrants of our age, and should be resisted at every turn. We need nothing new to deal with horrible people than for our currently equipped LE edifice to do their damned jobs. We have process. It should be followed. This short circuiting through mob pressure to deplatform is nothing more than pulling the plug on the fundaments of the civilization that bore us to the point we're at.
    • pstuart 4y ago
      What exactly do you think I'm advocating for? I'm certainly curious what rules you expect LE to enforce and to whom they would be applied.
• lamp987 4y ago
  >Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you? The wrong part is that you didnt read the Popper's book because that million-times repeated internet argument is a complete and total misunderstanding of his point, based on a small part cut out of the bigger context.
• wyager 4y ago
  > What's wrong with that according to you? Popper is a pseud who is popular with other pseuds.