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99.99% of disgusting hateful speech is just that: disgusting hateful speech. The other .01% is the only hope we have as a species of honestly addressing our si
by DanielBMarkham 14y ago
99.99% of disgusting hateful speech is just that: disgusting hateful speech.
The other .01% is the only hope we have as a species of honestly addressing our situation and problems and adapting and moving forward. The mob cannot tell the difference between these two groups. In fact, unless you are from the future looking back, nobody can. People who change society for the better through their speech are almost universally hated. At first.
This isn't a nice-to-have feature of modern life. This is critical stuff. To see Ban Ki-moon say “when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.”? A little bit of us all die.
We as a secular free society must protect people humiliating others, their beliefs and values, through speech. It's the price we paid to get to where we are -- thousands of unpopular folks yelling in the wilderness about how we are stupid, wrong, immoral and how we should improve ourselves. It's much to steep of a price, too much depends on it, for us to abandon it now.
- nickpinkston 14y agoThis a thousand times over! Though I do support their right to express such anti-free speech material, it's some weird kinda strange loop they've got going there...
- coffeedrinker 14y agoOnce blasphemous speech is outlawed, every religious group will have a new tool to use against any criticism. There are a lot of Christians in America, and for the most part they don't complain against negative speech against their religious ideas. Imagine if they could prosecute every time the name of Jesus or Christ was used as a curse word. We need free speech.
- aristidb 14y agoPublicly, that is. In a private forum like Hacker News, exclusion of disgusting hateful speech is legitimate and even necessary for the survival of the community - or people would leave because the "trolls" have taken over.
- illuminate 14y agoRight, there's a difference between tolerance and embedding it in your community's culture.
- danielweber 14y agoI agree that HN can operate how it wishes. I'm not sure that barring disgusting speech is "necessary," if only because "necessary" can be such a loaded word. reddit, for example, seems to have a principle of free speech, where there only a very specific things you are not allowed to say board-wide. So there is a fair amount of disgusting speech there. It seems to work for them -- although I have been slowly disengaging from it over the past year or two, and maybe that's part of the reason.
- aristidb 14y agoDon't some individual subreddits moderate fairly heavily? And the upvoting/downvoting also has the effect of hiding disliked speech.
- danielweber 14y agoYes, they do, and the admins support lots of freedom and experimentation for the subreddit moderation policies. (Although there are "default" subreddits that are a little weird.) The sitewide bans, to my recollection, are of only two things (besides that which is illegal): sexualized pictures of children, and doxxing.
- ericingram 14y agoI think the big difference between private and public is that the public authority uses force against the property of others to exclude speech, supposedly deemed as disgusting to a particular group, but you have to recognize as history shows that it will be abused to limit legitimate political speech. Private forums like Hacker News in no way infringe on the rights of others, by using their own property (web site) in a way they deem fit.
- winter_blue 14y ago> thousands of unpopular folks yelling in the wilderness about how we are stupid, wrong, immoral and how we should improve ourselves Were you by any chance referring to the story of John the Baptist?