Free speech (well, most freedoms, really) will die the day we decide "saving lives" is worth _any_ cost.
Heck, we already decided trashing the economy is worth "saving lives" (how many?), I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread, lower the suicide rate of those vulnerable to hate speech, etc. And why stop there? Remove 2nd amendment and you can save even more lives! Too much freedom just seems to lead to people dying, because people make bad choices that affect others.
You’re on a slippery slope and don’t consider that this is an exceptional situation. The danger of losing civil liberties comes when the exception becomes the rule.
AFAIK, no amendments have been violated since YouTube is a private entity. They can editorialize what they, how they want. It’s is their liberty to make a choice here, the same as your liberty to not support that choice.
That's a slippery slope right there, a very dangerous one. In the US, spaces where one engages in political activities have moved from public (town square in front of City Hall) to private (the mall plus parking lot). That's a problem.
The other thing is monopolies. In the past, when you were on the fringes of the spectrum you'd publish with your fringe publisher and could at least get your message out. Nowadays Youtube suppresses the neonazis. That's nice and good, as long as it's nazis, but what if they don't like what you have to say? Big publishers and government have a symbiotic relationship, and there is always a sprachregelung.
That’s not a slippery slope but your point further on is valid. The privatization of the town square carries the potential to erode our civil liberties as these new public centers aren’t held to the same standards. The question here is then how do we protect that.
Which freedoms do we give up here? Freedom of the individual or freedom of enterprise? Imo if a corporate entity decides to act like a public space, then it should be treated like one and held accountable as such. Otherwise we’ve created a simple way of bypassing some constitutional liberties.
That still however doesn’t answer the question as to where we draw the line for freedom of expression. Nazis took over once in the public sphere and they can do it again. I will argue against moral relativism here and say yes it’s ok to suppress nazis so long as we don’t turn that around and become needlessly oppressive in other ways.
A reasonable point. But I am worried about the day that those who seek more power are able to convince people that we are in a sustained exceptional situation that is not really all that exceptional. And with private entities doing their bidding to clamp down on dissenting voices, that could become even more possible.
I don't think we are there yet, but we should be wary of that possibility.
> and don’t consider that this is an exceptional situation
exceptional situations are ripe for exploitation by corporations and governments and political parties. And indeed we've seen all of these try (and succeed) in taking advantage of the situation...
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill
If anything that only proves the GP's point. During the mentioned time period the only solution was to infringe on civil liberties by imposing a strict quarantine, and yet the people of the day still decided that it was better to die free than to live oppressed.
Indeed they are liable... well, to a certain degree:
A prime example here is the DMCA — but there are also other existing laws that place restrictions on content, which Youtube (and other platforms/publishers) must adhere to.
> I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread
Well, if you read the whole thing, the 1st amendment includes the freedom to peaceably assemble, so at least to that extent it has already been removed and to cheering crowds no less.
Don't you think this is because the modern secular attitude has no real foundation to make moral choices and picks "saving lives" almost randomly, just as a plausible highest good? :)
For example, Christianity strives to save souls, not lives. That gives a very different vantage point. From this point it's absolutely clear that the right to speak candidly cannot be abolished on such a ridiculous premise as saving lives.
What's the point of supporting the current economic model if it doesn't support human welfare? What's the point of any of our abstractions if they don't serve human welfare?
I'm totally in agreement with you.
The pain of economic loss is processed in the emotional and reward centers of the brain. Empathy and compassion, on the other hand, are processed in advanced sections of the brain in the anterior prefrontal lobe. When we are encouraged to think about the stock market all the time, then the emotional centers are allowed to take over, and we forget that people are what's important.
I'm responding to this not for you, but for others. You should know that what you've just said indicates a disgusting train of thought not characterised by any good intention.
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The issue when talking about the long term affects is that, you're right, we don't have enough information. However that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands and do nothing.
The whole point of humans recording history (and science is mostly just trying things and writing them down so we can build on this knowledge later) is to see patterns and conclude things.
There's all kinds of misinformation that can spread in the cracks here because only history will tell us the real truth, but drawing on similarly infectious diseases from history will help significantly.
It's not 'ascientific' to draw from the corpus of scientific knowledge. It is ascientific to say: "This disease is completely unknown so we should wait until the human death toll has reached critical mass before making an action which could impact our wealth".
For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.[0]
In case you forgot, economy is the quantity and value of transactions in a market. Less people is lower quantity.
From the admittedly little we know about the disease, it is much more deadly than anything that's currently making the rounds. (If you're going to rebut me please control for number of people infected, because it's a common misconception that "more people die of other things" but that's because "other things" are affecting more people)
If you want to have an actual conversation, I'm happy to do that.
First of all, everything coming out in the news recently should cure you of the illusion that we have any idea about the number of people infected. Estimates of an undercounting of a factor of ten in the early days in New York. An aircraft carrier with 60% of cases being completely asymptomatic. Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
It's interesting that you use the precautionary principle only towards a virus but not towards a wide scale social experiment on an overwhelming majority of the population.
The elderly certainly contribute to the economy, but if you're pretending that it's anywhere near the impact of something like global unemployment in developed countries hitting 10%, you're being obtuse.
Your description of the economy is rudimentary and shows disregard for things like organizational capital which are vital to an effective economy.
And finally, the corpus of scientific knowledge is one thing -- attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
> Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
> attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
> For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.
First of all, even if the true mortality rate of covid-19 were 1-2% (it isn't, it's likely much lower), it wouldn't infect 100% of the population.
You can't just do [total confirmed deaths] / [total confirmed cases] to arrive at a mortality % and then multiply by the total population to get a death count. That's horribly biased and not grounded in reality. The current estimated fatality rate is biased in my opinion as it mainly selects for people already in hospitals. Research is indicating that [total confirmed cases] may be much, MUCH smaller than [total cases] [0]. People are getting it and recovering without every being tested. Some people (a lot of people?) have mild-to-no-symptoms.
Look, it's reasonable to want to prevent excessive loss of life. But it's a double edged sword. Mortality rate for people aged 20-30 is estimated at .2% (though it'll like turn out to be lower for healthy adults). Prolonged stay-at-home orders have driven up suicide rate though (not to mention the devestating damage to people's livlihoods). 2 graduating seniors recently committed suicide at the Air Force Academy presumably related to covid-19 lockdown orders, and with a class of ~800, that's already more deadly than covid-19.
You're right we shouldn't "sit on our hands", but we also shouldn't fall victim to the politician's fallacy [1]
Look at what happened to the Chinese stock market once pictures of people literally dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan leaked, and before there was a lockdown.
>Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Also you should be free to sue the content creator, maybe instead of censoring content youtube should have better "know your creator" type legislation?
If we want to convince people, we can't stop at saying "freedom", as if that makes the rest self evident. We have to explain why freedom is important. Why the cost is worth paying.
Heck, we already decided trashing the economy is worth "saving lives" (how many?), I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread, lower the suicide rate of those vulnerable to hate speech, etc. And why stop there? Remove 2nd amendment and you can save even more lives! Too much freedom just seems to lead to people dying, because people make bad choices that affect others.