I'm sure everybody read the article before commenting, but just to summarize: Voltaire probably never specifically gave this quote, it probably comes from a historian writing about him. Likely due some ambiguous quotation marks, people took it as a direct quote and ran with it.
Why is it sad? It's a feature, not a bug - most of the articles aren't worth the time spent reading them, but they work as good discussion prompts. Comment section is where the value is.
I tend to check the comments first, in case the article is clickbait or a duplicate post. Usually, if the commentary is interesting, I’ll go read the article, then come back.
I really hate it that so many people these feel the need to immediately push back when somebody says something they don't agree with. I remember years ago you could have a discussion and express your opinion and it was fine. Now with a lot of people it's better to say nothing.
> I remember years ago you could have a discussion and express your opinion and it was fine.
I’m always curious what time period people are referring to when they say something like this. Because it seems to me that there have always been things that you would have been shunned for saying. The only difference is that collection of things changes over time and people are uncomfortable when those changes outpace their own opinions. That has been happening throughout recorded human history, every generation thinks the generation or two after them are destroying the moral fabric of society. It wasn’t true when the ancient Greeks complained about it and it probably isn’t true today.
Sorry, that is where I duck out of the discussion. You just said it would be trivial to give me an actual counterexample and yet you apparently aren't willing to put that trivial effort into actually finding one. You clearly don't want to put any effort into this conversation so I won't either.
A dictatorial regime using violence to force society into a certain mold isn't at all the same as one generation organically having different values than a previous one.
Show me a generation that has been free of force of violence. This is shaping out to be another classic HN case where an example is demanded and then methodically shut down because it doesn't reach someone's ideal version of humanity. The awesome thing is he could have given literally any example, and the force of violence influence on value bit still would have been true.
A generation is not a dictatorial regime, and "organic" is operative. There is a world of difference between values changing over time organically and a small group of dictatorial leaders deciding they are going to beat society into submission.
I would ask you respond to me and the things I said and not to HN as a whole (or to what people said in this particular discussion), whatever other conversations you think this relates to, I don't think I was there and I don't think I'm responsible for them. By and large I stand by the things I've said here (there are things I'd take back if I could, but I digress), but I certainly won't be held responsible for things other people have said and that I'm not even aware of. I'm not as unreasonable as you're implying, this example was flawed.
You could turn this criticism around on your comment, "this is a classic HN whatever, where any criticism is dismissed for no reason. The crazy thing is I could've criticized this for any reason, or cited any amount of evidence, and it still wouldn't have been enough."
This is a public forum, your demand that I not include generalized related efforts of others is entirely unreasonable and since I don't deem the request 'organic' I will not consider it valid. I'm sorry you moved the goalposts to an impossible standard; of course no doubt you can use any amount of semantics to retroactively say organic was whatever weasels the strongest argument at the moment. Just keep in mind 'organic' was your introduced construct so you're arguing against your own words and not even something said by the person you replied to.
No goalposts were moved, the previous commenter did not say "organic" but it matches their intended meaning [1].
HN being a public forum means our discussion is visible to anyone and anyone can join. It doesn't mean that I represent anyone's views except my own, or that I should answer for trends you perceive in HN's comments.
Damn I thought you were answering for the view of my cat. Appreciate the explanation that your view is your own view.
>"organic" but it matches their intended meaning.
Yeah the fact they used cultural revolution which you say is not organic pretty much shatters the notion they were presenting things the way you say. The fact you thought they meant whatever dubious notion of 'organic' you have doesn't mean that they represent anyone's views except they own, or that they should answer for your perception of implied organic-ness.
This is so ridiculously over-the-top - and so incredibly obviously not the category of change that is being discussed here - that I have trouble believing you really mean it. Like, come on dude.
The claim was that morality only ever improves with younger generations, that things only ever get better.
It's a stupid claim and I pointed out an obvious counter example.
Many people who lived in China during and after the Cultural Revolution, and in the former Soviet Union, say the way that many people talk in universities today are starting to sound like the people in power in the places they came from.
Yes - it's so stupid, in fact, that this extreme version that you are interpreting it as is obviously not what we're talking about here. It really feels like either a) HN-sterotypical-pedantic-literalism; or b) a bunch of bad-faith strawmanning. Neither are helpful.
This is part of the reason why increasing federalization and consolidation of governments of the world worries me. A big part of progress in society is a crapshoot and arguably a lot of what we do is inadvertently harmful to society. Allowing experimentation in relatively small segments of the population compartmentalizes risk while allowing everyone else to copy it if they see it works.
How much copying is actually happening? I live in the US, and our healthcare system is objectively terrible. There are numerous examples of systems in other countries that provide better care for more people for less, but we refuse to adopt any of them.
First past the post voting is also obviously terrible, and many better ways are available and have had successful implementation, but nothing changes here.
Theoretically what you're saying makes sense, but it doesn't seem to match reality. Instead we just get a lot of tribalism, war, and death.
Perhaps it is more of a question on scalability. It is often claimed that Taiwan has a universal healthcare system in place (sustainability is often challenged) in which cannot be replicated in the US due to demographic and geographic factors let alone political ones.
Experimenting with health care systems at the state level would be a perfect example where more experimentation at scales smaller than the national level would be very helpful.
Chesterton's fence always rearing up its ugly head.
Hard to find a reform the next generation wants that hasn't been written or conceived by our ancestors, yet so many people are naïve to the point they think they're part of something novel.
I know that people always complained about the younger generation. That's not what I meant.
What I meant was that these days a lot of people feel the need to immediately push back on someone's opinion by framing it as ethically bad. They do this while offering no opinion themselves. For example I got in trouble because I questioned the way corporations are implementing diversity initiatives. I am completely on board with the intent but I think it's not done in an effective manner but more like a PR stunt. It's possible that I am wrong but I don't think I deserve to be called a racist by people who are not offering any thought of their own on the issue.
I think this has to do with the the way the US parties with the help of social media have managed to split the populace into two camps that live in separate realities where even listening to somebody who is on the "other" side is viewed as treason.
> What I meant was that these days a lot of people feel the need to immediately push back on someone's opinion by framing it as ethically bad.
Because this is almost always true. For example, there was somebody here, who said the same thing, that they got in trouble because they asked whether transwomen can have periods. They knew the answer. They just tried to argue about something stupid, and they used this problematic wording for a specific reason: they wanted to have a pointless debate. They even knew that if they would asked the same thing with “period symptoms”, there wouldn’t be any debate. They didn’t want to have a conclusion.
Btw, one of my close friends said the same thing about corporations. He has zero ground to say such thing, he can’t even argue for his statement. It’s just his feeling.
I don't think so. You may think you are especially enlightened with your views and therefore people with a different view just deserve a rhetorical beating.
A. You are probably not as right as you think you are
B. People come from different backgrounds and life experiences may come to different conclusions
C. Aggressive takedowns may make you feel good but achieve nothing in solving issues. They just produce pushback. A little bit of effort in understanding others can go pretty far.
We could all keep going back and forth in the comments with "This is almost always true" and "I don't think so", but that isn't going to get us anywhere. If you don't think this is true, can you give one example of it not being true? When was this hypothetical period in which anyone could express their opinions without the threat of them being labeled "ethically bad"?
There is a problem with your question. It’s definitely happened. I don’t know any example, because whenever I questioned such statements, it was always just to hide some racist, sexist, etc opinion. But still, I’m pretty sure, that there are cases. The problem is I can’t imagine that it’s more than 1% at this point. I questioned such statements too many times, and only a proper study can change my mind.
"When was this hypothetical period in which anyone could express their opinions without the threat of them being labeled "ethically bad"?"
I remember having decent discussions with people in the 2000s and being able to agree or disagree. It wasn't perfect by any means but I have noticed that in the last ten years with a lot of people it got increasingly more difficult to talk about an issue and developing thoughts while talking. It feels like you are either all in with "their" side or you get lumped in with the "other" side. Nuance not allowed.
Hmm, coincidence, you fondly remember with rose-tinted glasses a period which happened ~20 years ago. People always do.
To give you an US-centric example: arguing against discrimination of Muslim Americans during the early 2000s got you the same kind of anti-establishment pushback you can get for, say, criticising gay marriage today.
Yeah, people absolutely were shunned for unpopular opinions in the 2000s. 9/11 and the War on Terror caused a real coalescing of American society that was incredibly difficult to push back against. For example, the Patriot Act originally passed the Senate 98 to 1. Many people had their careers irreparably harmed by opposing the invasion of Iraq with the Dixie Chicks being the first to jump to mind. And regarding your point about the treatment of Muslims, does anyone remember the "Ground Zero Mosque"? This type of behavior is nothing new and pretending otherwise is certainly remembering the past with rose-tinted glasses.
With exactly the same people? Because every space on the internet which I regularly visit becomes worse because the influx of new people. My country’s subreddit was awesome when we were like 10000. Then it become famous at home, and everything went south.
Of course, it can happen also with the exact same person. For example, I wouldn’t have the same debates as 10 years ago. And also, when somebody say something which I disagree, I wouldn’t debate it, I would ask for a source, or just ignore it. Most of the time, I know immediately the source. But the only reason for this is age, and that in the past 20 years, I’ve already debated, and read a lot about basically every single topic which is politically important, and will be important in the next ~50 years.
I agree with original statement. But we can get there with a little thinking:
It is a fact people's view's are becoming more polarized. Some google searches will get you there. This is due to people now more than ever always having access to others who agree with their views, and ignore people who don't. This is the age of tinder swiping and (un)following (un)subsribing. People have become more replaceable. Agree with this person? This forum? Be there. Disagree? Leave. Like this person? Keep them. Dislike? Ghost them. We meet more people now than we ever meet in humanity's history. The need to learn how to deal with different views is going away, when you can always hide from them and go for places that have supporting views. The need for respectful disagreement is getting lower.
In the past there wasn't as much this choice. In the extreme, nomadic times, you had the same people all your life. Now we are at the other extreme. I'm not surprised that people's relationships are getting more and more superficial, and more temporary. There's always a "us" vs "them" to be had somewhere. With so many people, what used to be sporadic outliers, are now in massive numbers. Even if they still belong to the extremes of the natural distribution.
As we know, these people also tend to be more vocal, "the vocal minority" as it is usually referred, very opinionated, who defend their views to the end.
Then you could also add the fact the emotional trauma is spreading, although this one will make many people scratch their heads. Emotional trauma increases what we refer in psychology as negative affectivity "(...)a broad personality trait that refers to the stable tendency to experience negative emotion". Disagreeableness being one of the most typical ways in which this manifests itself.
Add to this the easyness of being anonymous, being rude without consequences and you get a perfect recipe for at any point you have a conversation online, getting obnoxious, opinionated, rude and disagreeable replies. The step from online conversation to IRL isn't that much of a step at this point, and it still makes sense the same is happening.
This is not a deduction, but a inference. But it fits everything i've just said: it's becoming more difficult to have an opinion, and not be attacked, shamed, mocked or invalidated by it.
It's becoming increasingly rare to hear "I see your point. What I in my view makes more sense is..." and instead "You're wrong, you have no clue what you're talking about and you should go hide yourself."
This can be explained also with age. When somebody says something outrageous, I know the source immediately. For a while, I asked for a source. After the 100x time you get a very clear view about the source, and you just leave. This happened only because I’ve kept asking for a source for more than 10 years.
For example, if Canada, and “personal nouns” are in the same sentence, you know the source. You debated that at least a handful of times. You don’t want to do that again. It’s pointless. But still, I hear that fake news from time to time from my friends. Even after, I clearly proved them that it’s fake news. It’s just pointless.
The problem is that the well is poisoned. There are so many people abusing your caveats above that using them can lead to harm. This is well examined in Thank You for Smoking: the main character weaponizes “just stating his opinion” and different worldviews to influence public opinion. Trust is therefore eroded so that anyone who may actually have a good counter position is indistinguishable from bad actors.
I don’t want to say that justifies piling bad on bad. But that once the well is poisoned, we all die.
And ignoring “weaponisation”, just makes anybody part of the weaponisation. One very obvious example is the war in Ukraine, and protests for “peace” in western countries, which is a very obvious Russian propaganda tool.
> What I meant was that these days a lot of people feel the need to immediately push back on someone's opinion by framing it as ethically bad.
I think the problem with statements like this is that there are some things they could refer to that are very, very obviously (at least from where I sit) actually ethically bad, but were considered by many to be acceptable things to say few generations ago. Things like sexist and racist jokes, comments about where women and "colored" people belong, blatant homophobia and transphobia—y'know, all the widely-normalized bigotry that was a part of the rich white male landscape in the postwar years, à la Mad Men, remained so to some extent at least through the late '90s, and continues to be aggressively defended by some to this day.
It is true (I might even call it a truism) that some people go too far and overreact, but I think it's important to step back and think for a minute about just how short a time it's been since these things were considered widely acceptable. Then think about how that affected the people still around today who had to sit through that. Then remember that, as I said, there are still many people today who are actively advocating for a return to that blatant bigotry.
This is why you get people who overreact even to genuinely-benign questioning of such policies: because it's very hard, in many cases, to tell the difference between someone who's just asking questions, and someone who's "just asking questions"[0].
I think the problem with statements like this is that there are some things they could refer to that are very, very obviously (at least from where I sit) actually ethically bad, but were considered by many to be acceptable things to say few generations ago. Things like sexist and racist jokes, comments about where men and "White" people belong, blatant heterophobia and cisphobia—y'know, all the widely-normalized bigotry that is a part of the rich white they/them landscape in the postwar years, à la CURRENTYEAR, remained so to some extent at least from the early 2000s, and continues to be aggressively defended by the majority of the media, academia, etc. to this day.
It is true (I might even call it a truism) that some people go too far and overreact, but I think it's important to step back and think for a minute about just how short a time it's been since these things were considered widely acceptable. Then think about how that affected the people still around today who had to sit through that. Then remember that, as I said, there are still many people today who are actively advocating for a return to that blatant bigotry.
This is why you get people who overreact even to genuinely-benign questioning of such policies: because it's very hard, in many cases, to tell the difference between someone who's just asking questions, and someone who's "just asking questions"[0].
Both sides can play this nonsense game. Not every perceived slight is bigotry or -ism. Stating the fact that men cannot get pregnant isn't transphobic. Stating the fact that Black people per capita are more likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of violence isn't racist. The immediate push back to even broaching these subjects, facts, and findings is what got us here. We're not even capable of discussing anything because any deviation from the party line is immediately perceived as the worst of the "opposition". If you state you're pro-free speech, you're a fascist neo-Nazi. If you're pro-trans children you're a pedo child groomer. Nuance and the capability to talk across the aisle has sadly disappeared, and everyone just gaslights and projects about the other side being sexist, racist, anti-White, Europhobic, Islamophopic, antisemitic, etc.
Explain. You "got in trouble", what kind of trouble exactly?
Did someone disagree with you? Because that's natural. And did someone call you "racist"? Well if you posted your opinion publicly and 10,000 people saw it, it's almost certain at least one will comment that. Doesn't mean it's the majority opinion at all.
The answer to that question depend on what kind of quantity and quality that the shunning had on a person. At the extreme end we have massive discrimination of whole demographic because something a single person said or did, and at the other end we have zero reaction.
We can look at notable events in history, like say Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Monty Python films. Those were censored in some countries and got shunned by Catholics, but they did not get fired, their homes did not get turned on fire, the shows did still air on TV and movie studies in the UK, they continued to get employment later in life and in general was not that shunned by society at large. How they treated Catholics was not compared to the Nazi. UK flags was not burned nor did anyone break into UK embassies.
So that is one level of free speech we can compare with. Catholics may disapprove of what Monty Python said and did, but as a society we should defend the level of free speech that Monty Python performed. We should avoid having consequences of Monty Python-level of free speech be worse than what Monty Python received back in 1979.
Yeah I agree. My parents were born in the 40's and 50's, and they always taught me not to discuss politics publicly. It was just the smarter thing to do that nobody knew your alignment.
It seems now online, the biggest discussions are about politics.
To put the above in perspective, the civil rights march was on August 28, 1963. Not talking about politics was a good strategy for white men, because the political environment favored them so much. Not talking about politics was not an option for people who still had to fight for equal rights.
in the time, talking politics just give someone a reason to kill your whole family. we had go into a new, better epoch. gen-Z have more freedom than older people can imagined!
Policy, being most difficult and slowest to change, has a lot of intertia, so sticking it exactly in the center of mass / center of inertia makes intuitive sense. And since the shape is symmetrical, that place is also the geometrical center :).
this is true, if and only if public sentiment is an indicator of the direction of policy. There have been a number of studies that suggest this is not true [1]
Depends on who you are. I put up with a lot of shit for being who I am in the early internet era that is far more acceptable today. Would not be willing to go back in time for anything.
>That has been happening throughout recorded human history, every generation thinks the generation or two after them are destroying the moral fabric of society. It wasn’t true when the ancient Greeks complained about it and it probably isn’t true today.
The Greeks and Romans suffered serious civilizational decay around the times that people were saying such things.
Worth remembering that the "Dark Ages" were named that by those with a heavy Roman bias and otherwise weren't particularly dark, having experienced innovations like standardized handwriting (punctuation and consistent lettering and casing and such), art, science, math, agriculture, and laid the groundwork for the later Renaissance.
That gives us 1 generation being right and we're roughly 100 generations removed from Socrates. I'm not sure that I would hang my hat on a 1% accuracy rate just yet.
I would argue that in the social media space, trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon. At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today.
> trends in "cancel culture" and just generally shaming people for saying something not supported by whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour are a relatively recent phenomenon
What happened to bands/athletes who spoke out against American wars in the past? What happened to atheists for the last few decades/centuries? Or women who were accused of being witches? What happened to people who thought that women could participate in professional life? How about people who thought that it was ok to be gay or love someone outside of your race? How about people who thought that native peoples we not savages or subhuman?
To think this is a anything new or has anything to do with "wokeness" (whatever the hell that means) is to take an extremely short-sighted view of the world.
> At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today.
I'd argue the exact opposite. 10 years ago there were a lot less people online. And those who were online engaged in more niche and closed off platforms/forums. It's only been in the last 10 years that general discussions with huge numbers of people from all around the world on any and every topic have been combined into a singular feeds on a small number of platforms.
Perhaps true in your experience but not true in general. In the 90s and 2000s for example people would talk about how they couldn't make certain jokes/comments they would like to make because of "Political correctness gone mad"[1]. That wasn't even new then, for example Allan Bloom's bestselling book "The Closing of the American Mind" from 1987[2] where he claims that cultural relativism and political correctness in academia stifles open debate about ideas. Sounds like something you could literally just republish today as the conversation hasn't really changed much.
[1] Here's an article from 2016 chronicling the rise of the phrase over 25 years before that. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-co... . If you search for that phrase you will find a treasure trove of exactly the same sorts of outrage we see today, only now the phrase "political correctness" is replaced with "cancel culture" or "wokeness".
>whatever is the current "woke" / "social justice" viewpoint du jour
The verbiage in this bit is exactly what I was talking about. Your objection was not simply that there are forbidden topics, you are specifically complaining about what topics are forbidden.
And to be clear, the "cancelling" of people existed before either social media or the internet. Yes, the internet and social media can act as a multiplier on this behavior, like they do for all sorts of other human behavior, but they didn't create it.
I suspect that people used to just have smaller, more homogeneous social groups. So saying something terrible wasn’t an issue because all of one’s associates either engaged in the same behavior or considered it too risky to speak up.
As for social justice being a recent phenomenon, it isn’t. It being on the web is, but the web is still relatively young and it finally became intertwined with our offline selves that your online behavior is just your behavior. And social consequences for that behavior can be executed online.
Yes, but now it's also really trendy to complain about woke social justice cancel culture while spewing fascist tropes.
When did the internet become garbage? I'd say Facebook and Gamergate, but news groups were really cool until they got trashed by trolls, or was it when you needed to set up a special eggdrop to protect your irc, and that was a long time ago.
I don't think it's recent, it's just done a complete 180. You could absolutely be cancelled for holding the wrong opinion in the 80's when I was a teenager, but the "wrong opinions" were anti-conservative opinions back then.
1968 - Gold and Bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest against poverty, for black pride, and in solidarity with workers. Received death threats and were called "a couple of black-skinned storm troopers."
2016 - Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem and never played another game after the end of the season.
It's easy for CIS-het white men to feel threatened by their loss of supremacy in American society. And to take it out on everyone outside their group.
That's not really at issue. There are a lot of factors involved there -- if he had QB1 salary demands, but didn't have QB1 talent, then it's hard to say that he was better than QBs he wanted to start ahead of.
I'm happy to concede that he was starting caliber, because I think he was. I don't think you can realistically consider a player who was 1 for 11 in his last season a top QB, but he was definitely ahead of guys like Deshone Kizer, Brett Hundley, CJ Beathard. Looking at the list of QBs who started in 2017, I'd tentatively (and very subjectively) rank him ~21st -- but without knowing his salary demands, it's hard to say that what he wanted was commensurate with his ability to win games. The best player I'd put him clearly ahead of was making $4-4.5 million that year. He wanted $9-10 million and a chance to start. It was reported that he wanted $20 million to play in the AAFL. Beyond that, he had a chance to play in Baltimore, which I was excited for, before his girlfriend called the team's owner a slavemaster and the most iconic player associated with the city, a slave.
So, while we can debate the merits of whether or not he deserves to play football, he's turned down offers of $4-5 million to play in the CFL, had exorbitant salary demands to the AAFL, and ducked out of an opportunity to play in the offense best suited to his talents. Other players who knelt at the same time and in support of him still had careers well after Kaepernick.
Summing up, "Colin knelt and never played another game of football" misses not only a lot of context, but ignores the fact that he actually did play after kneeling, as have lots of other players.
I think if it's anything, it's McCarthyism for a new generation.
We've done worse, and with more rigor than today's cancel culture, but for however much I might find it distasteful, the stigma borne of cancel culture at least doesn't have the full weight of the law behind it.
I'd say it's our monkey genes at work. When Chimps meet a male that is not their brother, they get theirs and kill him. Killing another community completely has been observed in the seventies.
I think that's definitely a part of it. Our monkey brains process that there is danger, and (naively) find ways to amliorate it in peer groups. We associate in-groups with safety and out-groups with dangers, and both infinitely large and infinitesimally small in (or out) groups would require the brain to do the much bigger work of individual threat analysis.
> I remember years ago you could have a discussion and express your opinion and it was fine.
I also remember when racism, xenophobia, slandering women, and generally ignorant talk was accepted and chuckled at. Thankfully, women are now expected to express opinions at dinner parties and minorities aren't run out of town for having the audacity to exist in the same neighborhood.
Hacker News is a discussion forum. Not only that, but it's one where the culture is defined by a contrarian-yet-intellectual spirit. It's the last place anyone should come to share opinions without expecting a response, likely a critical one.
> It's the last place anyone should come to share opinions without expecting a response, likely a critical one.
Sure, but this topic is "special" in the sense that the response GP is complaining about is about the most uncritical, non-contrarian, obvious possible one. If you view conversations as a multiplayer gradient descent, then making an accusation - even an implied and/or non-specific - of racism, sexism, bigotry and associated "sins", is like making a huge sinkhole on the optimization surface: a very deep local minimum, nearly impossible to walk out of.
It's so easy for anyone to do this, and the effect is both immediate and so obvious, that when someone does that, it's hard not to see it as a deliberate attempt at shutting down the conversation. It's equivalent of someone pulling a gun in the middle of what the other person thought was friendly sparring.
So free speech to express any opinion but not free speech to respond to opinions expressed?
99% of the time that someone decries the "death of free speech", it boils down to them not wanting to hear criticism for expressing ignorant or hateful ideas.
Just because you can say something doesn't mean you should. And if you do say something that is stupid or is harmful to others, you should expect push back. If you have no defense for that push back, it's a clear sign that you should either re-evaluate your opinion or express yourself in a more thoughtful manner.
This is a lesson that most people learn in grade school. But one of the big issues today is that a lot of people believe that others not accepting their opinion is a form of persecution. They are so self-centered that criticism of what they say is taken as an insult to them personally. Criticism of these people lead to no moments of self-reflection and no moments of personal growth.
The big question for me is how do we move past this moment without a large number of people realizing that they are acting like spoiled children. Speech is as free as it's ever been. What's different is an entitlement behind expressing opinions that destroys any meaningful discussion.
> it boils down to them not wanting to hear criticism for expressing ignorant or hateful ideas.
Or, in actuality, it mostly means they’re tired of people stripping all of the nuance away from their ideas, casting them in the most extreme light, and then deriding them as hateful and bigoted without any critical thought.
I understand the person you originally were responding to, because I feel much the same way. I used to be able to engage in conversations with random people about the world, and while this still happens occasionally, most people either self-censor or blatantly straw man you to score points.
The types of deeply nuanced, sometimes multiple day/week long conversations and debates I used to see on IRC in my youth have ceased to exist online, and can really only be had in person now with close friends who will not immediately act in bad faith.
This sounds more like the medium/channels that you use for discussion have changed. The type of people who had internet and knew how to use something like IRC 20-30 years ago is a pretty distinct sub-group of people vs the general population. And the atmosphere in specific chat rooms is very different than current large social media platforms.
I would also chalk a lot of it up to you changing over the last few decades. All of us have a habit of being nostalgic for things past. But a lot of that nostalgia isn't because things were better, it was because we were in better health, were not as jaded to the world, and monotony of life had not yet kicked in. When you were growing up you also didn't have to take full responsibility for what you said and a lot of times didn't understand the implications of what you were saying.
Providing an existential proof that a claim is not universally true is not “stripping the nuance off”, it’s called rational argumentation.
Lol wtf is up with people these days thinking that they have zero responsibility for the precision or correctness of the words that they use in discourse to ensure that they are saying exactly what they mean? Grow up and stop making excuses for your lack of self-awareness.
Indeed. My wife, whom i consider relatively open-minded in today's society, is somewhat offput by the fact that I engage with and consider 'conservatives' friends. There is a pervasive and insidious association with disagreement with 'evil' or 'wrong' in society today. People who espouse themselves as tolerant, are not. Any opposition to a held belief is considered 'wrong', inherently.
This attitude is destroying society. There is no place for nuance in general discourse anymore. It bothers me greatly. I have no solution, only an ability to despair.
I wouldn't consider your wife that open minded if she is off put by you engaging with "conservative" friends. There is nothing off putting about that.
But if your "conservative" friends happen to drop openly misogynist, racist, and/or xenophobic things inappropriately into casual conversation - she might be justified in feeling a little off put since she is probably worried that you also hold similar hurtful views but are more careful with what you say.
> But if your "conservative" friends happen to drop openly misogynist, racist, and/or xenophobic things inappropriately into casual conversation
The problem is that today, unlike a decade or two earlier, the conversation on-line (and increasingly off-line) is dominated by people who will happily choose to call anything they feel like as "misogynist, racist, and/or xenophobic", using it to invalidate what others have said wholesale (and in some contexts, also make an implied threat).
You are, I assume unintentionally, doing that too, this very moment: the problem with calling something "misogynist", "racist" or "bigoted" is that it's an asymmetric superweapon - once you say, or even vaguely suggest, that I'm saying something racist, it's impossible for me to argue my way out: any attempt of proving it's not is considered an admission of guilt. "Kafkatrap", I believe, used to be a term for this.
There are severe consequences to being seen as a misogynist or a racist or a bigot. There are no consequences whatsoever for accusing someone of being a misogynist or a racist or a bigot, for any reason whatsoever, including just for shits and giggles. No third party wants to challenge the accusation either, because it carries a risk of becoming seen as guilty by association.
> she might be justified in feeling a little off put since she is probably worried that you also hold similar hurtful views but are more careful with what you say
And herein lies another problem: fear of people secretly committing wrongthink. There is no way one can prove whether or not a person is nice, or is a wrongthinking racist bigot who's just being careful with what they say. By finding reasons to assume the latter, one is not only making their own life worse, but also that other person's, and their combined social circle.
He said his wife felt off put by him engaging with them. I said that was wrong, but also put forward a hypothetical situation where her feelings would be justified. That is not the same at all as saying "they are misogynist, racist, and/or xenophobic".
> There are no consequences whatsoever for accusing someone of being a misogynist or a racist or a bigot, for any reason whatsoever, including just for shits and giggles.
That's just how accusations work. I can just as easily say: "There are no consequences whatsoever for accusing someone of being woke, for any reason whatsoever, including just for shits and giggles."
> And herein lies another problem: fear of people secretly committing wrongthink.
Well I would be concerned if my partner had misogynist, racist, and/or xenophobic thoughts. Because those are not the thoughts of a kind, secure, and empathetic person (the type of person who I wish to share my life with). But you may have different morals where having misogynist, racist, and/or xenophobic thoughts is not an issue.
Really, I think it's just a consequence of living so long in what I consider an echo chamber. It's jarring to move back out of a huge, exceedingly left/liberal metro area into a much more politically mixed area.
And yeah, as an immigrant, certain conservatives have absolutely espoused views that are... antagonistic towards her family, even though they didn't know it at the time. You're basically on the money with your last sentence. It's really more of an apprehension that my political views are shifting (or I hid them) as a result of hanging out with those who hold contrary views.
1) Other ideologies are not immune to having people with such views, so I'm not sure why to single out conservatives for those kind of worries.
2) A truly open mind might be open to 'racist' viewpoints, such as blacks are more likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia and this trait is inferior to whites in regions without mosquitoes. That's just a straight up racist viewpoint (by the dictionary definition) coupled with the assertion whites legit have a characteristic here that is racially superior in places without malaria. I wonder how many other biological traits like this, of any 'race' (to the extent such a concept exists), we've thrown aside because scientists are just too scared to investigate it.
I only "singled out" conservatives because I was replying to a comment that specifically mentioned conservatives. I didn't think it would be relevant or useful to generalize or list the stereotypical flaws of every political belief system.
I'm really struggling to follow what you're trying to say in your second point. Honestly, if I'm hanging out with a friend of my wife and she starts going into "racially superior" traits of whites vs blacks - I'm going to either look to change the conversation or excuse myself to grab a beer because that's a strangely detailed and long example to get into.
That's certainly your choice to bow out. My wife is a different race from me, one that has a significantly different composition and cultural background than mine. We spend a lot of time comparing our physical and cultural differences and how they are superior in different situations, and I feel like I learned a lot from it. It's unfortunate others aren't able to appreciate diversity in this way.
I'm pretty sure the person you replied to said nothing about their friends being misogynist/racist/xenophobic. The only thing we know is they were conservative, so your statement "I only singled out..." is a complete sidestep from your process conservative -> "If your conservative friends happen to drop misogynistic/racist/xenophobic ..."
When literally the only thing we know is the person's political ideology and you go straight to talking about if they were saying racist stuff we all know what the implication is, and we all know it was said in a weird way to create plausible deniability that just maybe it wasn't being made.
> The only thing we know is they were conservative
Well no, that's not true. We also know that his wife was "off put" by him engaging with them. And if you re-read my rely, you'll see that I specifically mention her being "off put" 3 different times because that was the main part that I was replying to.
And if someone tried to shoehorn a long winded discussion about "racial superiority" into an unrelated conversation (much like you are doing right now on a discussion about free speech), I would certainly bow out because it's irrelevant and weird.
>Well no, that's not true. We also know that his wife was "off put" by him engaging with them.
No being off put was a description about the wife not them. All we know about them is they were conservative.
>And if you re-read my rely, you'll see that I specifically mention her being "off put" 3 different times because that was the main part that I was replying to.
There was no mention of xenophobia/racism/etc that was entirely your introduction.
>And if someone tried to shoehorn a long winded discussion about "racial superiority" into an unrelated conversatio
My guy, racism was your introduction, why did YOU shoehorn it in. Don't get upset you brought up racism and now you have to deal with replies including the subject you roped in.
What's pretty telling is that after I mention racism in passing, and you immediately jump in to say "a truly open mind would be open to racist view points". Then you go on giving examples of what you think are "racially superior" genes, as if this helps argue that conservatives being racist is an incorrect stereotype.
What's telling is that when I even number something as an entirely separate point and explicitly state in reference to talking about an "open mind" you immediately go back into your rant about "conservatives" stereotype no matter that point was entirely devoted to open minds and not about conservatives.
> 99% of the time that someone decries the "death of free speech", it boils down to them not wanting to hear criticism for expressing ignorant or hateful ideas.
OP hasn’t made any claims (that I can see) that they wish to avoid criticism for their ignorant and hateful ideas, and you’re slinging shade at them. Maybe they’re in the 99%, but… maybe they’re in the 1%. You can’t be too upset when people react to you negatively - if you say something harmful to others, you should expect pushback too.
I think you seriously misread my comment if you thought that everything I talked about was a direct reply to the parent comment and specifically about the person who posted it.
I was not upset or objecting to push back. I was, as people often do in replies to non-substantive comments, using it as an opportunity to expand on what I previously posted.
"But one of the big issues today is that a lot of people believe that others not accepting their opinion is a form of persecution. They are so self-centered that criticism of what they say is taken as an insult to them personally. Criticism of these people lead to no moments of self-reflection and no moment"
Well under oath in court, DeSantis General Counsel Ryan Newman defined woke as: “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them”
> What do you think is wrong with the belief that there are systemic injustices in American society that should be addressed?
Nothing. What's wrong here is you making a sleight of hand (also known as "Motte-and-bailey"): whatever someone said in a court, under oath or not, about the definition of a word, has zero relevance to what the word means in regular conversation. It has even less authority than a dictionary, which tries to be generally descriptive, because it's just making an operational definition for the purposes of the court case.
I imagine you understand perfectly well the meaning of "woke" GP used, and you surely realize it is close to how this word is understood in general by those who don't subscribe to this particular group of ideologies - otherwise you wouldn't have to try and substitute an alternative meaning, from some court case no less, that just happens to be maximally inoffensive and agreeable, and also very much not the thing people are talking about.
> I imagine you understand perfectly well the meaning of "woke" GP used, and you surely realize it is close to how this word is understood in general by those who don't subscribe to this particular group of ideologies
To the best of my understanding, "woke" is now used by people to signal pretty much anything that they don't agree with. It's more frequently used when the subject matter is a black, gay, trans, women, or minority rights. But it's current usage is so incredibly broad, it is pretty much meaningless beyond "liberal nonsense I don't approve of". Hell even M&Ms, sidewalks being shoveled before roads, and not wanting to expose your kids to gas fumes (I can keep going with dozens of additional absurd things...) are all now called "woke".
Do you have a better definition than the one above? Because the fact that you fail to offer a counter-definition is pretty damn telling.
I'd just as well say "jimbokum"'s post has zero relevance to what the word means in conversation.
Which is not to say he wasn't making a worthwhile observation - that those who complain the loudest about wokeism/cancel culture arguably share quite a bit in common with those they perceive as being the primary promoters. Certainly it's always struck me that a lot people on both sides of the debate really are exceedingly thin-skinned (or at least worry excessively that those they feel they're trying to protect are thin-skinned).
Not arguing about facts and opinions, just about who was more "harmed" by the other parties speech. Not that the arguments presented are dumb and ridiculous, or even ridiculing a person for holding those views. But an attempt to litigate harms based on their individual identities.
(The label "white panther" I find pretty funny and a good example of battling bad speech with counter speech.)
Somebody is dead and somebody else is alleged to have killed them and you're asking someone on the other side of the world about injustice in this specific case?
Apparently only the top-level GP is allowed to push back on what other people say or do, but when the OP you're replying to exercises their right to free speech to do the same, it's the end of the world.
It's not the end of the world, I was just poking fun at a goofball who didn't see the irony in his kneejerk response. I'm a free speech absolutist, so I support his right to say whatever the heck he wants. That's how I know he's a goofy dude, I read a bunch of his replies in this thread and he CONTINUES to put his foot in his mouth.
Also, this hyperbolic style of response (end of the world, racism, xenophobia, the other million examples in the thread) is part of what the OP was saying is a problem today. Nuance in dialog seems to be lost, and the second someone disagrees instead of coming back with a well reasoned response, it's "oh so you YEARN for the days when minorities weren't even considered human?!" and the conversation ends.
That's boring. Strive to be less boring. It's not comfortable but it's worthwhile.
Pointing out that there was never a time when everything was all rosy and dandy is not a non sequitur. It's pointing out that their view of history is naive and not grounded in reality. To call these two points unrelated is to not understand the subject at hand.
> Pointing out that there was never a time when everything was all rosy and dandy is not a non sequitur.
But it is. Also, no one was making such a claim, either, so why point it out in the first place?
> It's pointing out that their view of history is naive and not grounded in reality
Says who? You? I'd venture to guess GP's view is grounded in reality much more than yours is. For instance, there is plenty of racism today, and it's mainly from the people of the same political party that's been most racist from its beginning: https://www.socialjusticesurvivalguide.com/2018/01/08/the-de....
All that's changed is that in this party it's now in vogue to be racist against whites.
> To call these two points unrelated is to not understand the subject at hand.
You could in fact relate them. You could say probably what you meant, which is: "today's censorship is great because it silences all those evil racist bigots that used to be able to speak their minds." And to that, I would reply that your view is not grounded in reality! Take, for instance, this lawsuit:
"Stacy Deemar, a middle school drama teacher, sued the school district over its curriculum allegedly forcing students to participate in “privilege walks” separated by race, comparing “whiteness” to the devil, and other lessons that pit “different racial groups against each other,” according to the suit."
Unfortunately, this kind of racism thrives under today's speech police.
"Sally Field ... apologized for being white during her acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday."
Why is she apologizing for being white? That sounds awfully racist!
"A California emergency room doctor out for a ride on his mountain bike was allegedly murdered Wednesday by a man who police said struck him from behind with his vehicle, then jumped out and repeatedly stabbed him while, according to a witness, decrying “white privilege.”"
It looks like this kind of openly accepted hate speech is getting people killed! The present day certainly isn't rosy either. Maybe it's even worse than it used to be!
...then they should be expected to back it up with a reasonable argument and supporting facts. If they can't do that, then they should expect push back. Even if they can do that they should expect push back - because that is how conversations work.
After all, what is the point in discussing something if ideas are not challenged or expected to have a sound argument behind them? To feel that you should be able to say anything you want and people cannot make a counter-point is absurd and quite selfish.
Do you have any evidence that they were actively censored as a conscious decision by employees of the largest social media platforms? Or did their opinions expressed simply lose them following and/or not generate their normal engagement?
If their "censorship" was a conscious decision by employees of the platform - how is that not also an expression of free speech by those employees and/or the platform? Should private companies not be allowed to moderate content on their platforms as they see fit?
If the "censorship" was a result of them losing following and/or not generating normal engagement - what do you expect to happen here? People can express any opinion they want, but people are also completely free to not listen or engage.
Those people were deplatformed and deamplified, rather than debated.
GP definitely has a valid point as do you. Speech was not equally free if the counter points weren’t allowed, which allowed a lot of people to say anything they want for a long time.
1. Do you have an example of someone who has been deplatformed (kicked off Youtube, Twitter, etc) for simply saying that COVID came from a lab outbreak? Because I'm pretty sure they also had some strong opinions on other topics and/or engaged in online harassment.
2. Do you have any evidence that they we "deamplified" as a conscious decision by employees of the platform? Or did their opinions expressed simply lose them following and/or not generate their normal engagement?
If their deamplification was a conscious decision by employees of the platform - how is that not also an expression of free speech by those employees and/or the platform? Should private companies not be allowed to moderate content on their platforms as they see fit?
If the deamplification was a result of them losing following and/or not generating normal engagement - what do you expect to happen here? People can express any opinion they want, but people are also completely free to not listen or engage.
Here is an example of person who got deplatformed from Twitter because they expressed virus came from a lab. There are numerous such examples which did not had news articles published for them.
So a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong posted a self-published, non-peer reviewed paper, which was subsequently shown to not be supported by the underlying data cited. She also fled Hong Kong after publishing that paper.
This sound a lot less like she was deplatformed from Twitter by Twitter employees, and a lot more like Twitter was given a legal order from the Chinese government to deplatform her. Which is a very different conversation than employees of social media companies suspending someone because of their personal beliefs.
Despite her being suspended from Twitter, "Yan’s paper on Zenodo — despite several blistering scientific critiques and widespread news coverage of its alleged flaws — now has been viewed more than 1 million times, probably making it the most widely read research on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic" [0]
She also proceeded to appear on the most viewed national evening news segment multiple times as well as dozens of podcasts and live streams.
So I don't really see how going from having a Twitter account to being a national conservative hero as a whistle-blower is really feeling any negative reproductions from her speech. In fact, her speech seemed to make a name for herself and win her a lot of positive publicity.
The reasonable argument and support facts back then was the same as today. China had a research lab researching SARS-CoV viruses in the same location as the first cases of SARS-CoV-2.
People just didn't like the political implication, and that is not something which reasonable argument and supporting facts can solve.
Of course they push back. You can't expect to express your opinion without them expressing theirs. Don't they have a right to as well, or is that yours, exclusively?
"I love the new Marvel film" "Eh, I didn't think it was that great". Why is the 2nd person in the equation not allowed to express their opinion?
It's only when it turns into an argument, where both parties refuse to accept the differing opinion of the other party that things go awry. Or frequently as I find with friends, they're prepared to try to change my opinion but aren't prepared to discuss it for as long as I am, where they get upset & overly emotional and it therefore turns into an argument.
Some people have a hard time separating the idea that's being attacked from themselves; personal attacks are not okay. "I don't think people should vote for x for y reasons" is a lot cleaner than "I can't believe you'd vote for x, what kind of person are you".
I was that person. Stopped it, better off for it. I realized how annoying that behaviour is. Nowadays i respond: "Ah, okay." Whats the value in disagreeing about taste? Negative. I remember how hurt i was in the past, when i showed people music i love and they dismissed it.
I even stopped wanting to be right all the time, since i grew tired of arguing over trivia. I think i disentangled my knowledge/smarts from how i feel about myself.
I believe that people should have the right of freedom of speech. However, it also means that you should have the freedom of speech to argue against them too.
(However, if you wish to state your view, it would be better to try to make an argument for it, if you can do so. (It is possible that it is just a guess, in which case you can say so; if you know why you made that guess then you might mention that too.) If a reasonable argument can be made on both sides then a better debate will be possible, rather than merely being ignorant and saying things without any good reason to do so. If you actually explain things, then you can learn better, isn't it?)
Yes, this was when we had a liberal society. Western countries have rapidly trended toward authoritarianism in the last couple of decades, unfortunately, and liberalism is in its death throes.
Ken White, a well known former prosecutor turned defense lawyer and first amendment law expert/speaker (amongst other things), did an interesting article towards the end of last year talking about the importance of being clear about terminology in these discussions ("In Defense Of Free Speech Pedantry" [0]). I think that's very important in these online debates because "freedom of speech" has become a somewhat overloaded that people can use to mean different things. I tend to think of "Free Speech" specifically in terms of what he calls Free Speech Rights (FSR), the actual legal rights afforded by the 1st Amendment, 14th Amendment and subsequent court rulings and precedent, with what people do with it and my own opinions a separate sphere. A lot of people though are bringing in what he terms Free Speech Culture and Speech Decency as well. Just because we legally can do something doesn't mean it's good to exercise that power. Norms sometimes should be challenged, but also are usually worth a bit of thought and discretion. And legal FSR apply to everyone and preserves a forever ongoing cycle of discussion and culture, that's part of the point, and in turn protect criticism and counter criticism, exclusion as well as inclusion. The right to speak necessarily entails the right to not speak.
I don't know if his proposed terms will ultimately catch on and make the most sense, but I do think it's worth some effort in being more precise with our language because FSR vs FSC and SD involves extremely different applications of power and risk, and separating out the domains can help everyone think more clearly about the topic. In the case of this classic saying, it involves all of them in a compact manner. Someone can think speech is just plain wrong, disgusting and evil even, but not want to see force used upon the speaker or any other speaker for a variety of good reasons.
My heart sinks when I see this sort of parochial US-centric definition of free speech. The vast majority of the world is not protected by and has no interest in US constitutional rights. The principles of free speech are universal, much more important and much broader than the US constitution. There are many ways to foster and promote free speech that has nothing to do with US law. Yes, we're often discussing US companies when this topic comes up, but you should realise that people outside the United States are not covered by US constitutional guarantees, and US companies don't treat us like we are. We must foster a discussion where the principles of free speech are seen to be important outside of this narrow, legalistic, US-centered sense.
There are fundamental rights of man. Government can recognize or abrogate those rights, but cannot invent those rights.
For example, if rights were invented by the government, there would be nothing about slavery that was wrong. If we say slavery violates the right to liberty, then we are saying that the right to liberty is inherent.
>Liberty, free speech, facts, etc. are apparently just nice theories from a more enlightened time.
*Terms and conditions may apply. Please review your wealth, race, gender, and sexual orientation before attempting to use said liberty and free speech in public. US.A does not accept liability in the case of injury or death by law enforcement officers.
This is ascribing some sort of mythical quality to rights. Rights are simply what a society decides should be conveyed to its people. A country could decide that their people have a right to receiving a free hoodie every November and as long as the country supports that right, those people have that right. There is nothing inherently moral about rights. Countries have many times supported the immoral rights of their people. And people's rights are only as good as the society's support for those rights. There is nothing inherent or inalienable about them.
This is exactly the root of the “atheists can’t be moral” argument. Not that any individual atheist can’t be moral for the time being, but that a godless society inevitably falls into relativism where the only good is the consensus and the only morality is what you can argue.
This is one of those cases. I think we’d all be better off with an absolute basis for rights than a relativistic one.
There is no absolute basis for rights and the good being the consensus happens on religious societies as well. What is good is constantly being argued over and over in all societies.
Believing in an absolute basis for rights ignores the reality that every single right people have was usually fought for during a time when people did not have that right. You can lose rights and you can gain them.
It’s also how you get people arguing that the rights people have in some places (e.g. healthcare, higher education) aren’t legitimate rights even though they most certainly are.
Believing in a relative basis for rights means that slavery is ok as long as the consensus agrees on it. So slavery in the US was completely moral right up until the start of the Civil War and it's moral anywhere in the world it is fine today (as long as it is legal / consensus). I don't think that's moral at all. An absolute basis for rights is above law or human discourse - slavery was appallingly evil exactly because it was an stain against the enslaved peoples' human rights to liberty (regardless of whether the law allowed it or not).
African Americans didn't earn the right to not be enslaved. They always had the innate human right to liberty regardless of what the law said, abolitionists defeated the oppressors that suppressed their innate rights to liberty.
I can see now why we’re talking past one another. I am making a statement about the usage of the word “rights”. When I say “you have a right to due process” it is not a statement about an abstract concept but a matter of fact statement about the legal protections you have, which depends on the jurisdiction in which you are physically located.
You’re talking about the philosophical basis for how we come to our individual beliefs about what rights we should have. Note that the conversation is teetering on the edge of an appeal to the law fallacy: what the law currently says is entirely irrelevant when considering what it should say. To say that slavery is legal is not to say that it is moral, it’s just a question of fact.
In any case, if you have an absolute basis for rights I’d like to hear it. I’m not an expert and I’m curious about people’s theories about these things.
> if you have an absolute basis for rights I’d like to hear it
Societies based on free men do far better than societies based on slaves. Armies of volunteers are much more formidable than armies based on conscripts. Economies based on free markets are much more prosperous than command economies.
I don't know what you'd find compelling, but I see a consistent pattern there. It's almost as if being free confers an inherent advantage. :-/
Anyhow, if you had a job where you are paid to work and could leave any time to get a better job, would you say you'd perform better at the job than if you were forced to work there and whipped if the overseer didn't like your work?
I certainly don't think we are always in accordance with our absolute human rights.
In a relativistic basis for rights, there is not "reviewing what we consider immoral", because morality is just "what every we consider moral". Slavery is moral (at least in 1850s America) because the consensus was that it is ok. Under an absolute basis for rights, it's clear that slavery was wrong then, and wrong now, and will always be wrong (regardless of what the law or consensus says).
I can personally believe slavery is morally wrong but still accept that a different culture may universally consider that there is a right to own other humans as slaves.
And the fact that there's no known good examples of slaves being happy with such an arrangement is a very strong argument in favour of any sort of right to own slaves being a unlikely sort of right that a society would ever successfully and sustainably adopt. I just wouldn't rule it out on principle - if there's anything like a "universal truth" I would accept it's that other societies/cultures need to determine their own rights for themselves, and they can't be imposed.
I'm not sure the union and the confederacy saw themselves as separate cultures though? And either way, I'm not convinced that it was an acceptable use of force (granted, it's not a subject I have any great depth of knowledge in). There are parts of the world today where certain members of society live in conditions not far from slavery, and while I very much hope those societies can in time see the advantages of agreeing on and adopting a more free and equal set of human rights, I don't believe it's justified to use force to impose them just because we're so certain of their "unalienable" nature.
I would imagine not a few slaves would have been killed in the process!
Either way, that on its own doesn't justify the bloodshed that occurred, and arguably the divisions in the US that don't appear to have fully healed yet.
And from what I do know about it, I wouldn't say the US civil war was a good example of an unprovoked party forcibly trying to impose their own "rights" on another society anyway.
One thing I'm willing to agree with you on is that the justifications used by those who believed in slavery were "wrong" - they made assumptions about the biological characteristics of people based on their skin colour or country of origin that weren't justified on any scientific or humane basis. There's really no excusing any sort of belief that people who are clearly capable of the full range of human emotions and thought processes were somehow subhuman and not deserving of free man status. Perhaps there's never been an example of slavery in society that wasn't accompanied by such beliefs, and on that basis I'd accept that all existing examples of slavery that I know of, past or present, are "wrong".
The Janissary elite drawn from the devşirme system of child levy would be the obvious example, particularly toward the end when they controlled many of the state assets and staged palace coups to get the sultan they wanted.
This is inane. I explicitly said that rights are orthogonal to morals. Why are you trying to claim I said the opposite? Do you understand what words mean?
How could rights be orthogonal to morals? Do you have any examples, either real or theoretical, of a right that came to be without an argument based on morality? In fact it's right there in the name. "Rights" refer to things it would be wrong to take away from people, making them right.
Out of curiosity, where do you propose such rights stem from?
And would you argue that those same rights were still "natural"/unalienable etc. even in a society that universally didn't accept them?
If they came about as the result of "natural evolution" then they can't be truly universal in the sense that evolution could very well have taken different paths that led to a species recognisably similar to us but whose nature and genetic make up would lead to adoption of a quite different set of rights than those you believe to be unalienable.
As it is, I suspect you'd have a hard time getting many groups of humans from millennia ago to agree with you on exactly what such rights are. Or are they all wrong too?
Bees followed a different evolutionary path, and human rights are not applicable to them.
> Or are they all wrong too?
Humans are full of false beliefs. If they believe that man does not have a right to liberty, then they are wrong, just as wrong as believing that throwing virgins into volcanoes assures a good harvest.
I don't believe that man has an intrinsic right to liberty - just that societies where basic human rights (including various freedoms) are protected by the state are more likely to flourish and grant their citizens more meaningful and fairer existence. I don't believe we've come close yet to perfecting exactly what those rights should be and how they should be protected however.
Well there are plenty of injustices in the world, most of them we can do little about. If my owners gave me the ability the live a decent and meaningful life, that potentially included the opportunities to do things that would be unrealistic if I had to fend entirely for myself, then I wouldn't necessarily complain, no.
But if the state failed to protect me against mistreatment by said owners, then I would absolutely have reason to protest and demand better.
I believe having slaves is wrong, that doesn't make it a fact. I have no reason to believe there is any natural law dictating that, it's nothing but a social construct we have agreed to.
> For example, if rights were invented by the government, there would be nothing about slavery that was wrong.
Slavery (or it's near equivalent: peasantry) was not considered unnatural for the vast majority of human history, really up until modern era. As horrible as it was, it was also the basis of many feudal economies the world over, and it probably powered societies through the dawn of agriculture, so at least 10k years. Prior to that, hunter gatherer groups also raised other groups and took slaves.
Industrialization had more to do with slavery's eventual decline than any idea that it was unnatural.
This is reflected in the areas where it ended earlier due to earlier industrialization (England, the Northern States of the US) vs where it ended later due to a persistent preindustrial agrarian society (Russia and the American South).
What is inherent in humans is the capacity for empathy and the ability to mentalize about another human's experience. That can lead to a belief that slavery is wrong, but that belief is in battle with the desire to exploit other humans for your own gain.
When slave societies were faced with free societies, the free societies tend to bury them. Free societies have an inherent advantage, as they better fit human nature.
Human societies across history and prehistory have always believed in destructive and wrong things of all sorts.
> When slave societies were faced with free societies, the free societies tend to bury them.
> Free societies have an inherent advantage, as they better fit human nature.
What are the examples of that which are not also essentially industrial vs feudal or technologically primitive societies?
That history seems pretty thin.
What's more likely is that freer societies are better able to harness the abilities of their inhabitants, and unlike slavery/serfdom based states, they don't have to deploy as many resources to defend against their own enslaved inhabitants. It's a triumph of a better organizational structure, not something inherent to human nature.
Otherwise free societies would have become the norm far earlier in history than they did.
> What's more likely is that freer societies are better able to harness the abilities of their inhabitants, and unlike slavery/serfdom based states, they don't have to deploy as many resources to defend against their own enslaved inhabitants. It's a triumph of a better organizational structure, not something inherent to human nature.
I.e. a structure that fits human nature better, making it inherent.
Rome's army consisted of free men, and they conquered everyone else. Slave armies have a poor track record when they come up against free men.
> Rome's army consisted of free men, and they conquered everyone else.
Rome relied heavily on slavery. Slaves were 20-30% of the population [1]. The slaves did the labor that allowed the free men to go fight and conquer others. It's not an example of a free society in the slightest.
Historically, some conceptions of them absolutely do.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I'm not sure if many people realize the the UNHCR has the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights[0], ratified by ~180 countries. Unlike the First Amendment, the preamble the the ICCPR makes it clear that it is concerned with the responsibilities of States and citizens:
Recognizing that, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ideal of free human beings enjoying civil and political freedom and freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy his civil and political rights, as well as his economic, social and cultural rights,
Considering the obligation of States under the Charter of the United Nations to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and freedoms
Realizing that the individual, having duties to other individuals and to the community to which he belongs, is under a responsibility to strive for the promotion and observance of the rights recognized in the present Covenant
Article 19 of the ICCPR deals with freedom of expression, and states:
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
This frames freedom of expression as a positive right, whereas the First Amendment is about negative rights. Also in contrast to the First Amendment, the power to curtail these rights is explicitly given to law-makers, in a limited fashion. Non-legal restrictions on free expression constitute a violation of rights.
Freedom of speech as defined by the ICCPR is so limited as to be effectively meaningless (which is why ~180 countries have ratified it). It wouldn't protect your ability to report on military misconduct, not wear a hijab, or criticize politicians, for example.
The "public health or morals" clause certainly leaves the door open for abuse. But it's still more useful than talking about the First Amendment as if it applies to the whole world.
I also think it's useful to frame rights both positively and negatively, and to focus on more than just the government's responsibilities.
This is a fish don't know they are wet phenomena. Government protected free speech is taken for granted here that people cannot contemplate what it means for the rest of the world.
Sorry, but this is just the kind of narrow parochialism I'm complaining about. I said "the vast majority of the world", and I stand by that - the idea that ordinary people in China, India, Africa, the Pacific and so on give one iota of a damn about US law is completely absurd. Furthermore, this attitude is a fantasy even within the Anglosphere - I live in New Zealand, and I bet not one person in 100 could give me a clear statement of what rights the 1st amendment guarantees and what its limits are, beyond the barest outline.
> Furthermore, this attitude is a fantasy even within the Anglosphere - I live in New Zealand, and I bet not one person in 100 could give me a clear statement of what rights the 1st amendment guarantees and what its limits are, beyond the barest outline.
They don't have to. Popular culture is saturated with a low res version of 1st amendment.
What is more annoying about parochialism is every thing turning into mud slinging on the US.
The assertion of the US' founders is that such rights are inherent to all people, natural rights, and inalienable.
The fact that it was codified into law in a specific country is an implementation detail. The concepts of liberty in the US documents are philosophical assertions and not related to any nation.
They also happen to be law in the US, but even there they don't really hold force; such "rights" are violated constantly.
Nothing of the ideology seemingly professed by the famous US founding set were ever actually implemented. Slavery is just the big obvious one but there are a million other examples of their failure to actually implement their espoused philosophy.
It seems like more of an aspirational/marketing meme than anything.
“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” -Lincoln
The framework applies equally turn on US country so I'm not sure what you are objecting to. If you read the link they provided it provides definitions for different types of free speech ranging from those that are legally enshrined (or not depending on your country), to how individuals socially react and common custom.
The reason is because the audience is likely majority US-based, US-adjacent, or their work focuses on compliance with US laws and customers more than other laws.
Unless you mean the source piece by Ken White itself, which is a specifically about the first amendment and not human rights in general.
This is a fair point but any discussion of free speech should be grounded with examples of systems that help maintain it, of which the US constitutional regime is one. Not all such regimes have worked, as the French Revolution demonstrated starting 2 months after the adoption of the US constitution. [0, 1]
So my question would be, what other practical examples would you introduce to the discussion?
Oh? How successful do you think the US constitutional mechanism has really been in protecting free speech? And by "free speech" here, I mean exactly the broader sense, not constrained by a narrow constitutionalist view. To take one facet of the question, consider the World Press Freedom Index:
The country I live in (New Zealand) has no constitutional free speech guarantees, and ranks 11th. The US ranks 42nd, behind East Timor, Jamaica, Slovakia, South Africa, and many other places I imagine your average American would not associate with free speech. Now, I have quibbles with the way the Press Freedom Index is assembled, and it only captures one narrow (but important) aspect of what we care about when we speak about free speech. That notwithstanding, my question to you is this: scanning down that list of countries, does it perhaps occur to you that the US may have something to learn from us, rather than the other way round?
I lived in Russia, New Zealand, Canada, and US. Of the four, US undoubtedly is the best at protecting controversial political speech, which to me feels like exactly what you want to prioritize if you want to maintain a free society.
The US constitution protects controversial speech, in the sense that government punishment is not meted out to people who step out of line. The limits of this are immediately apparent when you ask if people functionally have the ability to speak freely from within US institutions of academia, journalism, or large corporations. I work with colleagues in all of these from all over the world, and nobody is more afraid of saying the wrong thing and having their lives ruined than Americans. The fear is palpable and ever-present. So again, how successful has the first amendment really been here? The frequent response to this is "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences", which is exactly the kind of legalistic attitude we have to get away from. Real freedom of speech means exactly the ability to say controversial things without suffering disproportionate harm, and I just don't think the US is doing markedly better than the rest of the free world on this front.
I'm not sure where this perverted view on the freedom of speech comes from. It has never meant freedom of consequences or criticism which is what "free speech absolutists" of today are seeking. To say otherwise would be to force people to associate with others. You're going to force a business to keep an employee who is damaging their reputation or hurting team morale. You're elevating the rights of trolls to the point where it infringes on the rights of others specifically the freedom of association. Free speech absolutists want a captive audiences who cannot disassociate with them and force companies to host content that is damaging to their brand. They have no respect for the speech of others in the form of protests which they label as "cancelling" and rail against despite it also being free speech.
I'm not talking about free speech absolutism. What I'm describing here is a specific US-centered cultural phenomenon - thin-skinned, hypocritical tribalism that has turned people against each other, where every conversation that strays outside of narrow doctrinaire bounds, however innocuous or well-intentioned, might be reported on by a remorseless army of cruel snitches ever hungry to find some way to elevate themselves by destroying others. It's the very opposite of being kind or considerate, and, having seen its effects on colleagues, I can't imagine anything more damaging to "team morale". Freddie De Boer has a pungent phrase for this - "planet of cops" - and his essay is worth reading:
I feel focus on the first amendment gives people of this bent cover: it lets them exert incredible power over speech in every practical way, while claiming that free speech is intact because there's no violation of the constitution. The fact that we need to clearly rebut people like this is exactly one of the reasons why I feel over-indexing on the constitution is unhelpful.
Businesses don't have freedom of association. For example, in California, the "ban the box" law means that FANG must hire convicted domestic abusers even if it is bad for morale. This of course pertains only to past actions of the applicant though.
This is very interesting! How did the FANG in your hypothetical find out about the person being a convicted domestic abuser? The law says they are not allowed to ask about prior criminal history which is not relevant to the job itself, so it would be interesting to know how these pieces of information come to light.
I'll leave the question of "should a person be branded for life even if they've done everything they can to make things right" for the reader.
> Oh? How successful do you think the US constitutional mechanism has really been in protecting free speech? And by "free speech" here, I mean exactly the broader sense, not constrained by a narrow constitutionalist view.
Overall quite successful, especially measured by longevity. It has not always been pretty. Politics in the US is a blood sport--sometimes quite literally. And the right to free speech has not been evenly distributed. But there aren't a lot of nations that have offered the level of protection from government suppression offered by the US since the late 1700s. Many of the nations you cite have not enjoyed these freedoms for very long. Nations like Japan and many in Europe also developed their current rights regime under the protection of the US during the post-war period. It's premature to conclude they have done better.
> That notwithstanding, my question to you is this: scanning down that list of countries, does it perhaps occur to you that the US may have something to learn from us, rather than the other way round?
Of course. Just as one example I'm impressed that many European nations do a better job of balancing free speech vs. harms than the US does. For example Germany does not permit Nazi speech, which seems reasonable. They also did a vastly better job of maintaining a civil dialogue about COVID at least early on. [0]
I'm not in any way arguing the US is perfect. You would have to be pretty blind to do that.
I always find it instructive to view these reports at the source. I developed this habit in 2018, when Reporters Without Borders (who maintain the Press Freedom Index you linked) published a report of the six most dangerous countries for journalists: India, Yemen, Mexico, Syria, Afghanistan, and of course the United States. When I read the report, it described how in Mexico journalists are executed by cartels and organized crime, how journalists in Yemen die in prison due to mistreatment, how in Syria journalists were killed in airstrikes and taken hostage by Islamic militants, how in India Hindu nationalist mobs would run down journalists with trucks… and how in the US, six journalists were killed in one year: four murdered by a stalker angry at a 2011 story the newspaper had published (subsequently tried and found guilty of mass murder), and two killed by a falling tree.
Being the midst of Donald Trump’s presidency, of course, there were headlines all over the United States: “Reporters Without Borders ranks US among most dangerous countries for journalists!”. The story was perfect clickbait, especially in that political environment.
I’m not saying Reporters Without Borders is untrustworthy. But I’m skeptical of their rankings by default, because being overly pessimistic about the US is an easy way to get lots of attention.
Here’s their report on the US’s ranking in the Press Freedom Index:
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker lists nearly 300 journalist arrests, nearly 1,000 assaults, 160 court orders, 80 cases of equipment seizure, nearly 50 instances of chilling effects and hundreds of other types of suppression of journalists since 2017[1].
That’s a much more interesting source since it aggregates objective facts and statistics. Do you know of a comparative analysis of these stats with equivalents in other countries?
> But what he didn't do was suppress the press, jail the reporters, etc.
See "Four more journalists get felony charges after covering inauguration unrest"[1]. PEN America, Protect Democracy and the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Clinic also sued the government because of press suppression[2][3].
I don’t think any of those bullets are strictly untrue. The question is whether in combination they actually demonstrate a serious threat to press freedom relative to other countries.
The parent post that you're objecting to is advocating exactly what you are. Talking about different measures of free speech and how it relates to society. There are both legal and social Dimensions to the issue
US companies power to enable free speech culture is strongly proscribed by the laws of the countries where the content is being accessed. I don't see how US tech companies could over come China's Great Firewall, for example, without the cooperation of the Chinese government.
I've been watching some First Amendment Auditing videos, and it is amazing the degree of ignorance there is not only among the public, but also public servants, including police officers, who should absolutely know that constitutionally protected activity can't be turned into a crime just because someone finds it unpalatable. In fact, that's precisely the reason why First Amendment protections exist. We wouldn't need them if there weren't speech, religions, journalists, or protests that some people didn't want.
I understand your point about "just because you can doesn't mean you should," but on the other hand, we will never know whether constitutional protections have real force unless we see that they work for rights that other people would rather we not exercise.
Many police officers do know, they just see respect for rights as an impediment to their "real" job of enforcing order. The culture largely teaches them that they're in a war against criminals and that anything they do to win that war is justified [1].
I disagree with this idea, that we are talking about Free Speech Rights. When I see people say Free Speech, it is in the lens of the inalienable right that we all have. The US constitution does protect some specific scope of Free Speech, but any limitations legally are still infringements upon the Natural Right of Free Speech. Rights do not come from the Government, they are innate and natural. The government can merely infringe or protect those rights. A company or government infringing on those rights is unethical, because infringing upon any other's rights is unethical, regardless of what the US government says.
That interpretation of rights is not universal and in my experience seems to be a philosophy mainly coming from the US (presumably reinforced by the language in the American bill of rights). I view rights as describing the actual (implicit or explicit) contract between a people and their government, not as an absolute metaphysical or moral concept. In my view, a person in a developed nation has a stronger right to clean water than a person in an impoverished nation as statement of fact observable from the effort their government goes to to ensure they have clean water. I prefer this view of rights divorced from morals because it lets a population pressure their government for rights based on what they want rather than getting bogged down on whether it is morally right to e.g. have access to guns or silence in criminal proceedings.
> Rights do not come from the Government, they are innate and natural.
I don't understand this philosophy. Who decides these rights? Wouldn't whatever rights that you consider to be innate and natural be the ones important through your own cultural lens? Isn't it possible others disagree with what rights one should be granted?
In general this development is synonymous with the development of orthodoxy and heresy in late antiquity - it's not enough to believe what you want to believe, but to insist that everyone else believe it too.
The template works like this, create a set of ideas, but cast them as having been part of the fabric of reality itself. This can happen intentionally or organically. Organic development is as simple as raising kiddos with the same belief. The way that socialization and mental development happens us that it makes these truths appear as normal and obvious as apples are red.
Are rights obvious and self evident? Congrats you've been born and socialized in the west. Is the mandate of heaven obvious and self evident? Congrats, you were born in China a millennia ago.
This is an innate aspect of philosophy. You’d have to go history diving to whoever came up with the idea first but it probably originated around the time of the renaissance or Greek or Roman philosophers.
I don't know that's a great example given that many cultures don't share those numerals, so it can't be assumed these ideas propagate solely by the virtue of being old.
What culture that's developed enough to control a nation state doesn't use those numerals? Many cultures have alternative numerals that are in use, but usually only in informal usage.
China? They didn't adopt Arabic numerals until the 17th century after it was introduced by Europeans, and there's no way to argue they weren't a nation state before that.
You’re missing the entire point and it’s important because it was completely novel at the time and still is really. It has nothing to do with the particular rights that our founders believed to be natural. But the idea that they aren’t granted by a government. That government can only infringe on rights, not grant them and take them away, etc. like kings did forever or even today even in many western countries where the rights are limited.
What differentiates "rights" from the pure freedom to do anything we are physically/mentally/emotionally capable of? That seems like government (of any size, e.g. a tribal council) introducing law into chaos. I'm not sure how one differentiates a government preventing murder and inhibiting speech with that definition.
It's making demands of the natural world that the natural world doesn't have to obey. These natural rights are only that way because specific groups of people agree on them, making them unnatural, or, as I said previously, it implies that absolute freedom is your natural right. If that's not the case I'd ask you to explain where natural rights end and chaos begins.
It's natural in the sense that you have it if you are the only person on an island somewhere, assuming there's no aircraft or satellites going overhead. In that situation you could literally say anything you wanted, as long as you can collect food and water and not die of some other cause before you finish saying it. Kind of goes for other things to a lesser extent, for example you have total privacy and there's no one there to take away any guns you have, but you do have to think about other people more in those cases, as the island thing is just a thought exercise.
Sound like you're defining "rights" along the lines of "what you can do in isolation, as long as it doesn't affect anyone else". Does that seem correct?
Yeah that's where everything gets complicated, obviously people's natural rights can conflict and that's where you need to set up some sort of rules based system, but the point is that you don't infringe on someone's natural rights unless there's a direct conflict with someone else's natural rights. For example your natural rights to bear a weapon cause a conflict if you are bearing them in someone's house in order to rob them after you just broke in. Conflicts with their right to have property, etc.
It seems like your position is "natural rights should guide or at least influence societal rights", and you consider that to be self-evident or maybe axiomatic
I don't see why natural rights would be part of the discussion altogether
They are natural in that you have them by virtue of existing; if you were alone on a deserted island you would be able to exercise them. The traditional interpretation in the US is that they come from God: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Of the five main drafters of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson was the only slaveowner. Jefferson was definitely a huge hypocrite on this question, but he at least had the decency to feel guilty about it. In fact, Jefferson's initial draft of the document included a paragraph condemning slavery and blaming the British crown for it—though unfortunately, this passage was excised from the final version.
> I tend to think of "Free Speech" specifically in terms of what he calls Free Speech Rights (FSR), the actual legal rights afforded by the 1st Amendment, 14th Amendment and subsequent court rulings and precedent, with what people do with it and my own opinions a separate sphere. A lot of people though are bringing in what he terms Free Speech Culture and Speech Decency as well.
This is a very American take. Which might be reasonable as in the UK and Australia for example, the government has much more control of speech. But it feels odd, like when Americans generalise very odd things about 'white' and 'black' people they when only mean Americans.
But I think even before the constitution, the moral value exists. And that's the thing people all over the world have fought for.
> Free Speech Culture and Speech Decency as well.
I don't think the ethics/values of free speech are summarised by either of these terms.
Rather I'll keep using 'free speech' to mean the moral value, and 'US constitutional law' to mean US constitutional law.
he talked his band of followers into murdering nine innocent people in 01969 through incitement to imminent lawless action, though he didn't directly order any of the murders
> Just because we legally can do something doesn't mean it's good to exercise that power.
What does "good" and "bad" have to do with this? We have laws specifically so we are not at the mercy of moral judgement. We tried that already, it didn't work. If it's legal you either accept it or try change the law. Anything else is mob justice.
I think that this is a dangerous attitude that leads to more laws and the clawing away of rights.
The supreme court explicitly held that people have the constitutional right to hold an anti-gay rally outside of military members' funerals [1]. I think that the vast majority of people (including the overwhelming majority of people holding anti-gay views) would find this behavior atrocious and immoral. But it's protected free speech.
The problem though is that enough of this kind of stuff happens and laws begin to change. Sure, it's one crazy group in this case, but if this sort of behavior were prevalent enough, peoples' views on free speech would change. Sure, this is an extreme example, since something specifically mentioned in the constitution is very hard to change. But there are plenty of examples of laws that only exist in response to some idiot(s) who decided to ruin it for everyone else (as a very simple example, I no longer have the right to buy more than one pack of Sudafed at a time where I live... they didn't just dream that law up out of thin air).
This would be a much more compelling argument if I believed that homophobic politicians, judges, and groups will defend the speech rights of gay people. Instead what I see is a pattern of right wing groups leveraging the courts to protect their own right to hate while also leveraging the courts to oppress groups they hate. Standing up for the Nazi's right to march in my town won't cause those Nazis to stand up for my right to march in my town.
When’s the last time the courts protected the right to hate in the form of preventing speech of gay people? This is just worrying about things that don’t happen. Right now socially LGBT people have a moral high ground and very little of their speech is ever prevented.
How does it infringe on their right to speak though? They’re speaking very loudly about the issue in fact. I hear them more than I ever have in the past. For being less than 1% of the population I think they’re one of the most overrepresented speech groups, from what I’ve seen anyway.
And this is precisely why I do not expect any defense from the right. When discussion of gay people in classrooms and in books is verboten and when tame drag shows draw crowds brandishing weapons and laws banning them entirely, I don't see people on the right leaping to defense.
They are speaking loudly about the issue, because their speech is being infringed. The law in Florida currently says that you're not allowed to talk to school children about sexuality in an inappropriate way, without specifying what this exactly means. I have not seen any conservatives deny that this is specifically set up to still allow talk about heterosexuality (e.g. a male teacher talking about how he went hiking with his wife) while disallowing any mention of homosexuality (e.g. a male teacher talking about how he went hiking with his husband).
The only defense I can see would be the same which was used to deny gay marriage - "we're not infringing on their rights, they can still marry straight people of the opposite sex!" - which I'm sure we can all agree is not in any way a good defense.
You can legally share every last detail of the poop you just left in the toilet, pictures and all. If you choose to do that at the lunch table at work, nobody is obliged to remain seated with you. Ergo, sharing such details is not a good idea. Even though it is perfectly legal.
Those co-workers who vacated the table are exercising their rights in walking away. Call that "mob justice" if you will.
There's a difference between walking away & taping someone's mouth at the table. Walking away is freedom of association. Taping someone's mouth is censorship & a forced imposition or outright violence against a person.
Parent is trying to draw a parallel between mouth taping and censorship. The problem is that lunchroom scenarios aren't cleanly isomorphic to online scenarios.
Okay. Let's say you like to share details of your bathroom escapades on a forum dedicated to 3d printing. The admins give you a few warnings and eventually kick you off, because nobody wants to hear that. I daresay that isn't "violence." It's still an exercise of free association where the forum moderators have decided your speech is "not good" despite being perfectly legal.
Sure, call it censorship. I maintain that it's legally permissible to ban shit-posters for misconduct. I'd further argue that failing to ban shit-posters will dissuade 3d printing enthusiasts from using a particular forum, granting the shit-posters a heckler's veto which is its own form of censorship.
It's legal for an adult to drink a handle of vodka every night. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. It's legal for you to tell your neighbor you hate them. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
This is disingenuous. Drinking vodka is not a constitutional right, it is just something that is not forbidden by law, so you are comparing 2 very different things. For any constitutional right people should be proud to show support and exercise it as much as possible, otherwise it is not a right, just a permission like drinking.
I would differentiate between inventions and encapsulations. It's one thing to adorn any random idea with a famous name to give it more traction. But to summarize the thoughts of an influential thinker with a pithy saying, even if he didn't actually say it, is usually not harmful and a normal part of localization.
I've always been a free speech absolutist. I don't think there's any speech, including hate speech, that I would ban. If I don't like it, I can offer my own opinions and try to educate people, but banning speech outright is wrong.
The problem that has occurred is that some people on the extremes now think "All the other people/children are so stupid that they will get tricked into believe all these lies. We should shut down that speech so that these poor idiots don't fall into this trap." This is thinking that I strongly disagree with. Some people may believe hate speech but I think that's a reflection of who they are, ie. they will probably believe it with or without the convincing. I personally believe that most people are smarter than this and banning speech based on "protect the children!" is a terrible excuse that both the left and right are using nowadays (more by the right a decade ago).
There is no system better than complete free speech, because it allows the most amount of information to be passed back and forth and gives people the opportunity to decide for themselves.
>personally believe that most people are smarter than this
Every single time someone's uttered those words they were eventually proven wrong
Not that I think we should be banning speech, mind you. Just figured a reminder on that tiny bit was warranted. Assuming people aren't morons is the doom of many endeavours
I know silver bullets don't exist, but educating just doesn't seem to get the societal positive attention it so thoroughly needs and deserves.
Where the silver bullet fails is the "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it realise its thirsty" analogy.
School and education have been conflated in a detrimental way, and the reputation of schooling needs urgent repair. During Covid it seemed as if teaching was on the brink of earning more respect, but it was very quickly forgotten and probably only got the attention for reasons of childcare as opposed to education.
All implications of the above are a sad indictment of where society has found itself.
Additionally, if we follow the path of assuming everyone is a moron, we very quickly reach The Nanny State. This is the current pendulum swing.
I agree but as with basically all things... it's messy. North Korea believes deeply in education. I fear that only once one political party's view of heresy has been solidly ingrained in the education system, will we then see education getting any funding again. It seems that since tribalism and fear of enemies is the most powerful political motivator, we can only invest in systems that reinforce a tribalism-based tool of manipulation.
Because of such crystallization, in America, critical thinking has become fairly close to heresy, and any tid bit of questioning of your own group's inflexible logic must be couched in "please don't hate me, I'm on your side" first. Those of us that enjoy being contrarian to our friends are getting less and less boost in social media, and most political messaging now contains a bite of "the other side, your fellow Americans, are corrupt/evil/incompetent." I just don't know how we can shake this situation but I think free speech isn't the problem at all, it's the incentives around our speech.
Yes, the blank word "education" means essentially nothing. I think most people on HN (including yourself) understand my intention, however you are absolutely correct that "education" can mean wildly varying things if they have pre-conceived outcomes to which "education" is being directed.
cough Vocational education and training centers cough [0]
My definition is along the lines of independent thought, critical thinking, alternative perspectives, the scientific method, (stretching here: mathematics as a language of observed behaviour). Teaching them to fish rather than giving them a fish. Anything other than blind acceptance, or at least providing a sense of judgement to know when blind acceptance may be justified.
And none of this is easy because 1) once a child is of school age they've already got a firm base of blind acceptances that, basically, work against their own education, and 2) independent thought and critical thinking means a lot of asking "why?" and lots of asking of "why?" takes up precious[1] curriculum teaching time.
[1]:Precious to school and education board/department management KPIs that have no provable basis in positive real-world outcomes for either society or the individual
As a child, you spend 8 hours a day in class and then you potentially have 16 hours a day of indoctrination time with family. We are taught to respect our parents, and so to a good child who respects his parents, it goes without saying that the child would also respect his parents' beliefs. Your teacher is ephemeral. They are your teacher for a year and then you will almost always move on and have no more of a relationship with them. Parents are forever. There are plenty of stupid and abusive parents.
Totally aware, as I have a number of teachers that are part of my close and extended family.
The caveat, somewhat, is that good teachers (true scotsmen) can be closer to a parental and positive influence on a child than a stupid or abusive parent almost exclusively because the (good) teacher is not stupid and abusive.
There's a glaring "no true scotsman" fallacy in my logic above, but my point is that stupid and abusive creates its own opportunity for improvement. My vicarious and anecdotal experience seems to bear this out (but having said that, my vicarious and anecdotal experience comes through teachers who are dedicated, experienced, and committed to the outcomes of the children, which is rarer than it should be).
There's no escaping the trauma of bad parents, but the ability to present the opportunity for a brighter future can help immeasurably. Hope. It can be better than it is.
Yeah well that's kind of an unfortunate consequence of the complete deferral of responsibility on to the state. It takes a village but the liability for the well-being of any given child is so dispersed they may as well have no caretakers whatsoever. And with the rapid advance of technology nobody has a plotted demonstrably universal plan for cultivating an individual. And we never did, but the inexorable complications added by the face-peeling pace of technological advancement is leaving parents, the state, teachers, and whatever remainder else of the village totally blind insofar as divining inputs and the resulting outputs as it concerns the "education" system. I'll let you factor in the massive populations, strife, inequity, massive social changes and etc...
And it's a pretty terrible bureaucracy no matter what your perspective may be. It's rife with failure in the noteworthy aspects where it is overly-rigid, and equally so in the areas where no rules or regulations exist. Large parts of it are given to Goodhart's Law, so the results aren't actually as one would hope for them to be, erstwhile it alienates many children in various ways, pressing them into a perpetual ennui, anxieties fit only for consenting adults, social isolation, undesired social exposure, and at the end of it all it's quite probable due to many factors, they will walk away just as vacuous as they would have been if they were pressed through some much more comfortable alternative.
The glum reality of it all is, is that it is little more than the facade, and mostly it serves the purpose of childcare these days.
But more importantly your insipid comment that, God forbid, someone actually give the child some basis for moral structure is itself precisely what I mean to communicate when I speak of the deference - throughout my attainment I was never once given any meaningful education on ethics, or civics, on value or right and wrong. It was rule and law, but never the Rule of Law. And that does not make an upright person. And science does little to inform morality, and droll literature did little to inform us of the myriad moral conundrums inexorably a part of real life. Just because you disagree with it does not make it wrong, that is arrogance.
I would say that I was fortunate to have an upstanding parental figure who fought against all odds to raise me singlehandedly and did so with the most couth methods imaginable - hard and ceaseless labor - but unfortunately I'm in an arena where civility we're so won't to brag about exists only as shibboleth, and I and my like have to dance with backbiting vipers who are more than willing to use uncouth methods to gate or otherwise swallow whole anyone who has some sense of dignity, fairness, accountability, or empathy. And they do so from the bastions of these monolithic bureaucracies hidden behind gilded titles and moats of texts and rules and laws - fictions. But by God maybe if we had teachers willing to step out of the relativistic framework, institutions that respected thousand-year old proven frameworks, even just a human ecology class - by God maybe there wouldn't be so many snakes in the system. And it's not some isolated incident, I can point to highly visible instances like the GFC or the recent congressional insider trading debacle or the countless instances of corporate misbehavior... Because nobody "indoctrinated" the shitheels at the helm of these catastrophic fuckups.
I get where you're coming from, but it's not an error. It's your civic duty to make that distinction.
By definition, half of people are worse (however you define worse) than average. The world is truly held up by the inertia of the achievements of our betters spanning generations. I praise myself lucky every day to live in a stable western country with a heritage of centuries of liberality and thousands of models of civic courage and leadership.
If the edifice we're standing on is stable, and let's hope so, it's despite the frothing masses of idiots and vengeful iconoclasts. Yes, always a good chance I myself am one of these idiots, but nonetheless, it doesn't make the overall assessment any less true.
The inability or unwillingness to point out right from wrong is either due to a lack of courage or an absence of hubris. Both sides of the same coin. That judgement, who to entrust with the levers of society, needs to happen.
It sounds like you believe those in power are more astute or intelligent than those they exercise power over. I disagree. I don't think there is a positive correlation between a person's ability to impose their preferences on others and the quality of their preferences. If anything, I would guess there may be a negative correlation, considering the kind of person who is likely to become a successful politician. Thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor is not exactly reward in politics.
I would also bet that those who are the most interested in imposing their preferences on others probably are way less likely to listen to or attempt to understand different perspectives, leading to not even understand the views and practices they seek to ban.
> It sounds like you believe those in power are more astute or intelligent than those they exercise power over.
It's not what I said at all.
It's inevitable that the levers of power are held by some. We've been lucky in the west, all things considered. So going forward, who's it going to be? The crazies? Hope not!
I'm not sure if it's really inevitable, but if it is, I think tolerance should be their most important virtue. I think that's also what sets western rulers apart as generally higher quality. They are usually more tolerant of dissent and individual differences, compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world.
> By definition, half of people are worse (however you define worse) than average.
It's worse than that when you're trying to make decisions on behalf of everyone. It's perfectly possible for the decision that's right for you to be wrong for well more than half of the population for diverse individual reasons that they each understand and you don't.
Which is why in cases like that you defer to the individual to make their own decision, and if you think your choice is better, convince them rather than force them.
That's true in the ideal, and I 100% agree. But not in the actual real world, because, very tritely put, nobody is an island.
Individual choices always have some blast radius. Some small (what movie I'll watch), some large (what chemical to kill my weeds with), some of unknown magnitude (whether to lock up my gun in a safe or not).
That's where the trap comes in. Somebody needs to meddle at some point. Who's going to define what that point is? Who's going to define the course of action that's both virtuous for the community and for the individual. I certainly hope it's not going to be the crazies.
> That's true in the ideal, and I 100% agree. But not in the actual real world, because, very tritely put, nobody is an island.
No, it's true in the real world. That's the issue. Nobody is smarter than everybody. The consequence is that you should never prohibit someone from making a choice "for their own good" because the chances are better that they understand and act in their own best interest than you do.
Where you need some kind of government action is for externalities. Dumping industrial waste in the river might be rational from the perspective of the factory, because they don't live down river, so you need a law to protect the people who do from the factory acting in their own self-interest. You can't convince them to stop doing it with argument because safely handling the waste is more expensive for them in actual fact. You have to change the math by prohibiting the bad act.
That's still subject to the same problem. You can enact highly inefficient and ineffective environmental regulations by being lazy or uninformed or corrupt. But for that we don't have any alternative than to do the best we can.
For getting people to make better choices or hold better ideas, we do. We try to convince them. If we fail, it's more likely to be because we're wrong than they are. Forcing them should not even be attempted.
>The consequence is that you should never prohibit someone from making a choice "for their own good" because the chances are better that they understand and act in their own best interest than you do
Say that to all the OSHA regulations that were written in blood with a straight face
OSHA regulations punish employers for the actions of employees. That has its own set of problems but it's a kind of externality. The law isn't punishing the employee for refusing to wear safety equipment, it's punishing the employer for refusing to provide it.
Tangentially, what's truly the difference between banning speech and cancellation culture, I wonder?
If you can lose your job and thus your ability to provide food and shelter for yourself and your family for daring to speak up against the prevailing group think, is that much different from being sent to jail for saying the same?
Political correctnes people and "minority" interest groups have turned into the biggest bullies, it's so darned scary - I for one fear this slippery slope to a very totalitarian society.
The difference is that the government can't (yet) legally reverse your identity from your IP address and throw you in jail for having an anonymous discussion online.
But if you publicly said "my name is Joe and XYZ racist thing", people have the right to cancel you.
Historically this public/private distinction has been violated lots of times in the U.S., e.g., WWI, McCarthy. I don't think it's totalitarian; it's usually relatively limited. Most of the time, for most topics, the government leaves you alone and you can say what you damn well please.
What sort of things do you fear being bullied for saying? I can honestly say I'm not afraid of being "cancelled" for going against some sort of group think. So I'm curious what kinds of things that people that hold your opinion are afraid of being punished for saying, could you give some examples?
Yeah there's a wide range of currently contentious topics - pick either one of them.
It really is about whether people can tolerate hearing things - or even knowing they speak about them - that they don't agree with, without turning into (in the worst cases) a savage frenzy of bullies. The ability to discern nuance seems to be getting lost.
A corollary to this is that it doesn't matter how "dumb" people are or aren't, being affording democracy, free speech, etc. is better than other options.
At the end of the day, autonomy to be dumb morons, and the autonomy to not be, is what people deserve.
The problem is that inevitably "but they're morons" becomes the excuse to deny them agency and freedom. And then it's just a matter of who gets to decide who is "smart" enough to deserve freedom. Every single time we've gone down that path it's led to oppression and abuse.
I suspect currently most people still aren't morons, but the morons have been given algorithmically amplified megaphones that are drowning out all the other voices.
I almost agree. But there seems to be speech that should be forbidden, like threats of physical violence. I would argue that just the threat of physical violence changes the expected value of the future and hence can force someone to alter their behavior. I think this is one of the few cases where "your freedom stops where the freedom of the other begins" actually applies. I would be interested if you would also argue against prohibiting this kind of speech
It’s a legal decision. The case they decided on was not, “should free speech absolutism be protected by law?” The case was about what sort of speech is a type of criminal conduct. A scammer is breaking the law if he lies to you in committing a fraud. That does not mean he doesn’t have free speech. This isn’t difficult to understand for most people who aren’t being contentious in bad faith.
> The case was about what sort of speech is a type of criminal conduct.
the case was decided by the state on basis of "what sort of speech threatens the laws created by the state"
I'm pointing out the difference because science requires questioning, and free speech allows it, but the state and the mob may prefer you to not question state mandates on, oh let's say for example, covid's origins or the hastily prepared novel vaccines or whimsical ever changing masking policies and any measures of their effectiveness
> But there seems to be speech that should be forbidden, like threats of physical violence.
The thing being prohibited there isn't the speech. Prohibiting threats is really prohibiting coercion. The words of the threat are the evidence of the coercion, not the crime itself.
That's why the threat has to be credible. It's not a crime to say threatening things as an actor in a play because you're not actually threatening anyone even though the communicative aspect is the same.
> I almost agree. But there seems to be speech that should be forbidden, like threats of physical violence.
I would not ban that either. However, if you decide to make a serious threat, which takes a significant amount of energy, like doxxing and calling me on my phone to tell me you will kill me, you will have to live with the consequences of the legal system.
If you just tell me in HN comments that you will kill me and my family, I would certainly not give a damn because that's low effort.
There is a difference, I think, between consequences resulting from your actions and being prevented from taking those actions at all. With regard to speech it's not a clear line, certainly, but the distinction matters, I think.
Banning the speech doesn't prevent the violence. Frankly I'd prefer the verbal warning to the surprise attack.
I also don't like the idea of receiving multi-part prose shouted at me from the sidewalk on what someone is going to do with my entrails if they have no intention of actually trying to follow through.
I can't imagine a perfect rule regime, personally. Humans are slippery when it comes to being jerks.
Sorry you're right, I missed that (I spent all of 5 mins typing up my comment). I wasn't considering all those cases like threats, inciting riots, etc. Those are already crimes and I agree with that. What I meant was regular speech.
This, by definition, means you're not a free speech absolutist. Everyone draws the line somewhere and the current collective is that existing laws are mostly good enough, with some movements to curtail things like bullying and online hate speech (although something like requiring platforms to review every comment / beam everything to the government would not be healthy for giving society)
Could you defend why? A law that punishes or throws you in jail for speech is a restriction on free speech, regardless of how long ago some congress voted on it.
Yes, the issue is free speech. That right doesn’t give you the right to commit crimes like fraud. Nobody who self describes or is described as a free speech absolutist believes in decriminalizing fraud, sedition, perjury, etc. It means, as it’s colloquially used, someone who doesn’t believe in restricting speech in absence of one of those crimes. Our forefathers arguably fall into that group. It is literally the #1 amendment. They were Protestants. This was a, perhaps thee, defining issue for America.
> Nobody who self describes or is described as a free speech absolutist believes in decriminalizing fraud, sedition, perjury, etc. It means, as it’s colloquially used, someone who doesn’t believe in restricting speech in absence of one of those crimes.
Given almost everyone who replied, including the OP WanderPanda, assumed you meant the textbook definition of absolutism (given the discussion about harmful speech that either causes people immediate harm or spreads misinformation about things like vaccines), I don't see how this could be considered the colloquial definition of 'free speech absolutism'. Until it is, it might be more useful to explicitly state "except for speech that harms people" whenever you refer to yourself as such.
If the default understanding is a strawman of what all self-avowed free speech absolutists believe, that will favor the side of those free speech absolutists in the long run. I’m ok with that. I’ll be right now and forever, the rest of you will have to catch up later on when you discover you’ve been fighting a strawman.
Wouldn't this be "free speech absolutist relative to their countries' laws"? It seems like the moniker "free speech absolutist" is meant to be, well, absolute.
And you hit the struggle right there. Absolute is not the goal, even for free-speech absolutionists. What you define regular speech to be is different to what other people define, and while that might be okay, there is no consensus among any majority or even significant plurality of people about where the actual line between protected and non-protected speech should be.
Surely a verbal threat of violence is better than just violence?
Like, if I want to kill you, surely it’s better that I tell you, than if I just do it without warning? The expected value of the former is strictly better.
It's not either or, you get both. Violence often follows threats, and if threats are allowed you can force people to do whatever you want and just have to remind them of a few cases where actual violence was done.
My thinking is, promising something about your actions is itself an action that goes beyond mere speech. So threats of violence can be regulated, and so can contracts, product labeling, and so on.
Not the person you asked, but I would not prohibit even that. It's not that I like this, but I do not see any way to prohibit the hate speech in a way that is practical and will not be broadened and misused.
We should stop and punish actions, but the state should not punish the speech. My 2c.
I kind of agree but you can't be absolutist either. If a mob boss says "kill this guy" to one of his hitmen, and the guy kills him. Only the hitman goes to jail? The mob boss just used his freedom of speech but didn't act?
So what about the threat of violence then. If the mob boss tells the shop keeper “it’s a nice shop you have there, it would be a shame…” and the shop keeper gives him money. Is that still free speech? The mob boss didn’t act on the threat. What about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, it is just speech? The muslims who decide to act on it aren’t coerced, remunerated or affiliated to the Iranian regime. So it’s a threat of violence but you can make the case the authors aren’t involved themselves in any crime.
Those are good points! But let's consider them in a practical light.
For the mob boss, he is committing an actual crime of extortion. If a shopkeeper goes to police, the mob defense would not be "we were in our rights to threaten", but "we never said this; no idea what the shopkeeper is saying". A prosecutor would have to prove that it was indeed an extortion, but if he proves this to a jury the specific words said would be irrelevant and a first amendment claim would fail.
The same way if an insider is telling a friend about a stock merger during a quiet period, it is an actual crime. The specific words and methods do not matter.
It is tempting to restrict the speech in an attempt to minimize the evil. But giving state this power sooner or later vests it in some political clique that will use it for political suppression; original noble goals be damned. And this is almost impossible to undo.
1. Free speech generally implies speech in the public discourse, not in private.
2. Giving an order to or threatening someone is not “speech” in the sense that you are disseminating a questionable opinion: it is an action. You are quite literally _doing_ something, not just communicating e.g. don corleone’s offer one can’t refuse.
Well depends, do you want to get the mob boss on ‘hate/prohibited’ speech or for ordering a Hit?
He could just go ‘i really don’t like this guy’ and that would be understood at ‘kill him’ without him saying. Would that be ok or you still would want to prosecute him?
What if someone (person A) directly conspires with another person (person B), through dialogue and speech, to commit murder against person C, but doesn't actually commit the murder themselves? Yet they caused the murder to occur via their speech. That is an example of speech that we probably both believe should be made illegal.
The problem with free speech absolutism is its childish view of causality. It only views the end cause of a sequence of causes as bearing any responsibility. Reality doesn't work that way.
The decision to absolve person A of criminal (and often moral) culpability leads to obviously pathological outcomes in certain situations. For example, what if person A is a master manipulator, and person B has an IQ of 60. Who really has the culpability in this scenario? The free speech absolutist would still lay the blame at the feet of person B, but most reasonable people that aren't possessed by ideology would clearly identify person A as bearing a significant chunk if not most of the responsibility for the murder, even though all they did was use their speech.
Too often the speech compels the action though. If you can prevent the action in the first place maybe the loss of freedom is warranted? I don't think there's an easy answer, but I don't have to follow the thought exercise too far from purely theoretical before absolute free speech falls apart.
So if someone quite literally takes a picture of themselves holding a gun and sends it to someone with the message that they are going to kill them at a specific time, how is that not something that should be banned? What if it's a group of people? The negative emotions (read: human suffering) caused by other humans' words is real, and when the suffering is something society understands to be a natural and common reaction, why should society not curtail that speech?
I was tempted to make a finger gun at this post and take a photo to show how ridiculous this is, but I'm afraid to (deservedly) get hammered by dang for this.
Let me guess: you've never actually been credibly threatened with serious violence?
You're basically thinking like a "crunchy mom" anti-vaxxer who thinks that measles are harmless because she doesn't know anyone who's died from it.
Imagine for a moment that you're a black person living in 1920s Mississippi. You personally know people who were hanged by lynch mobs. You've read about Mary Turner who was burned alive while 8 months pregnant for daring to speak out against the lynching of her husband. And now white people tell you they'll kill you if you register to vote.
You seriously argue that banning those threats would be a worse infraction on people's freedom than allowing them?
If you don't see a way of defining hate speech in a way that won't be misused any worse that free speech is, it just means you haven't thought very hard about it, and suffer from status quo bias.
> speech that should be forbidden, like threats of physical violence
Not accusing you of doing this but... censorship is always justified through these sorts of extreme examples, but quickly devolves into banning, say, anybody who suggests that Covid originated in a lab in Wuhan. That's what makes me a free speech absolutist - if I had ever seen any evidence that actual "bad" speech (which I'm not 100% convinced includes threats of physical violence, but I can agree that such a thing could exist) could be banned without the mechanism being almost immediately abused by people with agendas.
Most people are not free speech absolutists. They may support free speech if they believe it will make the society better. It's means to an end, not the end itself. For them, the extent speech should be free is an empirical question and not a matter of principles.
From this perspective, the worst kind of speech is not hate speech or calls for violence. It's the speech that deepens political divisions and lowers trust in the society. When people see how free speech is making the society worse – when they start seeing their political opponents as their enemies – they want to police speech to make the society better. Especially the speech their enemies.
If you engage in speech like that, or if you support people who do it, you are undermining freedom of speech. You may believe you support freedom of speech, but in practice you may be opposing it.
Political speech isn’t a problem, but I object to people spreading objectively false information. Convincing people to take alternative medicine for serious diseases is just as harmful as yelling fire in a theater or hate speech the victims are simply the believers and their dependents.
This isn’t a new problem, it’s been illegal to pretend to be a doctor for decades. The difference is simply the reach we are giving charlatans.
PS: I can’t wait until a flat earthers start defunding GPS because it’s spreading lies…
> but I object to people spreading objectively false information
UFOs, MKUltra, involvement in various coups, PRISM, etc. used to be "objectively false information"... until it wasn't.
> This isn’t a new problem, it’s been illegal to pretend to be a doctor for decades. The difference is simply the reach we are giving charlatans.
Thalidomide is the famous counterexample. Just to be clear, I don't like people who give bad medical advice. But I am much more tempered when it comes to the rights of ordinary citizens to hold and discuss their personal views about industrialized medicine.
> Thank you for providing a perfect example of my point.
Thalidomide scandal is a counterexample, not an example, to your point for the following reason. You said
> Convincing people to take alternative medicine for serious diseases is just as harmful as yelling fire in a theater or hate speech the victims... I can’t wait until a flat earthers start defunding GPS because it’s spreading lies.
But here, the medical/pharma industry was wrong and the pregnant women whose children were born with birth defects would have been better off using alternative medicine (read "placebo") or no medicine at all. There are plenty of other examples of drugs where the prescribing/usage trend has changed because of newly discovered risks: barbiturates, ipecac syrup, opioids.
> rather that which amplifies misinformation is problematic
It's problematic only if the "misinformation" indeed turns out to be false. Which can never be known at the time. And -- given the historical context -- healthy skepticism of the medical/pharma industry is somewhat warranted.
So I disagree that online platforms should discriminate via the currently accepted status of the content being "info" or "misinfo". Online platforms should amplify in an impartial and evidence-based way and -- in particular -- stay out of arbitrating medical industry vs. the individual's right to be skeptical.
> women whose children where born with birth defects would have been better off using alternative medicine (read "placebo") or no medicine at all.
That’s a common misconception, some of those women would have died without it. Inflammation of the brain is as severe as it gets, unfortunately it was sold over the counter so people where taking it for less severe issues.
It took 4 years for the drug to be pulled from the market in Europe, but today it’s on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines and regularly prescribed in Europe.
Thus the reality and perception of this drug are different. Of course it shouldn’t have been sold over the counter, that was a mistake, but 10,000 birth defects is hardly the only thing it did. And in fact most pregnant women who took it didn’t have such side effects.
At the end of the day, a mistake was made and corrected by the medical/pharma industry. It's obviously an effective drug when used correctly, as you indicated. Still, ordinary people had to bear the consequences for a lifetime.
Which, to bring the discussion back to speech and your original comment, is why I'm arguing that platforms should be impartial with regard to what they amplify and let the legal system define and handle illegal speech.
The tradeoff is hundreds of thousands of people literally dying.
So, I have trouble seeing the benefits of a “neutral” stance being worth it. Shutting down all social media is probably an over reaction, but even that seems like a better option.
> but I object to people spreading objectively false information.
"But they couldnt have known back then, the facts only came out later".... This sounds good in theory, unfortunately people lie, and one mans objectively false information is another mans truth. If there was a magic 8ball that could say "true/false" to any such information, i'd agree, but there isnt.
There is information you can quantify as false. Ronald Macdonald was never president of the United States.
Many things aren’t known and plenty of things might be true, but a great deal of what gets passed around on social media isn’t ambiguous it’s just wrong.
> The difference is simply the reach we are giving charlatans.
This is the key thing people miss in the free speech debates. The reach is because it is profitable to give people that reach and host them, even if they are spreading misinformation and lies. Ban them from social media/youtube/whereever and they still have freedom of speech.
In the past, their audience would always be limited to a local network, only people they could interact with in person. It didn't make money to spread their nonsense, but now it does, and tech companies have no incentive to ban or remove profitable users.
The problem with this logic is that censorship is divisive. Whoever is being censored will resent it. They'll build their own networks and partition themselves, which only deepens the divisions.
Whereas if you debate them and they lose in front of everyone, their ideas become discredited and the viewers become inoculated because they've now heard an effective counterargument instead of encountering bad ideas for the first time in a place controlled entirely by their proponents.
> It's the speech that deepens political divisions and lowers trust in the society
So when Fauci lies on television, I can't speak out because it would deepend political divisions and lower trust in the society? That's a terrible standard. And completely subjective. This is the very definition of the absense of free speech. Free speech is the freedom to disagree, to challenge. Not to only say what is consensual.
Why do you support freedom of speech? For its own sake, or because words are actions with consequences? Is politics about being right, administering the state, or changing the society? Is "political" a negative, neutral, or positive attribute?
If it's change you're after, sometimes your best course of action is to remain silent and to leave politics to those with personalities better suited for it.
I've known enough politicians to understand that they are often better people than I am. Not everyone but many, perhaps even the majority. They can disagree in public, work together despite their differences, and go grab a beer together after work.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I don’t get free speech absolutism. In particular, there’s the old obvious conflict: most conversation takes place online nowadays, on privately owned platforms, like this one. In ideal free-speech land, these platforms are relaying our speech, and the decision to do so or not is part of their freedom of speech.
It isn’t obvious to me that there is an absolute direction. It seems like an interplay of the speech interests of various entities which may push against each other.
> the decision to do so or not is part of their freedom of speech
Well, you're not entirely wrong, but I feel perhaps like you're missing some nuance. I'm not a First Amendment attorney, but I don't think hosting is necessarily speech; and if Facebook ever claimed that their hosted content was a matter of their own speech, that could undermine their claim of immunity under Section 230. There's also the concept of private property becoming a public forum, which is well-supported by case law, but whose application is unclear in the virtual world.
Anyway, apart from all that, free speech as a value is much broader than the legal requirements of the First Amendment. I'm reminded of Alan Berg, hosting and debating bigots on his radio show, because limiting expression always ends up hurting minorities, and because suppression of such thoughts just drives it underground; sunlight is the best disinfectant.
>> In ideal free-speech land, these platforms are relaying our speech, and the decision to do so or not is part of their freedom of speech.
>> It isn’t obvious to me that there is an absolute direction. It seems like an interplay of the speech interests of various entities which may push against each other.
> Well, you're not entirely wrong, but I feel perhaps like you're missing some nuance.
I don’t think I was missing some nuance, I was describing a point where free speech absolutism misses some nuance.
> Anyway, apart from all that, free speech as a value is much broader than the legal requirements of the First Amendment. I'm reminded of Alan Berg, hosting and debating bigots on his radio show, because limiting expression always ends up hurting minorities, and because suppression of such thoughts just drives it underground; sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I do think there’s a value to open and thoughtful debate.
Free speech as a general value is good, but sort of abstract. I think open, thoughtful, good-faith debate is a closely related but slightly better value. Sometimes it is fine to not host a discussion if one of the parties is just there to spew propaganda for example.
Edit: removed a bit about Alan Berg, wasn’t familiar with his story. I don’t have anything to say other than, that’s just tragic.
> the decision to do so or not is part of their freedom of speech.
If this is true, then they should also face liability for that speech. As it is "platforms" are given the rights of free speech with none of the responsibility.
Personally, I don't think that platforms are people and thus don't have the same rights to speech which is why we allow them to escape some of the responsibility. There are big benefits to allowing platforms to do some level of moderation without accepting full liability for all speech on their platform. However, in exchange these platforms lose the right to arbitrarily ban and censor people.
> If this is true, then they should also face liability for that speech. As it is "platforms" are given the rights of free speech with none of the responsibility.
It is not true, we don’t live in a free speech absolutist world. I’m pointing out that free speech absolutism doesn’t obviously point in the direction of maximum free speech for the individual. In a free speech absolutist world, there’s no liability to worry about in the first place.
> Personally, I don't think that platforms are people and thus don't have the same rights to speech which is why we allow them to escape some of the responsibility.
Platforms aren’t people, but they are owned and operated by people, who have the same free speech rights as everybody else. It seems like this ought to include the owner’s right to selectively publish content they’ve been sent.
I’m not a free speech absolutist, and so I resolve this issue by saying, yeah, free speech absolutism is dumb, it is fine if we protect some types of speech, and selectively acknowledge the right of platform-owners to not broadcast some types of speech. There are competing interests and navigating them requires getting into the weeds. Unfortunately, this doesn’t have quite the moral certainty of “free speech absolutism.”
> In a free speech absolutist world, there’s no liability to worry about in the first place.
Says who? While it is an admittedly poor label, there are few, if any "free speech absolutists" who advocate removing all limits on speech. Usually they would accept some level of law restricting fraud or perjury.
> I’m not a free speech absolutist
Neither am I, I think it is a stupid label.
> It is fine if we protect some types of speech, and selectively acknowledge the right of platform-owners to not broadcast some types of speech.
There is a very large difference between allowing (or requiring) companies to censor specific types of speech in an open and content neutral fashion, and giving companies carte blanche to not broadcast anything they want without any legal responsibility because of those companies "free speech rights". There are of course, also numerous shades of grey between these extremes.
The "you have to let companies censor whoever they want because that is their right" argument is logically inconsistent.
I, on the contrary, believe that free speech absolutism is morally and intellectually lazy, naive, and wrong. Banning some speech is in fact necessary to preserve freedom.
Speech has real consequences, otherwise why would you consider it important to defend? Hate speech is a real problem. It is poisonous to society and results in real people getting killed for real. And no, the "marketplace of ideas" where you offer your own opinion to disprove lies is a hopelessly naive concept. That's not how the world works. In reality, people prefer to stay in echo chambers. And fascists laugh about how you're working towards making it easier for them to abolish all freedoms.
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
And no, there is no slippery slope here. Many European countries have well-designed, robust hate speech bans that have worked well for decades to protect freedom against those who would destroy it.
How does one definite hate speech? Who gets to decide? That's my entire problem with this philosophy. Some one or some group feel holy enough to be the arbiters.
A lot of religious texts, beliefs, and/or sermons would probably be considered hate speech to a not insignificant number of people.
How does one definite hate speech? Who gets to decide? That's my entire problem with this philosophy. Some one or some group feel holy enough to be the arbiters.
Yes, real life is hard and complicated and there's no easy way to decide it. We collectively do the best we can and keep trying to improve. That's just reality. That's why free speech absolutism is naïve- it appeals to our desire for one, simple, always enforceable rule but it's not the way the world works that one simple rule is always the best outcome.
The issue is, that collectively deciding what speech to ban, in a democratic manner, requires discussing that speech openly and publicly. But if the speech is illegal, that discussion can't happen. It's a Catch-22; censorship is incompatible with democracy!
> But if the speech is illegal, that discussion can't happen.
What kind of argument is that ? How do you think they trial people for hate speech ?
Murder is illegal you can still talk about it just don't plot an assassination. Being a nazi is illegal in germany, you can still talk about nazis and nazism
It's not a banned list fo words that immediately put you in jail for uttering them
No, that problem is quite simple to solve by designing the laws appropriately. For example, in the German criminal code, the first basic prerequisite for the applicability of the hate speech ban is that it occurs "in a manner suited to causing a disturbance of the public peace", which does not apply when talking about it in legal debates.
Exactly. Everyone acting like we have to have the perfect, be-all-end-all solution to everything or nothing. Our society evolves over time, slowly getting better (and hopefully not regressing).
I don’t think, “it’s hard” is a justifiable reason for an idea to be wrong, so I’m not sure the fact that having a fair way of discerning hate speech is hard means that we shouldn’t discern hate speech.
It's not hard, it's quite literally impossible.
If there's a person who believes God is real, and the Bible is real, and homosexuals are sinners... and another person who is homosexual and doesn't believe in God, where can there be compromise? I'm neither, just looking at this from above.
The best you can do is disenfranchising anything less than the majority's opinion.
I think the current US model works well. Free speech, unless it's going to lead to immediate harm and such.
Anything more than that is a step into authoritarianism, and where I fear we're headed. The private sector has already tried to be said arbiters, so it's interesting to see where this ends up.
What you claim to be impossible is in fact routinely and successfuly done. Because the point of hate speech bans is not at all to police opinions, it's about making sure everyone can live in peace no matter what opinion anyone holds.
* believing that God is real, and the Bible is real, and homosexuals are sinners is completely outside the scope of the law, since it only concerns speech, not beliefs.
* saying "God is real, and the Bible is real, and homosexuals are sinners" is also not affected (this is dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, frequently stated in public) because no matter whether you believe it to be true or not, it does not imply anyone should do anything in particular, and thus does not affect the public peace.
* saying "God hates homosexuals and they will burn in hell", still the same, what God does in hell is outside the scope of the law.
* saying "Every god-fearing man should do god's will and kill homosexuals on sight" in public in front of a crowd - BEEEP, BEEP, BEEP, we got ourselves a statement suited to causing a disturbance of the public peace, go to jail for between three months and five years.
* saying "People should not let homosexuals into their homes" - not affected, whom people let into your private homes is not a matter of public peace.
* saying "Companies should not employ homosexuals" - again not affected for the same reason, although companies who actually refuse to employ homosexuals would be in violation of an entirely different (anti-discrimination) law.
So you see: it's not actually that difficult.
> I think the current US model works well. Free speech, unless it's going to lead to immediate harm and such. Anything more than that is a step into authoritarianism
Yeah but all of those things said that you say are apparently okay can lead to declining mental health in gay individuals, who eventually kill themselves after years or decades of mental abuse.
>How does one definite hate speech? Who gets to decide?
Parliaments and courts.
See the battle-tested European hate speech laws I mentioned, e.g. section 130 of the criminal code of Germany:
"Whoever, in a manner suited to causing a disturbance of the public peace,
1. incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origin, against sections of the population or individuals on account of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or sections of the population, or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them or
2. violates the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning or defaming one of the aforementioned groups, sections of the population or individuals on account of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or sections of the population"
Note especially how the first sentence is a pretty tight restriction. Private speech cannot be affected. Academic texts are pretty safe. Anything arguing for moderation and careful consideration of facts is easily defensible.
And how can the parliaments, and the people who elected them, openly discuss what speech to ban, if the speech in question is illegal? Censorship is inherently anti-democratic.
Those laws you have the temerity to call “battle-tested” regularly lead to the violation of individual right by way of both arrest and prosecution for harmless and necessary speech.
What does a Daily Mail (already suspect source) article about a UK musician in the UK have to do with the statute as written in Germany as it applies to Germans? Right? The previous comment was talking about German law and jurisprudence and its effect (or lack thereof) on free speech?
As for the Daily Mail, you should be cautious in your commitment to its veracity and its applicability to an American audience. For example, the word “arrest” does not mean what you think it does in UK English. I think you are confusing it with the word used in the scenario you expected: “charged”. An arrest simply means that the police have started asking questions, and are notifying the subject that their questions and any answers can be admissible in court.
British police reality is not the same as in a US TV series.
…says the guy who fails to recognize that the musician was never taken into custody or charged with a crime. Some folks made an accusation (over a decade ago, by the way). The police followed up on the call by asking the guy questions about the incident. Literally just talked to him.
And then…? Nothing. No charges filed. No detention. No indictment. Nothing. The matter was dropped.
Anyone can accuse anyone of anything, both in the US and the UK. That doesn't mean when the police follow up, the accused go straight to jail and stand before a judge.
Now, once more, UK laws have NOTHING to do with German laws, especially after the UK withdrew from the EU. So unless you've got an example from Germany or at least France that demonstrates a legitimate chilling effect on free speech due to hate speech laws present in those countries, you're indeed confused as to what it means.
Fun fact: Europe is not a monolith, and the UK has no prohibition against Nazi iconography and rhetoric, unlike for example France and Germany.
As opposed to the US where cops were called on folks BBQing in a public park (where BBQing is allowed)? And the US lacks hate speech regulations. So… no difference? When someone calls with some BS, the police are usually obligated to follow up. Now if you want to discuss how there should be penalties for wasting everyone's time with frivolous or hateful calls to the police, we can discuss that.
> I'm sorry, is the UK not in Europe now?
For the purposes of examining hate speech regulations, no, it's not. Different currency. Separate economic zone. Limited to no hate speech regulation especially as it regards Nazi/fascism.
The US and Mexico are on the same continent as well. Closer in fact due to the huge shared border and no large salt water channel between. Should we lump the laws of Mexico and the US together haphazardly as well? No? Then why would you automatically lump the UK and Germany together like that when they are in fact quite distinct entities?
And how do you define hate speech? Speech that you don’t like? That offends you? It’s an extremely slippery slope until you don’t get to say what you want because someone with more power than you decided it’d be “hate speech”
> And no, there is no slippery slope here. Many European countries have well-designed, robust hate speech bans that have worked well for decades to protect freedom against those who would destroy it.
The country where I live only banned hate speech in 2017, and I think the world was fine before it. The issue is not that we need more laws to ban any kind of speech, but we need to actually enforce the existing laws instead. Before 2017 we only had a law for “instigation of the people”, which worked fine and did not ban "hate speech" per se.
> Many European countries have well-designed, robust hate speech bans that have worked well for decades to protect freedom against those who would destroy it.
And we know this because we stopped anyone who disagreed with the system from talking... oh wait lets try again: And we know this because anyone who disagrees is a lousy criminal thats in jail or silencing themselves for fear of such
I very strongly think that you do not know what you are talking about. And this is because the regimes around Europe is lying at all times. We are the good guys, we would NEVER abuse, NEVER EVER.
> It is poisonous to society and results in real people getting killed for real.
On the contrary, Twitter is full of people claiming this or that speech is getting people killed, with absolutely no evidence.
There are a growing number of people who truly and deeply believe exposure to opinions they disagree with, or even empirical data, is "violence" against them or even "genocide".
Making these claims is a great strategy for forcibly silencing anyone who disagrees with you.
I was too unequivocal in my claim, point taken. Clearly there is some speech that makes violence more likely.
I still believe that claims of harm and violence are commonly made against speech that is not promoting harm or violence, in an attempt to censor that speech. The proportion of each I don't know, just that I firmly believe both exist.
by this line of reasoning, what would happen if a group of hardcore communists decided that merely talking about how free markets for AI research is a good thing is something that they cannot tolerate, and begin killing people. Do we now forbid this speech too, as CLEARLY it is getting people killed?
I think it's more the fact that treating the Nazi's well and trying to avoid a violent conflict didn't mean that they would try to avoid it on their end. Cede them an inch and they'll commit genocide.
It is in fact a very accurate description. Goebbels spelled it out quite explicitly. Another quote from him in 1928:
"We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. [...] We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we. You are not among your friends any longer. You will not enjoy having us among you."
Goebbels is an unreliable narrator who had strong incentive to promote the idea that freedom of speech makes a nation weak.
The problem is not that the Nazis were allowed to speak (in fact, hate speech against Jews was often punishable under German law and Goebbels was imprisoned twice for it), but that they were allowed to be violent with no real consequences. Hitler only served eight months for his violent coup attempt in 1923.
Communication is a two way street. Speaking and listening. I'm not sure if free speech is currently restricted so much as listening is restricted. Censorship could be said to place limitations on both.
Free speech absolutism - are you going to force people to listen? Who has the right to decide what content is available, and where? Are media platforms then compelled to not de-platform? I am literally censoring the TV when I turn it off. You think that's wrong?
Don't understand what you mean by free speech absolutism, concept doesn't make too much sense to me.
Have you ever been a target of hate speech? Have any of your friends?
You act like everyone is super strong and can deal with hate speech. As if a gay or trans teen can always handle being told again & again that they're a disgusting monster, that they don't belong in this world and that people like them should die. Not everyone is strong enough to refute these opinions with their own. And then they kill themselves.
> Some people may believe hate speech but I think that's a reflection of who they are, ie. they will probably believe it with or without the convincing. I personally believe that most people are smarter than this
The genocides of recent history debunk the idea that people are "smart" enough to dismiss hate propagandists. Also, it doesn't have anything to do with being smart, because lots of "smart" people also join hate-motivated movements. They do it because hate serves their inner needs, the same reason that so-called "not-smart" people do it.
Believing in people's better angels is great and all, but outside of contexts where they feel safe, humans don't instinctively love or even tolerate their fellow humans, especially when their fears and insecurities are targeted.
Fear, intolerance, and hate are unfortunately much simpler and more default than nuance and tolerance. That is why hate speech is inordinately effective compared to tolerance-speech.
> it allows the most amount of information to be passed back and forth
It also allows for the most amount of noise, and there are tons of people who don't want to spend their lives filtering through a bunch of noise produced by bad actors and would rather trust someone reputable to do it for them.
I suspect the theory is if one controls others' speech, thereby one also controls their thoughts. Is this really true? How many people adjust their speech to fit in, and change their thoughts to match?
and then a few moments later they might concievably go "oh wait, this was simply unprovoked violence, and I am now going to be taking steps to protect myself and others from this threat to society"
Right. But curiously enough, advertising, broadly speaking, tries to either 1) make you lust for something the advertised good/service claims to provide, or 2) makes you fear something the advertised good/service claims to mitigate. I'm yet to see any advertisement try to get you to buy something under threat of repercussions, or threat of being dehumanized. This last category is what GP is asking about, so advertising can serve at best as weak evidence that it doesn't work (or else it would be used in ads).
It's push vs. pull. Ads pull you by creating a want (either lust-driven or fear-driven) and conveniently pointing to something that can fulfill it. The followers of oppressive and hateful ideologies instead push you to do something or adopt some belief, under threat of being labeled the enemy should you not comply.
Put another way, the difference between this threat-based persuasion and fear-based advertising is that the ads are just bullshitting you into believing you're in some danger, so you'll buy the advertiser's "solution", while threat-based approach is that the other party will put you in danger unless you comply with them.
That's the exact kind of thinking used by various oppressive and totalitarian movements and governments in the past. Sooner or later, it ends in physical violence.
It's just sad that those self-proclaimed anti-oppression activists don't see they're using the very same methods for their supposed goals.
Yes, as the lies build upon lies and more and more people flock to enter the parasitic class by corruption instead of being part of the host class, the inevitable end is war or one-sided killing.
Since you cannot shine truth on a small lie without exposing bigger lies, the lies snowball into unmanageable levels, inhibiting all creativity, science and business. This happens in any corrupt people, even without any violence or even threat of violence. But the violence is inevitable in the end.
What happens is they go underground and push back that way. In the USSR the citizens would declare their fervent loyalty to communist ideology and by night they buy Adidas black market shoes for their kids.
> I personally believe that most people are smarter than this
You've grossly overestimated the willingness (not the capacity) of people to reason and gravely underestimated the power of propoganda.
Everything in history from religion to politics, from sports to war, yes even the history of science, points to the capacity of humans to willfully ignore knowledge.
What about other rights that are in direct contradiction with freedom of speech?
Take, for example, privacy. In a free speech absolutist world, nobody can ever have privacy, for anything one says in confidence can be repeated for all to hear. Or I could completely doxx you, and you'd have no recourse.
I think you're misinterpreting the motivations to oppose hate speech.
Thinking it "might convince stupid people of wrongs" is something we might think of as a trope, but if you think about it it's an elitist fallacy.
It stems purely from the idea that I, smart and educated as I am, must preserve the common idiot from making mistakes.
The reason it's a debatable topic is much more banal und real: It's doing harm and impacting the lifes of the minorities targeted by such hate speech. No need for gullible fools to mistake it for a rallying call and do physical or otherwise subsequent harm. Hate speech is very well suited to hurt, oppress, silence and alienate all by itself.
So yes, free speech must prevail any counterargument! But so does the moral principles not to hurt others, and the logical necessity that my freedom ends when it would diminish the freedom of others.
And freedom of speech does not mean right to threaten others indemnity. If it would, that would do nothing but enable this very freedom of expressions downfall.
> There is no system better than complete free speech, because it allows the most amount of information to be passed back and forth and gives people the opportunity to decide for themselves.
I used this think this, but then I figured out that I live in a world where I'm not always welcome by the "majority" and have seen first hand how these things can go sideways. Now I view this attitude as a privilege and that it typically comes from someone whose rights aren't all that impacted by the tyranny of the majority.
> but then I figured out that I live in a world where I'm not always welcome by the "majority" and have seen first hand how these things can go sideways.
and if they cannot say what they think, they will simply welcome you more?
Amazing leap you made there. But by all means, let's let people run rampant and not have any boundaries and then shrug when violence happens against minorities.
Is there really any such thing as free speech absolutism? Let’s say there are no rules about what you can say on Twitter.
Carol tweets about not liking video games. In response 100s of trolls/bots start threatening to rape her. Alice sees the threats and decides not to tweet her own opinions about video games for fear of being on the receiving end of that vitriol.
In my opinion, at this point Alice’s freedom of speech is being impeded.
You could argue that she’s choosing not to speak because she doesn’t want to deal with the consequences but how is that different than not shouting fire in a theatre because you don’t want to be arrested?
Every society decides what speech is acceptable and what isn’t. And then enforces that via social norms, laws and regulations.
Personally I’d rather live in a society where people are able to share their opinions without being threatened. I think that society is actually maximizing the flow of information while a society focused on “No rules free speech absolutism” is simply delegating the choice of who is free to speak to mob rule.
TLDR - free speech absolutism sounds simple until you think about who is actually free to speak/which voices are heard on platforms that have no rules
> Some people may believe hate speech but I think that's a reflection of who they are, ie. they will probably believe it with or without the convincing.
I just don't know where you got this idea. "Hate speech" isn't just a vague, negative sentiment towards universally recognizable characteristics. It constitutes particular themes and narratives regarding identities constructed arbitrarily out of a constellation of human characteristics that mean nothing outside their context. The absurd story, for example, that Jews bake their Matzah bread out of Christian childrens' blood isn't something that would ever be reproduced on a desert island, any more than it would be reproduced by a thousand monkeys hacking away at typewriters. It's a particular trope invented by a particular powerbase (Christian princes) for economic purposes (maintaining Feudalism despite plebian uprisings).
No one would "probably believe it... without the convincing," because it has to be invented first, and then it has to be introduced to the milieu. The same is true of basically any story or narrative.
Here is where you might be right: maintaining the political economy of medieval Europe necessitated some kind of blood libel, and the Jewish communities were a conveniently vulnerable minority. So at that point, Christian princes needed no convincing themselves, and "that's a reflection of who they are:" Christian, and princes. (I leave it to the reader, as an exercise, to determine whether it was more material that they were Christian, or that they were princes.)
Here is where that's limited: Christian princes do not, themselves, need to believe the libel. They do need, however, their economic powerbase to believe it. And their economic powerbase of Christian commoners has no reason to think up the blood libel themselves when the facts of their exploitation under feudalism ought to cause them to resent, primarily, princes.
I am not suggesting that "complete free speech" is infeasible, or undesirable, but, to reiterate, I simply don't understand where you got the idea that people all over the world somehow spontaneously, perhaps genetically, simultaneously author with identical wording, the very particular tropes that constitute hate speech.
What does modern debates on free speech in the US have to do with Jews in medieval Europe? I’m struggling with the connection here because it almost seems like you’re implying that the proponents of unfettered free speech are coming from a place of some sort of generational pattern of blood libel and free speech is just an excuse, but that can’t be what you’re saying can it?
So if people are handed coolaid and are stupid enough to drink it there should be no burden of responsibility placed on the community? No regulation banning the handing out of said coolaid? I don’t want to live in such a society. I think most reasonable people want commonsense restrictions in place for everyone’s safety.
Free speech absolutionists can try their petri dish ideas, I’d just prefer they do it far away from the rest of us trying to live in a decent (and improving) society.
Safety is often the first reason given when removing freedoms. It would be a fallacy to compare a poisonous coolaid or more precisely, Flavor-Aid, to speech even when yelling fire.
What about: yelling "fire" in a crowded room, deliberately lying on the internet in a way that leads to deaths (ex. 4chan's "how to grow crystals" post), targeting kids or at risk groups with ads or content for things like gambling, alcohol, etc., calling for someone's death, posting instructions for making a bomb?
Yep, that’s pretty dangerous, and people could get hurt. That shouldn’t be protected by the First Amendment.
Oh yeah, and protesting the draft. That’s pretty dangerous too. Government military recruitment is a necessity when we’re at war, and advocating against it is tantamount to sedition and espionage. It’s basically the same situation as shouting “fire” in a crowded room, and should not be protected by the First Amendment.
Now, I don’t actually believe this—I’m merely sharing how the US Supreme Court used exactly the same analogy you did, in 1919. Schenck v. United States is the most important use of the “‘fire’ in a crowded theater” analogy in history, because it shows how, in practice, such common‐sense ideas actually get used by the powerful.
At that point, why bother to allow gambling or alcohol a place in society. If people truly have no self determination, why not let a state or federal agency dictate all of their rights and wrongs. Eat only what's good for you because if it isn't healthy and slimming, you can't say anything about it because obese people are an "at risk" population. No more addictive medications of any kind. Doctors aren't agents of the state and couldn't possibly be as educated as a government representative, like your congressman. And intimating that your government officials lied to the public at large would be strictly verboten, I'm sure.
Okay let's say you're right: no one can really define "at risk" so that's fine. What about kids? Can I seek out kids online and directly engage them in their DMs and tell them how awesome gambling, drugs, and guns are? I have links to all these sites (and phone numbers for totally reputable guys) they should remember for when they turn 18 that I will send them.
Drugs ate pushed on television stations a hundred times a day. There are so many commercials for drugs, it's disheartening. There are adds to be more beautiful, thinner, more muscular with drugs and products that promise all of these things. Syrupy sugar drink commercials and fast food restaurants are plastered on TV and print all day, everyday. All for the kids to see.
Don't forget the evils of "harmful lyrics" that Tipper Gore saved us from. That was teaching children forbidden concepts like inner city music and dangerous metal music.
It seems fundamentally it comes down to whether or not speech can directly cause harm. Canonical example of yelling fire and all that. But lately it’s also been about misinformation, lies etc. should for example defamation be a thing, or fraud etc.
Misinformation does not directly cause harm. The actions or inactions of those so affected is the thing that causes the harm; misinformation thus indirectly causes harm.
We do regularly allow perjury, as a matter of tradition and practice in the US. Almost every judicial search or seizure order issued is issued following law enforcement perjury (sometimes trivial, sometimes major). I have yet to see a search warrant application that does not contain falsehoods (each and every one sworn under penalty of perjury), and I only have experience with ones that have been signed and issued.
Not to mention there may be no mechanism to bring the perjurer to justice. For instance, I was served a search warrant on the basis a DOG accused me of wrongdoing. How do you accuse a dog of perjury? Not to mention it was an anonymous, unnamed dog and the person who allegedly listened to the dog was also unnamed on the warrant, so it was 3rd degree interspecies hearsay.
I think that's really easy to believe in - when you're not at risk in any kind of way.
I mean, if you're a white guy, what do you give a fuck about someone turning America into a white ethnostate? Sure, theoretically, it's morally bad, but you're not really going to be directly affected.
If you're not trans, being characterized as a groomer pedophile has no effect at all to you.
I think it's easy to take a stand in favor of free speech when speech is only speech, but that's a remarkably naive and gullible viewpoint to have. Do you think white supremacists that lynch black people don't use hate speech beforehand and talk about exterminating non-whites beforehand?
"But that's violence. That's diferent.", you might say. How do you think these people meet each other and collaborate with each other and normalize this kind of behavior? Through 'free speech'.
Man, I hate doing this, but im going to use identity politics because its fun to use it against the people pushing this shenanigans.
So as someone who is Asian, who thought that claiming the lab leak theory to be racist against Asians to be incredibly stupid, and as someone who has been on the receiving end of multiple insults related to COVID and possibly one violent interaction, I am still a Free Speech Absolutist.
My family knows what its like to live in a world where speech is censored, not by the government, but by everyone you know for saying something out of line with the official narrative. I despise the fact that the current left seems to be all ok with living in a authoritative world where everyone is expected to socially push the current narrative and suppress dissent. The worst part is that since its not directly coming from the Govt, its used as an excuse to continue to push these anti-liberal agendas.
I don't care if I'm on the receiving end of threats or actual violence because of free speech. Giving up your rights due to being scared is cowardice and allows actual authoritarians to take over your mind.
> I don't care if I'm on the receiving end of threats or actual violence because of free speech. Giving up your rights due to being scared is cowardice and allows actual authoritarians to take over your mind.
And assuming that people of color should be the victims of violence because you, personally, aren't concerned with violence is selfish and narcissistic.
The other side of that coin (which is far more prevalent historically) is that speech restrictions are used to stifle dissent and repress minority groups. I.e. illegalizing anti-war or minority rights speech.
You make the mistake of assuming that those in power will only be preventing speech you agree with rather than muzzling you.
Honestly, I would prefer that over the ambiguity. I'd much rather live in a state in America where being a Nazi is illegal with the side effect of knowing, unequivocally, that I need to leave another state because my existence is in peril.
So are you saying we should outlaw letting people gather and say disagreeable/racist things privately among each other? Boy that escalated pretty quickly. What's next? Should we outlaw people thinking racist and hateful things as well?
Actually there are a lot of black supremacists etc, people who absolutely hate me and want my whole race to die and I'll still listen to their podcasts and stuff just because it's something interesting. People who aren't scared to be labelled extreme are usually saying the interesting stuff that needs to be said. You should stop taking everything so serious and just go with the flow
> people who absolutely hate me and want my whole race to die
What's really interesting about that is I couldn't find one bit of audio that came anywhere near what you're characterizing. Even in the one episode of Underground Dialogue Podcast where they're talking about black secession.
I typed in 'white supremacist podcast'. It took a while to actually get a link because I'm pretty sure Google is censoring the results. (Go, Google!) But here's what I listened to:
I'm obviously just skimming through it but already just from the show notes we have anti-semitsm ('Jewish sex-trafficking money').
Hitting in random points. 22 mins in, nothing. 64 mins "KAnye was right about the jews. tell all black people" 1:51 nothing 3:12 a brief mention of a podcast that I looked up that talks about 'anti-White brainwashing' 4:19 'Columbus Jewish news'
Let's compare that with Hotep because Hoteps in general, should be theoretically the most anti-white podcast out of all the ones you mentioned.
First hit: nothing
58 mins: nothing
1h39: mysogyny but within the context of a 'nigga with a pussy'
2h17m - talking about Andrew Tate and Greta Thurnberg; possibly a mysogony subtext
2h43m - anti-Police
> I think it's easy to take a stand in favor of free speech when speech is only speech, but that's a remarkably naive and gullible viewpoint to have. Do you think white supremacists that lynch black people don't use hate speech beforehand and talk about exterminating non-whites beforehand?
What's naïve is thinking that they would stop the lynching if someone told them they weren't allowed to talk about it. It would make zero difference.
> "But that's violence. That's diferent.", you might say. How do you think these people meet each other and collaborate with each other and normalize this kind of behavior? Through 'free speech'.
Conspiracy to commit crimes is illegal for a number of reasons and covers this problem adequately without needing to infringe on speech per se. But you should also remember that it is not words that kill people, it is the actual violence that follows that kills people, and that kind of violence is already illegal.
Plus, racist speech is how we find out who the racists are. David Duke basically outed himself as a Klan member by making racist political speeches in public, for example.
The problem is that these hate movements aren't necessarily linearly correlated to the level of free speech. If there is less free speech, then indirect speech, euphemisms, and dog whistles are used. It doesn't stop it. Once any rule is made, it can be worked around. Even worse, the additional rules often anger and energize these people due to a perceived feeling of persecution. And lastly, the rules always get misinterpreted and abused to shut down significant amounts of speech that should not have been censored.
Unless you can prove with certainty that free speech causes an increase in violence and death, then it's better to default to openness.
The KKK and white supremacists marched in their clown parades regularly for decades and we laughed at them. Is it a coincidence that their movements grew significantly with the amplification of messages against them and social media censorship against them. Various right wing figures used this as leverage to increase their virulence.
Back in the 80s and 90s, we laughed at the KKK. Anyone remember Bustin' Loose with Richard Pryor? Or when Michael Moore got gay black cheerleaders to cheer on a KKK march in some town?
At some point, people decided that we should fear the KKK and white supremacists, and that gave the racists an enormous amount of power even though their numbers are dwindling. I think the world was better when we mocked them and belittled them.
But now the strategy is to call anyone a racist, which is self-defeating and something I vehemently disagree with.
And here's [1] an example of the moment you can see a person double down and becoming even more racist due to being attacked. I don't really like Scott but he didn't strike me as a white supremacist until this comment by him.
I mean, that's a pretty common narrative. "They were being ATTACKED for being racist so they became MORE RACIST." And?
There's this black guy. They did this documentary on him a while back. He went and befriended KKK members and skinheads. Through his individual action, he was able to get people away from white nationalism. White liberals absolutely love him. They point at him as an example of what all people of color should aspire to. Turning hate to friendship through personal interaction.
(Speaking generally, not to you specifically.) The thing is, as a person of color, the onus isn't on me to convert your racist grandparent or uncle from being a racist piece of shit. Fuck them. That puts me in the subordinate position of having to placate a white supremacist and that, in of itself, is fucking white supremacy. Fuck. That.
When you see videos like this, imagine if something similar was made about black people? If I were white, I would be extremely offended if anyone made a video like this about me.
I think the story of Daryl Davis is exactly the point of free speech. If it were up to the fascist liberals, those KKK people would be cancelled into oblivion. But Daryl Davis reached out and talked to them, and through the power of his love, changed hundreds of people. He didn't build up more divisions, he broke them down. This is what Free Speech is all about.
> The thing is, as a person of color, the onus isn't on me to convert your racist grandparent or uncle from being a racist piece of shit. Fuck them. That puts me in the subordinate position of having to placate a white supremacist and that, in of itself, is fucking white supremacy. Fuck. That.
> Is it a coincidence that their movements grew significantly with the amplification of messages against them and social media censorship against them. Various right wing figures used this as leverage to increase their virulence.
Or did we just have a black president and a political party that leaned into white supremacy dog whistles?
I think it's the opposite. It's the people who are at the greatest risk of violence who have the most to fear from censorship. If you are anywhere near powerful enough to commit genocide, you are also powerful enough to ensure that it's your opponents and not you who are censored.
Consider what kind of books are being banned from American libraries. It's books portraying trans and gender-nonconforming people in a positive or neutral light, not books calling them "groomer pedophiles". It's books telling American history from the perspective of America's exploited minorities, not books calling for ethnic genocide or pretending the US actually upheld the principles of freedom and equality it was allegedly founded on.
To support censorship, especially state censorship, is to support the powerful in imposing their version of the truth on everyone else.
I mean, if banning Nazi'ism is considered 'state censorship' then yes, I wholeheartedly support state censorship. If that's 'imposing someone's truth on everyone else', so be it.
Even if you don't value free speech per se, you should recognize the danger of allowing the most powerful to decide what is true or acceptable. You could well find yourself on the opposite side of state censorship. There is no guarantee that Nazis will not again take advantage of a population that is used to follow the state's lead, this time to silence you, or that another group won't do the same. Normalizing such deference to the state is inherently dangerous, and a gift to whoever aspires to take control of it in the future.
It's frankly incomprehensible to me how anyone who doesn't support totalitarianism can look at history (or present day) and dare to normalize any amount of state control over speech.
> There is no guarantee that Nazis will not again take advantage of a population that is used to follow the state's lead, this time to silence you, or that another group won't do the same.
And that's fine. This argument keeps being brought up over and over again, but if this happened, nothing would please more because it would remove the ambiguity from the situation.
> It's frankly incomprehensible to me how anyone who doesn't support totalitarianism can look at history (or present day) and dare to normalize any amount of state control over speech.
I mean, the fact that you can look at The Holocaust or Jim Crow and think that any amount of tolerance should be shown to Nazi'ism or white supremacy is beyond incomprehensible to me. But that's the issue.
For a certain type of person, any legislation curtailing 'free speech', even if that is done to stamp out white supremacy is an existential threat to freedom in America.
But to people of color, allowing white supremacists to spout intolerance publicly with no repercussions (other than maybe getting 'cancelled') is an existential threat to THEIR freedom in America.
I don’t think this is considering the full picture. It would be great if we could magically eliminate nazi ideology, but is the best way to do that really to hand the government extra censorship powers? Do you think the government is going to use that power to benefit the minority groups that need defending, or to advance their own agenda? Even if you have the right elected officials in place to censor things the way you want, what if the next round of elections gives that power to the other team?
Dan Carlin had a great example of this when there was lots of strife between MAGA and antifa groups. Lots of antifa people were calling for censorship of nazi speech while carrying communist flags. Carlin pointed out that if you give the government the power to eliminate that far-right speech, your far-left speech is next to the chopping block.
now I might be naive, but I would tend to think that if I hated someone, for whatever reason, and he lobbied the biggest organized crime syndicate(government) to restrict my ability to talk about my hatred with anyone else, it might just be that I choose to talk with my fists instead of lips.
Surely you cannot think restricting speech helps you in any way? Do you think it helps turn those that dislike you on your side?
> Surely you cannot think restricting speech helps you in any way? Do you think it helps turn those that dislike you on your side?
I think it removes the ambiguity. If you find laws that prohibit someone from being a literal Nazi disagreeable and would choose not to live in a state because of it because of 'free speech', that's fine. Just as I'd be fine for not living in Florida or Mississippi for the inverse of that reason.
People's right to free speech should be defended, for instance no more Galileo being silenced by the Church because empirical evidence fractured their fragile beliefs.
But at the same time, people can't just say _anything_. If society was still allowed to be legally publicly homophobic, I'd still be told to my face by various people that I'm a: monster, pedophile, going to hell, sissy and all manner of cruel insults & jokes just because I'm gay. That wears someone down, after a while.
While I agree with this, it's sadly a game theoretic reasoning, that is to say, fearful, relativistic, utilitarian.
Again, not being dismissive at all, but it says something about the state of our thinking and quality of our ideals, when we cannot make arguments on absolute grounds anymore. Or if we do, they seem quaint, passe, naive.
This has always been my view of speech. I believe that every human being has The right to speak their mind without fear of government reprisal.
I wish it also meant a right to speak your mind free from the judgment of your employer, or university, but that is a slippery slope. Just because I will defend a person's right to speak their mind no matter what, does not mean I have to listen to it, or agree with it.
I wrestle with this, because if I had an opinion, pick any social issue, I don't think an employer should be allowed to fire me because of that.
However, we have freedom of association, and a business may not want to associate with someone who has opinions counter to their own.
> However, I understand we have freedom of association, and a business may not want to associate with someone who has opinions counter to their own.
That's really the heart of it, isn't it? Forget employer for a moment - if you said something really offensive to one of your friends, and they decided to stop being your friend, you'd be upset, but should they be allowed to no longer be your friend? Of course they should. People get to choose with whom they associate, and companies (who are not people, but that's a different post) get to choose who they hire, because those people are a reflection of them. Freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences.
How far do you take freedom of association though? Should a company be able to discriminate based on race? Refuse to hire women unless they have sex with the CEO? Etc…
Of course we should not allow discrimination based on race, but there are other laws and protections in place to address that. And if a person of any race should start saying wild and discriminatory things, their employer should then be able to deal with it.
But that's the point. Employers are already quite limited in how they can disassociate with employees.
You can divorce someone because they didn't want to have sex with you. And you can decide not to be friends with people of a certain race. But employers do not have those rights under US law.
So it would also seem fine if you also couldn't be fired due to political beliefs. We already have a framework for dealing with these issues.
I've always thought the whole 'protected categories' thing was made a little odd by the inclusion of religion, given the obvious nexus between religious beliefs and political positions, e.g. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Political opinions receiving protection iff colored by a religious belief is pretty asymmetric. To maintain logical consistency, either both or neither.
Just to be clear, the implications of what you're suggesting would be the immediate legalization of anti-Semitism in the workplace. Are you sure that's better?
No, you're right, it's a half-baked idea. There's got to be some way of slicing things such that freedom from discrimination is prioritized over the ability to use that freedom to implement discrimination, but I'm not seeing it yet.
It does bother me that the status quo enables straight-up discrimination on the basis of religion, though, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe_School_v.... The whole broad application of the ministerial exemption thing is a perfect figleaf for arbitrary bullshit, laundered as inspired by faith.
e: s/religious discrimination/discrimination on the basis of religion
That whole "freedom of religion" thing is essentially freedom of speech and association in ritual trappings that allow it to go further than it could without them. There's no reason why it should be special-cased like that - we should either broaden these protections to all opinions, or treat religion same as any other opinion.
That's not true. There are a very small number of protected attributes that you cannot discriminate against as an employer. Everything else is fair game.
It didn't, though. It's perfectly legal to discriminate, just not in a public setting. Say, if you have a coffee shop, you can't just refuse to serve non-white customers. But if you have a private coffee club, its membership can be restricted to whites only - and the club can then have a coffee shop that serves only its members.
This seems like a reasonable compromise to me - accommodations are inclusive by default so you don't have to worry about whether a random store owner has a problem with your gender, race, religion etc. Yet people who want to exclude others from their spaces still have the ability to do so, subject only to social disapproval.
It is. There is no freedom from consequences, unless you are a politician maybe. I think if America continues on its current path, people will increase exclusive association into "us versus them."
> Freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences.
How I hate the proliferation of this idiotic phrase.
Freedom of speech is a concept, an ideal. Not whatever the US constitution says. The idea is that powerful forces won’t punish you for speaking your mind.
If saying “I don’t like blue party” gets you fired, debanked and slandered in the media; it’s not really freedom of speech.
You also have “freedom to murder”, but you need to suffer the consequences.
> Freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences.
Freedom from consequences is the only possible thing freedom of speech could be, other than not having your mouth sewn shut.
What you meant to say was, what we value is freedom of speech from government consequences, not private actors. And that is a value judgement, not definitional. The incorrect statement you used is spread by people trying to hide the former as the latter.
Well, in the US, "Freedom of speech" is often used in the context of the US constitution so, while it is indeed freedom from consequences, it's freedom from consequences in the narrow sense of freedom from the consequence of the government using its police power to imprison you for saying something.
ADDED: In other situations the degree of saying whatever you want is very context-dependent and also dependent on what consequences you're willing to suffer.
The problem comes when the very act of non-association with someone effectively silences them.
If everyone is allowed to speak through a megaphone, except people with certain ideologies because the megaphone maker refuses to do business with them, then you can argue that is a form of censorship, or at least, have the effect of censorship.
This can happen to anything and anyone, regardless of whether such ideologies are correct or not. What we would end up with are echo chambers. And I sincerely believe that those are the cause of many social issues right now.
Are all views valid and should be listened to? In order to ensure free speech do we all have to thoughtfully engage with white supremacists or pederasts? Seems to me free speech is my having a choice who I associate with as well.
Freedom of speech is also the freedom to hear and read any viewpoint you'd like to hear or read.
The problem currently is that there is broad censorship for many views and even if you actively want to research an issue, you'll only be presented with one half of the story because large tech and media corporations work in concert to block certain points of view.
Ah, OK - I missed that you were talking about corporations. So can we rephrase this by saying that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube should be fine with white supremacists and people who argue for pederasty on their platforms? I struggle with this at the extremes.
There are hate speech laws they can follow. That should cover the extremes. And if they don't, then it is the failure of the legislation.
Just like how you can't go to walmart and insult everyone you see. It would actually be illegal to retaliate against those people. But call the cops and they can be dealt with.
At least with the laws, there is more checks and balances. It isn't perfect, but it is better than giving private entities massive power to control opinions.
Is being partnered and prominently showing branding for example such thing?
Or what about being able to buy things and services from?
Later is actually more critical point. Let's take some minority group. We generally think that discriminating against them for being member of group is wrong and should be illegal. But what if we took stance that we do not discriminate against the group, but against those that voice they should have equal rights? Entirely fine surely for many people now? Effect would be same, other one is just due to their speech.
>a business may not want to associate with someone who has opinions counter to their own
I'm not sure it's so much that exactly as businesses don't want employees who make a lot of other employees uncomfortable or who hold loud (whether deliberately or because social media made something go viral) opinions or make stupid jokes in public that get associated with the company and cause PR issues.
The fact is that if someone employs/sponsors/advertises with/etc. you they can and will cut ties fast if you embarrass them.
> However, we have freedom of association, and a business may not want to associate with someone who has opinions counter to their own.
I think this part is why there’s so much angst about this these days: businesses have captured a huge part of our commons and our support systems, pieces that might have been (or could be) the purview of government at other times. If we’re all paying dues to BigCorp in order to live, is it fair to say “businesses can choose to not associate with whomever they want”?
> a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk even though the sidewalk was part of a privately-owned company town
Are we at that point of broad-spectrum BigCo dominance yet? I'd say probably not, but sometimes it just seems like a matter of time.
> we have freedom of association, and a business may not want to associate with someone who has opinions counter to their own.
Yes and no. Take the Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled in the baker's favor on the grounds that forcing him to bake the cake would violate his religious freedoms. I wonder, if the baker had refused purely as a personal preference not to do business with gay couples (freedom of association), would the court have ruled differently? As far as I know the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on such a question.
The idea was useful in the past when humanity was still experimenting with different ideas about morality, forms of government, religion, philosophy, etc.
Now that we have settled all that there is no need any more to allow wrong think and wrong speech. /S
In seriousness though, this fight is not new at all. The fact that somebody felt the need to state that quote means the same debate existed back then.
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
- George Orwell, "The Freedom of the Press" (1945)
>> I don't think there's any speech, including hate speech, that I would ban
How many times do we have to experience a charismatic (or just populist) leader using hate speech to compel great evil though? I don't want to wait until after the act to try and hold them accountable.
today’s issues with free speech boil down to that historically there were huge barriers to communicating with a mass audience, and now there are not, and how we deal with the consequences of that
Some fashionable variants on that maxim these days:
* I disapprove of what you say and will label you a terrorist / communist / traitor / Putin-puppet / etc. regardless of whether those epithets actually have anything to do with it.
* I disapprove of what you say and will demand you be silenced or canceled in the name of creating a safe friendly environment.
* I disapprove of what you say and use my social media company connections to make sure the algorithm suppresses you. Eh, why even bother? They probably do it automatically already anyway and just direct everybody to safe vetted opinions.
Independent of the other threads here (talking about freedom from prosecution from government vs private companies vs individual reputation)
And everyone talking about their own limitations on free speech (I support Bernie Sanders, but I draw the line at Trans rights)
I think it's also worth noting the changes in expectations of magnitude of reactions and reprisal for free speech today vs say Voltaire's age.
Reputation and shame used to drive so much of our public discourse. Whenever you hear about people challenging each other over some disagreement or disapproval, it's always the most benign stuff.
In that context, saying "not only will I not challenge you to a dual for disagreeing with me, but I will actually fight to PROTECT your right to say it" is pretty revolutionary stuff.
We should ask Voltaire (or whoever was actually responsible) if he would feel the same way if the person who he disapproved of was a person of significant means and power and was calling for the destruction of Voltaire's life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
So when people today scream about cancel culture because of some heinous shit they said about black or trans people, then use this quote to suggest that we should be defending to the death their right to call for systemic discrimination and repression of others....it's just not the same.
My observation about free speech: It's a cyclical thing.
"I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is one side, and "People must be protected from wrongthink" is the other side. Our democratic societies cycle back and forth between them, like clockwork. Often in the process, the "left" and "right" side of the traditional political spectrum swap stances on free speech (sometimes multiple times). In the 1950s, when McCarthyism was rampant, it was the left that wanted the right to free expression, even if it meant protecting communist agitators. Now, it's the left that wants strict rules on what can be said, because Trumpism made them think that wrongthink itself is a threat to democracy. It'll swap back, in time. It always does.
Talk it out, change the culture -- the same way so many other problems have been solved. Homosexuality went from culturally prohibited to culturally celebrated over the course of time. Surely we will find ways to inoculate ourselves and our culture against misinformation and rage-bait as well.
That's a rose-colored reimaging of the past, including for your own example. I imagine most problems you'd point to were solved via criticism, protests, violence, and more.
To look at your example in a US-centric light, being homosexual was literally lethal for some and cost thousands others their jobs. LGBTQ+ people are still losing their jobs for being homosexual. People are still saying things about the LGBTQ+ community that are statistically and provably untrue.
I personally don't understand why we would hold those perpetuating such things above criticism or force association.
Although I agree with overturning Citizens United, but where do you draw the line? I assume you mean "an employer can't fire someone for what they say in their free time" but what about non-employees? Will they be required to keep contractors? Vendors? Spoke persons? Customers?
Then you'll start getting tons of stories about small businesses being run out of business because they can't fire someone so the community has boycotted the business.
I doubt that will happen. The cancel mobs are just a very vocal minority. For example, look how popular Hogwarts Legacy is even though the cancel mob has been viciously attacking it.
Nobody talked about changing rights. People have the right to speak, and others have the right to reciprocate. We should voluntarily practice tolerance toward each other because the fragile apparatus of society breaks if we don't.
Asking respondents to be tolerant is limiting their freedom of speech in the name of civility. I find that troubling, especially given that most folks on the receiving end of a "social media mob" is because they said something others perceived to be intolerant.
in general, the concept of "taking away rights" is ill formed. my rights end where yours begin. in particular, i would take away the right of companies to fire people based on their speech outside of work, and i would take away the right of social media companies to censor people's political views. these can both be phrased as awarding new rights to people, namely a right to employment, and a right to internet expression. both of these come across as much more foundational rights than the alternative.
We have always understood that there are consequences of unpopular speech that are detached from whether that speech is good or necessary or correct. It's why we characterize people as courageous who fight long, but ultimately justified or righteous battles in the popular sphere. Courageous in the face of what? This! The negative social consequences of unpopular speech.
Savage justice is when somebody comes to your house and beats you to death with a tire iron. People calling JK Rowling a hateful bigot on Twitter and telling people to stop purchasing Harry Potter content isn't that.
Why do you hate the freedom of speech? It seems odd that "free speech absolutists" only seem to care about the speech of right wing trolls and even want to curtail other people's freedom of speech and association in doing so.
That's literally the absolute-free-speech feedback loop in action, isn't it? Someone making a statement that a person disagrees with, the second person making an argument against it, and the first person suffering a social consequence as a result. Substitute "a mob to ruin your reputation" for "educating a number of other people about how your argument is a bad one" for a less-hyperbolic result, maybe.
Free speech does not mean free from consequences. Its perfectly understandable to want to protect the freedom that allows nazi sympathisers to speak about their hatred for the Jewish people, while still wanting for no-one to chose to do so, and also there to be social consequences for the people who do so.
The anti-freedom of speech path would be to ban any pro nazi speech entirely.
“Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences” can just as easily be used to justify imprisoning critics of the government as it can to justify shunning people. Not all consequences are justified.
Plus, let’s be honest — most of the “consequences” of speech, like cancelling people, are not really targeted at the person being cancelled. They are really happening because people want to suppress speech they don’t like by scaring other people into silence.
Government is not the only source of oppression. We should be very careful about excusing social consequences for people speaking their mind, or we will lose free speech because of a cancel-culture mob mentality rather than because of government oppression. The end result is pretty much the same and we shouldn’t let it happen.
Is there no nuance left in the world? If we remove consequences from people who criticize the government, must we also remove consequences from people spreading Nazi rhetoric? If we eat bread, must we also eat shit?
Free speech is not an ideal that we should strive for in itself but shorthand for a principle that helps promote stronger societies that help its members live longer. Any speech that goes against that basic goal is stupid to fight for. Eating is something that is not something we should strive for in itself but shorthand for fulfilling the nutritional needs of the body. Any eating that goes against that basic goal is stupid to promote.
Free speech is definitely an idea we should strive for on its own.
We should strive for free speech even if it hurts people’s feelings, and even if it gives a microphone to crazy people, even Nazis.
The alternative is a world where the government, or a mob, or both, get to dictate what we can say and think. It would also be a world where we cannot point out errors without being shouted down, resulting in things like Soviet science and basic errors of governance being uncorrected until they ruin everything (e.g. the recent history of Sri Lanka). It would be a world where both scientists and critics of science have no ability to deal with pandemics or other disasters outside the bounds set by politicians who have no idea what they are doing.
There was a time when cancel culture was turned against people arguing for gay rights, desegregation, and feminism. That time may come again, quite soon, and people on the left who have recently turned against free speech and created mechanisms to weaken it will reap what they have sown.
> Free speech is definitely an idea we should strive for on its own.
Utter nonsense. Would you rather have free speech or live? Only one of these is a primary goal. The other is merely a means to attain the other. Hence, the restrictions on free speech provided by every country's laws.
> There was a time when cancel culture was turned against people arguing for gay rights, desegregation, and feminism. That time may come again, quite soon, and people on the left who have recently turned against free speech and created mechanisms to weaken it will reap what they have sown.
Cancel culture itself is free speech. The right used it to morally bankrupt ends that resulted in people losing their lives.
You seem to be missing the point that if something can be weaponized by the right, it can be weaponized by the left, and then the right can weaponize it again…
Any argument you have given so far can also be used by your opponents.
> You seem to be missing the point that if something can be weaponized by the right, it can be weaponized by the left, and then the right can weaponize it again…
No, I'm not. If some speech serves to cause people to die, that speech is bad and is not worth protecting. Preventing people from dying is the opposite of weaponizing. If my opponents want to prevent me from dying, I won't oppose them in doing so. My opponents and I don't disagree on everything.
If I say I should eat bread but not shit, your argument is that my opponents can now say that I should eat shit but not bread. You're ignoring that only one of these is wrong.
You seem to be missing that cancel culture is itself free speech, so your position contradicts itself.
> If I say I should eat bread but not shit, your argument is that my opponents can now say that I should eat shit but not bread. You're ignoring that only one of these is wrong.
I’m not sure why you keep going with the weird shit-based analogy.
My argument is simply that if you can control the speech of others, then they can control yours.
Whether some speech is “right” or “wrong” is always going to be up for debate. The result will simply be that anyone in power will ban speech they don’t like.
Your argument is fundamentally a nonsense slippery slope one. The eating shit analogy makes this clear. People in power can do what they want no matter what. The solution to that is to choose wisely when putting people into power, not preemptively eating shit.
How do you propose to solve this without limiting others freedom of speech? You have the right to say whatever you want but I don’t have the right to respond? Seems like just another version of rights for me but not for thee.
Getting someone fired, cancelling their appearances at universities and other public events, blacklisting them from academia -- those things are not speech.
Doesn’t seem a good idea to limit responses to speech. Speech drives action often times and it should. Someone may protest because of something said, they may not want to associate with a person etc. I’m not sure I see a huge difference between me not wanting to hire you because you are a jerk (based on my interactions) vs not wanting to hire you because I think you are a bigot based on your podcast.
What about boycotting businesses that employ them? Is that speech?
It's the employer who terminates employment, not the people asking the employer to do so. The opponents of the people asking the employer to terminate employment can exercise their free speech to argue for continued employment. That is the only action congruent with free speech absolutism. In this case, it also happens to match what the law protects.
Of course those things restrict speech for that person -- and they cause a chilling effect for anyone else who might want to say the same things.
You might as well also say that jailing people for their speech doesn't infringe on freedom of speech, because that is a consequence of speech they already made. But that's a very narrow (and ahistorical) view of what freedom of speech really means.
We can lean on the Wikipedia definition here: "Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction."
I think the issue is that you have people that are trying to apply new norms via small group social pressure amplified via social media. We have some social norms for certain attitude that no one will tolerate in polite society, but those norms are well known. In the last five years a host of new norms have been created that are enforced by small groups that don't mesh with general societal consensus.
On the other hand, the definition of free speech has changed from speech is not criminalized to speech without any negative consequences.
People who speak out want to influence people or policy, which to them would be positive consequences, and yet immediately label negative consequences as being "cancelled".
This has not really changed. There are negative consequences we should accept, such as criticism and disagreement, and negative consequences we should not, such as an online mob getting you fired from your job or the government sending goons to disappear you.
Yet the speech we are talking about general involves other people losing rights or violence against them. So that's ok but getting fired from a job is not? Seems like a double standard to me.
Yes, that is also speech. Unfortunately, most free speech advocates are not of the "I disapprove of what you say but will defend it" variety. They are of the similar species "I disapprove of what you say and will apply my principles in an inconsistent manner to ensure that your speech is suppressed while speech I do not disapprove of which nonetheless violates the same principles is permitted" variety.
Talk to any free speech advocate but those who preserve the purity of speech and you will rapidly find that they add epicycles for all sorts of things.
It's funny you mention epicycles, because those were added to the solar model to try to account for the fact that the pristine geocentric model alone couldn't account for reality. Rather than change the model, they tried to patch it.
To continue your analogy, free speech absolutism would be the geocentric model of the universe, the epicycles would be attempts to explain the obviously desirable exceptions to the rule (harassment, incitement to violence, etc).
That suggests that there is a missing heliocentric model for free speech, one that is not based on absolutism and thereby avoids needing to add exceptions while simultaneously avoiding the trap of strict epicycle-free absolutism (which, to continue your analogy, doesn't accurately describe our observations).
Haha wonderful! Yes! I confess to being not a free speech absolutist in truth, just one who is conveniently more of an absolutist than anyone who claims to be one.
Best example I can come up with is Colin Kaepernick. This isn't even a great example, he's doing pretty well in the scheme of things. It also isn't satisfying to most people, since it cuts against the political undertone of the question.
The high-profile "cancellation" cases like Rowling make a lot of headlines, but people like her will be fine, they have money and support. The real danger is when ordinary people lose their jobs for standing up to HR and DEI bureaucracy, univeristy reseachers get canned because their results contradict dogma, Colorado bakers get sued into the ground for living by their religious convictions, construction workers get fired for making an "OK" hand sign, etc
Small note about the bakers: they haven’t been sued “into the ground”. In fact my understanding is that they’re actually doing really well nowadays. They’re still open with 4 stars on Yelp with over 200 reviews.
I think we shouldn’t twist narratives to argue against twisting narratives.
Not for lack of trying. The baker in question has been beset with over‐the‐top cake requests, and there have been several lawsuits against him since the famous Supreme Court ruling. In fact, in January one succeeded in having the baker fined for refusing to bake a transgender‐themed cake, and survived appeal. So Masterpiece Cakeshop may yet be sued into the ground.
I read the “citation needed” comment as “in real life people don’t care, it’s just chronically online people that rush from one boycott to another”. Which I think applies to JK Rowling as well, since the new Harry Potter game is making a bank and supermajority of people simply don’t care.
Free speech (in the "I can say whatever I can get away with" sense) cuts both ways. If you disagree with a community, they will use their favorite language to cut you down. I disagree with that sense of free speech, as it does away with measured dialog around issues in favor of pitchforks.
Kathleen Stock is a good example, an academic philosopher run out of a job in 2021 and consistently harassed ever since for her philosophical stance on the relationship between sex and gender.
The article disagrees with your claim that she was “run out of” a job. It looks like she resigned after student criticism, even though the university still wanted to continue employing her. The outcry definitely has a negative effect on her mental health but I think calling it being “run out of” is a narrative spin on this article. She was publicly criticized and even though her employer fully supported her speech she resigned anyways.
What do you think being run out of a job means? If a mob shows up at my house with pitchforks, I will leave irrespective of whether my landlord wants to continue renting to me.
Read up on what happened to Stock, and what she goes through when trying to speak in public nowadays, and you'll see my description is factual.
A mob didn’t show up at her house. My understanding is that students were using their free speech in criticizing her speech while her right to speak was supported by her employer. I don’t see the issue here. The article doesn’t describe credible threats to her person; it’s not like someone put a bomb threat on her classes or something. It just looked like there was some outrage, maybe a protest, or a petition online, which I’m sure is hard to deal with but I don’t agree that it’s accurate to call it being run out of anything.
I don't think JK Rowling is anti-trans. She just doesn't think that trans women ought to have the exact same set of rights as cis women. That's not anti-trans any more than thinking men and women ought to have different rights is anti-men.
I don't think this is JK Rowling's position. JK Rowling doesn't think that trans women shouldn't have the exact same set of RIGHTS as cis women, she thinks that trans women shouldn't be able have the same set of societal privileges as cis women. This seems like a thin way to slice a hair, but I think the two ideas are distinct.
You're really not helping the cause here by defining "woman" in such a way that trans women are unambiguously excluded. There's an important debate to be had here about the nature of gender and the role it ought to have in society. And we can't have that debate if people insist on using language that presumes the answer.
We also can't have a debate about defining women where even daring to ask the question brings about mobs.
As much as the absolutist "men can never become women" crowd attempts to shut down these debates there's also the equally harmful groups who say that "anyone who says they are a woman is one and even questioning that makes you a transphobe". It's easier to dismiss the former as intolerant, but the latter is becoming the (only) socially accepted opinion on places like Reddit. Which is insidious for such a contentious topic.
I personally don't see how we can solve this cultural issue without there being some very clear grey area in between.
I agree monetary donations are not speech, they are actions. A better example might have been Scott Adams' recent statements. In so far as I haven't heard of him funding anyone. I sympathize with the papers that dropped Dilbert, but it sets a horrible precedent to cease business relationships with people because of their political views (not actions).
It's hardly a precedent. Companies have been shedding relationships with individuals, TV shows, other organizations for a very long time for expressing political and other views that alienate a sufficient percentage of their customer base such that the benefit of the relationship is no longer worth the cost.
Do you really find language like "chest feeding" to be a non-degrading way of talking about women? I can't imagine successfully defending that language to anyone, say 10 years ago. I think you just missed the point where it became insane, instead of progressive, because the line was blurry.
I want to ask, please read this question in good faith: why is chest feeding insane now, verses other polite terms established decades ago? What difference is it to cease making differentiations between ms/mrs(mz), or to call someone Chinese instead of chinaman, or calling someone African American instead of colored? Yeah it seems new, and therefore unusual/weird, but I don’t know if I can identify a clear and rational rubric as to what makes new progressive terminology insane and older progressive terminology sane.
(Also, I don’t personally agree with “chest feeding” since breasts don’t necessarily have anything to do with gender, men can have breasts. But like, if someone else wants to call their own child feeding activity chest feeding, what do I care? Also, I’m not feeding any kids witth mammary glands so I don’t really know if I even get to be an arbiter of sane/insane terminology to refer to those activities.)
I think you will find that hyperfixation on calling people by the "correct term" for their race is also insane, but less insane, which is why I described the line as blurry.
The benefit of changing the terms by which we express our fixation on race is that the old terms were largely associated with hateful speech, and the hope is that the new term might be less inflammatory. If you actually feel comfortable using someone's race as an adjective when referring to them, regardless of what form that adjective takes. I would suggest that you consider that more thoughtfully.
in the case if removing the word woman from the lexicon, the people who are being appeased have a problem with whether or not they get/have to be identified as women. Not that woman is a hateful word, but that you might exclude someone from the category.
This is different. It is true that arbitrary exclusion from categories is occasionally hateful, but it is not the case that people have been using breast feeding as a slur, and trying to retcon that to be so is obviously degrading to women who have not used it vitriolically, and do not consider it hate speech.
In good faith, can you really not imagine the difference between telling someone not to use the word chinaman to refer to someone who doesnt want to be called a chinaman, and telling them not to refer to thenselves as a woman, because someone else doesn't want you to?
I’m going to be honest I have never seen the case where somone calling themselves a woman was considered a slur by peers and told not to do it, so I think you and I are in radically different social circles or are going off of niche social media drama that doesn’t actually occur to any degree offline. I’ve at least heard of the notion of chest feeding, but I’ve never heard of “telling them not to refer to thenselves as a woman”.
I think you might be conflating “chest feeding” with womanhood, but I’ve never seen the case where someone was not allowed to refer to themselves as a woman and/or not allowed to refer to using one’s own lactation to feed a child as breast feeding either. Can you point to, I dunno, pregnancy tracker blogs or pregnancy communities or something where this is happening? Maybe a spokesperson for a hospital requesting patients no longer refer to their bodies with the above? I simply struggle to believe you that this occurs to any significant degree in the relevant community.
The thing that set the whole JK rowling controversy off was the idea that using the phrase "people who menstruate" was an acceptable way to refer to women.
If you are commenting in a thread about the Rowling controversy, it is dishonest to say that you do not participate in the part of the internet in which the word woman is considered a slur, when used to refer exclusively to those who have predominantly female anatomy. The people who get pregnant and menstruate, are exclusively in this category. And arguing that this is not what woman means "anymore" is equivalent to asserting that it is hateful to use it.
The ongoing linguistic castration is an assertion that the biological reality of sex is a immoral thing to take part in, because it is traumatic to those who do not wish to. However, note that among the consequences of the biological reality of sex is the notion of sexual attraction. Is it hate speech to assert that you are attracted only to women? What if you are a woman?
I think this comes off as kind of unhinged. I’ve never heard of someone claiming language that includes other categories must therefore be calling sub categories hateful. This is like the logic of saying “object oriented languages” means that “java sucks” or something. I’ve literally never heard of someone call women a slur except from you, except you’re claiming other people are saying it just by saying they call their own thing something else.
This is all weird and still doesn’t give a real, rational rubric as to insane or sane progressive language. Lgbtq doesn’t mean bi is a slur lol
If you take a look at historical media, the breadth of opinions you can find written today, especially if we include online media, is staggering compared to the past. For example, defending homosexuality as a legitimate life choice would have gotten you packed and sent away to the crazy house, and no paper would have ever written about this before the late 80s or so. Same with overt atheism in much public discourse, with respect for native rights, black rights, Irish and Italian rights and many others. Opposition to Israel used to be swiftly boycotted in any public forum. Opposition to the Vietnam War could get you in jail when it started. Communist sympathies too.
Apart from overt racism (which you can still easily find online, even among pretty popular figures in New media), virtually no position that used to be expressed in public discourse has disappeared, and many many ideas that used to be unthinkable and definitely unspeakable are now common place.
> For example, defending homosexuality as a legitimate life choice would have gotten you packed and sent away to the crazy house, and no paper would have ever written about this before the late 80s or so.
Quite to the contrary. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft [1] was a research institute dedicated to human sexuality. Histories have long been "cleansed" of records of gay and transgender people; look no further than the bible for evidence that homosexuality was quite normal in society a very long time ago. After all, there's no need to invent a rule against something that people don't want to do.
I was thinking about American culture, though I probably exaggerated things there as well. Still, if we pretend I was talking about the 1880s, I think my point still stands.
Also, sure - other cultures had different perspectives on sexuality. I don't think there is any argument to be made that biblical era jewish society was more respectful of Freedom of Speech than modern America or Europe, so I don't think this is very relevant in context.
It's pretty interesting looking at the history of that article[1]. For the first decade or so, the article pretty clearly states that Jemima was a woman. All the sources cited treat Jemima as a woman as well.
Around 2014 you get the first mention that she once said she once said she had mixed together with Christ and was neither male nor female. After 2014 you gradually get more and more edits from the point of view that Jemima was nonbinary or trans (all of the sources for this are post-2010).
The Friend did not proclaim genderlessness once, as you claim here. The Friend did not answer to the name you use so obtusely here, ever after a "rebirth." That historians such as Susan Juster (the publication ca. 2000) would disrespect the Friend's wishes as you do here, insisting on a name and gender that had been disavowed, is little surprise. There is a long history of erasure of LGBT identities, which Juster continues. However, she makes an effort towards an honest history, at least, in representing what the Friend wanted despite the disrespect she pays. You don't even try that hard, because the narrative doesn't fit your agenda. It wasn't until 2015 that another historian revisited Public Universal Friend and found the language that had previously been used to be discordant with the content of that same history. Language evolves, and Public Universal Friend was a frontrunner of this particular linguistic evolution: we now have words to describe people who do not find a place within the gender binary. And so, Wikipedia reflects the history of that evolution in its own edit history. Thank you for sharing that, anyway.
> The Friend did not answer to the name you use so obtusely here, ever after a "rebirth." That historians such as Susan Juster (the publication ca. 2000) would disrespect the Friend's wishes as you do here, insisting on a name and gender that had been disavowed, is little surprise.
That's not true, she uses both names on her last will and testament (and uses "her" there as well). And I'd caution against pretending to speak on behalf of someone who's no longer around. Many who do so have little interest in the deceased beyond them being a tool for their own ends.
To this day, you will find transgender people using a deadname on legal documents because they cannot legally change their names, or because it is a legal necessity to list all previous names. A lawyer wrote that document according to the legal strictures of the time. It isn't the evidence you portray it to be.
The busy bodies. This is a sampling of the mob being referred to. From your reply I’m sure you know this. You’re pointing out how irrelevant they are in this context which I agree with. But they are still a fair manifestation of the mob dynamic being referenced.
"I disapprove of what you say but i will defend to the death your right to say it"
Hahaha this reminds of a Romanian politician who had returned to Romania after the revolution and wanted to become president. He was recognizable by his style of wearing a bowtie amongst a sea of ties.
He used to utter this same quote to the people but it fell on deaf ears because people wanted products not rights. He never won and is all but forgotten even in the country he wanted to steer in the right direction.
Btw HN has a single organizing value: intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), so the question of how to relate to "free speech" or any similar concept reduces to: how does it relate to optimizing an internet forum for intellectual curiosity? It's not hard to derive some interesting consequences once you reframe the question that way.
Content-wise, I'm surprised to hear "woke" being applied to right-wing Americans. I guess it makes sense with the book bannings, attacks on public education, refusal to govern as a coalition, and more.
Quote sadly has not held up will in the last couple decades. We are now led by a louder more extreme minority that aggressively police’s discussion points.
For example I am mostly liberal and was a fan of Bernie Sanders. However in my personal case I don’t believe transgender and gender identity roles are something that should be pressed on still developing minors.
The problem here is you may agree or not agree but the point I am making is just my view on this equals bigot / hater .. etc. Any deviation from a strict all or nothing approach is silenced through bullying and harassment.
No room or in there is not even any desire for real discussion … it is just accept these things as “truth” or be labeled some form of hater.
It wasn’t so long ago that real discussion still happened on platforms like reddit and others …now it is curated to the point of nonsense.
I'm not sure I understand your position. Do you believe there any possible opinion is legitimate, and that there is nothing that someone could believe in that should get them labeled a hater and socially ostracized? Should we feel a need to become friends with klansmen to prove that we are open minded?
And if not, then how do you draw the line? If there are people who find your own opinion abhorrent or othering or whatever and wish not to associate or discuss with you, by what authority are they wrong? Do you personally feel the need to debate every opinion you hear? How many times should you defend your own opinion before it becoming acceptable not to want to discuss it again?
And just to engage a little bit with your particular opinion, I for one am immediately suspicious of any argument that says "non-sexual non-violent behavior X is acceptable, but not around children". Of course, I am open to the idea that in principle you may have some compelling arguments that I haven't heard before. However, I don't think it's very likely, so my prior would be that you are indeed not very trans friendly. If I were trans, I would be quite inclined to avoid you because of that, and very disinclined to debate this particular point with you in any setting where a more hostile discussion might reflect poorly on me (say, in the workplace). I don't think this reasoning is overly emotional or thought-ending. It's a rational way to respond to speech that may become confrontational.
Identity formation is an complex and fascinating subject in human development. As an educator and father of three can also chime in with my own personal experience.
I believe that many (if not most) people do not have a fully formed identity around gender or around sexuality by the age of 15-16.
So asking questions to this group on whether they identity as this or that may actually cause some psychological harm because they are still in the process of forming an identity on multiple fronts.
Imagine being a 15 year young women just out of middle school. You are extremely uncomfortable with you’re body, appearance and just now discovering things of a sexual nature. This period is difficult for many regardless of sexual orientation or gender.
Now imagine going into your freshman english class and the first question asked by your teacher is introduce yourself and your preferred pronoun. This may seem progressive and tolerant but consider it may also be harmful to minors at this stage of development.
Now as an adult if you feel you may have gender dysmorphia and start to identify as a deferent gender than birth .. by all means. In this case I am fully supportive and want people to feel comfortable and find happiness, I also believe we live in a mostly free society so as an adult this is absolutely within your rights.
If you read this far I thank you and am fine is you disagree. Just my thought is my perspective (and many others) as a father of three girls and educator for 20 years should allow for some nuisance in discussion.
My issue is not wether you and I agree on this topic as I assume you have your own valid perspective and experience .. my issue is that this topic is put off limits in many cases and it’s an all or nothing acceptance on supporting trans rights and what that entails.
Trans teenagers that want to transition are going to need puberty blockers, so obviously you can’t postpone any conversation around trans identity issues until adulthood.
Your perspective strikes me as a modern version of the old “concern” that talking to teenagers about homosexuality turns straight kids gay. By now we hopefully all understand how that’s just bigotry, and your argument is basically the same. You make some vague allusions to confused teenage girls being vulnerable to gay^H^H^H trans propaganda based on purely hypothetical worries. Gut feeling all the way down.
Note also that your concern is that a straight teenage girl gets mindwarped by the evil trans lobby and not the symmetrical scenario of a hypothetical teenager daughter that is trans but feels unable to come out of the closet because she doesn’t trust the adults in her life to respond reasonably.
Maybe ask yourself if you would be disappointed if one of your kids turns out trans and then ask yourself why.
Middle-aged men choose to transition to become transwomen, and they all went through puberty. Some even fathered kids.
So there's no reason for trans-identifying teenagers to have their own puberties blocked, before they can even make properly informed decisions about choosing lifelong sterility and lack of sexual function.
Like the older trans, they can wait a few years to adulthood or even later, and then decide what they want to do. This is the safer and more sensible option, and the one most compatible with "do no harm".
You are wrong. Puberty blockers do not cause infertility or lack of sexual function. Your statements are incorrect and incongruent with established medical knowledge and advice. Also, trans is an adjective, not a plural noun.
Over 96% of children who present with gender dysphoria and are given puberty blockers then go on to take cross-sex hormones. This treatment pathway does indeed cause infertility and lack of sexual function.
There's no good reason why these children can't experience their normal, untarnished puberty, and defer the decision to medically trans themselves to later on, in adulthood, when they are older and wiser.
Puberty blockers and hormones are different things, that's why they have different names. Puberty blockers do not cause infertility or a lack of sexual function. So 96% of children go on to become adults that choose to take hormones because they made the right decision going on puberty blockers. There is a good reason why children should have access to puberty blockers, and to not suffer through a puberty that isn't in line with their gender; it's so they don't kill themselves.
Another is to consider that while over 96% of children given puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones, those treated with watchful waiting desist in around 85% of cases.
This suggests that puberty blockers are much more likely to cement gender dysphoria, rather than treat it.
Furthermore, there is no evidence to show that not being prescribed puberty blockers causes gender dysphoric children to kill themselves.
"There is a significant inverse association between treatment with pubertal suppression during adolescence and lifetime suicidal ideation among transgender adults who ever wanted this treatment. These results align with past literature, suggesting that pubertal suppression for transgender adolescents who want this treatment is associated with favorable mental health outcomes."
> Middle-aged men choose to transition to become transwomen, and they all went through puberty. Some even fathered kids.
> So there's no reason for trans-identifying teenagers to have their own puberties blocked [...]
If this is really your whole thought process, I'd implore you to read up on why transitioning is beneficial for transgender youth. Do you know what would happen if we were to implement your idea? We'd have a lot more suicides in transgender youth, because going through the "wrong" puberty is hard, and leaves a lot of mental anguish. Instead of relying on simple thought patterns, could we please do actual research into these complicated topics and try to find what works best for those afflicted, not what feels right to us in the moment? Thank you.
It is in their best interest because puberty blockers are harmless and this gives the child more time to figure out what they want. If they want to go ahead with transitioning they can take the appropriate hormones when they're ready. If they change their mind and don't want to transition anymore no harm is done. Maybe you were under the impression that puberty blockers have permanent effects?
Puberty blockers just give children extra time to figure out what they want, and it sounds like you agree that's a good thing.
> my issue is that this topic is put off limits in many cases and it’s an all or nothing acceptance on supporting trans rights and what that entails.
I understand your concern, and I think your perspective is actually non-discriminatory.
But I'm still curious how you think the line should be drawn. If I said I think race mixing is a bad idea (to be very clear, I absolutely don't hold this opinion), do you think it would be fair for people to avoid discussing with me?
Where it gets complicated is dealing with dog whistles. Because you’re not actually expressing an opinion that liberals disagree with. No one wants a kid who expresses some gender nonconformity to be pressured into identifying as trans or transitioning. The liberal position is and always has been such things should be made available to everyone with appropriate medical and psychiatric supervision.
But in our shirty new world online discourse the game is now to say something that is obviously true “kids shouldn’t be forced to transition” but then actually mean something else “kids shouldn’t be allowed to transition” and then introduce legislation to that effect. So if you go on the internet and say these kinds of things that no one really disagrees with like it’s a hot take then people pick up pretty fast what you mean. The people caught it the crossfire are unfortunately those folks who actually hold the literal opinion that got appropriated because bigots realized it they could use it as a whistle.
The term "transition" as used here is a euphemism that covers interfering with a child's puberty in a way that is likely to sterilize them for life if the treatment persists, and surgical destruction of breasts, and in some cases, genitals.
I think most people, understanding the reality of this in stark terms, would be dead against children transitioning.
> The term "transition" as used here is a euphemism that covers interfering with a child's puberty in a way that is likely to sterilize them for life if the treatment persists, and surgical destruction of breasts, and in some cases, genitals.
> I think most people, understanding the reality of this in stark terms, would be dead against children transitioning.
The only reason why this hasn't been outright banned for minors yet is because older voters don't know what's happening.
It's funny, I see a NYT article that literally just repeats these things out loud so that everyone can see what's happening, and then they get attacked for just describing what's happening
What's being done right now is so damning, no criticism is necessary. Only visibility. The people who want to hide facts from the public can only do this for so long
> but then actually mean something else “kids shouldn’t be allowed to transition” and then introduce legislation to that effect.
Minors aren't capable of consent. The treatments have permanent side effects and lead to sterilization. One of the drugs used to aid in "transitioning" is lupron, which is also used to sterilize sex offenders
The only reason why any of this is allowed to happen is because the general population doesn't see what's happening. Criticism or "explanations" aren't necessary, all that's needed is visibility so that everyone can see what's being done and vote accordingly
Which is why the permission of their parents acts as a limit on what they're able to agree to, in this case as in all others.
> The treatments have permanent side effects
Yes, that's the point.
> lead to sterilization. One of the drugs used to aid in "transitioning" is lupron, which is also used to sterilize sex offenders
This is pure bad faith fear mongering. It doesn't matter what else the drugs could do. Titanium is used in missiles, chemotherapy drugs can be used for euthenasia. None of those are what we're talking about, so talk about what we're talking about not some other unrelated thing.
> The only reason why any of this is allowed to happen is because the general population doesn't see what's happening.
There's no "general population" this is being slyly pushed on. People are making decisions within their families. Each individual is making choices with medical consideration and the guidance and, if a minor, ultimately the permission of their families and doctors.
"Allowed" is a telling choice of words though! You're advocating for a state-enforced limit on what people are allowed to choose for themselves.
---
And additionally, and very seriously, wake the fuck up and pay attention. The anti-trans moral panic is the tip of the spear of fascism in north america. You had a clean chance to see that and change course last year when Putin explicitly used anti-LGBT reasoning as part of his justification for the invasion of ukraine! Look at what Orban is up to, what comes along with this rhetoric. Look at what you are being used to accomplish.
> "Allowed" is a telling choice of words though! You're advocating for a state-enforced limit on what people are allowed to choose for themselves.
To children. What people are allowed to do to children
> Which is why the permission of their parents acts as a limit on what they're able to agree to, in this case as in all others.
If a parent comes forward and says "I consent to my child getting sterilized", should that be the only criterion necessary? You said "all" here, so you think that the case I provided is also covered?
> The anti-trans moral panic is the tip of the spear of fascism in north america
> If a parent comes forward and says "I consent to my child getting sterilized"
Is that happening? We're not trying to formulate a generalizable moral framework here, we're responding to a concrete set of conditions experienced by actual living people.
We're inserting ourself into a specialized medical practice, against the wishes of both its practitioners and the people receiving the treatment, who say it helps them. Why are we doing that? Why are you so invested with what choices people make for themselves, again, with the consideration of their doctors and families?
> Would you describe Sweden as a fascist country?
Yeah kinda actually. Unlike most people with internet opinions of scandinavia I have actually lived there with a non-white spouse and they are racist as fuck. I wasn't surprised at all to hear they decided to euthanize old folks during covid and I wouldn't be surprised if they take a hard right swerve in the next decade either.
> wishes of both its practitioners and the people receiving the treatment, who say it helps them.
Not "people", "children", and we frequently disregard the wishes of children when it comes to their health and wellbeing regardless of how they feel about it.
We (adults) do this because society has already collectively decided that children are not mature enough to make the best decisions regarding their health and wellbeing.
When we decide that the children's (in this case pre-pubescent children), consent is irrelevant to them going to school, or having sex, or taking nude selfies, or getting a boob-job because they are not mature enough to provide meaningful consent, then you can be pretty fucking sure that we, collectively, as a society, aren't going to suddenly decide that pre-pubescent children are making an informed decision about things like chemical and/or literal castration.
Seriously, you really think that a group that is considered too undeveloped to consent to a boob-job is still developed enough to consent to sterilisation?
It's funny that you mention that because cosmetic surgery like breast enhancement and reduction are performed on minors an order of magnitude more often than anything having to do with gender presentation. I assume you spend a proportionate amount of time and energy fighting that practice?
And we allow minors to participate in all kinds of potentially harmful or regrettable things, with parental consent. Working as actors, playing sports that risk brain injury, using firearms, and yes, getting cosmetic surgery.
This isn't a new category of thing we're allowing minors to do. Why suddenly the strict consideration by outsiders who never cared about any of those other things?
The people cultivating this moral panic have admitted that it is a step on the way to a complete ban on trans healthcare and a crackdown on the existence of trans people. First make it impossible for minors, then under 25, then everyone.
Again you cannot just ignore that context and pretend that, ah, well, nevertheless, I just really think this one thing is important for this specific reason.
> It's funny that you mention that because cosmetic surgery like breast enhancement and reduction are performed on minors an order of magnitude more often than anything having to do with gender presentation. I assume you spend a proportionate amount of time and energy fighting that practice?
You say "minors" when I clarified "children" to mean "prepubescent children".
There is no way that pre-pubescent children are getting boob-jobs at the rate you claim they are.
Because we aren't talking about minor children in general. We're talking about prepubescent children.
And we frequently (like in all the examples I gave) ensure that, even with parental consent, they can't do certain things. Like sex.
> This isn't a new category of thing we're allowing minors to do.
Yes, it is. Irreversible changes purely based on the feelings of the prepubescent child and nothing else aren't allowed, your strawman notwithstanding.
> Why suddenly the strict consideration by outsiders who never cared about any of those other things?
Sorry, outsiders? Lot's of people cared about prepubescent children enough to enforce that those children go to school, that they are not allowed to have sex no matter how much their parent claims "But they asked for it!!! They feel ready for it!!!"
Seriously, we ignore the wishes of prepubescent children all the time, because they are not in a position to provide informed consent.
> Again you cannot just ignore that context and pretend that, ah, well, nevertheless, I just really think this one thing is important for this specific reason.
No. That's what you are doing. This is your single issue. I'm just pointing out that, collectively, society has already agreed that prepubescent children cannot make their own health decisions.
You are here whining that you should be able to petition prepubescent children so that they can give consent. In reality, they have no ability to give consent because we (society) took it away from them.
My "single issue" is not having a far-right coalition use a protect-the-children anti-trans moral panic affecting at most a few thousand people to mobilize a fascist takeover of my country.
In five years it has gone from "we just really care about female youth sports ok?" to "protect the children" and now already we are starting to see the first restrictions on adult trans healthcare and bans on queer public life.
If you were ignorant of that you'd be a fool, but I don't think you are which makes your support of it much more sinister.
And the wild thing is you don't even need to go through all this trouble! You could just say trans people squick you out and you'd prefer they not exist. There would be no consequences, it's now a mainstream position thanks to credulous supporters of these policies.
So if I oppose irreversible changes to prepubescent children, then I'm anti-trans? Someone should've told me when I spoke out against both male and female circumcision.
/s
I'm focusing on prepubescent children and you are going on about unrelated stuff.
For the last time, a prepubescent child is unable to give consent to castration, sterilisation and other irreversible changes.
The trouble is, your argument that the people who are against sterilisation of 9 year olds are transphobic is simply nonsense, and you're too emotionally connected to trans-as-a-political stance to see the human issues involved.
In a remarkable fit of irony, you're displaying cold indifference to humans, all the while yelling that they must take your feelings seriously.
I'm trying to get y'all to see that this isn't an isolated thing. The anti-trans moral panic you've gleefully taken up is part of a broader far right movement to crack down on queer and minority people in public life.
Because our wishes conflict with their economic motives
> the people receiving the treatment, who say it helps them
Again, children who aren't able to consent
> Why are you so invested with what choices people make for themselves, again, with the consideration of their doctors and families?
The same reason why I think the distribution of opiates should be tightly regulated. Because I see something that's inherently wrong, and I see corporations benefitting from it
"After careful application of my Logic, I have decided that I support precisely these two restrictive policies that also, separately and completely coincidentally of course, harm some of the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society."
Like, this is just not credible sorry. There is a neofascist moral panic being used to justify crackdowns and violence against this group right now. That's where we are and that's where your justification of support needs to start from.
They absolutelly should not.
Nobody is fit for conrracting while underage.
I would go as far and invoke my own freedom of speech and say kids should not be allowed to be targeted by any dog whistling or promot material period
Wonder how tolerant these folks would be with my view.
You can't say something bigoted and then try to add a disclaimer and somehow make it magically not big bigoted. Leave pediatric medicine up to the pediatric doctors.
I have a niece who is transitioning and it's attitudes like this that endanger her wellbeing.
This one touches a nerve because of how frustrating it is that the internet learned a new big word and it spread like wildfire among people who have an axe to grind against trans folks.
Sorry for the 50 minute video but there’s basically nothing I can write that will explain and deconstruct this better than an actual trans woman.
Oh I thought the answer to the last question was a very obvious yes - there’s a clear political trend called ‘self id’ where autogynophiles may deem themselves to be women and are admitted into women’s spaces, and self id is advocated by gender theorists as being exclusively for the benefit of transgender people.
I didn't mean "Is autogynephilia a fetish that people are confusing for transgenderism? (in some cases where bad faith actors will lie, or self-delude, to identify as women to gain access to women's spaces, making broad inclusivity dangerous and difficult)
I meant ""Is autogynephilia a fetish that (only affects transgender) people are confusing for transgenderism (in all cases)?"
Keep in mind, 90% of the time when someone is talking about autogynephilia, they are casting doubt on the very existence/reality of trans people - deeming them fetishists and fraud by default.
I don't really think you can brand it propaganda. The source is credible and well sourced - you can Google Natalie Wynn/Contrapoints.
It's also a complex topic that has many facets.
However the summary would be that male and female arousal in western society is quite different. Male sexuality is based on perceiving outward - seeing visual stimulus of someone being attractive, and getting turned on.
Female sexuality is based on perceiving inward - making oneself attractive, and being turned on by the reaction that it receives from the partner.
As a result, cis hereto women report feelings that in trans women get called autogynophelia when planning or expecting to meet with a sexual partner, or during sexual encounters.
> Female sexuality is based on perceiving inward - making oneself attractive, and being turned on by the reaction that it receives from the partner.
> As a result, cis hereto women report feelings that in trans women get called autogynophelia when planning or expecting to meet with a sexual partner, or during sexual encounters.
Women feel that they’re sexy women so men can feel they’re sexy women. This is not a compelling argument.
Not to mention, a few cherry picked oddball psychologists does not a consensus make. There are civil engineers that will say 9/11 was a thermite inside job and physicians that say crystals have healing powers. That doesn't mean they are right or even represent the scientific community's broad consensus.
I also suspect most of the people spreading transphobic messages have never had a close openly trans friend, partner, or family member.
> I also suspect most of the people spreading transphobic messages have never had a close openly trans friend, partner, or family member.
Many gender-critical women are those who have experienced the trans phenomenon via a man in their life deciding that he is now a woman, and observing first hand the misogyny in his expression of what he thinks makes him a woman. The accounts of transwidows (women whose husbands transitioned) are particularly depressing and painful to read, as their marriage breaks down while he transforms himself into an offensive caricature of womanhood.
I really feel for those women, having a partner transition is hard on any relationship. The person you fall in love with is your own perception of who the other person is and all that gets shattered in an instant because of a burden they’ve carrying for their whole lives finally becomes too heavy to bear and it changes their relationship forever. Some people are able to make it through that, others aren’t, and it’s okay either way. But when the relationship ends right after they start transitioning they don’t see their partner work through all their feelings, traumas, and see the other side.
You’re right, that lots of trans women lean into the stereotypes of womanhood right after they come out. And that’s because they’re going through all the awkward cringy phases that teenagers go through. Turns out those phases are more to do with the process of self-discovery than it does age. Because lord knows when I was 15 I wore skirts too short, way too much makeup, and was past the girly phase and already on the “reject pink” phase. They’re learning how to be women just like we all did. It is a source of endless fun teasing one of the women I volunteer with who’s currently going through an emo phase. So maybe it’s cringy but I choose to see the good in that someone is able to be so sincere and authentic and I would feel bad ruining her innocent fun. And just like all other women they figure themselves out and mellow.
Forbidden because gender theorists aggressively attack anyone that suggests autogynophiles exist as a way to push the ‘self id’ laws that allow arbitrary men to enter women’s spaces.
Nobody is posting transphobic messages. We don’t want people to irreparably harm their bodies because we care about them, unlike others.
You have to be 18 for GRS or 16 if you have very very long standing documented history of debilitating dysphoria. It is the same for top surgery and any other cosmetic procedures. HRT isn’t until puberty.
Kids transitioning is name, pronouns, clothes, and where they stand in boy girl boy girl lines at school.
I swear ever time I talk to people about these issues at events or whatever people will go on long rants and end with me being like yep, not only go I agree but that’s how it currently works.
Like the accommodation that trans kids/teens want with locker rooms is single person stalls so they don’t have to change in front of their classmates or awkwardly maneuver around a toilet but the rhetoric you see is completely opposite of that.
Genuinely, I am sorry and what or whoever made you feel like you were bigoted or transphobic for basically agreeing with WPATH standards.
The word "encouraged" is doing a lot of work here, in the same dogwhistle sense as the thread above.
ALLOWING a teenager desperate to bind her breasts, is not encouragement.
ACCEPTING a teenager and letting them know that this is OK - if they want it - in spite of what peers might think, is not encouragement.
This is like "Pride" all over again. "If you're born gay, and are proud of it, i should be able to say I'm proud of being straight, what's the difference?". No, we're saying "we're proud of being gay" as a response to you saying "you should be ASHAMED of being gay".
"Encouraged to transition" in almost all cases means "given the support, and resources to do so". But you are making it sound like someone is coming up to vulnerable girls and convincing them that they're trans and talking them into breast binding.
If you had said "We should not allow teenagers to (go through major body-altering procedures without significant counselling, deep psychological evaluation, and allowing them to make other life changes such as changing schools first)", we could have a reasonable discussion about harm reduction and trade-offs of being wrong, or statistics of transition regret.
But if you insist on using intentional language like categorizing all breast binding as "self-harm", then you're not really interested in having a debate are you? You've already decided what you believe, and you're going to pick the most incendiary "Won't anyone think of the children" language that only a monster would disagree with.
But that was already obvious by your casual dismissal of the term dogwhistle, which shows you have no interest in discussing reality if you think it's a concept irrelevant to this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
I think ultimately this is where we’re gonna have to agree to disagree because to
me, someone who works with trans people all the time, this is a gross mischaracterization of what it means to be trans. Manliness or womanliness has nothing to do with it, I know trans women who are super butch and do metalwork and know trans men who are femboys. The “wrongness” trans people feel their whole lives and the distress it causes (dysphoria) runs through to the very core. The most commonly reported age where trans people “know” is 5-6 well before they have any idea about what being a boy or girl even means.
Differentiating between “boy who is gnc” and “trans girl” is why every part of this process has multiple safeguards. And the reason why this matters and why the trans community doesn’t just say “whatever just make them wait until 18” is because going on HRT in early adolescence means they will grow up virtually indistinguishable from a cis person and get to live a much happier and safer life. What $10 pills can do at 14 costs $50-$75k or is just impossible later.
There is no way to create a vagina, which self cleans.
Claiming your opponents get their information is like people claiming you get your information from Tumblr. Which... well, 'neovaginas' - maybe you do.
> The problem here is you may agree or not agree but the point I am making is just my view on this equals bigot / hater
Yes, some beliefs are inherently bigoted and hateful. The people holding those beliefs often don't see it that way. Slaveowners often thought they were doing the right thing for black people. I see no reason why presenting your beliefs about trans people in a kind way should make your beliefs land any softer. I see no reason to discuss these beliefs with you, as they bring nothing new to the table that has not been discussed before.
> Any deviation from a strict all or nothing approach is silenced through bullying and harassment.
I don't agree, so let's test my hypothesis right here!
I come armed only with a single, short article about trans desistance that was aimed a general audience, let's have a short but real discussion. Before that I was tabula rasa.
IIRC the researcher Thomas Steensma quoted in the piece produced both of these results in the same set of published papers:
1. There is a high likelihood that some number of patients in his clinic will no longer identify as trans when they are older
2. There is a set of predictors which can be used to help identify minors in his clinic who will persist as trans when they are older
Reading between the lines, it also appears this is one of the more conservative researchers-- i.e., his clinic waits to socially transition kids longer than other clinics do.
Even so, what I read is that a) the guidelines for diagnosing gender dysphoria have become more stringent/accurate over the past few decades, and b) more research will reveal more predictors for persistence.
Given that, your position at the very least is under-specified. You could be saying that you favor waiting to do social transitioning per this clinician's guidelines. Or, you could be arguing that you want the predictors and indicators fleshed out more before you'd be comfortable with the kinds of treatments these clinics provide. Or, you could mean that you reject (out of hand or otherwise) the research on these predictors and/or the accompanying body of research.
All of those positions invite differing qualities of argumentation. And again, I've only read a single article here, so you may very well be privy to knowledge that would sway me in a different direction. But unless that single article was complete bunk, it appears that both the diagnosis of and treatment for gender dysphoria has improved over the past few decades, and that at least a part of the treatment is social transition where the costs and benefits of those who persist and desist need to be weighed.
With my incredibly small amount of knowledge in this area, zero of this particular treatment option for everyone who is a minor certainly seems excessive. If that is indeed your position, then what is the evidence for it and why aren't experts in the field taking that evidence into account?
In any case, I believe I have fulfilled the requirements for at least a single anecdatum that shows lack of bullying/harassment for your stated position.
I'm from Switzerland so I may get "gender" wrong but yeah that is the progressive take here since the 2000s or so. That just means that you shouldn't force gender stereotypes on children. Let boys play with Barbies and wear pink if the like it and stuff like that. But nobody thought about their gender because of this, they are still boys. Nowadays, at least from what I read online, it feels like your gender depends on these sterotypes and if you don't conform to them you're trans.
Those don't even need to be gender stereotypes. There is nothing (or there SHOULDN'T be) masculine about liking Trucks or Barbies.
But there are things that at least today still fairly strongly tied to gender Expression. Wearing skirts. Painting nails. There used to be more such things! Wearing pants. Having a labour-based job. Feminism enabled women to pick and choose aspects of things gendered masculine and incorporate them as needed. The reverse hasn't caught up - mostly because of misogyny, honestly. It's reasonable that "Women want to be more like men". It's demeaning when men want to be more like women.
But this is all still gender expression, not identity.
Where does expression end and identity begins? The answer is actually very difficult to establish. This line is constantly shifting, but it takes decades.
Is it possible that if we completely removed all social stigma on any kind of "gendered" expression, and allowed everyone to behave exactly how they want, would there be any gender binary remaining except biological? Would the majority of people end up some sort of "non-binary" and there would be no more reason to "transition"?
It's possible.
But that will take decades, and meanwhile there are people today, in today's society, who are suffering.
And this is just me taking a very shallow look at the problem that is sympathetic to people who say things like "This transition thing doesn't make ay sense, just act how you act, you don't need hormones or surgery for that".
There is another layer which is dysphoria, and then we get into a question of innate gender identity. I suspect a part of it remains.
The only way we find out the reality of what humans are like, and how they belong in our society, is by being accepting, and welcoming, and believing those that are trying to tell us what they want and need.
Unfortunately, to a lot of people, someone being "accepting" of an idea they disagree with, sounds like "encouragement" of the idea. So now you have all these stories of teachers grooming children to believe they're trans. And it's just b.s.
The only real concern is with children who transition early - it's unclear to what extent they can consent, and just how much counseling can affect their decision beyond what they genuinely feel (bearing in mind past examples, such as therapists implanting false memories of abuse in children during the Satanic Panic). Pushing someone into puberty blockers etc when they don't actually have gender dysphoria is also causing significant suffering for them later in life. Safeguards shouldn't preclude those who need therapy and surgery from having access to it, but we don't need more of this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Gender_Identity_Developmen...
Well, I sometimes wish I was born an eagle because I like travelling, flying and chasing the sun.
I am not going to try to have a surgery to make it happen.
There is nobody with no gender, there are rarities with natural double gender features, but strictly speaking, nature assigns a gender during early pregnancy.
All the ideas about gender changes occur to people later on and based on personal feelings/factors. The mind is something that develops by education and experience, not genetic urges as far I am aware.
If schools and parents would educate kids saying theres no such thing like gender and you get to choose and society lets the promoters of such go rampant, I imagine this would not lead to a net positive outcome.
Well, fair enough, that concept has never been discussed during my education(that ended 20 years ago), so I am not in the loop except from what I have seen online about it.
It seems it got a bit traction in the US, in Europe is relatively unheard of as of yet.
> However in my personal case I don’t believe transgender and gender identity roles are something that should be pressed on still developing minors.
I don't think those things should be pressed on developing minors either. But I see people of all stripes dressing their boys in pants and their girls in skirts; blue for boys, pink for girls; encouraging boys to hang with boys and play with "boy things" and girls to hang with girls and play with "girl things" and romanticizing cross-gender interactions between children as young as a day old. I don't think we should be forcing these norms on children of this age.
But I suspect that what you're actually saying is that we should not tolerate transgender expression in children. Which, I submit, violates the rights of that child to express themselves.
And, by the way, freedom of speech includes the freedom to respond to deplorable speech with criticism and even shunning. If somebody thinks that you're a bigot or a hater, will you defend their rights to say so?
I do not know if you habe children, but this is for good reason.
Children are brutal when it comes to peer pressure and such.
They do not engage in white lies, they say it as they think it is.
If you send your boy in a pink mini dress to school, you will not be doing him a favour.
There should be some rules on how humans present themselves when in public and in groups.
I mean, if society would be such that ypu could walk down the city center naked with all reproductional organs exposed with nothing but a kkk t shirt, this simply would not find acceptance.
In summary, kids minds and kid environments like school are fertile grounds for bullying under peer pressure etc.
It is good if a school promotes freedom of expression and tolerance, but some very vocal minority groups want everything yesterday and are pushing it down everyones throats.
Having had a close family member losing 5 years of his life and his savings to a fortuneteller crook has made me realize that people with too much of an open mind, in a crisis situation, will believe the most ridiculous coping strategies told to them by others.
Kids are often insecure and easy to influence, I think they should be kept away from people promoting irreversible things like gender changes.
Cigarettes , gambling and alcohol are forbidden to be promoted to minors, so should be this.
But how do we know what the "right" ways to present yourself are? It used to be that if you were a white kid in the US and you played with black kids, other white kids would treat you badly. I presume we all agree that this is not good behavior, and not good for society. But can you clearly delineate between this, and between kids bullying other kids because they are wearing the wrong colors?
I understand that we have to realistically look at the effects these changes have on individuals. But I don't think that we have reached any kind of "optimal social rules". Deciding to stop right here and now seems arbitrary, and I'm reasonably certain that there have always been people making this exact argument for any kind of change.
> But I see people of all stripes dressing their boys in pants and their girls in skirts; blue for boys, pink for girls; encouraging boys to hang with boys and play with "boy things" and girls to hang with girls and play with "girl things" and romanticizing cross-gender interactions between children as young as a day old. I don't think we should be forcing these norms on children of this age.
I don't think we should be either. But asides from the well known differences in brain size and white / grey matter ratios which I'm sure you're already with, I encourage you to visit your local Lesbian Mother's Group where I am sure you will find many parents who absolutely believe in year-0 of sex differences and who, based on my sister's experiences, are often very surprised about how boys and girls act.
> But I suspect that what you're actually saying is that we should not tolerate transgender expression in children.
There is no reason to say this. Many people against gender theory are former 'tomboys' that are healthy adults, don't conform to gender stereotypes, and are glad that breast binding, hormones and cosmetic surgery weren't foisted on them as children.
> > Many people against gender theory are former 'tomboys' that are healthy adults, don't conform to gender stereotypes, and are glad that breast binding, hormones and cosmetic surgery weren't foisted on them as children.
> What do you mean by "healthy adults"?
By healthy adults I mean they don't feel any need to conform to gender stereotypes, and are glad that breast binding, hormones and cosmetic surgery weren't foisted on them as children.
Edit reply due to rate limit: yes I edited because I realised I’d already written this in the comment you were replying to, you just hadn’t bothered to read the comment before replying. I wanted to highlight how foolish you were. I hope you understand now.
And yes mutilating one’s body is harming it, I have no qualms in telling you this in a very direct non-quiet fashion. Stop encouraging people to wreck their bodies.
> Comfortable as the sex they were born with, acting however they like, without harming their bodies.
> I would have thought that was clear but if you were asking genuinely there’s your answer.
Yeah. It was clear to me that you were using "healthy" to assert that transgender people who transition are "unhealthy." That surgery is "harm." Your later edit
> > > Many people against gender theory are former 'tomboys' that are healthy adults, don't conform to gender stereotypes, and are glad that breast binding, hormones and cosmetic surgery weren't foisted on them as children.
> By healthy adults I mean they don't feel any need to conform to gender stereotypes, and are glad that breast binding, hormones and cosmetic surgery weren't foisted on them as children.
shows that you understand your initial statement to be a dog whistle, and that upon reflection, you decided not to say the quiet part loud.
The topic here is about principles and rights of free speech. You've swerved into a debate about the legitimacy of transgender existence. I'm not here for that debate; you can keep yammering if you like.
> shows that you understand your initial statement to be a dog whistle, and that upon reflection, you decided not to say the quiet part loud.
You seem to be making some very strong assumptions about intent [E] and have been since your first response in this thread. As an outside observer, those assumptions don't seem supported by the conversation up to this point.
Instead of assuming this person is strongly biased and bigoted, perhaps can you instead assume they simply did not make the point they were trying to make as clearly as they would have liked, and thus revised their statement accordingly?
Something something positive intent and the like. Assuming negative intent when there's very little signal to support that assumption speaks more to your own prejudices and biases than anything else.
> Something something positive intent and the like
Trust, but verify. It's one thing to recognize a dog whistle and flip out. It's quite another thing to hear a dog whistle, ask for elaboration, and nope out when negative intent is revealed.
The 'talking points' thing is a non argument. For the record, my sister - the same one from the Lesbian Mother's Group - counsels at-risk adolescents and I live near the Tavistock center which was shut down by the UK government after one of their doctors blew the whistle on 'gender affirming' care.
Yes I edited because I realised I’d already written this in the comment you were replying to, you just hadn’t bothered to read the comment before replying. I wanted to highlight how foolish you were. I hope you understand now.
And yes mutilating one’s body is harming it, I have no qualms in telling you this in a very direct non-quiet fashion. Stop encouraging people to wreck their bodies.
As your comment-sibling suggests, it's good to at least try to assume good faith. Perhaps I wanted to give just a bit more rope for the commenter to hang theirself with. This is, perhaps, a counterintuitive argument for free speech: if you don't let them make asses of themselves in public, nobody will believe that they're doing it in private.
The ad-hominem response is little more than confirmation that I hold the higher ground.
I’m sorry what ad-hominem response? You labelled me a bigot for pointing out that gender theory harms children, which I guess you think isn’t ad hominem?
I told you to stop harming children and you think that is ad hominem and proves you have the moral high ground?
Kim Petras was abused as a 12 year old boy. You're welcome to your own newspeak but the rest of us don't have to revise history because you want us to.
I agree with you, same for religion imposed on kids, it plain brainwashing.
Religion has a few good things like the ten commandments at least, though.
Pushing gender identity on teenagers who do not even know how to urinate in a straight line and had no sexual intercourse yet is just plain wrong, always will be.The teens do not come up with these things themselves usually its often an external influence by highly irresponsible people pushing theit agenda.
To me this is more controversial than the abortion issue.
And thats right, I will openly oppose anyone who claims otherwise and I will certainly not die on any hill defending that.
I can agree to disagree and that is that.
All these who did the gender changes recently appear to be still unhappy and frustrated. Show me the success stories.
This is nothing new by the way, there have been a number of thai boys for example undergoing hormone therapy and gender change more than 25 years ago, they often would work in prostitution. The difference is, they perhaps liked the idea and did it for sexualbor monetary reasons and came up with the idea independently, not via social media.
