The problems often start historically when one group comes to believe that some other group wants to “eliminate open society and civility” (or so some other evil thing), and thus feel justified in using any means to oppose them. Never forget the bad guys almost always think they are good guys fighting evil.
100% except perhaps we don't agree on who is doing that.
Look at marjorie taylor green's most recent insanity.
"accusation in a mirror."
and it goes far beyond a handful of loud extremists who are given megaphones from the 'less-extreme' in their party (are they really the minority then?)
the Fox news led contingent have been screaming this 'under attack' narrative.
and they are openly setting the conditions for IRL violence.
Othering trans & queer people. freaking attacking drag queens which is SO silly..
claiming we are pedo groomers who give out hormones to tweens like candy. saying your identity will no longer be people like you in the future, straight & cis.
child abusers seem to be the one class that it's still acceptable to openly wish violence upon.
telling their audience to 'take a stand' or else lose their entire existence & identity produces extremism and prods armed extremists to show up in real life.
they are bringing guns to shut down libraries, ban books, pile into vans to go attack pride, passing discriminatory laws.
not even touching on poc, immigrants, & attacks on democracy/jan 6; i'm focusing on my identity since I can better speak to it. which btw funny how there is always an eminent caravan invasion (a specifically chosen word) right before the election.
we have always been victims of violence.
but this is a much bigger boiling kettle and one group is stoking the fire.
i clearly see this fear in the eyes of a large & heavily armed group.
they think they are under attack. what will they do to 'protect themselves and save our country'? what happens when the kettle boils over?
I agree with you if you mean that the individuals that first do the targeted group violence are the bad guys. But not if you generalize blame to the group.
Just about any large group of people, whether defined by by race, religion, nationality, or creed, will have bad individuals in it. And so the bad guys can almost always point to people from the other group that "started it".
When someone from the out-group commits an atrocity, it is just more proof of how bad that group is. When someone from the in-group commits an atrocity, it is an exception.
Sure, and those groups almost always believe they are the good guys, fighting against some group that does and exists to do bad things.
The point is, if you are going to write of a group (presumably, the other political party) as bad beyond redemption, you better have a damn good reason to think that you are the historical exception.
I mean the commonly understood contextual meanings of those words. Dictionaries are useful when you're unfamiliar with the words in context. I trust that you, being a native Anglophone, know what those words mean in the contexts they're used. However, if you're thinking of specific examples where you expect our understood meanings of those words to differ, I'll entertain those examples.
Also, violence isn't the only bad thing people do which justifies some sort of retribution.
>When one group wants to eliminate open society and civility, how is it possible to have an open and civil debate with them?
In the US, there is not one group trying to do that, but a multitude of groups, some who are in power and some who are not, most of whom deny that they are trying to do what you charge them with.
There are a multitude of groups doing that, but they're not equally dangerous now. The problem is that the hard right has control of the Republican Party. The hard left does not have control of the Democratic Party. If US democracy falls in the next few years, it's almost guaranteed to be because of the hard right.
I'm not surprised, but continually amazed that people actually and truly think this way; that there's only one insidious group that are the problem, and only they will be the cause of disaster. Take the blinders off, there's more at work here that petty tribalism.
Sometimes there is only one truly insidious group, and to suggest otherwise is the false balance fallacy. That group's supporters will think of themselves as just, and even see themselves as victims. It's always like that with authoritarian movements.
Can you pleas explain how that bothersiderism logic would not be equally valid for defending the Nazi party in the 30s? You must believe it’s not valid because it being valid means the comment is gas lighting.
The only thing surer than debates on the internet eventually leading to nazi comparisons is that some commenter will then cite godwins law.
It’s actually godwins second law of nature. how pertinent nazis are to the topic is not relevant, Godwin’s law will be brought up and very often inappropriately as even Godwin himself has noted.
“Godwin's law itself can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, when fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate.[12]”
“Godwin himself has also criticized the overapplication of the law, claiming that it does not articulate a fallacy, but rather is intended to reduce the frequency of inappropriate and hyperbolic comparisons“
And yet it doesn't make it any less true. The correlation exists, just as tides to moon phase, and doesn't negate the existence of either. HN has turned into that one site where any remotely ideological topic, any minutely political (cue the "everything is political crowd") will invariably bring out the "BUT NAZIS" replies. It's insufferable.
A. I wasn’t the one who broached the topic of nazis
B. This is a comment page about censorship and this thread in particular is about one party trying to end open society
So nazis are a natural comparison, and the valid comparison was attempted to be censored and avoided by bringing up an internet meme in exactly the way the originator has criticized. But hey knowing the meme is a get out of jail free card, no civil discourse needed!
Just admit that the comment would have been a valid defense of the nazi party in its ramp up. No meme-ing out of that and there’s been no attempt to deny it, just distract from it.
One group also set alight many businesses, destroyed property, incited violence, and destroyed the lives of countless individuals in the last two years. The point remains: there are a multitude of groups. Focusing on a single one only shows a blatant and ignorant bias.
Once one realizes that tolerance follows the model of a peace treaty rather than a moral precept, these apparent dilemmas resolve themselves. Treaties only protect parties who abide by their terms. There is no contradiction in being intolerant of intolerance.
> There is no contradiction in being intolerant of intolerance.
There is, because literally every viewpoint is an implicit repudiation of some set of values, ie. aka intolerance. The whole point of tolerance is the recognition of this fact and that resolving such differences requires dialogue (edit: resolving them without violence that is).
As Popper said, only those views that directly incite violence or cannot be kept in check by public opinion should be silenced, otherwise you put the whole enterprise of tolerance in jeopardy.
I am becoming more sympathetic to this, too. Real liberals (not necessarily leftists, although perhaps so) need to start punching back, hard. Slippery slopes are real and we're on one.
To reinforce the peace treaty of civil society everyone needs to push back against these “defections from peace.” It’s social contract stuff, too.
The alternative looks like a replay of all the worst stuff from social repression to actual nuclear war-given the misinformation propping up the Russian invasion of Ukraine and nuclear threats.
> When one group wants to eliminate open society and civility, how is possible to have an open and civil debate with them?
Roger Baldwin, founder of the now gone-astray ACLU, said this [1],
> Host: "What possible reason is there for giving civil liberties to people who will use those civil liberties in order to destroy the civil liberties of all the rest?"
> Roger: "That's a classic argument you know, that's what they said about the nazis and the communists, that if they got into power they'd suppress all the rest of us. Therefore, we'd suppress them first. We're going to use their methods before they can use it."
> "Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it."
> > "Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it."
There's a much shorter version of this sentiment that people loved to use during the 2020 riots: "violence is the language of the unheard"
This has been the rule throughout human history, and it’s unfortunate that people (some in this thread even) are discovering the first principles for the first time for why we strive to apply the same standards to everyone, and not do carve outs. Unfortunately, politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from power. When elite opinion makers decide that certain things are okay, those things are okay … like mass protests and rioting during a pandemic.
There is no nuance in this debate. Roger made those statements in 1982. The only access to broad public announcement was via TV, controlled by private companies for the most part.
Today platforms have the same choices about what to air or not. Free Speech is also about not forcing people to say things they do not want, it is also about not forcing platforms to broadcast lies.
I'm (still) strongly sympathetic to Baldwin's point of view, but the GP also has a valid point, in that liars have gained most of the benefit of the civil-libertarian point of view since the rise of the Internet. These days, a lie can literally travel around the world before the truth makes it out past the firewall.
There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.
> I'm (still) strongly sympathetic to Baldwin's point of view, but the GP also has a valid point, in that liars have gained most of the benefit of the civil-libertarian point of view since the rise of the Internet. These days, a lie can literally travel around the world before the truth makes it out past the firewall.
That's largely made possible by censorship. When you counter such views in groups that support them, you are likely to be silenced without your knowledge. Social media sites have built a whole suite of tools to aid in the removal of such content [1], and such tools are available to people from all ideologies. You might think that evens things out, but the secretive nature of the tools means that only a handful of people, relatively speaking, know how it all works. That creates a new "us vs. them" mentality, and we need to find our way back to a concept of shared humanity.
> There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.
Social media today, like the printing press in its infancy, is understood and managed by a small number of people. In that environment you can still take a principled stance to argue against censorship and for transparency.
Yes. Imagine complaining about not being able to sit at a particular lunch counter, or getting the seat on the bus you want. I mean, dude, there are other seats and better places to eat. Why are you eating at diners anyway?
We have always made a distinction between things that are not the fault of the individual (skin color, gender, ethnicity) and things that are (speech and actions). Which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
As usual, this stops the conversation cold, because it doesn't fit anyone's narrative. Free speech advocates want to claim that the marketplace of ideas will lead people to good ideas, while people for restricting speech want to claim that it's possible to restrict speech without going full-on totalitarian dystopia. The case of religion shows quite starkly that both narratives completely fail to describe a central example with great historical and current relevance.
Free speech is a good idea for game-theoretic reasons. That's it. Free speech lets people fight it out with only the occasional riot and attempted overthrow of the republic. That's better than the alternative.
This one is in flux, I suspect. In the past, people were born into their religion, and today, at least in the west, it is becoming more common for people to choose their religion. So I guess this is the exception that proves the rule.
When people with the wrong opinions (on who knows what, frankly, the list keeps changing) get banned from banking systems the very same people will be in the thread defending the sanctions and censorship action.
“Just build your own bank.”
“Just build your own currency.”
It's like the tech tree from the Civ games in reverse.
To develop 'Social Network' or 'Digital Currencies', you need 'Server Farm', 'Internet', and 'Power Grid', and to have those you need everything from 'Intercontintental Data Cables' to 'Semiconductor Manufacturing', and way back to extraction and refining of raw materials..
They do it to regular people every day, I was banned countless times from websites when I was a stupid kid, and more than a few times as an adult. No one cares until it happens to famous racists. I wonder why.
Where we pretend that groups like the ACLU didn't have to go to court for that, and that it's always allowed for everyone and it's never a huge problem.
>"That's a classic argument you know, that's what they said about the nazis and the communists, that if they got into power they'd suppress all the rest of us. Therefore, we'd suppress them first. We're going to use their methods before they can use it.""Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it."
I'm not aware of any group intending to overthrow a government or otherwise do harm which was allowed to recruit and spread their propaganda as aggressively and freely as possible, and which was thwarted in their aims by nothing more than civil discourse. I don't know what experience he believes to be contrary to that classic argument, but that of the Nazis and Communists ain't it.
It certainly doesn't seem to work with modern propaganda or conspiracy theory. I'm certain QAnon and anti-vaxxers have been presented with arguments contrary to their claims, and those of white supremacists and anti-semites have been litigated for a century or more, and yet not only do they persist, but are experiencing a modern renaissance.
Show me an example where this proposition that "letting them all talk" is the best way to prevent organized violence and mayhem at scale. I can raise you book burnings and gulags and death camps galore.
> I can raise you book burnings and gulags and death camps galore.
Yes, the famous events that come from letting everyone speak: book burnings and death camps. If we could just burn enough books, we could keep books from being burned forever. If we silence enough people, we can keep people from being silenced.
Elaborate on your examples of how the powerful allowing the weak to speak leads to book burnings and death camps, and I'll give you something more detailed than a clear, concise response.
The argument is for deplatforming, so it would be more accurate to say, “in order to prevent book burnings, we must not give them any assistance in publicizing their thoughts.”
Deplatforming doesn’t forcibly prevent speech, it just pushes it to the margins. You can still publish your book in favor of book burnings, but, in a deplatforming world, no major publisher would publish it, so you’d have to do a small independent print run that would likely be ignored.
This is the way the world has always worked. Publishers (including TV channels, newspapers, etc.) have always exercised discretion over what they thought was worthy to publish. What’s different today is that the human content moderation has largely disappeared, which has allowed the marginal voices (antivax on both left and right, QAnon, etc.) to flourish.
Edit: That’s not to say this content moderation has been perfect. It allows small communities to exercise behavior that the larger society finds abhorrent, such as refusing service to people of color. And so laws are passed regulating what small communities can do, which understandably pisses them off. Human systems are messy; there’s no absolutist answer that works, either in unbridled control or unbridled tolerance.
> In its application to statements about groups, the German law of insult
had a development very similar to the Anglo-American law of libel.1 The
Supreme Court had decided at an early date that statements about a class
of people were punishable only if it could clearly be established that they
were directed against definite individuals. An insulting remark about "Jews
generally" was not considered within the statute. This view was reaffirmed
in 1931 in a case in which a general attack on the Jews was held to be "not
directed in a sufficiently recognizable manner against individual Jews."
Similarly, an attack against the "German Jews" was held not to be suffi-
ciently restricted, although in a few instances persons were convicted for
insulting the Jewish inhabitants of small communities
Even known extremists, posting lies about people who were targetted for being Jewish, were let off, where the same lie about any random person could have led to a year in prison:
> In one of several cases
against Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer,
a fine of 400 marks (then less than $100) was levied for an article which
stated that a Jewish attorney, Dr. Wassertriidinger of Nuremberg, had
committed perjury. The opinion of the court was that in spite of the seri-
ousness of the libel and of a prior conviction of Streicher, no prison sentence
be inflicted because "the defendant is a fanatic whose statements cannot
be taken too seriously." Similar tenderness in meting out punishment was
frequently explained by the characterization of the defendants as zealots.
> Furthermore,
the immunity of the members of the Reichstag often protected Nazi depu-
ties against criminal prosecution. Those deputies became the so-called re-
sponsible editors of many newspapers—frequently one deputy was the
editor of several newspapers—and thus made criminal prosecution for
many libelous publications impossible. Although the Reichstag could waive
the immunity of its members, it did so infrequently and then only after
long delays.
So it looks like we tried not censoring them, and suprisingly, it didn't work.
