Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Scholar Thomas Doherty describes how the HUAC hearings swept onto the blacklist those who had never even been particularly active politically, let alone suspected of being Communists... I was referring more to the original Hollywood Ten. Although, I'm curious to hear how the witch hunt you describe would not, in fact, happen with a similarly concerted attempt targeted at far-right views. > I think a perfect example…
> Although, I'm curious to hear how the witch hunt you describe would not, in fact, happen with a similarly concerted attempt targeted at far-right views. This is a concern of mine, which is why I took time to differentiate Jones and Damore. I see one as having a legitimate cause for deplatforming, and the other as reactionary. > If anything, that's an argument that we don't have to ban Nazis, because all of that hap…
Well, isn't that the thing? If you already accept as a given that censorship is legally and morally justified and you turn it into a mere policy decision of who is worthy of censorship, there is a real and present danger of that mere policy decision turning into outright and explicit oppression.
It's like a lot of the classic civil liberties scenarios, like how the "ticking time bomb scenario" can justify torture. So let's talk about that case, by way of analogy. If there's a ticking time bomb, and you can verify within minutes where the bomb is, you can just club someone with a wrench or something until he tells you, and if it turns out the bomb isn't where he told you, you keep torturing him until he tells the truth. In that single, specific, narrow circumstance, you might be able to justify torture. But once you've made a policy of "torture is sometimes justified", how the hell are you going to make sure they only use it in the extreme edge cases where it's called for? More likely, from a rule-utilitarian standpoint, you just end up causing a lot more pain and suffering by letting a bunch of people get tortured unnecessarily.
So, even if there are individual cases where you can have a net reduction in expected totalitarianism and state murder by censoring totalitarian, murderous ideologies, allowing such censorship risks those exact ideologies sneaking in through the back door.
In the free speech case, it's even more dire, because the standard propaganda narrative of murderous, totalitarian ideologies seems to be, "$BOOGEYMAN is murderous and dangerous and we need to restrict civil liberties in order to protect you from them". Nazis never campaigned for universal liberties; they just campaigned for installing themselves as the oppressors and their perceived oppressors as the victims, while pooh-poohing anyone who did advocate for universal liberties.
> I'm curious, do you see a difference between social deplatforming, and a technological deplatforming?
I'm actually idealistic enough that I don't think anyone, even literal Nazis, should be fired for their political views as long as they don't bring those views into the workplace.
I think the pattern of tabooing certain forms of extremism causes more problems than it solves. If you don't actually let racist people say overtly racist things, they're going to say racist-adjacent things that are moderate enough to be held in good faith, like "unrestricted immigration is culturally disruptive" or "the Muslim world doesn't seem to share our cultural values when it comes to respecting women", and then you can't tell the racist trolls apart from people who genuinely hold those moderate views, and now we're at the point of absurdity and indirection where the racist trolls themselves post slogans like, "it's OK to be white", which makes it really, really awkward for those of us who aren't racist trolls, but don't have any rhetorical space left to argue against the scores of far-leftists who regularly state that, actually, it isn't OK to be white.