A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming • Hacker News Board

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#131

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #128

stcredzero wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of positive effect I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years. Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy? Cond…

> I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years. Again, no gulags here. Just Twitter, Reddit, and bad clones of the aforementioned. It's also worth noting that the Soviet Union, at its best, simply was not a liberal democracy. The position that I'm taking is nonsensical outside of a liberal d…

There's no conditioning going on.

The general population that grew up online in web forums is very much conditioned to accept totalitarian dictates about who can say what, where. Even to the point where they concoct ideology about it.

a discussion that's been going on for as long as liberal democracies have existed

The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate free speech on your property is historical fact and precedent.

There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehova's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute her pamphlets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc

Originally, it was widely recognized by US jurisprudence, though property rights and freedom of association are important, the First Amendment was even more important.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#132

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:35 AM UTC

claudiawerner wrote: post #125

stcredzero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement. The whole point of Free Speech is to enable all sides of any issue to have their say. That is a fundamental mechanism against totalitarianism. In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. Sorry, but Karl Popper's idea is just Orwellian nightmare fuel. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Tolerance is to live…

>Tolerance is to live and let live. This is one reading of tolerance, but there are multiple (as expounded by Popper and Marcuse too, for instance). I don't think considering an idea badly because it's used as fuel is a good thing. A quick counterexample to the idea that tolerance means to allow anything and everything is that if I were to tell you I tolerate your presence, but you begin to make annoying sounds conti…

I don't think considering an idea badly because it's used as fuel is a good thing.

An idea that demolishes a foundation idea by melding it with its opposite is a very insidiously bad thing.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#133

Post by claudiawerner » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:36 AM UTC

froasty wrote: post #9

mlillie wrote: post #2

This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement. "Where does it stop?" is the same slippery slope garbage peddled by #HimToo and #BlueLivesMatter acolytes. But even engaging with the question at face value, the answer is very simple, and the author of this piece didn't try very hard if he couldn't find someone who is able to answer it. In fact, the best answer was given by Karl Popper in 1945. > In order to maintain a to…

For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society: "Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation,…

As much as Popper and Sartre (and the other left intellectuals) were diametrically opposed, they seemed to have found some agreement on this issue; here's a nice quote, using Sartre's example of anti-semitism:

>“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#134

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

pvg wrote: post #123

stcredzero wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not misrepresenting the other's argument at all. I'm clarifying it.

No you aren't. You don't get to decide what the other person's argument is and then rail against that. It's a pretty fundamental rule of reasonably civil discourse. I'm sure you've seen dang berate people about this but in case you haven't: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20quotation&sort=b...

I'm pretty clear about what is the other person's idea, and what other ideas that idea is parallel to. In that case, I'm not misstating the other person's argument. I'm clarifying the idea's implications.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#135

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:38 AM UTC

> Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories

Big fat citation needed on this. You speculate as to how they may become pyrrhic victories, but it's far from concluded that this will be the case. Previous deplatformings (Milo, Alex Jones) haven't produced any visible negative consequences for the platforms. There's little reason to think this will either. Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble finding a DNS registrar. Especially, surprisingly few important DNS registrar customers care.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#136

Post by fzeroracer » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:41 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #127

fzeroracer wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a natural consequence of the marketplace of ideas and of capitalism in general. Capitalism ascribes values to speech. If speech therefore has negative value, capitalism has the imperative to censor or prevent that speech from occurring. I would even hasten to argue that if you don't follow that train of thought you would be inherently anti-capitalist or unable to understand the full extent of the free market. A…

[dupe]

I want you to cite the part where it is widely recognized by US jurisprudence, because we've seen similar cases arise (see: Cyber Promotions vs AoL) where it was argued that a company does not have freedom of speech rights to send unsolicited emails to another company's users.

Additionally you make a large mistake in assuming that a company using the government to censor someone is the same as the company itself censoring someone. If we were to take your argument to its logical conclusion and apply that ruling to individuals, I would not have the right to tell people to leave my property. If they stuck a sign in my lawn, I would not be allowed to remove it lest I am censoring them.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#137

Post by claudiawerner » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:41 AM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #41

watwut wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people in these debates are less interested in whether "words" are ugly and more in political projects pushed by those words. When a guy in synagogue is shooting people, because he happen to believe that they are organizing immigrants to genocide whites, competitive left wing group trying to convince other guys does not make people in synagogue wake up from death. It does not cancel out. You can be simul…

The point is not that the extremism on one end cancels out extremism on the other. The point is, it is possible to tolerate both - there is no paradox of tolerance with respect to speech. As to your second point, the suppression of speech also has dangerous consequences. Plenty of anti-Semitic thought is rooted in the belief of Jewish control of the media. Suppressing speech probably only serves to reinforce this vie…

>The reality is that intolerance of hateful speech rarely makes hate go away.

Is there any evidence either way? I don't have the source at hand, but I believe there was some study done that found that Reddit, after removing communities which spread hate, turned out significantly better for it, with less vitriol all round. The hate literally went away.

>Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned

Here is a quote from Hitler opposing what you are saying:

"Only one thing could have broken our movement — if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement."

You say,

>Aside from instances where the suppression of speech is nearly certain to avoid negative consequences

But isn't the distance between speech and action shorter now than it ever was? Here is a quote from 1965; do you think, with the most recent flash riots organised over the Internet in which people have literally been killed, these words are more relevant than ever?

"The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short."

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#138

Post by pvg » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:46 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #134

pvg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you aren't. You don't get to decide what the other person's argument is and then rail against that. It's a pretty fundamental rule of reasonably civil discourse. I'm sure you've seen dang berate people about this but in case you haven't: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20quotation&sort=b...

I'm pretty clear about what is the other person's idea, and what other ideas that idea is parallel to. In that case, I'm not misstating the other person's argument. I'm clarifying the idea's implications.

Well, you were, quite blatantly, but you've now edited the comment to not do that - thanks. It seems we're in agreement on the important bit.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#139

Post by newsbinator » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:47 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #14

tunesmith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define intolerance. That's the whole problem. So being "intolerant of intolerance" is meaningless except as something that signals a different meaning - different lines, different behavior, different standards - to every listener.

> Define intolerance That thing everyone except the intolerant seem to understand remarkably well, and the intolerant spend a lot of time quibbling over the definition of in a desperate attempt to derail their inclusion in it. Or, more seriously: treating other people as unwelcome or hated or less than human, for reasons other than being hateful and intolerant.

> "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobellis_v._Ohio

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#140

Post by SamReidHughes » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #131

woodruffw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years. Again, no gulags here. Just Twitter, Reddit, and bad clones of the aforementioned. It's also worth noting that the Soviet Union, at its best, simply was not a liberal democracy. The position that I'm taking is nonsensical outside of a liberal d…

There's no conditioning going on. The general population that grew up online in web forums is very much conditioned to accept totalitarian dictates about who can say what, where. Even to the point where they concoct ideology about it. a discussion that's been going on for as long as liberal democracies have existed The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate free speech on your prop…

Also extended to shopping centers in one state with Pruneridge.