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Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

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Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#271

Post by lazyjones »

cousin_it wrote: post #84
cheschire wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help. However, in opposition to my own idea, I consider that simply requiring a more effort wouldn't necessarily change the groupthink problem, but would just stifle low effort downvotes. Let's cons…

We could remove downvotes. They had three purposes: 1) Crowdsourced moderation. Well, everyone is using manual moderation anyway. 2) Silencing others. This is a misfeature. 3) Finding the best content. Upvotes are enough for that. That said, I'm not sure this will reduce groupthink. Twitter has no downvotes and plenty of groupthink.

In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h, so people eventually saved them for really bad / offensive / spam comments instead of punishing people for their opinions (except a few who even wrote scripts to downvote certain people systematically...).

The problem is in my opinion that once people begin to act like this, their victims behave like this also. If you get punished for arguing against somebody, you learn to stop arguing and just downvote that person instead. It's a chain reaction.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#272

Post by NhanH »

krapp wrote: post #244
missosoup wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent summary of what's going on. Firing, cancelling, and silencing anyone with a 'bad' opinion doesn't convert them to a 'good' one. Instead it makes them more hostile and causes them to double down. I'm pretty confused how America keeps going down this path even after an actual 50% of the entire population revolted against the 'good' ideologies and voted in Trump with religious fervour. Pretending th…

>I'm pretty confused how America keeps going down this path even after an actual 50% of the entire population revolted against the 'good' ideologies and voted in Trump with religious fervour. About 60% [0,1] of "the entire population" voted at all, and out of that population, votes for Trump and Clinton were split almost evenly, with Clinton still getting a slight majority of (a couple of million) votes, which isn't…

I am just going to assume the GP already knew everything you just said and reply that you are missing the point.

Change 50% to 30% and his point does not change. There are large number of American who voted for Donald Trump with religious fervor, and unless you are planning to do a Thanos, you will have to come to term with them.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#273

Post by hbarka »

AHappyCamper wrote: post #78

I understand that there are a lot of people who are hurting right now, and I empathize with their pain, but how can we share out most wonderful and beautiful ideas with each other or convey important information to the public if we believe there might be serious reprisals against us if we "say the wrong thing". For example, I personally helped work against slavery on the Black Market in the Middle East, and I wanted…

I’m having a hard time believing that you helped work against slavery, as you say, because to me your follow-comments don’t reconcile with someone empathetic to fighting against an injustice yet dismiss those who have a connection to the injustice as just a PC problem. Did you mean to say that you were just devising an example for argument’s sake?

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#274

Post by yadco »

AHappyCamper wrote: post #78

I understand that there are a lot of people who are hurting right now, and I empathize with their pain, but how can we share out most wonderful and beautiful ideas with each other or convey important information to the public if we believe there might be serious reprisals against us if we "say the wrong thing". For example, I personally helped work against slavery on the Black Market in the Middle East, and I wanted…

I somehow think that the people who get insulted and make a big deal about such terms aren't people who actually do something to help with these issues so you wouldn’t need to care about reaching them.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#275

Post by koheripbal »

kanox wrote: post #93
phkahler wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There is no "right" way to convey the issue above without offending someone. You are not responsible for those people being offended. If people actually respond that way to your efforts they look stupid. Just carry on doing what is right. Most of them are not actually offended but are claiming you may be offensive to someone else.

> You are not responsible for those people being offended. This is objectively false, you can get fired for offending people both at your job or outside it.

I love it when people throw the term "objectively false" at anything they disagree with - in this case, the person is sharing their opinion on what should be reality.

Someone's opinion on how things should be cannot be objectively false.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#276

Post by smt88 »

lr4444lr wrote: post #223
smt88 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying someone "didn't live a virtuous life" is not factual. In this case, it's an irrelevant and tasteless opinion about a victim. It implies Floyd somehow deserved to be shot in the back and killed.

The utterer was a Chaplain. This is a main aspect of what they are hired for: to remind us of the moral judgments of the religious tradition they were trained in. They're not just psychotherapists who wear funny clothing, and they aren't PERSONALLY setting those rules about the virtuous life. Maybe you don't want chaplains, which is an argument, but that's separate.

So someone gets shot and the chaplain doesn't remind us of the sins of judgment or wrath. He reminds us that the man shot in the back was a sinner??

Even assuming agreement with his religion, he's not even a good chaplain. His own religious texts say he shouldn't judge, and here he is judging a dead man he never met.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#277

Post by dahfizz »

yadco wrote: post #274
AHappyCamper wrote: post #78

I understand that there are a lot of people who are hurting right now, and I empathize with their pain, but how can we share out most wonderful and beautiful ideas with each other or convey important information to the public if we believe there might be serious reprisals against us if we "say the wrong thing". For example, I personally helped work against slavery on the Black Market in the Middle East, and I wanted…

I somehow think that the people who get insulted and make a big deal about such terms aren't people who actually do something to help with these issues so you wouldn’t need to care about reaching them.

People lose jobs and suffer threats and harrassment if the cancel culture mob turns it's sights on you. It's not something you can just not care about.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#278

Post by PopeDotNinja »

paulgb wrote: post #250
blueflow wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"changing your pronouns" has a link to "tying your identity to how you are being referenced" (i claim this from observation). Using the wrong pronoun is such much more likely to be seen as a personal attack than using your pre-marriage name.

Have you seen anyone personally take offense, or just high-profile cases? I've definitely seen a few of the latter (e.g. Jordan Peterson) but the common denominator there seems to be antagonistically refusing to use pronouns or doing so to make the point that you reject them, which is different from an honest mistake.

Before understood more about gender identity, yes. I think it's likely more that I was speaking to a person when they were low on patience for reasons that had little to do with me. But it's amazing how vividly remember upsetting the person, and how afraid I can be at times at doing it again.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#279

Post by PopeDotNinja »

danielheath wrote: post #143
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage reading every code of conduct and honoring it? The trouble I'm having with social changes, expectations, per person pronouns, and other things is that managing all of these interactions can be a crushing amount of cognitive load. Now that I think about it, it's the same challenge I have with microservices. Formerly simple interactions are now hellza complicated. I'm not fighting the trend. I'm just…

Exposure to unfamiliar ideas is exhausting. Doubly so when the social behaviour that typically becomes second nature in adolescence no longer fits (IMO that’s why video calls are exhausting too - the usual subtle social cues don’t apply).

That's the truth. New + important = hard.

Re: Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

#280

Post by andreareina »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #236
high_derivative wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find codes of conduct meaningless. They will go on in very general terms about 'hate speech' which is just synonymous with 'anything that anyone feels offended by' now. I would argue that code of conducts were a symptom of the start of the problem. The strategy of the grievance class: - Propose a code of conduct which surely nobody can disagree with, it's great to have rules and be nice to each other. - Design the…

That was always implicit in group discussions. As others have said, Codes of Conduct aren't creating new rules, they're just making them explicit instead of implicit. Let me give you an example: you have a group of friends. Two of your friends have recently experienced a miscarriage. The implicit rules in your group have now expanded to include "no dead baby jokes" (depending on how dark your group's humour was, this…

Can you point to examples where you feel they're done well? Whenever the subject comes up it's always the egregious ones that are pointed out so I'd like to see the other side.
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