501–510 of 606 posts
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Once something leaves your lips/phone/computer it doesn't matter who it is intended for. Surely you know this.
>Once something leaves your lips/phone/computer it doesn't matter who it is intended for. It matters if you choose your audience. I agree, if you make a statement in public, say on twitter, then you've chosen the audience. The world.
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Challenge accepted. Pederasty is so far from our cultural norms it’s current form is meaningless compared to a socially accepted version. In a society with active mentoring of youth by people across the gender and sexual orientation spectrum pederasty would reduce the stigma’s associated with homosexuals thus increasing social cohesion. War is a stress test for societies. By destroying less efficient social structure…
> By destroying less efficient social structures it promotes long term progress and reduces inefficient practices like slavery. Sorry, what? Slavery was never "inefficient." The problem is that humans have rights and holding slaves deprives them of those rights. To the contrary, slavery was, is, terribly efficient for the slaveholder.
The really fucked up part is that the advent of slavery was an improvement over stone aged bands warfare of genocide where at best some of the women and children might be forced into concubinge and human sacrifices to dispose of unsustainable mouths to feed.
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> And it's not a refutation at all, because the examples you cite are themselves restricted to particular jurisdictions (and I'm sure of this because I spent the past ten years travelling the entire world and never saw anything of the magnitude I've seen coming from the west during that period), and the incidents are far more excessive breaches of the local cultural etiquette in incidents where they do end up causing…
> I've travelled the world too, but with my eyes open :) Clearly not, since exactly as I already said, the examples you cite are restricted to specific jurisdictions it's quite easy to avoid, although the one you go to with the example of "excruciatingly forced politeness" has me scratching my head about the problem, frankly. > Perhaps you believe these cultural norms are more intrinsically worth defending than polit…
Please, enlighten me. Name me a state which conforms to your ideals of 'free speech absolutism', where people are free to say whatever they like on any topic without any risk of public outcry or legal repercussions. I'll wait.
> do you think people defending free speech have a problem with minorities and that's baked into the position or something and you're just jumping to that conclusion immediately without actually examining it at all?
No, I believe that your display of visceral hostility towards the speech of 'professional offence takers' and insinuation that being asked to use particular pronouns is a burden to which all other requests/demands to comply with cultural norms pale in comparison is an indication of a type of speech you value over others, in this case the speech of the person offending the minority group over the speech of the offended party. People actually defending freedom of expression as a general principle don't tend to argue that the most uniquely horrible threat to freedom of speech worldwide comes from those using their own speech to argue that a particular person is a bigot their company or university shouldn't host. Partly because they care about securing people's right to advocate boycotts even if they don't agree with boycotts, and partly because much of the rest of the world is entirely comfortable with jailing people for wrongthink.
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People might pick the news they want to hear; but thinking this is "fine" is an appeal to ignorance. Ignorance is not strength. For whatever it's worth I was raised dirt poor, central Britain in a city that had been in rapid decline for many decades- Yet I believed, fiercely that Europe was less than Britain, that Muslims were coming for our benefits and our women and that Britains colonial past was something to be a…
Right, but did you believe these things because an algorithm on social media was giving you a limited view of the world? My own view is that I could limit my intake of knowledge to just a handful of people, but if they were the right people, I’d end up with a more original worldview than if I tried to read “both sides” since “both-sides-ism” tends to reactively assume the people shouting old views loudly represent an…
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One of the problems with upvote/downvote is that it is binary, while topics of discussion in the social rarely aren’t. In the social space of forming opinions, many things happen in a grey spectrum, and need not be polarized all the time (upvote / downvote)
Simple up/down voting is probably a relic of the simple concepts and simplified programming needed for early development of social media (web 1.0). An overhaul of these networks to adapt more to human-like discourse is much-needed and welcome imo. Kialo for example has a more complex voting system that works better.
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I was using "we" to mean "we" would be self-censoring.
self-censor? Your original post makes no sense then, how can you self-censor a word that you self deem to be benign? You’d have to recognise that the word wasn’t benign in that context first?
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Could you just say “slave market” or “illegal market”? Of course, black in this context refers to the transactions being performed in the shadows, and has nothing to do with the colour of the skin of the participants in the market. It’s all a bit absurd, but it’s also a trivial change to adopt. And now I’ve offended adopties. I jest.
Once you start with this type of thinking, it never stops, and instead of focussing on how to save slaves from a life of misery, you're instead having meetings on which words are less offensive in your posts, messages, and internal communiques. The amount of energy that this takes up is ENORMOUS, especially when you're dealing with something as difficult and dangerous as the slave trade. And what do you do when the n…
They are after social capital so harm and belittle their social status as much as possible in return. Treat them like any other cowardly bully or predator and make yourself offically Not Worth It as a target because their capabilities will be harmed by the proverbial scratched corneas.
"Offended by the term Black Market? That is the offical term for illegal portion of the economy and this is about the ILLEGAL slave trade."
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> War is a stress test for societies. By destroying less efficient social structures it promotes long term progress and reduces inefficient practices like slavery. War destroys progress and is incredibly inefficient. The mere threat of war creates an endless arms race resulting in half of discretionary spending going to defense. The reason for submitting to government authority is for protection of life and liberty.…
For clarity the argument goes like this: The global average military spending is 2.2% of global GDP, the US spends 3.4% of GDP. In a vacuum that looks like a dead loss, but over the last 10,000+ years even minor increases in progress could easily make up for that. Consider the USSR was destroyed by failing to manage that expenditure, in a world without war it could easily still be around. Now extend that back to ever…
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…
It comes down to your individual values, what you stand for and what your intentions are. If someone you don't know is attacking you, well that's probably not someone to listen to.
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> I've travelled the world too, but with my eyes open :) Clearly not, since exactly as I already said, the examples you cite are restricted to specific jurisdictions it's quite easy to avoid, although the one you go to with the example of "excruciatingly forced politeness" has me scratching my head about the problem, frankly. > Perhaps you believe these cultural norms are more intrinsically worth defending than polit…
> Clearly not, since exactly as I already said, the examples you cite are restricted to specific jurisdictions it's quite easy to avoid Please, enlighten me. Name me a state which conforms to your ideals of 'free speech absolutism', where people are free to say whatever they like on any topic without any risk of public outcry or legal repercussions. I'll wait. > do you think people defending free speech have a proble…
My point wasn't that there was, it was that the things you were pointing out were easily avoided by not going to the jurisdictions in which they were prevalent. Ironically, the answer to your question not that long ago would have been what is considered western countries.
> No, I believe that your display of visceral hostility towards the speech of 'professional offence takers' and insinuation that being asked to use particular pronouns is a burden to which all other requests/demands to comply with cultural norms pale in comparison is an indication of a type of speech you value over others
Well, you're wrong once again. I don't care if objections to free speech are rooted in leftist marxist arguments for subversion, snowflake tier nonsense about feelings protection, or brutalist fascist arguments for protecting the prestige of the state, they're all equally as bad as each other and I do not value any particular objection any higher than the other. The simple fact is though the ones that actually are eroding free speech in the western world today are very firmly on the emotional and leftist side of the political spectrum, which is why those are the ones I'm attacking directly in this discussion. All other forms of infringement on free speech pale in comparison to those.
> in this case the speech of the person offending the minority group over the speech of the offended party.
Once again, complete nonsense, if you're preferencing a right to free speech of special interest group A over group B, then you're by definition not a free speech absolutist. My view is that stupid people ought to be able to say stupid things without being silenced by other stupid people, and you analyse the trainwreck at the end to figure out where the actual truth lies, and without that process you never get to figure out the truth to begin with.
> People actually defending freedom of expression don't tend to argue that the most uniquely horrible threat to freedom of speech worldwide comes from those using their own speech to argue that a particular person is a bigot their company or university shouldn't host.
This is completely false, this is typically the exact kind of people that other free speech absolutists including myself are ringing alarm bells about precisely because they are the ones most effectively eroding free speech in the modern world, and having people like you come to their defense despite the magnitude of harm their idiocy entails.
> Partly because they care about securing people's right to advocate boycotts even if they don't agree with boycotts
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at all, but for what it's worth I'm completely comfortable with the idea that people ought to be able to boycott whoever they please for whatever reason they please and that has nothing to do with freedom of speech, unless of course you're mandating the global boycott of party x in order to impose a chilling effect on their freedom of speech as party y, which is abhorrent, yes.
> and partly because much of the rest of the world is entirely comfortable with jailing people for wrongthink.
Which is why it's such a great tragedy that the last vestiges of the place where this was not the case has now vigorously reversed course on that state now means by magnitude, the modern west is one of the least free places in terms of speech. That is utterly horrific.