Somebody’s got some nice privilege. I wish fb would delete stuff that offends me.
Removing Holocaust Denial Content
801–810 of 823 posts
Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And how can anyone call themselves an adult if they need some third party to come in and censor things for them? You can block, you can mute. You can stick to trusted groups. You can also learn self control and not feed the trolls. If we want to control intolerance effort should be put into making the systems by which we personally and purposely block it from our lives…
> And how can anyone call themselves an adult if they need some third party to come in and censor things for them? You can block, you can mute. You can stick to trusted groups. You can also learn self control and not feed the trolls. I'm sure many HN readers are perfectly capable of reading, researching and filtering. But let's face facts: many people are gullible at best, and at worst put themselves in an echo chamb…
He's a great example of someone who isn't a true adult.
Ofc children should be blocked from certain content.
Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh jfc - mods, get in here! at least do as good a job as Facebook.
You find something I wrote here offensive? Perhaps you think something I wrote here is untrue? It's a serious request; Explain why you think I should be censored.
your post is literal holocaust denial
dang now I've replied in good faith to an obvious bad faith actor :/
Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#804Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Holocaust denial is banned in Germany (same as swastikas by the way). It works really well In what way does it "work"? What do you actually gain by silencing those people? It seems like you're lending them credibility. As in "these things that I'm saying are so dangerous that the government wants to shut me up!" You can't control what people actually believe, you can only control whether or not you hear about it. Us…
The problem is that you can’t realistically fight Holocaust denial and the idea behind it with arguments at some point. In the interest of “proving” Germany wasn’t the bad guys after all, these people won’t stop sowing doubt that it occurred, and that’s exactly how you would allow it to happen again. The German democracy is designed to defend itself, and this is one of its tools. Interestingly, the American sort of o…
>The problem is that you can’t realistically fight Holocaust denial and the idea behind it with arguments at some point.
It sounds like you're a holocaust denier. If they're wrong, then show they're wrong. (not saying they're right). If they refuse to believe, then ignore them. They are a fringe.
>these people won’t stop sowing doubt that it occurred
Diversity of thought is strictly a good thing. The very thing you are worried about is a lack of diversity of thought. A world where questioning the superiority of certain groups of people is tantamount to a crime. Let them sow doubt, it keeps the marketplace of ideas healthy by giving people reasons to articulate the truth.
>Every freedom has its limits
This is sloppy. Either you embrace free expression as an ideal, or you don't. Anything short of free speech absolutism will decay back down to suppression and censorship. I don't think it's hard to separate out expression from incitement, and I believe the former should be unbounded.
Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#806Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is indeed a problem, so acknowledge it as such. But do not use this problem as a justification for misrepresenting actual reality - that is dishonest. If your position is correct and righteous, misrepresenting reality should not be necessary. It is a rather sad and concerning state of affairs that there is such a widespread aversion to honesty on a site as normally clear-thinking as HN. As well, there seems to a…
Sorry, what exactly am I misrepresenting?
See comment edit above.
Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that would be you censoring certain types of speech on your property. It would have a pretty small effect on other people's ability to engage in speech. But it is an effect none the less. If you owned a huge amount of property, though, then this would be a larger amount of censorship.
We agree then, this is "censorship", but has nothing to do with "freedom of speech" as codified in US law.
> but has nothing to do with "freedom of speech"
It absolutely has something to do with the general concept of freedom of speech, actually.
Freedom of speech is a concept, not just a law.
Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
> merely expressing a negative opinion of something is plainly free speech and not harassment. Again, this is merely your opinion, and it does not reflect the opinion of everyone else. Another person will see that statement and believe it is harassment and not free speech. > You asserted the contradiction, not me. I merely confirmed your observation that a free-speech proponent who alleged that harassment was free sp…
> Again, this is merely your opinion, and it does not reflect the opinion of everyone else. Another person will see that statement and believe it is harassment and not free speech. You are mistaken. Criticism is never harassment and it’s always free speech by definition. Someone might have their feelings hurt by criticism and they might even believe it to be harassment, but they’d be mistaken. The president would pre…
Ok, so you accept that people do in fact have different interpretations about what constitutes free speech. But somehow you believe that your specific, personal interpretation is the absolutely correct one? Why? If you ask 100 people where the line is between harassment and legitimate criticism, you will get 100 different answers. What makes your answer correct and the other 100 answers incorrect? You refer to "widely accepted definition", as if a dictionary definition could somehow be applied to real world situations to judge whether an expression is harassment or not. Maybe it can be in _extreme_ cases, like if someone said "gays should be killed" we could easily judge that as harassment, or if someone says "i like cats" we could easily judge it as not harassment. But there's a huge gray area where expressions can be interpreted either way and it's up to each individual to assess whether they feel like an expression is harassment or not.
Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#809Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Again, this is merely your opinion, and it does not reflect the opinion of everyone else. Another person will see that statement and believe it is harassment and not free speech. You are mistaken. Criticism is never harassment and it’s always free speech by definition. Someone might have their feelings hurt by criticism and they might even believe it to be harassment, but they’d be mistaken. The president would pre…
Ok, so you accept that people do in fact have different interpretations about what constitutes free speech. But somehow you believe that your specific, personal interpretation is the absolutely correct one? Why? If you ask 100 people where the line is between harassment and legitimate criticism, you will get 100 different answers. What makes your answer correct and the other 100 answers incorrect? You refer to "widel…
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Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Again, this is merely your opinion, and it does not reflect the opinion of everyone else. Another person will see that statement and believe it is harassment and not free speech. You are mistaken. Criticism is never harassment and it’s always free speech by definition. Someone might have their feelings hurt by criticism and they might even believe it to be harassment, but they’d be mistaken. The president would pre…
Ok, so you accept that people do in fact have different interpretations about what constitutes free speech. But somehow you believe that your specific, personal interpretation is the absolutely correct one? Why? If you ask 100 people where the line is between harassment and legitimate criticism, you will get 100 different answers. What makes your answer correct and the other 100 answers incorrect? You refer to "widel…
> Ok, so you accept that people do in fact have different interpretations about what constitutes free speech. But somehow you believe that your specific, personal interpretation is the absolutely correct one? Why?
It's not correct, it's just "standard" in the context that I'm using it. But whether or not it's "standard" is largely irrelevant--the question is whether the concept that I'm labeling "free speech" is consistent in my framework with the other concepts (which I've labeled, "harassment" and "criticism"--which are also labeled according to standard definitions, for convenience). Let's stay away from semantic arguments--they're tedious, pointless, and boring.
> What makes your answer correct and the other 100 answers incorrect? You refer to "widely accepted definition", as if a dictionary definition could somehow be applied to real world situations to judge whether an expression is harassment or not. Maybe it can be in _extreme_ cases, like if someone said "gays should be killed" we could easily judge that as harassment
That's not harassment. It's an abhorrent idea, but "abhorrence" is different from "harassment". If you're shouting your abhorrent idea while burning a cross in someone's yard, that's harassment. If you're following someone around shouting your abhorrent idea, that's also harassment. Abhorrent ideas tend to be accompanied by harassment (and if you think about it, we consider these ideas abhorrent because they're very likely to lead to harassment and violence); however, they aren't equivalent to harassment. This is true even for a very broad definition of "harassment" like what you would find in a dictionary and even more so for very precise definitions such as a legal definition or probably all philosophical definitions.
> But there's a huge gray area where expressions can be interpreted either way and it's up to each individual to assess whether they feel like an expression is harassment or not.
I think we can reasonably define harassment as "an action based on an intent to intimidate or pressure someone". I think that definition is very precise and there isn't much gray area; however, litigating the intent to determine whether any given action is harassment is difficult. We can devise increasingly better tests for assessing intent (e.g., "we assume intent is to intimidate if a significant majority of people would feel intimidated under similar circumstances"), but difficulty of assessing intent is different than the precision of the definition.