Comment by wokky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wokky | Hacker News Reader

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When you accept this, you accept that "censorship" is unavoidable.

Your scare quotes indicate that when you say "censorship" you mean "the right to choose which points of view I/we will legitimize," I guess? Or "not censorship at all as it turns out?"

Dissenting views need to be given a platform, even if they make some students uncomfortable.

Should newspapers be forced to print my letters to the editor, even if they are a bunch of fevered ravings, because my incoherent hate-screeds need to be given a platform?

If you want to promote unpopular points of view, you may have to build your own platform. And 2017 is actually the best time in history for this very thing, and people who do no-kidding advocate genocide seem to have no trouble banding together and making their arguments available to anyone who's interested.

I don't understand how you got this out of my post. I clearly said that some speech will be denied a platform, and that's an unavoidable feature of communities of people living together.

All I said is that we need to step back and reassess what is being denied a platform, today, and whether we're denying too much speech a platform and dismissing too much speech as "fevered ravings."

I clearly said that some speech will be denied a platform...

What does it mean to you when you say that something has been "denied a platform?" It seems to me that the very notion depends on the assumption that ideas have some sort of natural right to an audience and outside support.

But your unpopular ideas do not entitle you to special outside help. You may have to build a platform for your unpopular idea, as was the case for so many once-unpopular ideas in history. That's what it means to be unpopular. It might be a lot of work. Nobody owes your idea a donation of that work.

The notion that some ideas are "denied a platform" today is both inaccurate and incoherent. No one has the right, the authority, or the power to "deny a platform" to a particular idea in general.

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