Hacker News Reader

Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

People started “compromising” on those principles when they realised it wasn’t the 1700s any longer, that the internet had given anyone with a computer access to the sort of message amplification Goebbels could only have dreamed of, and that democratic society was being damaged by contextless application of principles intended to protect it.

The parallels with certain other principles written for a time of flintlocks that have unintended consequences in an era of assault weapons should not be ignored.

View on HN

"The people have their own opinions! We must shut them up for the sake of democracy!" Next you'll tell me that fighting in the war room is prohibited.

Speaking of prohibition and the past, let's talk about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the Inquisition:

"[...] Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhort the episcopate and the whole body of the faithful to be on their guard against heretical writings, whether old or new; and one of the functions of the Inquisition when it was established was to exercise a rigid censorship over books put in circulation. The majority of the condemnations were at that time of a specially theological character. With the discovery of the art of printing, and the wide and cheap diffusion of all sorts of books which ensued, the need for new precautions against heresy and immorality in literature made itself felt, and more than one pope (Sixtus IV. in 1479 and Alexander VI. in 1501) gave special directions to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Magdeburg regarding the growing abuses of the printing press; in 1515 the Lateran council formulated the decree De Impressione Librorum, which required that no work should be printed without previous examination by the proper ecclesiastical authority, the penalty of unlicensed printing being excommunication of the culprit, and confiscation and destruction of the books. The council of Trent in its fourth session, 8th April 1546, forbade the sale or possession of any anonymous religious book which had not previously been seen and approved by the ordinary; in the same year the university of Louvain, at the command of Charles V., prepared an “Index” of pernicious and forbidden books, a second edition of which appeared in 1550."

It's almost as if the printing press had given anyone with paper access the sort of message amplification that John Wycliffe and Jan Hus could only dream of, and that Catholic society was being damaged by contextless applications of principles intended to protect it.

The parallels with certain other principles written for a time of longbows that have unintended consequences in an era of muskets should not be ignored.

It always astounds me that hysterical moralists today believe that they would be the ones resisting despots and authoritarian regimes, when it's clear that it was precisely those same hysterical moralists in different times wearing different costumes that would, on the drop of a dime, passionately support and install them for the sake of their own naïve sense of moral propriety.

Smashing analogy! Oh, except that society was in fact negatively affected by the early unfettered press, and accordingly came up with all sorts of methods of regulating and managing it. It’s where we get libel laws, for one thing. You print something provably false about someone, and you’re going to face consequences for it.

This is clearly us heading to a similar point online. Cowering behind common carrier exemptions and appealing to fundamentalist understandings of “free speech” aren’t going to wash for much longer.

Speech has consequences. It astounds me that it’s so often the supposedly pro-market right who get outraged when market forces sock it to publishers of dross like InfoWars

Amazing! Now the right to freedom of expression, as historically understood and instantiated by Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is now considered a fundamentalist understanding of "free speech". And what exactly is Article 19?

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Clearly, the long, moral arc of the universe eludes you. Yes, those with power did everything within their power to repress and dispossess those utilizing nascent means of communication to spread free inquiry and discussion outside what "respectable" society desired.

The end result of that attempt at suppression and repression was the Thirty Years War, the Commonwealth of England, more than eight million dead in Europe, and a safeguard so enduring that within a generation of the aftermath, freedom of the press was established in the United Kingdom--as well as the dissemination of certain, how shall we say, liberal philosophies that led to the draconian view that freedom of speech is fundamental to an open society and must be purchased by eternal vigilance against those that would take it away. As previously noted: different times, different costumes.

The United Kingdom is a strange place for you to pick as your model of laws protecting free press.

And, as seems to be eluding you, we're talking about Spotify here. I don't believe Article 19 is intended to cover them. It'd be a - yes! - fundamentalist reading for sure that read "any media" as meaning Spotify had to carry InfoWars.

As for your "eternal vigilance", Popper already has you there. Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. And I'm sure you wouldn't want that. Well, sort-of sure.

And, of course, you resort to picking out Spotify as if in a vacuum. But it's not in a vacuum! Alex Jones was de-platformed on from a communication medium with 2 billion monthly users! A platform that, in 2013, 50% of Americans check every day, with 80% using it as their only social media presence! Facebook is literally the most public forum that has ever existed in the history of mankind! And this is just yet another miniature step--always justified--towards "preserving" democratic ideals by thoroughly undermining them through overreach.

And once again, you seem to quote from totems that you've never read and don't actually understand.

To wit, Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies:

"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, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. "We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

"Resort to picking out Spotify" in a thread about Spotify? If you want to talk about Facebook we can - but it still won't be the same thing as talking about state censorship.

As for Popper, this is getting tedious now. Yes, that's what he said. Yes, I've read it. I agree with him. You've banged on at length that any restriction at all on any publication anywhere is tantamount to the Inquisition.

Popper disagrees with you. Most of Western Europe disagrees with you. Busterarm and the alt-right agree with you. Enjoy debating with them.

Well this would be scary if it were true, but the premise of America's democracy is that it's not.

If it really were true that there was some "evil words" that would spread through the whole population like wildfire like some virus, then sure, free speech would be a bad system. You allude to WWII almost as though you're insinuating the root cause of the WWII was insufficient political correctness.

And America’s democracy is in robust health, is it? “Fake news” sourced to state-sponsored actors not currently a subject of concern there?

Oh, and speaking of viruses, anti-vaxxers aren’t still a thing there, are they? I’m sure the good speech will have cancelled out the bad on that subject already.

As for WWII, do I think the weaponisation of the first broadcast communication medium had a huge hand in the rise of Fascism in Germany? Yes, I do.

Then it's clear that you're entirely ignorant of the history of radio in Germany, in particular its contribution to the rise of the Nazis.

Before 1933, German radio broadcasting was conducted by 10 regional broadcasting monopolies, each with a Weimar representative. Their radio had a distinctly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slant up to the Nazi victory in 1933. If anything radio hindered the rise of Hitler.

https://www.princeton.edu/csdp/events/Petrova04042013/Petrov...

Can I suggest you read at least the abstract of your cites?

“This negative effect [of four years of anti-Nazi messages] was fully undone in just one month after Nazis got control over the radio in 1933 and initiated heavy radio propaganda.” (Emphasis added)

Clearly literacy, as well as history, eludes you. By March of 1933, the Nazis had risen to power. The Nazis did not weaponize radio and then rise to power. They rose to power and then took over radio.

And just how did they manage to dismantle the Weimar democracy and take over all forms of mass media so easily? Because for years prior, those in control of the German government had justified every violation of fundamental law, order, and governmental restraint in order to pinion the ability of political enemies to operate freely in the name of democracy and propriety. Yet, it turns out that, as your kind apparently never learns, power changes hands and the tables are turned against you. And yet now you have no tenable defense against being silenced--your opinions are the ones deemed too pernicious to allow to exist in a "free" society (as every society claims to be!). Your protestations are now "fake news" and, all-too-suddenly, you find yourself, your allies, and countless other innocents in a railway car to places like Kolyma or Auschwitz.

You are again failing to read your own cites.

"Radio propaganda helped Nazi to enroll new party members and encouraged denunciations of Jews leading to their deportation to concentration camps and caused open expressions of anti-Semitism."

The weaponisation of radio by the Nazis, which naturally had to occur after they took power, is what drove the rise of fascism in Germany. You're really going to struggle to make the case that propaganda in no way supported the Nazi state here.

And I guess the Germans must also be in that group that "never learns", what with their strict controls on Nazi speech. Still, they seem to be doing better at avoiding fascist leadership than the soi disant land of the free.

> Still, they seem to be doing better at avoiding fascist leadership than the soi disant land of the free.

Are they really? https://newrepublic.com/article/144954/return-fascism-german...

If you've been paying any attention, you'll noticed that Merkel has completely caved to anti-immigrant fears among Germans and backpedaled almost entirely.

It is absolutely amazing how thick you are. Of course, mass radio and propaganda helped the Nazi state operate.

But they were only broadcasting on the radio after they had power in 1933. It only helped them amplify their hold after they already had total control of the government, in 1933.

But you know what actually helped the Nazi state form? Banning the NSDAP from 1923-1925. And in 1927, banning Hitler from public speaking. And in the period from 1925 to 1932, using armed fighting squads to try to de-platform him in bars precipitating the existence of the Sturmabteilung (SA). And yes, using radio as a political fulcrum to turn people away from opposition parties.

In 1933, Hitler walked the road paved for him by people like you. First as the farce of Weimar, then as the tragedy of National Socialism. Every action had a precendent. Every action justified first by a moral panic. Moral panic by people that can conceive of no reason not to use their over-weaning self-righteousness as a lever to tell other people what to do, without considering the long-term consequences of such actions, without context, without understanding, blindly obeying emotions generated by other people.

Because clearly, in retrospect, the Crusders' blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Inquisition's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Commonwealth's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Bolshevik's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Nazi's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, and countless other movements unnamed. But your sense of moral self-righteousness is morally right and justified and will lead only to utopia and the land of milk and honey.

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in 't!

Tis new to thee, perhaps. But this is wrestling with a pig now.

Still, we’re getting somewhere amid the bluster. “Of course” radio played the role I said it did, all those screeds ago.

Just like then, we once again have a new mass medium. Just like then it is being weaponised and we’ve not yet adjusted to cope well with it.

Because anyone can publish anything, any uncomfortable truth can be dismissed as “Fake News”.

Because anyone can publish anything, scientific untruths like “vaccines cause autism” are continuing to cause real harm long after truth finally had its boots on.

But we are finally realising it is time for hygiene factors here. That’s what’s happening to Spotify. They can choose to host InfoWars but they will face consequences from their customers for doing so. That’s how it should be.

Could that go the other way? If fascism triumphs again will businesses face outrage for hosting a triggered lib podcast that insists Sandy Hook really happened? Maybe! But by then it will be too late.

The task is to stop fascism getting to that point. And that may call for targeted intolerance, yes. So we’re back to Popper. I don’t think he was writing from a place of moral self-righteousness.

Sorry, I have no desire to hold your hand anymore as you struggle to produce a single coherent thought.

As you stated elsewhere, I'll be quite happy to debate with the "alt-right" and other adults. Sadly, that seems to exclude you, by definition. Keep your Orwellian licensing schemes on Ingsoc Island and leave the rest of us alone.

Oh, that’s a pity. I was looking forward to you finding another launching point for a straw man you could patronise.

Busterarm: you were talking about posters with zero empathy who shut down conversation? You might need to widen the scope you think that applies to. The alt-light are just as bad as your progressives.

Thank you for expressing this truth so perfectly. It would be wise for many to study your words (or, preferably, history).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com