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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech. The bigger their communities get, the more they infect the communities around them with their hatred and lies. This should be blindingly obvious if you’ve been online for more than a couple of years.

Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a dictatorship.

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This is the "fascism is infectious" theory, under which we are all potential fascists if we just get exposed to the "infection".

By this theory fascism is somehow so inherently attractive that is has to be regulated similar to an addictive drug.

People are surprisingly easy to reprogram. You can read countless stories of once-liberal parents turning into hateful conspiracy nuts in their old age out of prolonged exposure to right-wing media.

If you see people around you saying “white males are undergoing a genocide” or “brown people are criminals” every day, chances are you’ll eventually start to internalize some of those talking points. Without tremendous effort, we’re nothing more than a rough aggregation of the opinions we surround ourselves with.

People adapt to their surroundings, and try to fit in, of course.

But that's not unique to fascism. By this argument you'd have to ban all ideologies.

> People are surprisingly easy to reprogram. You can read countless stories of once-liberal parents turning into hateful conspiracy nuts in their old age out of prolonged exposure to right-wing media.

You should be more skeptical of your intuitions about which way the arrow of causality points.

These are people who now believe that Jewish cabals run the world and that the dead kids at our schools are crisis actors. Don’t you bullshit me.

There are also reasonable, nonviolent, left-leaning centrists who think everyone should have Free Speech, because no one can parcel out Free Speech and have it still remain free. The people who spout the nonsense you cite are a marginal fringe. They're probably greatly outnumbered by people in the far fringe left who are just somewhat not quite as bad. All should have the right of Free Speech.

The president and many members of his party spout the same garbage. These beliefs are not fringe anymore.

> People are surprisingly easy to reprogram.

Not you, though. No way could YOU be under the influence of a totalitarian ideology despite the fact that you are openly advocating restricting basic human rights.

I am advocating the right for private organizations to ban fucked-up ideologies from their services. That this is being framed as some sort of totalitarian assault on free speech shows just how far the right-wing rot has gotten.

The balance fallacy will be the death of democracy in America.

> I am advocating the right for private organizations to ban fucked-up ideologies from their service.

Can we start with yours? /s

This has nothing to do with "right-wing rot". We already have ample historical examples of what happens when those wielding power, whether religious, royal, or financial, can suppress views and speech and it wasn't a good thing! The Enlightenment and the birth of the liberal movement (now classical liberalism, I suppose) were in reaction to those abuses and they fought many hard battles to get us the rights we enjoy today. It would be insane to throw that away for a little temporary advantage.

You're speaking as if these groups are working to amend the Constitution. It's a ridiculous comparison.

Worse yet, all this anger is a massive distraction. We should be talking day and night about the rampant voter suppression and e-voting security flaws that do actually pose an existential threat to our democracy. But no, let's just focus all our attention on Gab for weeks on end.

> We should be talking day and night about the rampant voter suppression and e-voting security flaws that do actually pose an existential threat to our democracy.

In that much, at least, I will agree with you.

> Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech. The bigger their communities get, the more they infect the communities around them.... Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a dictatorship.

Those might have been the exact words of a 1950's McCarthyite. How can you be so sure that you're just just as wrong as they were?

Trump proudly came out as a nationalist a few weeks ago and is visibly salivating at the prospect of pitting thousands of troops against a migrant caravan. Unlike the Communists, these people are already in positions of power and are fighting to gain legitimacy by any means necessary.

> Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech.

I do not understand this assertion.

The way I see it, Free Speech is an antidote against totalitarianism, in contrast to Censorship, which is a tool of totalitarianism.

ah, so that's how Hitler was beaten? everyone just started talking and the NAZIs just dissapeared?

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