I mean, I think it's horrible, but I can envision lots of functional and useful societies that are horrible based on my principles (how would you like to to be part of a hize mind?), but that doesn't make them bad in an absolute sense.
Scaled down, freedom of speech is to protect us from changing cultural and mob rule running roughshod over what we consider good and bad to the detriment of all. The law would basically just lag internet outrage by a few months or years.
Edit: This is meant to be interpreted in context, where a platform has taken a stance that it doesn't censor, and a government blocking that platform. I'm also not making a stance that anything goes, as speech inciting direct action against the law (or meant to cause a situation which is immediately and obviously unsafe) is problematic, and under what I take free speech to embody, which is freedom of thought and to express those thoughts. As absolutist as the first words sound, it's not really meant to be interpreted that way, but more as a call to acknowledge that good and bad are relative to the farthest degree, which is about as far from absolutist as you can get.
Edit 2: From closer reading, it wasn't actually a government request. The article notes that the government often issues these through the courts, but the ISPs acted on their own in this case.
Absolutism is poison.
More people died in 9/11, but those videos are all over the place, even on youtube. Those planes hitting those specific builder _were_ the message of the terrorists.
- Define innocent
- Define political
- Define evil
In way that is independent of the culture in which it takes place. It might even be possible to do so, or come close, when limited to current cultures and Humans. That's a far cry from proved as universal though. It's been quite a while since I read it, but I believe this short story[1] covers some of the ground I'm trying to express. Note: If you key off humans/aliens, I think you're missing the point.
1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
I think the opposite is true. It is gratifying to the logical mind to process this event through the lens of pedantic philosophical analysis, but in real life most things aren't so ambiguous and they definitely aren't ambiguous in this case.
> Define innocent
In this context I define innocent as "undeserving of abrupt and violent execution".
> Define political
In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
> Define evil
In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
Seems pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to read the story you linked (though it does seem interesting even though I am generally not a fan of yudkowsky's writings), but if you want to summarize it I don't mind addressing that summary.
Okay, you've traded innocent for undeserving. That doesn't feel any more definitive to me. Who's undeserving?
> In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
Governments are made up of the people. If they aren't enslaved, then they have some responsibility for the action of said government. It's one group of people doing something to another group. Whether it's from some government or not is irrelevant. For example, is not a non-government group advocating for the eradication of a subgroup of people evil in your reasoning? That's not political in any way.
> In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
You've already stated morality is relative in your first comment. You're relying on a relative assessment to claim something as universal.
> Seems pretty straightforward.
It seems fairly shaky to me.
I think 4chan has gone too far on this one. They should ban neonazi propaganda. -- the grandparent
In that case, you're for free speech in principle, but not in practice.
Which is fair, given that free speech in practice means being willing to commit felonies.
I'm not sure I follow. What "free speech" do you think is currently a felony in the US?
It's the "hate speech" label that gets complicated based on who defines it. Many who claim things are hate speech today also use hate speech themselves (following your definition of suppression based on race) to shout down and ban others.
It shows just how complex this situation is and why "hate speech" is precisely the type of speech that needs defense in the first place because it's mostly rooted in defiance and disagreement, not outright hate.
No. The 1st amendment of the US constitution is about government interference - the idea of free speech is broader than that.
Yes, it does. It has to, otherwise free speech is defined as any arbitrary level of censorship a government allows, and one could say North Korea has just as much "free speech" as the US.
Now, I'm not making an argument that free speech as such is preferable or even feasible in a civil society, or that censorship per se is wrong, and I'm definitely not making the typical slippery slope argument that any form of censorship will inevitably lead to tyranny.
However, free speech has to be defined as a constant to mean anything objective.
and
> it's all culturally defined.
contradict each other completely, right?
Everyone is for free speech, it just everyone has a different idea of what that means (as you say)
If you're "for free speech as long as it's accepted within my culture" then you're not for free speech. I did clarify a bit in my original comment what I was going for though.
I think they'd be happier with the policy of, "if you don't like it, leave" than trying to appease others.
Also people need to realize chan culture. Each board may as well be its own website. 4chan hosts /pol/, it also hosts /lgbt/. 4chan's moderation (rather, lack of) is being seen as an issue because of how heavily moderated the internet has become in the past 20 years.
Reddit, the "bastion of free speech", bans every subreddit that gets in the way of advertisement money, giving Voat more popularity. 4chan, "a bastion of free speech", banned #Gamergate discussion which gave 8chan its rise to popularity.
I'd rather have extremists on Reddit and 4chan where they can be debated and talked down to by moderates than on Voat and 8chan where they can form echo chambers. Echo chambers are a lot better at recruitment. Pushing "bad people" away where they are out of sight and out of mind hasn't been solving the problem, it has only been making it worse year over year.
if you are old enough to remember /b/ raiding Hal Turner, i'm pretty sure that same thing would have happened to Alex Jones had raiding not been banned.
I don't believe 4chan will ever share this sentiment with you.