If I was to commit some atrocities tomorrow and write a pamphlet outlining my motive and calling for others to do the same thing while adding a note saying "look, they'll try to censor this!" will you, out of principle, argue that my manifesto shouldn't be censured because that's what I would've wanted? If so, why?
In my opinion his main objective was to get attention and put his nauseous ideology in the spotlight. I don't know if banning it is the right solution but frankly I won't waste my time playing devil's advocate for a mass murderer.
"First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Hopefully society will not do that.
The content might be repulsive but we are better off knowing how they think than allowing only them to know the contents.
Crazy manifestos are probably just like weapons in this regard, ordinary people won't care to get one if they are illegal, bad guys will.
As a kid I got a good explanation of how badly certain ideologies failed even if they looked reasonable.
I also got an intro to safe handling of guns, especially the part about never ever pointing a gun at anyone, loaded or not, except in wartime. I was quite young then but it sticks, like a whole lot of other stuff from my childhood.
I'll try to give that to the next generation together, together with an explanation of how insanely stupid such manifestos are - and a crash course in unarmed fighting (disable or confuse opponent, get away).
Young people should know what exists or it will take them by surprise.
> "First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Definitions of "terrorist" differs and while I and you can agree on this and many others I really really don't want to have more power than necessary in the hands of any government.
Read history and you'll see that most cruelties in the last few hundred years were commited by states against their own citizens, not by random blokes with weapons.
Speaking as a us citizen, that is crazy talk. Why should the government be let to decide what is "too dangerous" for me to read? It seems incredible that first world democracies still engage in that kind of censorship.
Another instance, I think fox and Breitbart are scourges for their disinformation campaign (not that they're "conservative" or have an "agenda", the wsj is also conservative and has an agenda), but making them illegal is a line too far. It provides too much power to a government who already has too much.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl...
Obviously the risk is not that reasonably educated HN readers could stumble upon this manifesto and start a massacre, the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people. People become radicalized on the web, actually the shooter himself kept spouting "memes" straight from /pol/ and other alt-right websites. Similarly many Islamist terrorists who carried attacks in recent years also radicalized online, feeding on propaganda websites and fake news.
Does banning 4chan or the manifesto achieve anything? I'm not sure. But dismissing any attempt to curb this very real problem as "crazy talk" is not really constructive criticism.
You can literally make the same argument against fox or Breitbart. Or cnn, nyt, wapo as the president continuously tries to. He should remind you why the government should have limited powers.
And yes, the general fear of sex and sexual is maddening and counter productive.
I guess it makes sense if you're a libertarian/anarchist or something in this vicinity but if that's the case this discussion has been rehashed millions of times before and I don't think we'll find a common ground here.
But this seems to clearly intensify. We now have laws passed "to regulate things against Fake News during election period"[1], in a climate of already large distrust of population against politics.
It's really unclear how this plain censorship is not replaced with a mandatory warning, which would give the opportunity to let people judge by themselves (or at least decide to trust the authority that the material doesn't worth their attention).
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_France/Fausse...