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Comment by lvh | Hacker News Reader

This may be an appealing idea in the abstract, but there are people who sincerely hold the view others are subhuman and deserve to be raped and killed, and there are people who believe it’s fine to have sex with kids.

Society can absolutely decide not every point of view is worth debating.

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Good debate helps us get to a deeper understanding of the way the world works, or maybe about ourselves.

Bad debate at best gives a platform for truly repugnant points of view, and at worst causes human pain as victims feel their pain dismissed.

If there is a belief that is backed up by evidence (and in this case there is) then the first response should always be to provide that evidence.

Just because someone sincerely believes that others are subhuman doesn't mean the conversation ends immediately. We could try providing evidence and clarifying whether they are dead-centre wrong or just dealing with a technical detail before turning to exclusionary tactics.

I mean, seriously. If the choices are (1) end the conversation, try and get someone to resign and (2) try and convince someone to take a different view through conversation over a few days then (2) is far superior. We have a lot of people working in, eg, law and the upper echelons of business who are fantastic contributors to the general good despite having extremely questionable moral stances.

Is that also the second response? And the 100th? It isn't like Stallman provided new arguments or new evidence here. This wasn't the first response. It was the 100th.

> Just because someone sincerely believes that others are subhuman doesn't mean the conversation ends immediately.

Holocaust deniers used this very tactic under the banner of "skepticism".

They wrote books, they gave speeches. They participated in "academic debate" as if the authenticity of the holocaust was something to be debated.

And they caused a lot of pain to those that did live through the holocaust -- only to hear from someone making false claims that it did not, in fact, happen.

Thanks to people that instead of refusing to debate the deniers choose to show proof of why they were wrong, nowadays, 74 years after the horrors, we have readily available proof to counter the lies of whom, with malice, try to deny it again. If people had chosen the first tactic of refusing to debate the most probable thing would be that we wouldn't have this amount of proof to counter them today.

We should always explain why something is wrong and try to convince to avoid future trouble.

The problem of course being, that Holocaust victims were asked to be more logical about genocide while denialists defended the notion that it didn't happen at all.

If someone using a tactic in bad faith means we can't use the tactic any more, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. People talking about things they don't understand and being in need of correction goes a bit deeper than "well, Holocause deniers ask questions too!".

Stallman is not a serial Holocaust denier. He is a software philosopher.

And insofar as he is an agitator, on most of his pet topics time has proven him to be right rather than to be a troll.

And for centuries society decided that 1 was the correct view and anyone who disagrees with it was to be shunned or worse.

> Society can absolutely decide not every point of view is worth debating.

We could have decided that three hundred years ago too, in which case the divine right of kings would still be a thing.

EDIT: A lot of people seem to think that the divine right of kings would not have been a thing worth strongly defending back in the early 1700s - and certainly far more than they would have defended the rights of people in the west indies or far east to not be "raped and killed". Do you have any argument to back this up? Would bumping things to five hundred years change that?

If banning discussion of things outside the overton window wouldn't have had results you'd like then, why would it do so now? There might be reasons! But I haven't heard people bringing them up.

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