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Comment by cameronbrown | Hacker News Reader

Banning Nazi content is easily the most obvious way to create real Nazis amongst the youth, who being young are attracted to anything taboo, or who may believe that there's some big conspiracy to cover something up so "it must be true, they don't want us to know". This is a dark line of thinking.

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Ahh yes, of course, the large monolithic monoculture called "the youth" is naturally stupid enough to be "attracted to anything taboo" without thinking or questioning it. That's why they sure are attracted to other taboo things like incest and necrophilia.

No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people. Things are a lot more nuanced than "banning bad, because kids dumb".

Political ideology is NOT like incest and necrophilia at all. It is our history and needs preservation.

I never said kids were dumb, but they absolutely are curious, and forbidden knowledge is an incredible lure. The absolute majority will realise it's messed up, but there will always be that few who become radicalised from what they see.

Rather than burying our past we should and need to teach them why it's wrong. This trend of rewriting history is extremely worrisome.

You think the archtype of the edgy, rebelious youth is fictional? If you were too far removed from those groups of kids in high school, perhaps you should spend some time on 4chan.

>No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people.

It absolutely does, because edginess is appealing to many teenagers/young adults. Not only that, but laws to this effect against blanket "hate speech" are regularly used by white supremacists and the like as evidence of, for example, Jewish people using laws to unfairly elevate themselves with the priveleges of a protected class while simultaneously suppressing thought that can lead to dissent.

Holocaust denial laws lead to increased suspicion with the justification that scepticism is banned to preserve a false narrative and prevent the lie from being discovered. It's easy to see how preposterous this is while the atrocity is relatively fresh in our collective consciousness, but what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all survivors have been dead for some time and people rightly start to wonder why investigation of an event is illegal?

This is a weird form of puritanical censorship and the unintented consequences to society are far worse than any imagined benefits. You have no right to control thought in your image.

Edit: also, your hyperbolic mention of incest and necrophilia doesn't quite support your claims, as sexual arousal is quite strongly linked with taboo for many people, as evidenced by the wealth of voyeur, BDSM, and even incest pornography. It seems like these kinds of authoritarian proposals tend to come from sheltered minds.

Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot.

When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread.

And when society permits it to be mainstream politics, you're one solid resistance movement away from genocide.

> Honestly, no it's not. When society doesn't just ban, but abhor Nazis, then Nazi groups are small. There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot. > When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread.

There's a lot of certainty in the way you are saying it.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but do you have any references? Truly curious, I always see these things as hard to measure/understand, so super interested to know info that would help remove that for me.

Science won't help you here. Ofcourse his argument is no more than a hypothesis, but you can't really disprove it because of scale. You might find a model that shows this dynamic, but it won't be a proof, And vice versa. Because we already witnessed major genocide, and a huge bloody war caused by such extreme ideologies, some people think we can't just let it play out again so we can gather more data for our scientific accuracy.

I don't know if censorship is the answer. But because our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice.

*By true honest dialog I mean actual dialogs between people that try to convince each other with the goal of understanding where there is agreememt. And where there isn't one, where it stems from, and how it can be mitigated by some synthesis of opinions. This, as opposed to one sided commentary that it's goal is only to discredit the other side by focusing on disagreements and inducing fear and radicalization in your intended audience.

I'm not asking for double blind control studies.

I'm just asking anything to provide evidence. Well rounded arguments with lots of accurate and well thought out examples (i.e. statistics, objective trends, etc) maybe books or theories supported by certain segments of the social sciences, etc.

Same goes for your statement: > our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice. (censorhip)

Can you please tell me why this time it is so different than say the election between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine? I'm truly interested in hearing the concrete reasons for censorship being the 'no other choice' option.

Again, not saying anyone is wrong, just interested to hear how much of what is stated is based on subjective truth vs objective truths.

> There's people who are into rejection, but it's not a lot.

You're missing my point.

Those most likely to be radicalised are already isolated.

If we scrub content about Nazi ideology from Internet Archive (and everywhere else), these people will find it elsewhere and likely be even more radicalised than they otherwise would be.

Nobody is arguing it should be mainstream politics, only that it should be archived and preserved as lessons to the future generations.

Importantly: if you scrub it almost everywhere then you can't argue against it, because you'd need to actually articulate the WtongThink in order to argue against it. So when an impressionable young thing like my past self happens to stumble across well articulated arguments (as opposed to straw arguments) for the bad thing, they will have no where to go to be set straight.

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