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Comment by gerland | Hacker News Reader

> Free speech doesn't mean everyone is forced to listen to that speech.

You are completely right. Free speech does not mean that anyone will force you to listen to Alex Jones or any other nutjob. It means that AJ will have the right to speak and you can ignore him.

From the top of my head, let me just list a few of the poeople that were considered crazy and could not initialy find a platform to express their ideas:

Clair Patterson E. Cuyler Hammond Albert Einstein Marie Curie Sklodowska Nikola Tesla

You get my point?

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> You get my point?

If have come to the conclusion that you either get why people defend his presence as a price for many advantages or you do not. These are not the people that buy his "man-oil".

Some say the smarter ones give in, although that should not be applied on this topic in my opinion.

> Free speech doesn't mean everyone is forced to listen to that speech.

It is just a personal dislike of Alex Jones, not an elaborate thought. Not that hard to sympathize with, which makes defense against content regulation quite exhausting. But it is also a lie, since nobody was forced to listen to Alex Jones at all.

We have seen targeted harassment against Russians by mainstream media outlets. It is the same strain of reasoning, although I would put it anywhere near reason to be honest.

I hope I won't go too close to breaching the Godwin's law, but there seem to be some analogies to Herschel Grynszpan here. We can always find an outlier that would be a good excuse for an overblown reaction. We can also probably find outliers on the other side of the spectrum, but we choose to ignore them. Conveniently.

Once again a post that does not break any guidelines is being downvoted. Which proves why we need to battle deplatforming inj the first place. If you cannot even post something as harmless without people trying to bend the system to silence you, then I cannot believe that there will be a due process for anyone that has a really strong opinion.

You're drawing a false equivalency, and even contradicting yourself. Alex Jones is no Einstein. And it sucks that those people initially had trouble spreading their ideas, but clearly they were able to do so, otherwise we wouldn't know about them. Sounds like the system functioning decently well, perhaps with some initial hiccups.

No Sir, you are just strawmanning here. Please do not put in my mouth (or rather in my hand) words that I did not say. My point is, that you cannot always distinguish what is hogwash and what is legit. If you refuse someone the right to speak, you give people a convenient tool to silence everybody that is inconvenient to them. Also, it's just a matter of common decendy to allow people their basic rights.

Sounds like people had to go around a system to get results. System that was full of holes and not bordering on orwellian or huxleyan principles.

When were Einstein or Curie ever considered crazy or deplatformed?

Einstein was refused publication and ridiculed until Bohr, who was an authority, vouched for him. Madam Curie had to publish under her husbands name, because her publications were rejected on the basis that she was a woman.

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