Every stable community already has things you can and cannot say (try arguing the merits of pederasty, war, or heroin and see how far you get!)
Pederasty is so far from our cultural norms it’s current form is meaningless compared to a socially accepted version. In a society with active mentoring of youth by people across the gender and sexual orientation spectrum pederasty would reduce the stigma’s associated with homosexuals thus increasing social cohesion.
War is a stress test for societies. By destroying less efficient social structures it promotes long term progress and reduces inefficient practices like slavery.
Heroin is an opioid and can be used as such. It’s current stigma is associated with recreational uses, but it can easily be used for chronic pain in a hospice instead of similar opioids.
PS: IMO the real reason to segregate ideas across forms is to avoid having the same conversations everywhere. Bringing up politics means people talk about politics rather than whatever the original subject was.
The struggle between people who believe in this and people who don't is more or less the plot of Babylon 5. The show actually moved me closer to the Shadow position: excessive stability is as much a problem as excessive chaos. Civilization seems to find a balance on the long view.
War destroys progress and is incredibly inefficient. The mere threat of war creates an endless arms race resulting in half of discretionary spending going to defense.
The reason for submitting to government authority is for protection of life and liberty. War results in destruction of life and reduced liberty, so it's a major failure in that regard.
"Sorry ma'am, but your son died in the Great Stress Test of 1861. I know you just spent your last nineteen years raising him, but we weren't sure if slavery was efficient or not, so we needed him to help settle the question on the battlefield."
The global average military spending is 2.2% of global GDP, the US spends 3.4% of GDP. In a vacuum that looks like a dead loss, but over the last 10,000+ years even minor increases in progress could easily make up for that. Consider the USSR was destroyed by failing to manage that expenditure, in a world without war it could easily still be around. Now extend that back to every poor use of resources eliminated by war like Aztec mass human sacrifice or the southern states use of slavery.
I don’t think it’s acceptable trade off for the direct suffering of war, but it is a defensible argument.
And sometimes destroying leads to improvements - the blitz destroyed a lot of slum housing in the London east end, which was rebuilt en mass in a way that wouldn't have been possible without the widespread destruction.
Massive losses felt across the population in the UK led to a national unity and a desire for improvement of everyones lives, leading to things like the welfare state and healthcare for all.
Looking further back in history, the US war of independence is deemed to have had desirable outcomes.
You can still think war is a failure but acknowledge that it can lead to benefits as well as drawbacks.
Please explain the monumental advancements of technology witnessed during both world wars. Even if they were not a direct result of the war effort, they still succeeded in spite of all technically and scientifically advanced nations being on a war footing during those time periods.
> The mere threat of war creates an endless arms race resulting in half of discretionary spending going to defense.
Please explain why we have not seen a significant drop in defense spending during the periods when the threat of war has lessened. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union when the world was decidedly unipolar for more than a decade.
> The reason for submitting to government authority is for protection of life and liberty.
I would argue that ceding some liberty to government is necessary for peaceful defense of life and property (backed up by the threat of collective force) but I don't believe that a government inherently defends liberty. To the contrary I think that liberty must be actively defended from the excesses of government, preferably by building those protections in to the legal foundation of the governments power so that if they are violated it invalidates the mandate granted and provides legal recourse against the government in favour of those wronged by it.
To be clear, I don't support war and I think that there are much better and less destructive ways to stimulate technological and societal growth but I don't hold with weak arguments either.
The problem is that you can't counter this by showing the monumental advancements that may have happened without the destructive nature of those wars on lives, economies, etc. because, well, we have no idea.
> Please explain why we have not seen a significant drop in defense spending during the periods when the threat of war has lessened.
Because "the mere threat of war" still exists - except instead of Russia, it's now terrorists, Middle Eastern countries, North Korea, etc. Also because the military industrial complex has an ungodly hold over governments.
But we have. See the second chart, covering Defence spending of the United Kingdom from 1900-2020. https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/past_spending
Spiked over 45% of GDP during WWI, and over 50% during WWII. Took a small bump over 10% that I believe was the Korean War, and has been fairly consistently drifting downward since, and is roughly comparable to 1900s pre-war spending.
The United States has a similar graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... and while it's still nowhere near pre-war spending, there's been a similar downward trend over the last 50 years.
Modern war not only means crazy lot of civilian casualties, and environmental destruction. It is literal breeding ground of hate, human misery, all of worst qualities of people. Only a defence contractor would advocate for war.
Increasing acceptance of gay people by checks notes encouraging adults to have sex with minors.
And before you accuse me of cutting out a part of your argument, you haven't actually given a definition of pederasty that's not the one everyone understands, which is "adult men having sex with minors".
It has obvious terrible effects involved with it and the very fact it is being considered is a sign that things are deeply wrong but bizzarely winds up a lesser evil in some ways. Which arguably just makes it more insidious which is a whole other moral topic.
Anyway, the point was not to convince anyone just to discuss the topic in a positive manor without provoking a massive negative response from HN. Consider taking some issue you strongly disagree with and making a single positive argument about it. For example, the upside of infanticide?
Sorry, what? Slavery was never "inefficient." The problem is that humans have rights and holding slaves deprives them of those rights. To the contrary, slavery was, is, terribly efficient for the slaveholder.
The really fucked up part is that the advent of slavery was an improvement over stone aged bands warfare of genocide where at best some of the women and children might be forced into concubinge and human sacrifices to dispose of unsustainable mouths to feed.
Wonder what he would say to the mechanization of labor through technology and its benefits of ending the institution of slavery and providing owners cheaper or eliminating labor expenditure?
So just another view point on the issue of "inefficiency of slavery" argument.
Surely explicit guardrails act as therapeutic discourse, in that it seeks to clarify systematic self-deception. By self-deception, I refer first-and-foremost to the myth of objectivity that often surrounds contemporary debate.
I fail to see why moderators should police tone over content and I'm not convinced this is even the case.
My point is that every stable community has a different subset of things that you cannot say.
It's easy to create a group where pederasty, war or heroin can be freely discussed or praised. The problem nowadays appears when utterances aimed to that specific group are picked up and propagated by the general network, reaching people who were not their intended targets and who didn't share the original channel's assumptions for what can and cannot be said.