Comment by kichimi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kichimi | Hacker News Reader

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There seems to be this large segment of the population who are utterly blind to the basic human psychological fact, that the people who they want to control with measures like this are the exact same people who will rebel harder against those measures.

Banning the word simp makes the word simp even funnier. Deciding that random things and certain language are 'problematic' and declaring undesirable thoughts as 'problematic' has the exact same effect. Banning drugs has made drugs more desirable, raising the smoking age makes smoking cooler. Calling trump a nazi and saying that the UK leaving the EU is xenophobic did nothing but strengthen peoples opinions.

It's the same behaviour from the same people, from banning words to polarising politics, that fails over and over and over again and they still fail to see it.

I mean, doctors have been telling people not to smoke for sixty years and smoking rates have certainly declined over that period so I don't think this is universally the case.

Why doesn't calling Hitler a Nazi make actual Nazizm more popular? Would you argue that all the Allied propaganda during the war was actually counter productive?

Considering Hitlers supporters were proud nazis.. I think this argument has failed to serve your needs. Feel free to try again later.

I share your sentiment in opposing such efforts, but I think they're actually highly effective. Right-wing populism would have done much better were it not for the extreme censorship deployed against it. Most people have never even heard the best arguments for right-wing positions because they are so actively suppressed.

I'm very skeptical the censorship is working. Censorship has created a whole class of "intellectual" that is using alternative platforms (e.g Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin) to espouse their points of view.

Those podcasters have enormous platforms and the censorship on the left makes it look like these people are providing a sort of intellectual forbidden fruit. People like the Weinstein brothers commonly point to cases of how the media and tech shut down real news and science and then use that to try to advance their own politics.

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