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Comment by a254613e | Hacker News Reader

>no one should be able to think or speak free

Who says that? People, myself included, don't want specific harmful for society groups to be allowed to speak free, not that nobody's allowed to say anything.

Yes, nazis should not be allowed to speak free. And no ramblings about privacy here on HN will ever change my mind.

In fact, I'd be happy to sacrifice my own privacy if we can root out the evil of racism, nazism, terrorism, and other things that absolutely everybody agrees are bad.

That being said, I think the frameworks used to prevent that at the moment have a lot of potential for abuse, especially from private companies. And it's something that should be improved upon, and normal people should have privacy as much as possible.

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There are no things that "absolutely everyone agrees are bad", kind of by definition.

So, who decides, or is there a cutoff on what percentage of people must believe an idea for it to be allowed to be communicated?

Not everything's a programming language where you need to define exact thresholds for something to be either `True` or `False`. I know this is HN, but I don't think we really need an algorithm to tell us nazis are bad, do we?

And as such it doesn't make sense to write down a specific definition like "groups that goals are to harm others" or similar, even though that would cover pretty much everything. Ideally there would be a public organization, not aligned with specific political groups, making the decisions in a transparent way. Or some sort of a body like WHO where countries can take part in. It's a complex topic, that I don't have a perfect solution for.

> I know this is HN, but I don't think we really need an algorithm to tell us nazis are bad, do we?

I don’t need an algorithm to tell myself that nazis are bad.

But once you want to censor other people, you need to come up with an algorithm deciding what’s censorable or not. So… where’s your threshold ?

Any part of nazi ideology should be forbidden in any way, shape, or form.

As to how to recognize it, I think it's easy for humans to do so. And how do we train computers to recognize it? Well, if we can teach it to recognize cars, bikes, etc from photos I'm sure extremist ideology shouldn't be impossible to achieve with some helping hands from people.

And besides, as I said in another comment. I don't have all the answers, just like I don't have an answer on how to teach computers to recognize X in photos flawlessly, but I think this is something we should start working on.

> I think [recognizing nazi ideology is] easy for humans to do so.

It isn't, not even when you are one of those who thinks "anyone who disagrees with me must be a nazi"—meaning that in theory you could just train a model with things you like and things you don't like and label the second group with "nazism"—because your opinions can and do shift often too and so the model would become outdated by the month, if not by the day.

> And besides, as I said in another comment. I don't have all the answers

And yet you speak with such certainty, as if you did. On that note, in your first comment you proclaimed that you were willing to sacrifice your privacy, and yet you used an anonymous account to make that declaration.

It's perfectly fine to wish for something without having all the answers - I don't think I should be attacked for that.

People should be allowed to say that they wish to improve something, even if they don't have the exact scientifically proven step by step way to actually implement it. We are allowed to say that wars should end, that people shouldn't die of hunger, and so on - even if we don't have the exact step by step plan on how to implement it that we can share on HN.

And sacrificing my privacy doesn't have to mean that it's open to public, it refers to actually being able to enforce certain rules. If I were to do something that's illegal on HN the authorities would have no problem finding me.

I made no attack in my comment and I don't appreciate the insinuation.

> People should be allowed to say

Well, you're not going to find disagreement on that area from me; everyone is, or should be, indeed allowed to say anything. As I understood it, you were arguing otherwise.

> We are allowed to say [...] even if we don't have the exact step by step plan on how to implement it that we can share on HN.

And other people are similarly allowed to argue with you on anything you might say if they so choose. That's the point of a free exchange of ideas, I think.

> And sacrificing my privacy doesn't have to mean that it's open to public

But... Something is either public or it's private....

Anyhow, not only you suggested that I was attacking you for no reason, but you also brought up "wars" and "hunger" and I don't particularly understand why, and this now seems like an attempt at equivocation. Hopefully I'm just misinterpreting, but I don't feel like you are trying to argue in good faith.

Cool let's censor animal right activists.

And in case you don't follow, it's because the Nazis were very pro animal rights.

What is a nazi? I might say it's someone who was a member of the Nazi party in Germany during the early 20th century.

You might say it's "groups that goals are to harm others"

Someone else might say it's anyone who doesn't support progressive policies because to do otherwise would cause harm to people, many of which are "marginalized" and "under-represented".

Let's see if we can agree on what a nazi is before we start figuring out what people are allowed to say and think in private.

>Ideally there would be a public organization, not aligned with specific political groups, making the decisions in a transparent way.

Good luck with that.

> Ideally there would be a public organization, not aligned with specific political groups, making the decisions in a transparent way.

Like the ministry of truth, huh?

Yes, nazis should not be allowed to speak free. And no ramblings about privacy here on HN will ever change my mind.

That's why the left constantly describe anyone who isn't on the left as Nazis, even though they clearly aren't. Free speech requires absolutism - the moment you make an exception of the form, "well ... but not for them" suddenly the term is redefined and huge swathes of people are being dumped in that bucket regardless of reason or evidence.

I'd be happy to sacrifice my own privacy if we can root out the evil of racism, nazism, terrorism, and other things that absolutely everybody agrees are bad.

The people who talk about racism the most are by far the most racist people in society. They manage to be racist whilst claiming to hate racism by redefining it to not be about race, but perceived "power" where "power" is entirely subjective. Hence they can hate on white people whilst claiming to be fighting racism.

Again, the lesson is simple. All free speech must be protected to the absolute end. The moment you make an exception, leftists will en-masse attempt to redefine the word used to delimit the exception to encompass anyone who isn't on their side.

The right isn't above this sort of behaviour either, see the abuse of "terrorist" to mean random people in Afghanistan in the first years of the millenium. But I haven't seen much of that lately. As of 2021 this behaviour is definitely more common on the other side of the hall.

Just so I'm clear, because English isn't my first language, saying that people shouldn't be allowed to advocate for complete extermination of complete groups of people based on their skin color or similar, somehow makes me a racist?

Besides, the whole "free speech must be protected to the absolute end" is such a stupid thing to insist on. Here in Germany that's not the most sacred thing, do you know what the article 1 of the german basic law is? "Human dignity shall be inviolable." - and guess what, we're not some dystopian racist hellhole.

Literally nobody in the modern world is advocating for the "complete extermination of complete groups of people based on skin colour" with the possible exception of China in Xinjiang (although I guess that's based on religion rather than race). If they were, you would be right to identify them and call them racist.

The way these terms are actually used in 2021 has nothing to do with the classical definitions. Rather, Twitter warriors describe anyone who votes for Trump as a racist Nazi. The terms have become unmoored from their original definitions. And as a German I am sure you're aware that this problem of redefinition happens there too.

Here in Germany that's not the most sacred thing, do you know what the article 1 of the german basic law is? "Human dignity shall be inviolable."

German law is crap then. That statement is vacuous, means nothing and can be interpreted in whatever way the government wishes to whatever end the government wants. The US First Amendment is vastly superior and I'm not even American: it is crisp, fairly specific and applies to a very small group of people (Congress).

As for not a dystopian racist hellhole, no, Germany isn't. Neither is the USA, so using Germany to try and make a point about free speech doesn't seem very relevant. China is such a place, if the reports of concentration camps for Muslims in the west are true, and they also have no free speech. So the correlation between free speech and being non racist seems pretty good.

Ok. I'm not sure that "speaking free" is a useful concept. I think it's more useful to discuss controls on public vs private speech.

I believe that two consenting "nazis" should be able to speak privately on e2e platforms, mainly because this is the same mechanism that will let consenting marxists, christians, muslims, satanists, pro-life advocates, pro choice advocates... escape mainstream outrage.

I realise this is a security risk, in the same way that not having microphones everywhere in public spaces is a security risk.

Child exploitation and plotting terrorist acts are the "biggest hills to die on" in this space, but investigators have always had "targeted" means to deal with these without resorting to mass surveillance. I believe existing powers are adequate to investigate these crimes.

I'm also generally ok with mainstream censorship of broadcast or social media. Public speech is a different animal.

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