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Comment by mewse | Hacker News Reader

> The internet needs a true public square

Honest question: why?

Because when you can brand any idea as radical or dangerous, you get to dictate what radical or dangerous is, and when you do that, you control the narrative and people.

There are some things that are unambiguously dangerous. The insurrection at the capitol this month comes to mind.

Unequivocally. What is the alternative? Banning every single idea besides a pre-approved list of topics? That's Nineteen Eighty Four all over again.

If anything, public discourse enables people to observe and see potential clusters, covid could be traced to tweets talking about pneumonia in November and December of 2019.

If, instead of squashing them, we figured out the underlying problem, which almost always is lack of prospects, we can act accordingly.

Letting private companies enforce their terms of service may not be a perfect alternative, but it is a reasonable one and has been somewhat effective.

Yes this most recent operation was a smashing success, in terms of convincing shallow thinkers that it's wrong for subjects to bother their rulers. Just look at what Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant has to deal with right now. Amazon is sponsoring a recall election "justified" because she had the audacity to talk to protesters who were physically inside city hall. (In reality, because she wants Amazon to pay taxes.) Perfect timing!

Oh come off it. There was no "insurrection at the capital." There was a bunch of rowdy types running around with their shirts off and a bunch of old people taking selfies. A few bad things happen. I'd call it a mostly peaceful protest and you would too if you were using objective criteria that was equally applied.

Why do we have them in the physical world? So people can gather and speak and protest without approval of corporate overlords.

Never thought its gonna get to a point where i have to explain individual liberty in the west

It's a primary source of information for over a billion people at this point. It's probably not a good idea to have that monopolized by corporate or government interest

Because when the people are allowed to freely share their ideas with one another and talk about them without interference the cream rises to the top.

There is historical evidence of this, the monarchs of the centuries past, the Catholic church, they all stifled the ability for people to freely discuss ideas, and even killed people for sharing the wrong ones. As soon as the printing press was invented that allowed people to share ideas freely you had revolts against them all over the next few centuries leading to representative democracies and republics, the enlightenment and development of ideas such as human dignity and individual rights, diversity of religion in the west took hold, the end of theocratic rule over Europe, and it all culminated in the creation of the US and an end to global colonialism mid 20th century. We owe our great way of life and our emergence from theocratic and monarchical shackles in large part to the ability to express and share ideas freely, this is a big reason why western societies hold that right in high esteem, it was a resounding success, it worked for us up until now and it will continue to do so if we let it.

For one thing, conversations are a lot easier to have when there is an implicit rule that context is always considered when evaluating word usage. For example, the word 'autist' in the context of 'stonks' and 'wsb' is not understood to mean an attempt to mock people with disabilities and therefore unlikely to get anyone offended as a result.

South Park tried to make this argument over a decade ago and they were dead wrong.

People get offended because they want to get offended. They then rationalize it after the fact, usually by resorting to “certain words are always wrong”. But if a friend occasionally does something annoying, you could either elect to ignore it, or you could take a stand and make it a make-or-break issue. But the choice to make it an issue is yours.

So that those with the currently loudest voices can silence all others?

So that the "invisible hand of the market" may decide who is wisest (as demonstrated when we look at all the instances where this happened)?

I think all of these wishes of a true public space are usually colored by the (mis?)perception of certain opinions being opressed, when in fact they are often just socially unacceptable because of their destructive nature.

Not to be that guy, but I grew up in Austria inbetween old Nazis and young Neo-Nazis. When they said: "you are trying to silence us" what they meant is "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech". This is literally (translated from a very thick accent in Austrian German) what one of the neo nazis said to me after the 8th beer and a heated discussion. To assume these people want free speech for anybody other than themselves is naive. For them tolerating others is a vehicle to convince them of their cause: Once they have what they want they will get rid of it.

The question how much tolerance we have to show those who themselves are intolerant is a old one and still not easy to answer. However to me it is quite clear that we should sacrifice the free society we have without a fight.

It appears to me that our society is currently threatened by a group using the exact strategy that those Nazis were using in your home country, except they're at the next stage, past the using free speech and actively now attempting to destroy it.

I'm of the belief that to protect your free society you protect it's virtue, even when people take advantage of it. If you hold steadfast to "free speech", no group ever gets past that first stage, so they can never take power. It means sometimes tolerating hearing reprehensible views of the world, but it is either that or giving someone all the guns and the power to control what you say, and if history teaches us anything, that always ends badly for the regular people no matter the initial intention of the person doing the censoring, a power like that is irresistible to those who want to use it to benefit themselves.

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