Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

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>Or are we really that elitist, and do we really have so little faith in individual's ability to think for themselves?

>Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas?

Not all ideas are the same. The free market of ideas is a concept that promotes exploration and competition between ideas. However, some ideas are, on their face, intentionally manipulative. If we look up the 14 words or other rhetorical devices typically deployed in disinformation and propaganda efforts, we can identify a lot of soundly anti-social noise in the general pro-social marketplace of ideas.

Someone refusing to pay ad revenue dollars to monetize a flat earth, anti-vax, or white supremacist message isn't saying 'ideas are bad and we should not have them'. They're saying 'we explored these ideas, and I have judged them. They didn't win the competition'.

This IS the competition inherent in the marketplace of ideas. To remove this does not promote competition in the marketplace; it banally removes it, replacing it with a nihilist 'no idea is better than any other' position.

"Social justice" movements are also manipilative and are doing much more harm than good at this point, but companies and a lot of people keep pushing them. Should we start banning them too?

What concrete evidence do you have that social justice movements are "doing more harm than good" or that whatever harm they are doing is equivilent to flat earthers, anti-vaxxers and white supremacists?

Well, to be fair, these companies are only woke in some markets. This isn’t a global problem.

Show me the major corporation’s Middle East division with a pride logo. I’ll wait right here… skelton.

So clearly the solution to overly woke social justice is just for everyone to become the one religion that no one is allowed to criticize and who is still “allowed” to have different opinions.

Modern solutions and problems and all that.

My plan has no downsides unless it does. You’re welcome /s.

Social justice movements are almost without exception extremely critical of countries like Saudi Arabia but despite this fantasy conjured up by conservatives that it's the woke crowd that shy away from criticism of Islamic theocracies, it's amusing how it's always the former that love multi-billion dollar arms deals with them (though to be clear, both neoliberals and neocons are guilty of this).

I guess hijabs in American streets are a larger problem than enabling the mass surveilance and extermination of undesirables in their eyes.

>"Social justice" movements are also manipilative and are doing much more harm than good at this point

Seems like a completely separate discussion, but I'd disagree emphatically with a premise that attempts to equivocate between content that is misleading, false or intentionally promoting genocide and whatever you'd define as falling under the umbrella of social justice.

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