There isn't any point telling this poster he's wrong, you'll just alienate him further.

Most people think they know they understand by now; the other side is perilously silly at best, or prefers they were dead in the worst case. And they're right so often that this heuristic is too useful not to act on. I don't blame anyone for banning or flaming anyone anymore, given that. And I admire anyone who can still have that unevenly prized nonviolent noncoercive conversation. Especially if it can actually be meaningful and not just a tired re-treading .

Nothing. But my ideology is mainstream, and it is incompatible with the other one. The other ideology can have Voat. Why should they also have Reddit?

Reddit/Discord are not “open opinion” platforms. They are businesses. If they don't like what you're saying then they should kick you off, especially when advocating for violence and spreading fascism. You are free to start your own business and proceed to pick up where the conversation left off on your own platform, at least until the government comes knocking and asking about why you are supporting violence and sedition. That's the beauty of the free market.

Ok, well, reading that I realize I "have different ideas than you" about that! Like I'm not sure that

> The best you can do to prevent actual harm in the real world is allow unfettered speech and discussion.

No-one likes fetters, so that way of framing it makes it sound a no-brainer. But, to give a real world example, I guess most people think HN would be much worse without moderation of any kind. I'm not sure how one would test the truth of your statement. It doesn't sound obviously true to me, at least. It sounds like you are 100% certain. What evidence would it take for you to change your mind? I suspect belief in such "free speech absolutism" comes from abstract principle first, with real-world evidence a very distant second.

Seems a similar situation to, say, pacifism. I'm very anti-violence, anti-war etc, but I'm not a pure, idealist "pacifist". To say you'd never use violence, in any situation?! that non-violence is always worse - just sounds like you haven't thought so much about it. e.g. even if thugs were dragging off your loved ones? You wouldn't lift a finger? I doubt it. That would seem like your abstract principle was trumping prudence/evidence/reason etc, producing non-sensible results, in a similar way.

I don't think there are simple and good answers to any of these questions. Yours is simple but, I think, not good.

In India, there have been pages created listing Muslim girls and women for sale. Using photos and real names. And the men describe the various ways they want to use their "property" once they buy them. If you were a Muslim in India, facing fears of state-encouraged real life violence, what sort of conversation would you like to have with these people? Are you going to look at a page like that and think: "I'm so thankful for the culture being created here."

What you say works great in a vacuum. But unfettered hate speech leads to bad places. Just ask the German Jews. Ask a Tutsi how they felt about the hateful radio shows before the genocide started. Imagine what it was like to be a black person in the US facing lynching and pogroms over the misinformation being widely spread.

But, hey, I guess just "conversation" would have solved all of those issues. Because those screaming their hateful messages are just misunderstood people who can be easily reasoned with. And who can call it hate to begin with? After all, calling a group subhuman, and wishing for their daughters to be raped, is just a cultural development no one should interfere with.

Would you put up with unfettered, unwanted speech by someone with a loudspeaker outside your home? Even if they were on public property?

>who decides

Courts, associations of people, etc.

The canonical argument against your line of thinking would be Der Sturmer in Nazi Germany having enough freedom to promote the interests of the Nazi party which consequently outlawed the free press and railed up the hatred to the point of genomics (See: Popper and the paradox of tolerance). We could also look at the radio stations in Rwanda preaching Hutu Power that contributed to the genocides there, or contemporary issues like the Rohingya genocides amplified by social media.

Restrictions on free speech are universal across cultures at all levels of society including within this very community and I don’t see attempts to restrict speech which the proverbial common sense person would see as likely to cause dehumanization and derision and calls to violence as necessarily being all that impossible to do in a reasonably if not completely fair manner.

This naively ignores the empirical fact that (a) many people seem to be immune to light, and (b) most people debating believe light to be what's shining out of their debate-hole (rather than an emergent property arising from the debate).