Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

It doesn't phase me as much as others speaking in my stead or far worse, alleging a indemonstrable hatred or bias towards other ethnicities. People I like very much have been accused of hating me because some didn't like their politics. That is way more offensive to me than the usual vulgar bloke that tries to get a reaction for his self-confidence.

The majority will always have the freedom of their speech.

Speech was severely restricted at the time and Germany also had hate speech laws. That probably had a severe negative effect because people became more radical as they were disallowed to vent their grievances. Those that demanded restraint often did it because of their own vanity.

Open hate speech with government propaganda which discriminated against Jews came later. At that point the Nazis already felt justified in their actions.

I cannot say anything to Rwanda because I don't know the conflict. I tend to disbelieve those that said it was because of hateful speech.

Pretty obviously, such state of affairs wasn't stable. After world war 2 there were several riots and violence, and the Belgium administration attempted to switch side and promote Hutu over Tutsi. A Hutu government emerged and declared themselves independent, and started to purge the Tutsi population. After a few years of wars with nearby countries, instability, and displacement of Tutsi, the Tutsi population formed a armed military force and a civil war broke out. After a couple of years of guerilla wars and temporarily peaces, with neither side winning, the Hutu army/administration decided on the idea of genocide as a final solution to the conflict.

Where in this process did free speech cause the genocide?

It's probably more productive to think about it in terms of "the usual people who were given a voice back then, but only the subset of them who couldn't f-off without leaving behind a ton of their wealth if things went bad."

In effect they limited voting to people who had settled down and had substantial skin in the game.

Why did they do this?

There's literally 3 links providing evidence in my post.

Furthermore, the onus is on the claimant. The claim being made that these Indian truckers are white supramacists and nazis; or that their friends and fellow protestors are nazis? That literally doesnt make any sense.

Sorry but the yellow journalism or, might i even say it, the propaganda asserting these protestors are nazis is a failed narrative.

I am not super knowledgeable about the situation, apologies if I misrepresented something.

Sure, lets put the trucker sideline aside for discussion.

>claiming that free speech was removed (implying some official stance) is hyperbolic. I will concede that the Charter is more vague than I'd like on where the boundaries of free expression lie.

The gymnastics of your following sentence proves my point.

Lets look at this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

There are exceptions to free speech. Defamation/Libel, incitement to suicide, false advertising. I find all these exceptions to be reasonable or exceptions to speech. False advertising or fraud in general isn't the speech but rather something beyond the speech. Even obscenity in which porn or even death videos are not obscene. The obscenity exception is very tight.

So there can be legitimate exceptions.

In fact, in our law we criminalized 'advocating for genocide' which I suspect both of us agree can stay. Mind you, it has literally never been used. Literally only attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugesera_v_Canada_(Minister_of... but wasn't even proper. Though perhaps we can agree deporting him was a good idea?

The very next rule is the problem. "wilfully promoting hatred'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Andrews

Supreme court ruled that it did violate freedom of speech but section 1 they made the exception against this scumbag. This is what we call 'best of intentions' and its good to stop that dude but what did it open?

When Charlie Hebdo shooting happened in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo#2015_attack

There was a reaction, especially on reddit, to stand up together against these terrorists. You will find however, NOBODY in Canada stood up. The few who did ended up in front of hate crime tribunals for promotion of hatred. Of which lets be realistic, this armchair not-lawyer... they were guilty. The problem was that hate crime tribunals know the line they walk. They dismissed virtually all these guilty cases because they knew when they go over the line they lose this tool. There was a unique feature of these hate crime tribunal cases. Every single group attacked were Conservatives.

What happened there? Standing in solidarity with victims of terrorists was indeed promoting hatred of islam. It was discovered in 2015 that you can use the hate crime tribunals to silence political opponents. Suddenly the Conservatives were all racists.

How about Comedians who make dark jokes? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55959133

Sorry, but Mike Ward isn't some white supremacist or something. These laws aren't about making people good people. This isn't about making people less mean jerks.

Free speech is officially dead until this is fixed.

And as the submission title says, there's no way that simple prohibition can "solve" this. (It's hard to legislate epistemic hygiene.)

And. "Ironically" the folks whining about woke cancel culture support the folks actually banning and burning books by government decree.

Also, just for a sensible chuckle about this recent Spotify / JRE deplatforming: https://i.imgur.com/Ihf4ENv.mp4 (I don't think money changed his beliefs.)

All education should be consensual

You're right, I misread your comment. He really does not differenciate this clearly, despite having examples for both cases.

Once you take this step you legitimise the idea that there is an authority with the power to censor - ostensibly for good reasons - and sooner or later that power will bend somewhere else.

It's important that children learn about everything, especially about opposing ideas because only then can they form their own opinions and develop critical thinking, and most importantly the ability to reevaluate an idea based on changing data.

To paraphrase your analogy I prefer my children to only learn about the US healthcare system, and not waste time learning about how other countries do it for better outcomes with less money.

And this is the problem with your post - who decides what is OK, and what is a waste of time?

Ps - I am upvoting you not because you are right, but because you add a valuable perspective to the conversation, and I support your willingness to bring it.

It's not a strawman, as many people assert that platforms should just let anything not-illegal stay up. You may not believe this, but there are others who I've seen assert it.

> Facebook and Twitter ban for political reasons, which is entirely different than banning spam.

It's not the same, but the issue is that once you're past the border of "we'll only ban illegal stuff", you're now in the realm of much more subjective decisionmaking. In practice, many forms of speech could be classified as both political, and harassment/bullying/other bad stuff, which is what usually happens with Facebook.

In their case, they don't want to get into the political sphere, but they do want to bad blatant misinformation, and in practice that does overlap with politics.

I see Jo Jorgensen, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Mark Rubio, Mitch McConnell, etc. I've never seen anyone banned for saying to end the Fed. To cut taxes. To have family values.

If you're paying a monthly fee or buying hardware, they don't care how much time you spend using it as long as they get your money, so that's a different incentive.

The ad-supported model is more profitable specifically because of the network effect -- you get more users when you don't charge money and the bigger network is more network effect. But then the users don't have a real choice; the biggest network with everybody on it is the one funded by ads.

In a federated network, you choose the provider who makes the algorithm and can choose one whose business model isn't selling your attention to advertisers, and you're still a part of the same network as people who choose differently. Then people aren't locked in, and when they realize that the algorithm whose purpose is to suck up all their time and spam them with ads is costing them way more than e.g. $10/month, which business model becomes more popular?

1) Use a private or different browser, VPN, or Tor to exit your personal filter bubble, then search for news or trends and see what the algorithms serve to fresh faces.

2) US-specific example: If you're a Democrat/Republican, read the Fox News/NY Times politics or opinion section. If you know some big names on the "enemy side" go consume some of their content. It'd also be a good idea to read some news stories from outside the US; they don't have much stake in the fight and have some distance, so it's good for perspective.

3) Ask that family member (the one your other family members proudly blocked on Facebook) what their news sources are. Just a word of warning: they may take this as a sign you're "defecting" and talk your ear off, so try to come up with a way to time-limit it, like "it's for a school paper."

When public discourse was a physical event, you were forced to hear both sides as they exist in your neighborhood. Now you can choose to ignore your entire state and, instead, listen to a small cult on the other side of the planet if it so suits you. Take, for instance, those few who have left the west to join ISIS.

It's the picking and choosing that allows people to leave their reality behind, for better or worse.

The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Casablanca (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Great Expectations (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950), A Place In The Sun (1951), High Noon (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Wages of Fear (1953). (I slipped two French films in.)

Almost anything by Hawks during those years. Or Hitchcock. Almost anything with Bogart. Or Grant. Or by Wilder.

Tons of noir films skirted the rules.

Look, I’m not a fan of the Hays code but some of those movies were to me better because of what they had to imply.

This is after the Hays code but as an example I recently watched the original 3:10 to Yuma and the remake. I hated the remake. What appeals to me about Elmore Leonard stories is that despite being about bad guys, they have a degree of charm to them (Out of Sight, Justified, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty,etc). The remake took all of the charm out of the original and replaced it with graphic violence and cruelty.

"but" part does not matter. There is always an explanation why they do it. Does not make it any better.

You can if you're practical and think of it as working towards a common goal of decreasing abortion. Something everyone is in favor of. And face the fact that outlawing abortion doesn't eliminate abortion. Similar to how outlawing murder doesn't eliminate murder.

If you increase comprehensive sex education, decrease stigma around discussing sex, increase access to free and low cost birth control, decrease abstinence only rhetoric, increase child care options, increase free access to health care while pregnant, and increase access to free and low cost health care for delivery, you can drastically reduce the number of abortions. While we're at it, increase funding for adoption, both in placing your child and in adopting, and for foster care.

Unfun facts: Childbirth in the US costs between $10,000 to $30,000. Over 30 million Americans have no health insurance. Many have poor health insurance (deductibles of $5,000 are common on the open market... mine last year was $7,000). My last friend who adopted wound up spending nearly $40,000 to complete the process.

This is just a bit strange on the internet, because so much of what we see is one organization exactly repeating what someone else said on their request, so it's the organization saying it, but it feels like maybe it isn't.

The assumption that users cannot see or understand the slide towards abhorrent content is incorrect.

My preference would be many small communities that have different support models. Let some communities be ad driven, others pay to subscribe, others yet donation based. These all have pros and cons.

The mistake is thinking there is a single solution.

Yes. The people doing those boycotts believe those things are actively causing harm to people. I don't agree, of course, but that doesn't make them illegitimate.

> Once you've proven yourself to be a shitbag, I'm not going back to your products ever if I can help it. Nothing illegitimate about that, it's called "voting with your wallet", which is nicely capitalist behaviour.

Imagine you lived in the first century AD, and you boycotted everything Saul of Tarsus was involved with, because of the religious persecution he committed. After he had his conversion and became Paul the Apostle, would you really continue to boycott him?

If your position is that one person can make an argument and be wrong because of other things that other person did, you are not denying that the same argument could, possibly, be made by another person and be right. Therefore, this is not arguing against the argument, it is simply opposing the person making it. Hence, ad hominem.

> The accusation of hypocrisy, and blindness to the faults of their favoured group is pertinent

Well, maybe. But at best it’s a tangential issue to the actual argument put forward.

> relevant to the arguments being put forward.

No. Bad things are wrong, and you shouldn’t need to resort to personal attacks in order to argue against them.

> I am not expressing a logical disagreement with the premise of the article, merely laughing at the bald-facedness and ignorance of it.

Sure, but take care that you do not lower the discource down to “Well, you’re ugly!”. Try to argue the points, not the people.

We want curious conversation here. That means people hearing each other and learning from each other across differences. This is very different from (and incompatible with) ideological battle, in which the goal is simply to defeat the other side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679.

We've had to ask you about this quite a few times before. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd appreciate it.

My real world experience is not quite that extreme but it’s certainly more so than it used to be, particularly in any gathering that includes twenty-somethings.

Maybe the 60s were like this, I’d be interested to hear a comparison from someone that lived through them.

Good comment though.

That's an interesting read on the situation. If conservatives are rethinking their devotion to a would-be dictator, would you silence their ruminations?

On the other hand, if you're going to make a case like this, it really helps to make it without reverting to the key of ideological battle yourself. Otherwise the comment pattern-matches, in my sandblasted moderator brain, to the automatic dislike of one ideological side for any information they perceive as favoring the opposite side. Conformance to already-held views, as you aptly describe this, is not interesting. It's a reflexive rather than a reflective reaction (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

Long, tedious experience has driven into me how mechanical such reactions are, and also that they amount to well over 90% (if not well over 99%) of the things that internet commenters have to say about disivive stuff. As moderators trying to look through the lens of 'what's interesting', as opposed to 'who does this favor', we're conditioned to perceive such comments as more noise than signal. Especially when accompanied by snark or other markers of aggression.

I mention this here because your post was an interesting case of starting out on the one foot and ending on the other. Perhaps that is helpful, or interesting, or neither.

If so, I think it will be along the lines of two people get into a fight. After about 5 seconds, they are exhausted and realize that getting into a fight was a really bad idea. They will soon stop and hopefully grab a beer together afterwords, perhaps to argue politics some more.

What does "working" even mean? More support for a political party? Less resistance?