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Comment by gentle | Hacker News Reader

This guy spreads vaccine and mask disinformation and as a result should be deplatformed. No sympathy for liars.

You dont want the government silencing people. You dont want to go down that road. Eventually it leads to you.

The way you combat these people (and I didnt look deep into this persons views) is to call them out and provide truthful information. And then people have to decide for themselves. You will always have a fraction of people who are fools (on any topic) but most people will side with rationality.

I support the government silencing people causing egregious harm (which the government has the burden of proof to prove). “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Calling them out and providing the truth doesn’t work. Ask the 42 year old who tried to break into the Cincinnati OH FBI office and is dead after a shootout with police. There is a significant amount of the population where there is simply no inoculation against conspiracies and other incoherent reality models.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cops-get-into-shootout-with-ar... (Armed Man Who Stormed FBI Office Said He Wanted ‘War’ After Mar-a-Lago Raid)

I think this is a really naive view. Attempting to expand the "fire" in a crowd limitation to many other speech areas is reckless. The government are just humans, and humans are conniving and motivated by politics. That road leads to an obvious end.

You list small examples of when free speech goes bad but I can assure you not having it goes bad in a bigger way for many more people.

What you call naive, I call rational and pragmatic. Your mistake is giving too much credit to the average human. I encourage you to consider the position when you’re at the business end of a barrel held by someone who isn’t functional enough to think critically/rationally (of course I don’t wish you actual harm if that’s in question). Its easy to pontificate from safety. I was previously a free speech absolutist, but realize the operating environment has changed over the last decade and my beliefs have changed accordingly.

I believe that the government must be held accountable and to a high burden when rights are in question, but I also can demonstrate with receipts that there are a lot of batshit crazy people out there.

"Your mistake is giving too much credit to the average human" again the government are just humans. You seem to think its a single point of godly knowledge and wisdom void of mortals. Its just a small group of people who control a larger group of people and they have private motivations often times not in the public interest.

The government (small group of people with outside interests) is constantly wrong and biased on many topics, I would never want them to have a monopoly on free speech or decide what is truth.

Government is run by a collection of humans. Why do you give them the benefit of the doubt when you do not give such benefit to the commoner? I can understand giving bother or neither the benefit of the doubt but to pick one seems capricious. Perhaps it is you that is pontificating from safety.

It's a good thing your opinion doesn't override the US Constitution.

A piece of paper written hundreds of years ago is always up for interpretation. The rule of law is interpreted by the living, not the dead (with my apologies to Thomas Jefferson).

I too am curious how this specific court case will shake out.

> You dont want the government silencing people.

You mean, like banning his substack account, in which he tells us about how the government attempted to silence him?

Someone who got banned from the town square can also move out to the boonies and write his own tract, does that make the first banning legal?

Well it is legal in many places, but is it in America?

Sorry, I don't buy this "Twitter == town square" stuff. I've debated it a lot on HN and elsewhere, and I'm not convinced by any of the arguments I've seen. I know you want it to be true and likely do sincerely believe that it is. I just don't.

If that were the standard then the entire public health apparatus in most countries would have been banned many months ago. Clearly it's not. You can spread as many lies as you want as long as it's in favor of vaccines and masks.

Anyway Berenson has been reliably ahead of the curve on this. He is FAR more accurate and trustworthy than governments have been. The tweet that got him banned said something like "It doesn't stop infection" and pointing out that because the vaccine only reduces symptoms without reducing infection, that makes it a therapeutic. Which is correct.

Never seen a vaccine before that train your immune system but doesn’t reduce infection. This just doesn’t make sense!

do you have any peer reviews research paper that have data showing it doesn’t reduce infection?

if he mean “does not completely prevent you from getting infected” then this is true.

All vaccines do not completely prevent infection. But that’s not a reason to stop calling them what they are and start calling them therapeutic :-)

The disinformation came from the government:

1. Masks work. Nope. Only N95’s are proven. Every study prior to covid deployment showed that masks did not work. All studies comparing the issue show no impact.

2. Vaccines prevent spread. Nope. Government kind of knew this.

3. Vaccines will prevent you from getting covid-19. Nope, natural immunity is probably the only way through it for most of the populace. Sweden’s and Florida’s science based approach turned out to be correct, targeted preventions for at-risk groups.

4. Virus came from a wet market. Anyone going against this insane theory was attacked so viciously that the social media groups cowered in fear of the government. Look what is now being accepted as an option.

The government based their approach on a hope that everyone would concurrently get the therapeutic vaccine and freeze the virus to prevent transmission. The problem was the inability to think about the logistics.

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