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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

> pro book banning in libraries

I've seen tons of recent support for censorship from ideas and speech the (left? I wouldn't consider it actually left) doesn't like. Then you have conservatives moving against these books that promote woke religion and suddenly these same people are very pro free speech.

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There's a huge difference between saying, "LGBT people are people," and "LBGT people should be shunned out of existence." Words have meanings.

I see, so we allow the ideas that you agree with, and ban the ones you don't. FREE SPEECH!

I hope that if someone writes a book saying people should physically harm you (yes, specifically you by name and picture) then you will not ask for that person to be put on jail -arguably the worst kind of ban possible- or say anything to stop that book from continuing being published, otherwise you would be an hypocrite for not really following your logic in which words should have no consequences for their authors.

> I hope that if someone writes a book saying people should physically harm you

One could argue that calls for gender-affirming surgeries or treatments are equally, if not, worse. These topics are especially prevalent in the LGBTQ community, as I have found from my experience. Nevertheless, we seem to encourage this kind of behavior whereas we. It is important to be aware of which ideas you are rejecting, especially when the community you seem to be defending is also committing acts of the same caliber.

Banning books that talk against the Holocaust and promoting books that talk about gender-related surgeries are nowhere close in the damage they can potentially create even if you take the most pessimistic stance possible about the later, a sense of proportion is needed in any discussion.

I hope you can see the hypocrisy and bias in your desire to ban ideas you dislike – it's dangerous. A better outcome would be to fight bad ideas with good ideas.

And I hope you see the hipocrisy in saying that my idea about banning ideas that are bad for society is a bad idea. Because if that was your "good idea" vs my "bad idea" it didn't win that fight, just like it almost never does, and instead marketing, marketing budgets, preconceived notions, convenient beliefs, upbringing, the hard limit in the number of ideas one can learn about in one's lifetime and many other factors outweighs the fantasy that all ideas should be given equal exposure, as in a book titled "we should kill black people" should be countered with one titled "we shouldn't kill black people" and that every single person in every generation should extensively read both and come to their own conclusion and not use any conclusion society already learned as a whole.

No one couldn’t. I’m sorry, but this is garbage. Harm is a thing. Transphobia is transphobia.

I’m sure that racist whites thought that MLK was agitating for “equally bad, if not worse” things than Governor Faubus but they were just wrong.

I understand that you have a rich imagination, please do not use it to justify censorship.

This is wholly independent of policy initiatives. The idea that books that discuss transition are morally equivalent to something like The Turner Diaries is worthy of derision.

The "shoe on the other foot" syndrome.

>I've seen tons of recent support for censorship from ideas and speech the (left? I wouldn't consider it actually left) doesn't like.

The left has always been pro-censorship: Stalin and Mao, for instance, set up societies with lots of censorship.

The right is also pro-censorship: think Hitler, or any religious conservatives for that matter.

The extreme left and right are both fairly problematic, although for different reasons and to different degrees.

Well when comparing Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, I don't really see any significant degree of difference...

If you're talking about what modern Americans consider "left" and "right", though, I'd agree, but what Americans consider "left" generally isn't very far left, and it depends on who you ask: talk to an internationally-minded American and they'll say the Democratic party is centrist at best, or center-right. Talk to a Trump voter and they'll say that party is "far-left radical communists".

On economic issues and welfare, sure. But when it comes to gender activism the US left is way further over than the rest of the world, to the point that they've alienated a large part of their original support base.

To different degrees? I'm not sure about that...

The right is significantly more dangerous now, but I don't see that as a historically universal truth.

Authoritarians have always been pro-censorship. Libertarians have always been anti-censorship.

Both exist on either end of the ideological spectrum. Right-wing authoritarianism is a thing, and so is left-wing libertarianism.

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