Look at marjorie taylor green's most recent insanity.
"accusation in a mirror."
and it goes far beyond a handful of loud extremists who are given megaphones from the 'less-extreme' in their party (are they really the minority then?)
the Fox news led contingent have been screaming this 'under attack' narrative.
and they are openly setting the conditions for IRL violence.
Othering trans & queer people. freaking attacking drag queens which is SO silly..
claiming we are pedo groomers who give out hormones to tweens like candy. saying your identity will no longer be people like you in the future, straight & cis.
child abusers seem to be the one class that it's still acceptable to openly wish violence upon.
telling their audience to 'take a stand' or else lose their entire existence & identity produces extremism and prods armed extremists to show up in real life.
they are bringing guns to shut down libraries, ban books, pile into vans to go attack pride, passing discriminatory laws.
not even touching on poc, immigrants, & attacks on democracy/jan 6; i'm focusing on my identity since I can better speak to it. which btw funny how there is always an eminent caravan invasion (a specifically chosen word) right before the election.
we have always been victims of violence.
but this is a much bigger boiling kettle and one group is stoking the fire.
i clearly see this fear in the eyes of a large & heavily armed group.
they think they are under attack. what will they do to 'protect themselves and save our country'? what happens when the kettle boils over?
they're pointing those guns at me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/xtbx7t/marjorie_t...
Just about any large group of people, whether defined by by race, religion, nationality, or creed, will have bad individuals in it. And so the bad guys can almost always point to people from the other group that "started it".
When someone from the out-group commits an atrocity, it is just more proof of how bad that group is. When someone from the in-group commits an atrocity, it is an exception.
The point is, if you are going to write of a group (presumably, the other political party) as bad beyond redemption, you better have a damn good reason to think that you are the historical exception.
Also, violence isn't the only bad thing people do which justifies some sort of retribution.
In the US, there is not one group trying to do that, but a multitude of groups, some who are in power and some who are not, most of whom deny that they are trying to do what you charge them with.
It’s actually godwins second law of nature. how pertinent nazis are to the topic is not relevant, Godwin’s law will be brought up and very often inappropriately as even Godwin himself has noted.
“Godwin's law itself can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, when fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate.[12]”
“Godwin himself has also criticized the overapplication of the law, claiming that it does not articulate a fallacy, but rather is intended to reduce the frequency of inappropriate and hyperbolic comparisons“
B. This is a comment page about censorship and this thread in particular is about one party trying to end open society
So nazis are a natural comparison, and the valid comparison was attempted to be censored and avoided by bringing up an internet meme in exactly the way the originator has criticized. But hey knowing the meme is a get out of jail free card, no civil discourse needed!
Just admit that the comment would have been a valid defense of the nazi party in its ramp up. No meme-ing out of that and there’s been no attempt to deny it, just distract from it.
There is, because literally every viewpoint is an implicit repudiation of some set of values, ie. aka intolerance. The whole point of tolerance is the recognition of this fact and that resolving such differences requires dialogue (edit: resolving them without violence that is).
As Popper said, only those views that directly incite violence or cannot be kept in check by public opinion should be silenced, otherwise you put the whole enterprise of tolerance in jeopardy.
But these days, it's become commonplace to equate words (or sometimes even silence) with violence.
The alternative looks like a replay of all the worst stuff from social repression to actual nuclear war-given the misinformation propping up the Russian invasion of Ukraine and nuclear threats.
Leftists are 100% part of the problem here in the US, I'm not sure what you would need to be smoking to think otherwise.
So you beat them to it?
Roger Baldwin, founder of the now gone-astray ACLU, said this [1],
> Host: "What possible reason is there for giving civil liberties to people who will use those civil liberties in order to destroy the civil liberties of all the rest?"
> Roger: "That's a classic argument you know, that's what they said about the nazis and the communists, that if they got into power they'd suppress all the rest of us. Therefore, we'd suppress them first. We're going to use their methods before they can use it."
> "Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it."
There's a much shorter version of this sentiment that people loved to use during the 2020 riots: "violence is the language of the unheard"
I guess it only applies to groups they like?
This has been the rule throughout human history, and it’s unfortunate that people (some in this thread even) are discovering the first principles for the first time for why we strive to apply the same standards to everyone, and not do carve outs. Unfortunately, politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from power. When elite opinion makers decide that certain things are okay, those things are okay … like mass protests and rioting during a pandemic.
Today platforms have the same choices about what to air or not. Free Speech is also about not forcing people to say things they do not want, it is also about not forcing platforms to broadcast lies.
These are not the same thing.
There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.
That's largely made possible by censorship. When you counter such views in groups that support them, you are likely to be silenced without your knowledge. Social media sites have built a whole suite of tools to aid in the removal of such content [1], and such tools are available to people from all ideologies. You might think that evens things out, but the secretive nature of the tools means that only a handful of people, relatively speaking, know how it all works. That creates a new "us vs. them" mentality, and we need to find our way back to a concept of shared humanity.
> There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.
Social media today, like the printing press in its infancy, is understood and managed by a small number of people. In that environment you can still take a principled stance to argue against censorship and for transparency.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...
Free speech is a good idea for game-theoretic reasons. That's it. Free speech lets people fight it out with only the occasional riot and attempted overthrow of the republic. That's better than the alternative.
It might not have happened yet, but I suspect we're heading in that direction. We've seen 'speech related' bans from Paypal and crowdfunding sites.
Paypal even deplatformed the (UK-based) Free Speech Union (although they reverted that decision after the backlash)
“Just build your own bank.” “Just build your own currency.”
To develop 'Social Network' or 'Digital Currencies', you need 'Server Farm', 'Internet', and 'Power Grid', and to have those you need everything from 'Intercontintental Data Cables' to 'Semiconductor Manufacturing', and way back to extraction and refining of raw materials..
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...
I'm not aware of any group intending to overthrow a government or otherwise do harm which was allowed to recruit and spread their propaganda as aggressively and freely as possible, and which was thwarted in their aims by nothing more than civil discourse. I don't know what experience he believes to be contrary to that classic argument, but that of the Nazis and Communists ain't it.
It certainly doesn't seem to work with modern propaganda or conspiracy theory. I'm certain QAnon and anti-vaxxers have been presented with arguments contrary to their claims, and those of white supremacists and anti-semites have been litigated for a century or more, and yet not only do they persist, but are experiencing a modern renaissance.
Show me an example where this proposition that "letting them all talk" is the best way to prevent organized violence and mayhem at scale. I can raise you book burnings and gulags and death camps galore.
Yes, the famous events that come from letting everyone speak: book burnings and death camps. If we could just burn enough books, we could keep books from being burned forever. If we silence enough people, we can keep people from being silenced.
Deplatforming doesn’t forcibly prevent speech, it just pushes it to the margins. You can still publish your book in favor of book burnings, but, in a deplatforming world, no major publisher would publish it, so you’d have to do a small independent print run that would likely be ignored.
This is the way the world has always worked. Publishers (including TV channels, newspapers, etc.) have always exercised discretion over what they thought was worthy to publish. What’s different today is that the human content moderation has largely disappeared, which has allowed the marginal voices (antivax on both left and right, QAnon, etc.) to flourish.
Edit: That’s not to say this content moderation has been perfect. It allows small communities to exercise behavior that the larger society finds abhorrent, such as refusing service to people of color. And so laws are passed regulating what small communities can do, which understandably pisses them off. Human systems are messy; there’s no absolutist answer that works, either in unbridled control or unbridled tolerance.
Well you're thinking wrong.
1930s Germany actually had hate speech laws.
Didn't help.
https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitis...
Turns out they didn't have hate speech laws:
> In its application to statements about groups, the German law of insult had a development very similar to the Anglo-American law of libel.1 The Supreme Court had decided at an early date that statements about a class of people were punishable only if it could clearly be established that they were directed against definite individuals. An insulting remark about "Jews generally" was not considered within the statute. This view was reaffirmed in 1931 in a case in which a general attack on the Jews was held to be "not directed in a sufficiently recognizable manner against individual Jews." Similarly, an attack against the "German Jews" was held not to be suffi- ciently restricted, although in a few instances persons were convicted for insulting the Jewish inhabitants of small communities
Even known extremists, posting lies about people who were targetted for being Jewish, were let off, where the same lie about any random person could have led to a year in prison:
> In one of several cases against Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer, a fine of 400 marks (then less than $100) was levied for an article which stated that a Jewish attorney, Dr. Wassertriidinger of Nuremberg, had committed perjury. The opinion of the court was that in spite of the seri- ousness of the libel and of a prior conviction of Streicher, no prison sentence be inflicted because "the defendant is a fanatic whose statements cannot be taken too seriously." Similar tenderness in meting out punishment was frequently explained by the characterization of the defendants as zealots.
> Furthermore, the immunity of the members of the Reichstag often protected Nazi depu- ties against criminal prosecution. Those deputies became the so-called re- sponsible editors of many newspapers—frequently one deputy was the editor of several newspapers—and thus made criminal prosecution for many libelous publications impossible. Although the Reichstag could waive the immunity of its members, it did so infrequently and then only after long delays.
So it looks like we tried not censoring them, and suprisingly, it didn't work.