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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

“Cognitive deplatforming” is a brilliant way of framing the motivation of certain “free speech” advocacy. It’s not good enough for someone to be able to express the idea, nor to be able to amplify it by whatever platform provided to them. You also have to think about what they want you to think. Anything less than that is denying their right to speak.

Recognize the pattern of their motivations and the resulting ideas? Know they’re harmful from prior experience? Better go think on it some more, or you’ve unduly cancelled them from your own brain, and that’s bad because everyone who wants to be in your brain deserves to be, rent free of course.

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> You also have to think about what they want you to think.

That's a wildly exaggerated interpretation of rainytuesday's post. I interpreted it as calling out the one-sided purity test applied to which media one may engage with.

I.e. you can ignore it and not think about it, but you can't expect others to concede that, just because the source doesn't parrot your side's orthodoxy, it can and should be ignored. Especially for something as mild as the statement about supporting news without a liberal filter.

Especially since, if motivated, biased, harmful (but truthful) reporting is enough to discredit a news source, then that would disqualify ABC, CBS, NBC, the Associated Press [1], the New York Times, and I'm sure many others.

If we ignore what anyone we dislike has to say, even when we think what they're saying is true, then dialogue is impossible.

[1] https://israelpalestinenews.org/associated-press-double-stan...

[2] https://ifamericansknew.org/media/nyt-report.html

> That's a wildly exaggerated interpretation of rainytuesday's post. I interpreted it as calling out the one-sided purity test applied to which media one may engage with.

You didn’t need to interpret. They said[0] what they meant pretty clearly.

> Non-engagement with the thesis was the point

And I don’t agree given actual political alignment that “news without a liberal filter” is mild. It’s a dog whistle for increasingly active hate. The news without such a “liberal filter” is openly hostile to my existence, and far moreso towards other people I care about. And to that point,

> If we ignore what anyone we dislike has to say, even when we think what they're saying is true, then dialogue is impossible.

I don’t want dialogue with anyone who wants me to cease to exist, nor anyone who wants to keep people I care about from existing. That’s not intellectual curiosity and it’s not the bedrock of a functioning society. It’s the exact principle of demanding people entertain harmful ideas even when recognized.

You can engage whatever you want, but I’m not obligated to spend a second thought on people who want me dead.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867929

"No liberal filter" becomes "they want me and those I care about dead". It's so convenient when the only media that pass your purity test don't raise any uncomfortable points, or report on issues you'd rather be ignored, isn't it?

My purity test of pattern recognition and not wanting to repeatedly consume ideas which threaten me?

I’m not asking for anything to be ignored. I’m asserting my right not to subject myself to it personally.

Upthread there’s a comment from “uvnq” that seemed unnecessarily hyperbolic, with phrasing like:

> They believe hate speech is violence. Not that it merely is bad, but that it actually equates to violence. In fact, certain forms of hate speech are not just violence, but genocide.

And then I get down the thread a bit and find the exact behavior described in uvnq’s post.

If the simple tagline “news without a liberal filter” can be interpreted as an indirect deadly threat against an individual’s life and very existence, then the moral framework has already been established to violently respond in “self-defense”.

I don’t need to be hyperbolic about speech as violence. The actual violence is violent. I also don’t need to make time to listen to the speech of people who want to do violence to me

Any publication to the right of Hillary Clinton is allegedly a threat to his existence; what a bad faith argument. Abandonment of truth in favor of "harm reduction" is the big picture, that's why everyone is worried about AI spitting out something contrary to the current phase of the sexual revolution or core liberal beliefs.

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