Please do not break up or encourage the breaking up of my threads without asking me first.
Fuck.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Reward good behavior and this is good, imo.
Of course, that itself argues for free speech because how can one play devil’s advocate if it’s illegal? If one of the “two opposed ideas” is illegal, is it not therefore a mandation against first-rate intelligence?
Yes this is a tough one. On one hand Carleas has a point that this thread is about speech, but on the other he stated he’s a free speech absolutist and therefore can’t censor off-topic contributions, but then again, does it really matter? What’s the purpose of adhering to the topic? The purpose of the thread is to inspire discussion and although I’d rather talk about freedom of speech than the Jews and Palestinians, I can easily look over it.
Now if the purpose of the thread were more like Quora where the goal is to categorize questions and specific answers related to those questions in a way that is easy to access for educational purposes, then I’d see it differently I think, but it’s doubtful that anyone would be searching for answers to the censorship question on a forum such as this and then be dismayed by talk of Palestinian holocaust. Idk, it just doesn’t seem that big of a deal.
How do y’all see it?
Why wouldn’t he be free to say it?
I think, in addition to what has already been said about slander and fraud, that there is a clear distinction between speech and behavior (action). Slanderous behavior is an action undertaken wherein the tools of the malicious activity are speech.
Slander should therefore not be thought of as speech, but action.
The activity is exactly the same except that in one case it targets a particular individual and in the other it targets a group. In both cases, there can be measurable damage.
I see no reason to treat them differently.
Good Stuff!
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize” - Voltaire
I don’t either, but to be slander the information has to be false and how are we to determine what’s true and false if it’s illegal to talk about it?
I think that you have something completely different in mind.
If speech is “absolute free” or “free without limit” then it must be legal to tell lies. If it is illegal to lie then “holocaust denial” would be illegal.
I don’t think you’re seeing the differentiation between speech and the action that is slander. Yes all speech is free without limit, but not all action is free.
It’s ok to tell lies so long as you do not know they are lies. If you know they are lies and tell them anyway, then you are putting into action a plan to harm someone or something where no retribution is warranted except out of personal vendetta.
For instance if you say brand X dogfood contains euthanasia drugs and your claim is knowingly false, then all you’ve done is hurt society by damaging the reputation of a legitimate dogfood manufacturer that was otherwise performing a valuable service. But if your claim is true, then you’ve performed a valuable service to the community. Both are actions, but one is good and the other is bad just like helping old ladies across the street is good, but pushing them into oncoming traffic is bad.
But that presumes the holocaust is true and how are we to determine that if discussion of it is illegal? The only possible answer is “Because they said it’s true and I believe them.” Well, that’s appeal to authority. How can you take anyone’s word for anything without verifying the reasoning yourself?
Open inspection is the only mechanism we have to establish truth. The moment something is illegal to discuss, it becomes impossible to establish it’s truthfulness.
A distinction which seems artificial. In one case, you call speech simply speech and in another you call speech action.
Then you are not advocating free speech, you are advocating speech restricted to what a speaker “honestly believes to be true”.
Right away that seems to produce a practical problem : A neo-nazi is speaking on a soapbox denying the holocaust. How do you know if he honestly believes that the holocaust didn’t happen or if he is outright lying? You are basically required to let him talk. If you take him to court then you have to prove that he knew that he was lying. That’s probably difficult and probably also a waste of time and money.
Therefore, people will be able to lie and get away with it.
If you had a law which made holocaust denial illegal, then you would be able to stop him. The assumption is that the evidence is so overwhelming that no rational person could honestly believe that it did not happen so if he is saying it, then he is intentionally lying.
That’s not the issue. They gathered the evidence, found it to be true and then made denial illegal.
And even after it was made illegal, people still have access to the evidence and they can confirm the truth of the matter.
It’s possible to enact laws which make the discussion itself illegal and then it wouldn’t be possible to determine the truth. That’s a question of which laws ought to be enacted.
No it’s not impossible. But there are areas of research which are off-limits in universities. That’s a separate issue because it goes beyond speech.
One of the ironic things about free speech is that it can be used to silence people more effectively than laws restricting free speech.
For example, there is no law in the US or Canada which makes discussion of men’s rights illegal. Yet, when people try to speak about men’s rights, the politically correct mobs come out to shout it down and denounce the speakers with all sorts of misinformation, lies and innuendos. And it’s effective.
It’s not artificial. Most everything I say is an opinion or published fact and there is no action associated with it because all I’m doing is engaging in conversation or I’m on a soapbox broadcasting speech, but if I say you bake babies in the basement, now I’ve done something since I’m not just speaking, but trying to physically hurt you by causing real-world damage to your reputation. Or if I follow you around hounding you with words, that’s action. I can’t scream in your ear and claim free speech.
If someone says something they honestly believe is false, it is more than just speech. The speech part of it is fine, but the action part of it is not.
If I say you bake babies, you suffer damages. If I say dogfood X has drugs, they suffer damages. If a nazi denies the holocaust, who suffers damages? Can the holocaust sue the nazi? The only ones who can suffer are the ones capitalizing off of it. Furthermore, denying the holocaust is just an opinion. To really be slander the nazi would have to falsify evidence against someone. Like, for instance, the claim that the chimney at Auschwitz was constructed by the Russians specifically for propaganda purposes. That seems like slander, if it’s false. If it’s not false, then perhaps the slander IS the chimney since the construction of it could have been “action” against the nazis to help demonize them.
Why would you want to stop him? Why not make moonlanding-denial illegal too? Or round-earth-denial?
Yeah that’s the assumption. Some people say the fine-tuning evidence is so overwhelming that no rational person could believe that god doesn’t exist and for a long time it was illegal to question god’s existence. Cholesterol, sat fat, carbon dioxide, the evidence is all so overwhelming that we may as well assume it’s true.
Who are they? How can they find anything to be true? Who made them an authority on truth? Free inspection is the only thing that can establish truth; not dictations by a supposed authority.
What if someone looks at the evidence and discovers a bunch of holes?
Well if the inevitable conclusion of the discussion denies the holocaust, then it instantly becomes illegal.
If I say something here and no one challenges it, then someone else can conclude that, within a free market of ideas, no one has found fault in what I said so far and therefore what I said might be true. It’s the openness to inspection that bestows the property of truth to statements made.
What about men’s rights? Where is that happening? Surely not here 
I would call that a design of democratic marxist leaning neo liberalism more than anything and certainly not a glitch. That’s not by accident.
Or anywhere outside of Muslim countries for that matter…
I’m seeing that happening in Poland’s case. Maybe Poland is being too sensitive about the issue. I personally do not see the world as having portrayed Poles as Nazi-supporters, as a whole; nobody was thinking ‘Poland camps’ as a creation of Poles. I think most people understand that it was occupied territory, with people forming multiple allegiances. Nobody is innocent in this story, and there was plenty of blame to go around. I understand it’s trying to protect its image, but I think Poland just shot itself in the foot with this law.
google.com/amp/s/www.washin … petrators/
The real cause also of Germany invading Poland was due to Poland acquiring lands or territories that were originally German prior. Also, let us not forget the killings and murders of ethnic Germans before its invasion that the Polish government completely ignored. I don’t care what nation you are nobody would tolerate a bordering neighbor like that.
I think there’s some imprecision in the way words like “censor” and “illegal” are being used here. What does it mean for speech to be “illegal”? To take Phyllo’s example of slander, in the US it isn’t illegal, to my knowledge, to slander someone, and it could not be. Rather, when you commit slander, you may be liable for the harm that your slander does. But you won’t be arrested or otherwise criminally punished. I may be using too technical a definition of “illegal”, but I don’t see a system that hold people accountable for the harm they do to others to be making those harms “illegal”, and it seem that it makes a theoretical difference.
So too with the men’s rights example. I wouldn’t call it “censorship”, even if its effects are censorship-like. Censorship is the state-run removal of certain ideas or expressions from the public sphere. The moral and political implications of that are very different from a situation where the expression of an idea draws even significant amounts of hate or derision. Even if that response tends to drown out the speech that provoked it, that still seems like someone suffering the social repercussions of their speech, rather than facing criminal liability and state-sanctioned silencing.
And yet moreso the implication that suggesting that an off-topic conversation should be held elsewhere is “censorship”. Indeed, such a request must presume that the off-topic conversation is permitted. It may be wrong for other reasons (for example, contravening UrGod’s claim of despotic ownership of any thread he creates), but it isn’t censorship and doesn’t entail censorship’s moral implications.
Returning to my devil’s advocacy:
The fact that speech restrictions are often a bad idea, and will often have the opposite of the intended effect, does not entail that all such restrictions are wrong. Prohibitions on Holocaust denial did not have the kind of effects that Pandora notes in Poland, most likely because, where Poland sought to prohibit the proliferation of certain truths, Germany sought to face up and own to similar truths in order to recover from them.
The problem with any modern nation now is that all communication platforms are either owned by the government or through corporations with ties to it. If all of them have a united ideological agenda in which case they do censorship whether passive or not is something that isn’t hard to imagine.
Also, freedom to assembly or protest isn’t what it used to be where if there is a gathering the controllers of government doesn’t like it is disbanded rather quickly. We seen this with the Occupy Wallstreet protests most recently.