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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29271 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Huge news from South America today.

A single judge in Brazil has not only blocked X in the country, but is requiring Apple and Google to remove VPNs from their phones, and is imposing a $9,000 daily fine (basically a year's salary) for anyone in the country caught using a VPN.

Elon Musk attracted the ire of this particular judge, Alexandre de Moraes, when he posted about the judge's previous autocratic attempts to silence free speech and to jail opponents of the current regime led by Lula da Silva. The legal system is very strange in Brazil, and apparently Supreme Court judges have huge unilateral powers to try cases and enforce laws as they see fit. This particular judge has done so thousands of times.

Now X is banned.

With dissent being silenced, and a corrupt socialist in charge, it seems that yet another Latin American country is set on the path to tyranny.

Banning Twitter and then banning VPNs to keep people from getting to Twitter anyway seems to me almost like banning a publication and then, to impede people from still reading it, banning eyeglasses.

A fine of 9000$ is quite something. A sufficiently determined tyrant will force ISPs to report connections to known VPN services. Can an ISP identify VPN endpoints by the nature of the traffic (not easily, I think)? What safer alternatives are there to the simple 'select VPN service, pay, connect'?

As far as I understand he didn’t ban VPNs, only VPNs used to access Twitter. That makes enforcement much harder.

That all your traffic is to a single endpoint is a pretty big clue that you’re routing it through a VPN. For popular services the IPs are also necessarily public since the clients need that information in order to establish the connection. So, identify all the single endpoint clients, then compare against a list of known VPN IPs, and you’ve caught a lot of violaters.

Though if you’re using something like AWS to provide your VPN service I suppose it would be trivial to add a feature that allocates a new IP just for you, just for the length of your session. Heck, you could have it switched it out every few minutes to confuse the government’s tracking effort. Or establish a dozen VPN tunnels and round robin packets through them.

Plenty of companies use VPN logins as security for remote connections though -- I don't think you can just ban this kind of traffic without a lot of collateral damage.

Back in the long-ago of the 2007-2009 era, various electronic freedom groups established and encouraged a wide variety of individual users to establish limited VPNs and forwarding services, as a parallel-but-less-fraught alternative to the then-new Tor network. I'm... not so optimistic we'll see a recurrence of that.

You could enforce a VPN licensing regime where only licensed companies are approved to run/access VPNs.

There's always Tor, or the dVPNs. But a sufficiently aggressive State can slowly figure out a list of badwrong IPs. To say nothing of more sophisticated techniques.

Ironically the one thing that defeats this is Starlink, since it's essentially impossible to jam and never interacts with local infrastructure. They can't take the sky from you.

The drawback is that the physical terminals are large and can be made illegal.

This is really no different from the numerous bans on satellite television by all sorts of tinpot dictators in the past. And even under such bans, dishes were super common because football.

The one practical way you can attack this is not technical but political, with states colluding to shut down Musk for undermining them. But this is a hard sell to the US because Starlink is critical military infrastructure.

Every time I've tried Tor, it was extremely slow to the point of being unusable.

Same. I would only ever use Tor to e.g. read The Great Replacement while I was in New Zealand, where I could leave it loading while I grabbed a sandwich. It's completely non-viable for something like Twitter or 4chan.

His management was controversial: he was accused of covering up police violence. One out of every four homicides in the city of São Paulo was committed by the police. In addition, Alexandre de Moraes sent armoured vehicles to suppress left-wing demonstrations.

Alexandre de Moraes assumed office on 22 March 2017. As minister, he claims to defend a policy of "zero tolerance". He denounced the alleged "criminal attitudes" of leftist movements and justified police violence.

Interesting guy, I respect a man who goes full auth just because. In general I’ve always disliked freedom of speech. At best it’s a useful tool for dissidents and political opposition to the current prevailing ideology, given I dislike much of that ideology. But that’s not really a principle, that’s merely strategic. If my ideology was in power, I would have no qualms with suppressing the free speech of my political opponents. If the right finally did score a major victory in a large western country (I count not merely winning an election but deep root-and-branch institutional reform) it would likely be necessary to suppress leftist speech to avoid returning to the same desperate original predicament.

In general I’ve always disliked freedom of speech. At best it’s a useful tool for dissidents and political opposition to the current prevailing ideology, given I dislike much of that ideology.

At best it's a useful tool for dissidents? Come on, this is an extremely weak take.

The best version of free speech is that the best ideas, and people, can float to the top. Even if you believe in the orthodoxy, if the reigning elite are smart and not tyrants they can use free speech to suss out their own weaknesses, and address them proactively.

Free speech allows for information to flow from the bottom to the top of a hierarchy in a quick and healthy way, letting society pivot and be nimble.

On top of this, it lets people in a society feel they are being heard, and have something to do besides just be ruled over with an iron fist. This means they're more productive, more fulfilled, and can help with social cohesion if people are able to coordinate over the identity of being a citizen.

I'm now curious about what @coffee_enjoyer would say about this as well?

The best case for freedom of speech is that “ideas / types of social organizations float to the top”, but the worst case is that large swathes of the population get manipulated by bad values and lifestyles. We need some way to ensure that only the class of people for whom freedom of speech is genuinely useful are able to practice it. Some ways to do this: (1) restrict freedom of speech to men between the ages of 23-35 who have passed a feasible course on logic, psychology, and sociology either in a written or verbal test; (2) a social practice of electing benevolent censors who filter information for the rest of population, who have passed a more arduous course and are also selected by personality and honesty; (3) require new ideas to be judged in a dispassionate way first, written and read like a PhD thesis; (4) never throw out ideas deemed bad, but sort them and archive them away, so that they can be accessed by reasonable people but not unreasonable people.

If you have a social organization (whether political or communal) which manages to elect “censors” who are genuinely honest, intelligent, and wise, who are humble enough to elect people even greater than themselves, then you have an eternal upwards spiral of prosociality. That can be applied to people, ideas, media, everything. It is the number one most important social technology and is a requirement for human advancement.

So, as examples

(1) astrology would never enter the minds of young people, because they would never read it and be mislead by it — it has literally mislead millions of people who waste time on it, and millions more for centuries in the past.

(2) no song about drugs would ever enter ears of the youth.

(3) loot boxes and gambling would be banned forever.

(4) non-prosocial video games would be relegated to the infirm.

I support free speech not because all speech is good (much of it is bad or even harmful), but because there is no ubermensch that I trust to decide which ideas I'm allowed to hear.

It's worse than oligarchy, isn't it? "You're not smart enough to vote" is both more honest and less insulting than "your vote is super important, let me just make sure you don't do it wrong..."

it would likely be necessary to suppress leftist speech to avoid returning to the same desperate original predicament

Why? What threat would they conceivably pose?

It literally worked once, clearly the meme is persuasive, why wouldn’t it work again?

Are you referring to the October Revolution?

I’m talking about the entire history of enlightenment liberal ideas spreading throughout the educated classes.

So you think the reason that happened was due to freedom of speech in itself? I find that a rather simplistic view.

Say rather that free speech is a necessary precondition. The hippies and revolutionaries of the 60s, and before them the socialists and the communists of the 20s, demanded free speech to spread their memes. Then, being less foolish than the conservatives they supplanted, they started shutting it down to prevent right wingers from formenting discontent in the same way.

Necessary but not sufficient. Multiple other social and cultural conditions are necessary as well. Also, my impression is that such leftist attempts at suppression stem from their enemies' observed ability to rally large masses of average people on their side. It's not generally something they're capable of themselves, so attempting to constrain them when the shoe is on the other foot seems unnecessary.

I'm a brazilian in his 20's. Here's my long-winded commentary on this:

If studying Latin America can help on anything, it's to highlight the pitfalls of "democracy" and everything that was assumed to be universally true by The Enlightenment and still taken as self-evident by some of us today.

Brazil is a straight-up failed state. Despite being blessed with good weather, natural resources, lack of natural disasters due to its position among the tectonic plates, lots of land, large population and since 1985 a "democracy" (that is now dying), it consistently manages to fail in becoming relevant. This deeply troubles many brazilians, including me as a young kid, because as reflected in the joke "Brazil is the country of the future and it'll always be", we look at ourselves and forever wonder "Why aren't we a first-world country?"

There's many crappy usual explanations for why we failed: Colonialization Past, American Imperialism, "Corrupt culture" inherited from the portuguese, Systemic Racism, etc. However the more you look into it, the more you realize that none of those are the real reason. If there was a point where you can point to in Brazil's history and say "only downhill from here", it's the "Proclamation of The Brazilian Republic".

I'm not a monarchist, I believe that in the right conditions democracy (ideally a more decentralized system of government) wins over more centralized systems like monarchies or dictatorships by avoiding the issue that "Philosopher Kings" are impractical, rare and mortal. However it probably really starts there, with the army, the oligarchic farmers and the intelligentsia all supporting getting rid of the Emperor (which had some moderating power although in a constitutional monarchy), the Emperor in turn does something rather uncommon in history (due to many reasons but mostly being tired of "The Paraguayan War" and lacking greed for power) and instantly surrenders the throne even though he had not only the popular support but also the support of the navy.

It's extra funny to me that this moment is still praised today given not only the current state of the country, but also the countless coups that occurred after that, the fact that this was just after and in OPPOSITION to Princess Isabel signing a law abolishing slavery, and better of all that Deodoro da Fonseca (the man who declared The Republic), which by his letters just before the "revolution" normally supported the monarchy, acted in such a way out of jealousy due to rumors that the Emperor had promoted his romantic rival instead of him. That absolute clown-show is taught to us as something we should praise, because it's "democracy" and democracy is inherently good regardless of any result that it brings, including the country becoming significantly worse.

Fast-forward to today and we can see a continuation of the shitshow that this country has been since it stopped being a monarchy, casually switching through history between failed republic and tyranny, with the help of science and history we also have a much better answer for why we fail to become a better country.

"Free Speech" is used by socialists and all kinds of demagogues to fool a 83 IQ poor population that they'll "solve all issues" as long as you give them power, elections select for the opposite it's supposed to select for and the consistent winners are often the most psychopathic greedy liars you can imagine (which eventually result in Venezuela, at least kings were a glorious coinflip), and due to the gap in IQ between people of different ancestries, inequality raises and creates extra social tension/division which fuels political polarization and justification of authoritarian behavior like what Alexandre de Moraes does. It also doesn't help that women as a group consistently vote for whoever tell them nice things (even if by lying) and are the biggest supporters of censoring what they consider "mean people". Brazil is ethnically, politically and economically divided through a spectrum of "North to South", which "coincides" with places where there was recent euro mass immigration and places where there wasn't as many. The Northern regions of course massively supports the people behind all the censorship and it was a key source of votes to them winning the elections through the years (and packing the Supreme Court in the same strategy that Venezuela used and the Democrats want to use in USA too). Countless brazilians right now, in the X platform itself, are celebrating this "Great Nationalistic and Socialist Act" by Alexandre de Moraes striking down an "Evil Right-wing White Billionaire". I don't like Bolsonaro but the whole "he's about to start a coup" was of course, as almost anything in mainstream media, a strawman. I think Bolsonaro actually sort of did want to start a military coup but he and most behind the scenes knew it was impossible because he had little institutional power, the unique side that could realistically start a coup (and ARE STARTING IT) were the socialists that have almost every institution packed with their own tribe by this point.

Therefore, as Padme from Star Wars once correctly said: "So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause."

Tyranny is eventually welcome with open arms by democracy, or at least the current way we "practice" democracy. Do not assume the people aren't complicit with this until it starts to REALLY hurt them, many Venezuelans that came as refuges to Brazil still believe Hugo Chavez was "good for the country", they're often just "confused and indignant" of how things eventually went wrong with Maduro and so on.

I used to despair that not only we're losing democracy, but The West in general is also trending in a similar way although slower. The entire western hemisphere seems to be becoming like Brazil, bit by bit, all sort of places that I used to admire in North America and Europe gradually resembles me of my own country. There's soon gonna be no champion of Free Speech, Small Government and so on in the global stage.

Totalitarianism, A.I Automation, Populational Collapse and Genetic Engineering. What a great combination of incoming catastrophes, I truly think we're entering a new global "dark age". Some still try to clumsily "go back", "restore tradition" and so on, but I ask of you, can we stop this foolish nonsense?

Voting for those that "want to go back" may be a good stopgap, the practical way of delaying the incoming stuff, but those "traditions", "ideals" and so on, they've ultimately got us here. I believe it's a natural progression. The slave morality of Christianity (which modern christians need to creatively reinterpret as to not fall in contradiction given Jesus didn't seem to like rich/successful people just like their average political enemy doesn't), the "Free Speech" that was used by all kinds of destructive people to subvert an entire hemisphere by this point and prepare it for complete Tyranny (because we found out that the average population has little resistance to mass propaganda and aren't as much agents of reason as they're agents of faith), the focus on "empathy"/"morality" as opposed in raw intelligence/IQ (which seems to be the most consistent metric by which societies seem to become "better"/"civilized" from economy, politics to general social cohesion and game theory cooperation).

I believe we're invited to what I consider the "True End of Enlightenment" and the epitome of the consequences of the French Revolution. I believe we're invited to accept the tragic incoming consequences of the nice-sounding beliefs that began to be preached by then, and tear it all down as we contemplate what went wrong.

I believe we need a new system of values, a new political ideology, and a new set of mythos (historical or fictional) to base ourselves in.

It's the Death of God AND Enlightenment. We've killed both, or perhaps we just found out both of their tombs empty when we inched closer to see their full glory. Perhaps we were just delusional to believe in them in the first place.

False promises of "the way" to paradise.

I used to despair that not only we're losing democracy, but The West in general is also trending in a similar way although slower. The entire western hemisphere seems to be becoming like Brazil, bit by bit, all sort of places that I used to admire in North America and Europe gradually resembles me of my own country. There's soon gonna be no champion of Free Speech, Small Government and so on in the global stage.

This reminded me an old article from Foreign Affairs called The Brazilianization of the World. It is a little bit more lefty critique for my taste, but some passages are eerie:

In political terms, Brazilianization means patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption. Rather than see these as aberrations, we should understand them as the normal state of politics when widely shared economic progress is not available, and the socialist Left can­not act as a countervailing force. It was the industrial proletariat and socialist politics that kept liberalism honest, and prevented elites from instrumentalizing the state for their own interests.

The “revolt of the elites”—their escape from society, physically into heavily guarded private spaces, economically into the realm of global finance, politically into anti-democratic arrangements that out­source responsibility and inhibit accountability—has created hol­lowed-out neoliberal states. These are polities closed to popular pres­sures but open to those with the resources and networks to directly influence politics. The practical consequence is not just corruption, but also states lacking the capacity to undertake any long-range developmental policies—even basic ones that might advance economic growth, such as the easing of regional inequalities. State failure in the pandemic is only the most flagrant recent example.

Brazil’s ignoble history of irresolution and indeterminacy, cou­pled with a dualized society in which hustling is essential to survival, gave birth to Brazilian cynicism. Increasingly, the West is coming to ape this same pattern. Not only does there seem to be no way past capitalist stagnation, but politics is characterized by a void between people and politics, citizens and the state. The ruling class’s relation to the masses is one of condescension. Elites call anyone who revolts against the contemporary order racist, sexist, or some other delegitimizing term. They also advance outlandish conspiracy theories for why electorates have failed to vote for their favored candidate—most visibly with “Russiagate” in the United States and beyond. This phenomenon, dubbed Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome, only breeds further cynicism in Western publics, who are increasingly taken with conspiracy theories of their own. This is another Brazilian speciality: in a country with very low levels of institutional trust and plentiful examples of actual conspiracies, conspiracy theories flourish.

Revolts against the establishment, when they aren’t driven by QAnon-style derangement, wield the weapon of anti-politics, where­by not only formal politics, but representation and political authority itself are rejected. Anti-politics tends to result in either a delegitimation of democracy itself, leading to authoritarian rule, or it prompts technocrats to learn from populists, returning to the scene promising an end to corruption and real change. The result is the same sort of distant, out-of-touch politics that prompted anti-political revolts in the first place. Brazil’s history from 2013 to 2019 is this dynamic presented in pure, crystallized form. But the same pattern is visible in Italy’s Five-Star Movement, the anti-corruption protests that led to Viktor Orbán’s ascent in Hungary, Trump, and Boris Johnson’s technopopulist attempt to defuse Brexit.

I am from Eastern Europe and I was born into socialist country and lived my childhood through the tail end of communist regime and then the newborn democracy. I disagree with the author that this is the result of some neoliberal capitalist plot, this pervasive feeling of frustration, political apathy and resulting cynicism was defining feature of late-stage communist regimes as well. I'd say it is the feature of out-of-touch bureaucratic regimes, all too quick to use force to save their pretend legitimacy. Everybody shouts the slogans and lies and everybody knows that everybody knows it's all a farce. Actually it is even worse than that, if somebody has some ideals or expects some decent behavior, he is laughed at - especially if something wrong happens to him. It is certain level of schadenfreude - you stupid naive moron, you thought you could have some hope? You got what you deserve for not being as cynical as me.

Corruption is no longer viewed as something wrong, it is basically the normal way to live. Everybody knows that some professions are underpaid, that some palms have to be greased so it is absolutely normal that your doctor asks for a bribe, if only because he also has to bribe somebody else in order to keep his license. "Patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption" is the oil that lubricates the whole machine, everybody understands and accepts it. Everything is so bleak, people find solace in their private spaces - their huts where they can escape for a brief time and forget the drudgery and hopelessness of their situation with elephant doses of alcohol. Yeah, it is quite depressing and I always get this feeling if I watch some local movies from 70ies and 80ies. You can almost feel it through the screen.

Have you considered that the problem is simply low human capital and an elite culture that developed around exploiting the low human capital through low margin extraction?

Brazil’s average IQ isn’t that low.

"Free Speech" is used by socialists and all kinds of demagogues to fool a 83 IQ poor population that they'll "solve all issues" as long as you give them power

Yeah, I'd say he's considered that.

blessed with good weather, natural resources

That's a bit of a stretch.

How so? Most of Brazil has magnificent weather.

But is is the sort of weather that is conducive to being a developed country? Meaning a weather not characterized by extremes?

Brazil was the 4th largest agricultural producer (in dollar terms) in 2020, so the weather is good enough for that at least.

I don't understand, how is it a stretch? It seems Brazil is in the top 10 countries with most natural resources given the amount of land it has, and tropical weather is good for agriculture even if hard to live/maintain roads/etc. Maybe I'm missing something but yeah? Please explain?

Isn't a significant part of the country a) practically impassable rainforest unfit for agricultural use b) similarly impassable arid grassland and scrub, which is also of little use?

True, a substantial portion of the country isn't normally suitable for agriculture but land still has plenty of theoretical value as we go into a future where resources/energy rather than intelligence will be the economic limiter. There's plenty of sun shining in those arid places which you can use to gather solar energy like China is trying to, and although I'm not very knowledgeable in this subject, it seems we cultivate even in not-optimal land through chemical fertilizers and GM crops, not to mention cattle raising or mining. It's not as good as some other countries but vast land is rarely a bad thing to have, I'm always surprised to learn how much fighting there is/was for small pieces of land in other continents. American countries in general (including USA) probably would never be as big as they're if they had a long history of civilizations fighting each other like Europe/Asia.

Brazil's the size of the continental US and Mexico combined. Consider the "impassable" areas like uninhabited Alaska.

Except our version of the Amazon - the Mississippi basin - has incredible natural soil quality while as I understand it the actual Amazon does not.

In general, the problem in Latin America is that high inequality means the rich are typically comfortable enough not to mount decisive action against the left (which comes with nasty stuff like risking their wealth, their lives, their retirement in Miami etc), so there’s no real opposition other than some atrophied principled conservatives and some crazy weirdos, especially once the left cements its power structure in the military.

Rich American rightists fight more and harder (even if not enough) because there’s nowhere more suited to their politics on earth, certainly in the rich world.

My wife is from Latin America but also has a Spanish passport, and we’ve debated on and off again about moving to Spain with our family if things truly got out of hand in the USA.

I take her point into consideration but my response always boils down to “If the USA turns to shit, there’s nowhere really to retreat to.”

My children are American. Hopefully my children’s children will be American, and their children, and so on and so forth.

Although battles may be fought elsewhere, the war for the future is here, and nowhere else.

What would even be the point of running?

Yeah, sometimes I daydream about a nonsensical timeline where we gave more power to the Imperial Family rather than take it away from them at all. A completely unrealistic timeline where the Emperor lead us into a civil war and stops the formation of a republic, perhaps even going back to absolutism.

Our last Emperor was a good man but the problem with "good men" is that they cannot be "great men" at the same time given accomplishing "great" things often involve at least some amount of sacrifice, pain and suffering. He said something along the lines of "Not wanting to spill more brazilian blood to keep the throne", but I wonder if he would change his mind knowing the circumstances of today.

I like "freedom of speech" because I enjoy being able to publicly debate certain ideas like the above in an attempt to understand and improve things, but if it wasn't for that I would probably prefer to live in China than most countries in The West at this point (to my younger self surprise), this late-stage of democracy turning into tyranny feels like living in asylum where everyone is demented by propaganda and you are supposed to pretend everything is normal or else be labeled "anti-whatever". Everything turns political.

My problem with the recent turn of events is that given democracy select for the most psychopathic narcissistic liars out there, when they get absolute power they generally don't really have a mindset of trying to build-up a nation, or perhaps it's often this way in Latin America because as a bunch of failed countries of immigrants there isn't a deep sense of patriotism like the Chinese seem to have. America seem to have gained patriotism through their collective great actions in the last centuries which Latin America obviously doesn't share.

If Lula, Alexandre and so on gave me any hope that we would be more like China and less like Venezuela, I wouldn't lose sleep over it, perhaps even welcome it because then a bunch of corrupt-but-technical-enough people would be in power and we could all stop pretending that the opinions of an uneducated 83 IQ population can do a better job, but they seem fully committed to become Venezuela rather than China and...it's just tiresome.

Perhaps China is just really bruteforcing everything because of higher IQ but I do wonder whether there's more factors than nationalism and IQ for this sort of "Totalitarian Technocracy" they seem to have, rather than the "We hate our people and want them to starve" Venezuelan/Soviet model. Any potential insights on that would be welcome.

Couldn't Apple and Google easily refuse? It would be hard for him to ban Google and Apple from the country and the people wouldn't stand for it. There would basically be no smart phones for people to buy.

They already remove apps from their stores in certain countries, why would they not in this case?

If one does it and the other doesn't, then the one who doesn't will lose an enormous amount of market share. But if the demand is sufficiently unreasonable, it's easier to count on the other party not doing it. It's a coordination problem solved by the ridiculousness of the demand.

They could. But the people who run those companies are cowards and non-factors so they won't.

Many people will be opposed to this move on Brazil's part, but for the wrong reasons, chief among which is national pride. As a free speech absolutist, I'm opposed to this move because I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted. This includes not just "wholesome" speech, but:

  • true threats, including to the head of state/government of one's country
  • deliberate defamations
  • shouting fire in a crowed theatre - even if this leads to a stampede, even if the stampede causes a mass casualty event
  • bullying speech, including telling someone to commit suicide — even if this leads to their suicide — even if they are minors
  • advocacy for the violent overthrow of government
  • advocacy for preemptive nuclear strikes against any entity whatsoever
  • and so on, provided it's just a speech, and not an act (speech act counts as speech for my purposes).

The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation. There is no such thing as non-physical pain, the kind people talk about when they talk about e.g. losing someone they love. That talk of 'pain' is merely a figure of speech. ". To which the reply may be: "but phantom limb pain is non-physical". To which the reply is: "no it's physical in my sense. For pain to be physical it's not necessary that it's triggered by a physical stimulus. It suffices that it's experienced as physical, i.e. it has the distinctive qualia associated with pain and is locatable in some specific part of the body or a generic region of the body. And phantom limb pain meets those conditions."

You can oppose this also from pro freedom of speech grounds without being a freedom of speech absolutist.

Personally I find the issue incoherent but I find coherent to have a situation with more vs less freedom of speech but you do need to suppress some organized pollitical comisar factions. For example, eastern european countries post communism that blacklisted communists, are freer countries than western countries today, or their own communist past.

How do you protect freedom of speech absolutism if you allow people whose idea is to suppress all who go against the globohomo "our democracy" faction.

Or take the Jewish supremacist authoritarian faction. These people use their powerful companies and organisations, and donations and plausible epstein type blackmail rings to get their way. Plus, civil rights law and the idea of antisemitism. Should the ADL and Disney have the freedom to coordinate to oppose freedom? What about the influence of people speaking advocating for censoring ideas that offend the "Jews, blacks, women" are wonderful effect? Is AIPAC donation efforts something that should be suppressed? What about journalists citing the ADL to character assassinate people? Now, obviously they utilize censorship constantly, and freedom of speech absolutism is something they oppose. But also they are a faction which there is a legitimate both pro freedom and pro the rights of the groups they have it out against, and pro truth interest in suppressing.

How do you have freedom by not taking away the freedom of political comisars? How do you avoid not losing against more ruthless factions that don't care for a universal freedom of speech and want to censor your group, and allow maximum freedom for theirs?

And is freedom of speech absolutism extending to the kind of people you select to run the pro freedom of speech institutions?

Or is their desire to act otherwise subject to restriction there, and institutions should be run by people willing to abide by certain rules and following a certain perspective? And absolutism would then be for the platforms? That would make more sense. But you do have restrictions based on ideology somewhere, even if not on the platform. Or take judges, to have freedom of speech absolutism you would need judges with your preferences to be selected and judges against freedom of speech (who might express such views) be restricted.

Another issue that ought to be considered is people abandoning their legitimate interests and supporting immoral and unreasonable and even lies, or not making legitimate negative critiques due to fear of coordinated slander and reputation destruction. That is being defamed. People being afraid to speak, that is to say. To be fair, "cancel culture" can include the claim of free de-association in an one sided manner. Although there is also a part of it that is about pressure and fear of losing ones job. I am not sure freedom of speech absolutism works and you have a better system, of people not being afraid if people are restrained from defaming others over nonsense. Although I am a freedom of speech absolutist when it comes to people who are telling a plausibly necessary truth and are whistleblowing.

I am for maximum freedom for people like Gareth Jones and prefer that people like Walter Duranty were fired for spreading lies. And in his time, Gareth Jones was outnumbered because he was attacked by the communists, and friendly travelers in the American establishment while the apologist for the Soviet genocides Walter Duranty won a pulitzer. People at the time lacked the nerve to share Gareth Jones truthtelling in the face of such tactics.

The problem of people who are cowardly in the face of other people using their freedom of speech to label them, as a means of shutting them up, is not something I have seen adequately addressed, by people talking about freedom of speech absolutism. Although, perhaps with less consequences for those whose speech goes against such organized groups, there might be more courage. In general, I think we need a more sophisticated model than freedom of speech absolutism that distinguishes between courageous truth telling and attempts to suppress the truth. While I acknowledge outright censorship is a key part of this, but an important component is drowning good speech, with delegitimizing it on frivolous grounds, lies, fallacies, denials, misdirections and character assassinations. Plus, using their freedom to organize and advocate for cancel culture, and directly threaten people to go along with it, or else.

The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation.

Okay, but do you believe the opposite of this is true as well?

"Bricks and stones may make our homes, but words will never help me."

Usually, people justify free speech not just on the fact that speech doesn't do harm, but because free speech produces some tangible good in the world through the sharing of information.

But if you don't believe words can cause pain, do you also believe that words cannot produce the opposite of pain - pleasure?

Because if words can't affect bodily pain or pleasure for better or worse in your view, wouldn't it be the same whether the government banned speech or allowed it?

But if words can cause pleasure/produce benefits, then how can you maintain that they cannot ever produce harms?

Where do you fall on fraud?

And do you consider copyright violation or trademark infringement to be a form of "mere speech", or does it count as something else?

So, suppose you're in the Ukrainian military, and one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians (or you can switch the nationalities if you want, doesn't really matter, whichever side you have more sympathy for). It's clear that what he's engaging in is "mere" speech - he's not causing any physical harm himself, he's merely communicating words and numerical coordinates to others. Should he face any consequences whatsoever for his actions? Would you say "well shucks, it's plain that what he's doing is materially hurting the war effort and is directly causing the deaths of our fellow soldiers, but because it is just speech, we can't legally do anything"?

Are you even permitted to fire him from his post in the military? If you are, that already seems like a step down from "absolutism" to me - it may not be jail time, but it's still a consequence of some sort.

You raise a good point. It's tricky to come up with a foolproof way of drawing the speech versus act ("words speak louder than actions", "practice what you preach") distinction.

Here's another example. Let's say someone is gifted with a thunderous voice and that when he shouts, he shatters the eardrums of people in a 10 feet radius. Should he be free to shoot in public? Presumably not. But that's because clearly this scenario has more in common with typical cases of physical violence. Here the physical quality of sound (rather than the meaning of sound) is what is playing a decisive causal role. So it's no longer pure speech, but something one might call a "sonic act".

Notice that the fact a shout is not per se meaningful speech is not the decisive consideration here. After all, imagine that our protagonist instead of letting out a meaningless shout, choose instead to recite the Constitution in public at the top of his volume. Then the sounds he make are meaningful, but still even a free speech absolutist shouldn't want to allow that. Why? Because by reciting the constitution he's simultaneously doing two things. The first is exercising his free speech. The second is an act of sonic terrorism. If due to the peculiar constitution of his physiology, these two things cannot be cleanly separated unfortunately (at least when he chooses to speak at the top of his volume), then he should not be allowed to perform the one because he can't help but also perform the other as well.

In your scenario ("one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians") I'm inclined to say even a free speech absolutist shouldn't allow that. But I will need to find a different basis (than "sonic terrorism") on which to exclude that kind of speech from protection. It seems that this is clearly an action and no longer just speech, in the same way that, say, taking money out of someone's pocket is action rather than speech (even though no one is directly hurt in the process intrinsically speaking). But it can be tricky to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions that give the correct verdict in all cases.

From all the possible gotchas, this is probably the weakest. In the military you have duties, and not aiding the enemy is one of them. So you are on the hook. Is it ok to write someone's name in a death note would have been a much more interesting situation.

From all the possible gotchas, this is probably the weakest.

It's not a gotcha. It's an argument.

In the military you have duties, and not aiding the enemy is one of them.

OP said "I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted". If he wants to amend his position to "any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted, except for speech that materially aids the enemy in a time of war", or perhaps "except for any speech that violates your previously agreed upon duties", then he's certainly welcome to do so. But that does, prima facie, appear to be an amendment of the original position.

I don't see contradiction in speech being legal and you being punished for violations of duties contracts etc. Those are orthogonal concepts. You get shot for treason. Since your speech didn't incur other penalties on you on top of the death sentence, you are not being punished for it.

At that point you can limit speech in absolutely any way you see fit. "Well, a citizen of $country is duty bound not to incite hatred. We didn't punish you for your speech on top of your jail sentence for inciting hatred!"

Not quite because the only way to incite hatred it trough speech, but there are many ways to commit treason.. The punishment for robbing a bank silently and robbing a bank shouting give me all your money should be the same

But in this particular example, the treason is entirely through speech. If that counts, so should inciting hatred entirely through speech. I don't really see the relevance that treason can in theory be committed differently.

Interesting. What do you do if a resourseful enemy defames you, suck it up? What do you do if a bunch of people openly conspire to kill you? It appears that you cannot legally defend yourself until they act, which they're free to do at the moment they pick.

If you're physically struck but not hurt, have you been assaulted?

Presumably conspiracy is a crime because planning crimes is also a crime.

I could see the argument that a threat to commit a crime is not a plan. A threat is usually contingent on some condition.

If the threat is to be believed (presumably threats are punished because we think they are credible) then there's no stated plan as long as the condition isn't fulfilled.

I suppose as soon as the victim ignores the threat, then perhaps the threat can be assumed to be a plan.

Presumably conspiracy is a crime because planning crimes is also a crime.

I'd presume so, yes, but they're claiming they're a free speech absolutist and that any speech act is just speech. Planning to inflict pain doesn't inflict pain itself.

Even if speech is not a crime it can be compelling evidence of another crime. If I confess to the cops that I committed a murder, that can put me away for murder ... unless I was actually on video with a dozen witnesses at the time of the murder, in which case my exact same speech would not get me convicted, because the speech itself isn't the murder.

(Though I'd say it should get me convicted of making a false police report, but I assume this is where @reconnaissent and I differ)

(Not OP, but will try and steelman the position as best I can)

Were such norms in place re: speech, defamation would be "priced in", so to speak, i.e., people would have ingrained defenses against believing defamatory remarks to be true, inculcated over a lifetime of experiencing free speech absolutism first-hand.

So, they'd believe nothing?

What is the mechanism by which you can separate defamatory remarks from genuine ones, which you'd likely want to do in order to retain basic communication ability?

A newspaper (for example) which regularly published untrue defamation would be equally-regularly corrected by competing newspapers, eager to siphon savvy newsreaders away from a competitor. Then the defamatory paper's paying subscribers would vote with their wallets and switch to other papers with better records of truth-telling.

Or so the theory goes.

I’m very interested in seeing what this does to Brazil’s freedom house rankings.

Also very interested to hear commentary from Brazilians, both IrL and on the motte.

I think we both know that Freedom House is a leftist political advocacy group that couldn't care less about freedom of speech. They'll probably boost Brazil's ranking since they have a left-wing president now.

How much of a joke is their list? The U.S. is ranked 58th on their list despite arguably being the freest country in the world. South Africa is just behind at rank 69.

That's worse than China's VPN policy. There's no carrier requirement to block VPN apps, and the fine is far lower, apparently starting at 100 yuan, roughly $15. Also I've never heard of anyone actually getting penalized, all the enforcement appears to be focused on mucking about with the packets.

He's going after starlink now too. A trial run of what the Dems would do here I suspect: full court lawfare against one target at a time and any business that associates with them.

Hat tip Tyler Cowen, the Brazilian military has some amount of reliance on Starlink. What are the chances that this is actually stemming from weird, completely internal politics about military interdependence with anything US, with one faction wanting to increase ties and the other faction wanting to decrease them... and this being a simple power play by the latter faction? X itself may not be an actual target, but a means to this end.

That is, one completely plausible scenario is that it's just a crazy authoritarian turn. Another plausible scenario is that factions in the gov't/military are fighting over things like Starlink, and the anti-Starlink faction is losing on that direct, internal fight (e.g., can't get the military to give it up, no matter how much they try to throw around political weight internally). So, the anti-Starlink faction finds an alternate means. The value they get from increasing authoritarianism WRT X, proper, may be a lot, a little, or even slightly negative, so long as they think the value they get from winning the Starlink fight is higher.

Well Silicon Valley wants to run the US, let's see if they can run around corrupt South American judges first.

Balaji's "network" is finally getting into a hot confrontation with nation states. There's going to be a lot to learn from this one.

I'm really interested in how they'll try to shut down VPNs and Starlink practically. It's pretty much impossible to jam so they're going to have to try to prevent smuggling of the terminals or successfully pressure the US to get to Musk and his infrastructure, which I find unlikely.

If they just randomly search people's phones, the fine is so devastating that people might be very afraid of getting caught even if there is a low probability.

Musk seems determined to go full John Galt here so there's a double-digit chance he'll end up in jail, X will be banned in the U.S., and Starlink will be given to "reliable people" to run.

He's not Galt. He's Rearden.

Musk seems determined to go full John Galt

I'd say it's less that Musk is going full John Galt, and more that the western world is devolving into every bit the dystopia Atlas Shrugged depicts, ham fisted and almost comically stupid as it may be.

There is also a small but non zero chance he pulls a Uno reverse card and does just that to the US government. Which in itself is kinda amazing.

I'm sure top men are scouring through out treaty obligations with Brazil as we speak to see if there's something to pin him on.

Oh, sorry if my comment was meant to imply that this incident will land him in jail. Of course it won't.

The way he could end up in jail is lawfare in the U.S.. If they can do it to Trump, they can do it to him. He seems to be pissing off a lot of powerful people.

I see no chance Musk will end up in jail. At the point they would be jailing Musk it would be easier and neater just to liquidate him for a lot of reasons.

For Musk to end up in jail, powerful people need merely to stand back and let overzealous prosecutors do their work. Trump's legal farce in New York proved that.

I mean yeah but all those same powerful people would need to do to kill him is shoot him with a gun.(Not them personally obviously but you get the point) That's 10x easier than the trail playing out and can't be undone or reversed by anyone.

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I think prison is more likely than murder because of the psychology of the perps. These were the kids who told teacher, not kids that started fights. They enjoy watching Authority punish their victims while taking a victory lap about how they made it happen. You can see this from all their published fantasies about Trump and Musk getting raped in prison.

Just having victims quietly murdered doesn't satisfy that sort of sadism. It needs to be public and identifiable as their handywork for them to enjoy it.

The "quietly disappear an inconvenience" crowd are much more professional and not driven by the same kind of narcissistic pathologies. And I suspect musk and thiel have taken steps to be indispensable assets to them: launching spy satellites and whatever spook-contracting Thiel is up to tends to help there.

Just having victims quietly murdered doesn't satisfy that sort of sadism. It needs to be public and identifiable as their handywork for them to enjoy it.

Quietly murdered, sure, but terrorists who'll shoot somebody while posting a 10,000-word manifesto are also a thing and that side of the aisle isn't devoid of them.

Alexandre de Moraes

This guy's Wiki is just too perfect:

De Moraes's presidency of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court and certain actions he took during the 2022 Brazilian general election has made him the target of several false conspiracy theories by former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters.[4] After the 2023 Brazilian Congress attack, de Moraes ordered several judicial actions to maintain Brazil's democratic rule.[5]

He's doing it for democracy.

Not particularly surprising, coming in both the context of the recent French move against Telegram and Musk's ongoing spats with the Biden administration, both of which provide diplomatic cover for Brazil to do something similar.

It's not exactly unique to this either. Brazil has a bit of a... I don't want to say habit, but leverages a trope of using western political rheotorical tropes in the course of its own actions, and/or encouraging others to do the same. The promoted coverage of the post-Bolsonaro crackdown on Bolsonaro has heavy thematic overlap with the European far-right and American Jan 6 partisan rhetoric favorable to the current administrations on either side of the Atlantic.

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