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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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But this is the same with the justice system then : you give people power to put others in prisons, but then it will be misused. It has been. Why is that that we should have total freedom of speech but not close the prisons? Censorship, like prisons, can be controlled by laws that define precisely when it is possible to censor and when it is not. After all, there are cases where we allow censorship (saying falsely that there is a bomb in an airport, death threats,...)

You're right that prisons (and the justice system more broadly) are prone to abuse. The big difference here is: we need a form of justice to have a society. We don't need a form of speech censorship to have a society.

There have been societies without prisons. The native americans had no prisons, up to my knowledge. I think there have been more societies without prisons than without censorship in the history of humanity. Even in the US there has often be some kind of censorship enforced by the society itself (not by the state).

Note that I didn't say "we need prisons". I said "we need a form of justice". No matter what the form is, it can be abused, and that is a shame. But it is not optional. Censorship on the other hand, is not only optional, it is actively bad. The two things are in very different leagues here.

I'm not convinced it's always bad. Eg there are countries were holocaust denial is a criminal offense. I'm not sure it's completely bad. Sure, it has downsides, but it avoids the propagation of those theories that are false and dangerous. I'd like to think that truth will always prevail but it seems obvious that truth does not always prevail on time.

I think we just have an irreconcilable difference of values. Because when you say "it's not that bad, some countries make it illegal to deny the Holocaust", my take is that it's a great example of why censorship is bad. Banning Holocaust denial accomplishes nothing, and is some legit tyrannical stuff imo. I don't suspect you agree of course, which is why I think we have an impasse where we simply do not agree on core values.

When you say it achieves nothing, it is not a subjective statement. It si objective: either it changes something, or it doesn't. As a matter of fact it makes it more difficult to propagate such thesis so it achieves something. You might think it isn't worth it but that is a subjective claim. Anyway defamation is forbidden in most countries and holocaust denial is a defamation against victims and witnesses.

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