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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Thank you. My entire lifetime, teachers warned me that we must always be on the look out for anyone infringing on free speech or authoritarians censoring us and that they ALWAYS try to start small and then move on to bigger issues.

Then one day I woke up and half of my fellow countrymen were pro-censorship. I am still confused by this.

Then one day I woke up and half of my fellow countrymen were pro-censorship. I am still confused by this.

They were always pro-censorship. Even your teachers were. After all they probably would have stopped you swearing in class, or engaging in blasphemy or calling for violence (depending on location and timing). You just weren't saying the kind of things they wanted to censor.

It's one of the thing I find surprising where people are surprised that majorities of the population support authoritarian things like lockdowns or vaccine mandates or censorship. And think this shows some kind of overnight sea change. This is the the default. Liberalism is a deal in the absence of one side (in whichever scenario) having more power, they agree not to censor pragmatically. Once one side has more power, and you try to say something they dislike then they will favor that censorship.

Standard caveat for the three principled Libertarians in the corner, trying to start seasteading to escape the whole thing. I know you are there.

I'm not sure you get it. I do not think the important part of it is about "making everybody else live according to my principle". Most people do not care that much about what others do. It's more that my freedom to live some kind of life enters in conflict with the freedom of someone else. For example, if someone wants to live without ever hearing "nigger", this person has to enforce a ban on the word. The person might not really care about what people do everywhere where they aren't, they just don't want to hear it. But the only reasonable way to enforce the "don't say nigger to me" rule is to find allies that do not want to hear it either and to ban it almost everywhere.

You may reply that it is not the same kind of freedom, as the freedom to say something is a freedom to act, while the freedom not to hear something is a freedom to a feeling or a non-feeling. But what about rape? The rapist is the actor, the victim is just feeling something. Or what about smoking in restaurants? A rape acts on the body of the unwilling victim, but so does the word "nigger" with the ears, and so does the smoke with the nose. Politics is often about finding practical compromises between opposed freedom.

If free speech is usually preferred to censorship, it is because without it, some truths cannot be said; that the government can start to live in a fantasy world where everything he does is wonderful. Such a government is obviously doomed. So it has been decided wisely that this should not happen. But it means that as long as every truth can still be said, there is no actual danger with censorship. A ban on the word "nigger" is not dangerous, as it does not change your ability to say any truth. I think that a ban that forbids the use of the word "nigger" as a quote of someone else's words is completely stupid, but it is not dangerous as long as there is some other way to speak, as ridiculous as it might be (like "n-word").

Then, there is the usual argument: if we ban "nigger", they will want us to reduce freedom of speech even further : this is the slippery slope fallacy. What about "if they can say nigger, they will soon try to kill black people"? History proves that limiting freedom of speech can lead to general censorship, but it also prove that racial insults can lead to mass murder. Is limited freedom of speech a worse result than a mass murder? Even if you think that a limited freedom of speech would eventually lead to mass murder, you have to agree that it works both ways: mass murder are a very good way to destroy freedom of speech.

Most people do not care that much about what others do.

I reject your premise -- most people care a lot about what others do; it's just that previously they haven't had the power or the social acceptance to enforce their will on the masses. We are at a dangerous juncture.

Its not really a premise. I'm just saying it's an unnecessary hypothesis, you can explain the behavior in another more rational way.

I disagree with your take on why freedom of speech is important. I was taught, and I wholeheartedly believe, that it's important because people are fundamentally untrustworthy. When you give them the power to censor speech, it may well start out as a righteous thing. But ere long that power will be misused (by them or by their successors) to not only censor speech that is genuinely bad, but simply speech that the people in power don't like.

This is inevitable. It will happen when you allow any kind of censorship. The only defense, the only way to prevent it, is to not allow censorship in the first place. Human nature means that even the most benign censorship will ultimately turn ugly, so you have to cut it off before it starts.

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.

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Same thing can be said eg about prisons. So you shouldn't have prisons...

There shouldn't be.

Fines, disfigurement/dismemberment, death. Those should be the only punishments.

Taking decades off someone's life is vastly more cruel than taking a limb, and the dilution of killing someone across 50 years by making them waste in a prison dilutes the resistance you get.

If every life sentence or decades long interment had to be replaced with a public execution or a public cleaving of limbs with the judge in mandatory attendance... there'd be a hell of a lot less of it, and a very good shillings point for public outrage and resistance.

Prison is like all bureaucratic solutions, it exists to dilute responsibility for the decision and to impose the costs of the decision with a minimum of potential for resistance.

But that is the same with death. If you give people the power to kill others, they will certainly abuse it. They can abuse it for censorship reasons, for example: I do not like what you said so I will find a false reason to kill you. How is that any better?

Well, my personal problem with libertarian arguments is precisely that they are absolute and unbounded. I think it is actually a trade-off between freedoms. Most of the time freedom of speech must win but sometimes it is harmless if it does'nt.

I didn't want to go further than "there are practical cases where it is acceptable to use a bit of censorship", so what you say seems ok to me.

"There is no problem in the world so complex it could not be solved quickly and easily if everyone would simply do what I say," as Gore Vidal once put it.

Did you steelman the case for some censorship, though? What your teachers said seems to be a slippery slope fallacy. For exemple, "authauritarians will put people in prisons, and they will start with criminals, so we should have no prison at all".

It needs to be clear that the existence of the "Slippery Slope" fallacy does not mean all Slippery Slope arguments are fallacies. Slippery Slopes do happen and it's a very common tactic, in fact. The fallacy is along the lines of your example but suggesting that censorship, once successful will expand is not a fallacy it's the most likely outcome. It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions. Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?

But it seems to me that in countries that implement a strong censorship, like eg Russia, the justice system, including prison, is a lot more instrumental than reddit censorship which has yet to prove dangerous. The justice system has to establish what is true or false (for example did you and did you not murder X?), and this power on truth is the very basis of polical censorship (remember 1984 Ministry of Truth).

Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?

Because the law is well written and only allows you to ban harmless things? That's like death penalty. If you kill criminal, why wouldn't you kill political opponents? The answer is that you can't because it isn't allowed. Why is it possible to draw a line for the harmless use of the justice system and not for the harmless use of small censorship?

It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions.

Just like the justice system has been used for repression a lot. Or the army. Russia used poisoned tea to kill political opponent, so is drinking tea a first step toward political assassination? The only thing that could convince me completely is a proof that the censorship as it exists is already dangerous. There are other restrictions on freedom of speech (eg you cannot publish classified material). Is forbidding the word "nigger" really more dangerous than allowing the government to keep secrets that no one is allowed to tell?

You are right, I claimed more than I intended. I would say that basic word-based reddit censorship, like censoring the word "nigger" or even the so-called (((echo))) has not really harmed the debate, even if it gives place to ridiculous cases like on /r/themotte.

There are other cases where reddit censorship is worse than that, like website-level rules against "transphobia". Those rules are very bad in my opinion, however they are nothing close to the Russian system of censorship. It is still possible to express opinion against transgender identity in most western countries, mainly because people can speak somewhere else.

or even the so-called (((echo))) has not really harmed the debate, even if it gives place to ridiculous cases like on /r/themotte.

You do know why we have to post on a separate website, and not the subreddit? Precisely because the slippery slope is real and comments merely explaining meaning atract attention of the AEO.

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