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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Then I think we should enable free speech, so the would-be victims can complain.

Apologies; "complaint" in that sentence is a euphemism for resistance, presumably violent.

Censorship can be weaponized as well, and the only real protection is free speech.

Censorship can absolutely be weaponized. We had much freer speech, probably the freest speech ever, and the general group of people who fought the hardest for that acme of free speech then turned around and weaponized censorship, rolling back all their principles as soon as it was convinient to do so. The free speech principles we all agreed to didn't help at all when they did this.

And censorship is less likely to protect the victims, because the group that has the power to enforce societal change against them likely also can apply censorship against them.

Let me put it this way: there's no actual substitute for maintaining a healthy ecology of memes in your society. If you let bad memes take root, free speech ideals won't actually fix the problem. Letting Nazis march in Skokie and defending Larry Flint didn't actually do what it was supposed to do. The idea was that we defend scoundrels to keep good people from being attacked. But what actually happened was that, having defended scoundrels to the benefit of one side, that side gained enough power to impose its own values, changed the definition of scoundrel, and banned defense of those so labeled.

Defending scoundrels was a waste of time. The principles in question failed to achieve their stated purpose. Rather than defending the indefensible in pursuit of an impossibly paradoxical ideal, we should use power to preserve the good as best as we, as a society, can understand it. We should recognize that simply punting on the question of who gets toleration is no longer practical, and we should develop answers that lead to a livable society.

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