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No, the idea behind it is usually good. It's that is always ends up getting abused...
Just look at history (looking at you blasphemy laws), the pattern is the same each time.
Now, I'm not saying that we can't have any regulations on speech (ie fire in a crowded theater that is not in danger) but any rules need to be transparent and very carefully constructed.
I think you misunderstand me. I see blasphemy laws as the same in character to hate speech laws, and I'm saying both of them are a good thing.
I assume the terrible "pattern" you refer to is stuff like this. Obviously in contemporary Western society, even the most extreme anti-Semite isn't burned at the stake, or even executed.
But the principle - that you can be legally prosecuted by the state for being a dissident - remains the same (It's just that we don't even perform such gruesome acts on actual violent criminals), and I argue that unless you find the management of our current society intolerable (in which case you wouldn't be happy even with the freedom to proselytise your beliefs) this is a good thing.
I have no sympathy for the victims of such government persecutions given that, despite fully understanding the rules, they deliberately chose to disobey them for the purposes of a principled stand. I can't really empathise with such a person because I would never be in such a situation - if I were bound to the post, as an angry Protestant gave me one last chance to renounce my Catholicism, I would just say "I renounce my Catholicism" and walk away a free man, having suffered only a wound to my ego.
I agree with the need for transparency. But you seem to imply that lack of transparency is an issue with the current rules, which I disagree with.
The current rules change with time (About 20 years ago, the statement "a man cannot become a woman" was considered so obvious that no one would even say it, but now this would be considered transphobic) - however it's pretty easy to get a sense of what beliefs are socially appropriate to express.
In my experience, when I have made statements that have fallen outside of the Overton window amongst acquaintances it was made pretty clear to me (an awkward silence, someone explaining that I'm being "narrow-minded" or "ignorant", etc) and so I know to drop the issue and ensure to never bring the idea up again in polite company.
And historically, every famous story about someone being persecuted for their beliefs seems to include multiple opportunities to recant the offending belief, which they explicitly reject.
As for "carefully constructed", I disagree. I assume you mean the rules should be as meta as possible, and try and reflect general moral principles instead of just taking a stance on some specific contemporary controversy (i.e. "It is unfair to blame a group for the actions of an individual" is better than "you can't say Black people are violent because of their crime rate")
It can be tricky to figure out what your foundational moral principles are (I'm honestly not sure about my own) In practise this is just done by considering how you feel about various controversies/thought experiments and then trying to find the simplest possible consistent framework that explains all of these feelings. But you can easily get wider framework wrong, in ways you might not think of.
Consider my example about Black people again. A typical progressive would agree with the object level statement that you can't judge the entire group of Black people by the behaviour of a tiny unruly minority, and the meta level rule is a pretty reasonable attempt to create a general moral framework that would let us derive this conclusion.
But of course a typical progressive would also agree with the idea that "The police are racist towards black people". If you asked why, this would at least in part be because of events like the death of George Floyd, i.e. actions committed by a small subset of the group. This is of course a pretty common right wing talking point, and can be easily patched by amending the general principle to exclude groups you join voluntarily.
But had our progressive tried going the meta route, they would find themselves hoist by their own petard (Even the amended version runs into difficulties - do homosexuals lose their protected status now, as they can choose to just not indulge their preference? I have yet to see a general moral framework for progressivism that doesn't lead to undesired conclusions)
So instead, our censor (whatever their ideological persuasion), should focus on attacking specific object-level beliefs instead of running the risk of logicking themselves into a corner (and this has the bonus of being more transparent)
OK, hard disagree. I'll be honest, I stopped here. We have a completely different understanding of history.
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Censorship has been an obvious and pervasive aspect of American social technology since well before the founding, all the way back to the initial colonization. How did our long and rich history of censorship amount to abuse, and what were the concrete negative consequences of that abuse?
As a non-exhaustive list:
The Sedition Act was near-instantly turned into a political tool, including of jailing dissenters and political opponents, including with charges related to writings predating the Act's enactment. In addition to not doing much good about the whole War With Napoleon thing, the statute legitimized a lot of internal revolutionary speech and literal rebellions, and badly damaged interstate comity; while not the sole cause of current red-hot judiciary problems, it's very much the first bite at the fruit.
Comstock personally used the law to charge sufferagettes in response to publishing an alleged affair by one of Comstock's . Leaving aside the object-level debates for his censorship itself being bad, the expansive and often quixotic efforts undermined much of his more conventional anti-fraud and anti-spam efforts, was an absolute mess when it came to actual STDs, and often publicized and promoted the very works he was opposing. (Also, from a social perspective, he also inspired a certain J. Edgar Hoover.)
McCarthyism blurred the lines between communist party Russian stooge, 'mere' philosophical sympathizer, and People Who Annoyed McCarthy well before the Army inquiries. In doing so, he both destroyed future anti-Soviet-espionage efforts and provided cover for tankie academics for decades.
Of course, the more morbid question is when did it have a negative impact on the censors; telling people that they'll win but burn down society invites a lot of Joker cosplay. The Adams administration didn't win reelection, but that was probably off the table before the Adams administration first won the presidency; Adams himself nor the Sedition Act's authors were prosecuted. Comstock made his keep off of those he fined and punished. McCarthy died abandoned, so there's that one I guess?
This was an excellent post, and a perfect example of what I was looking for: strong historical cases of actual censorship.
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Orangecat clearly isn't talking about every form of censorship, the impression I got was they are talking about censorship to protect people's feelings or in some other impulsive fashion - the kind which simply wallpapers over an issue, usually to shut up agitators. I can't think of any time that has had a positive impact on society.
When did it have a notably negative impact on society, though?
...I've just finished one big debate on censorship, and I'm not really up for jumping into another one. I know the consensus is supposed to be that censorship is very bad, m'kay. I observe that large amount of censorship, through a variety of methods and with a variety of targets, appears to have been the norm throughout our nation's entire history, excepting perhaps two decades bookending the turn of the last century which were unusually permissive, and which were immediately followed by an acute decline in social conditions.
I know how this all is supposed to work. I am skeptical that it actually works that way. I note that a lot of the standard narrative about censorship conveniently ignores most of the censorship actually happening in the past or present, and gets pretty hand-wavey about nailing down cause and effect.
Covid would be my first example, but it's the first of thousands so I assume I am misunderstanding you. The way I see it, people who argue against censorship aren't arguing against censorship, which is an amorphous concept found in every sphere of life, and as you (and @orangecat) say, often with positive effects. They are trying to stop power grabbing. Someone proposing censorship is trying to assume power they didn't previously have, and anyone grabbing power should be suspect, because the unscrupulous outnumber the scrupulous a thousand to one.
Speech is a particularly important power because it is the basis of communication, allowing our hierarchies to exceed our physical limitations. So I immediately suspect anyone who tries to take it, and it completely blows my mind that anyone would willingly give it up, especially for a reason as minor as hurt feelings or to cover up a mistake. And since in my lifetime I haven't seen any negative consequences to telling censors to fuck off - ever - but can list multiple times I desperately wished everyone else had told the censors to fuck off, I don't see a problem with drawing a line in the sand at 'no censorship'.
I mean, you're right that permissiveness leads to worse social conditions, but if that's all that mattered Saudi Arabia would be a utopia. It's not, (unless you have a fetish for censorship, then it's pretty great) so we get back to the same problem as always - who gets to inflict their values on whom? We can only go forward from here - there's no getting back the Hayes code and CCA.
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