I understand that there are a lot of people who are hurting right now, and I empathize with their pain, but how can we share out most wonderful and beautiful ideas with each other or convey important information to the public if we believe there might be serious reprisals against us if we "say the wrong thing".
For example, I personally helped work against slavery on the Black Market in the Middle East, and I wanted to raise awareness of this issue.
But now I have to be worried that I'll insult people by using the term Black Market, and will also insult people by giving off the impression that the the Middle East is a 3rd world primitive place where they buy and sell slaves.
There is no "right" way to convey the issue above without offending someone. So what should I do? Just shut my mouth and don't say anything? Then the slave trade will continue to operate freely...
All speech besides threats of violence needs to be free, or we can't progress as a society.
> how can we share out most wonderful and beautiful ideas with each other
The trick is to create channels with limited audiences, where you can set an expectation of which ideas are acceptable and which are not.*
It always has been, but the the arrival of new communication methods has disrupted the traditional channels, and now every idea is propagated to a much larger and looser audience, which aren't aware or don't share the expectations of the sender.
We need to rebuild the architecture of communication channels around this principle of limited audiences sharing a common understanding, and reshape the current "free" massive communication tools so that they respect this principle instead of exploiting the benefits of popularising aggressive messages for their shock value.
This compartmentalisation of channels would do much more for freedom of expression than the current "everyone gets a distorted and contextless version of the original message and can have their say".
* By the way, this is the reason why explicit Codes of Conduct are a good thing for online projects. Without them, you simply get a default implicit code of conduct based on the expectations of the dominant group; which is not a good solution for people coming from any other group.
This ignores that the web has birthed a global culture of people where participation in online discussion is the majority of their lives. And they sit around looking to be offended to raise their own social value amonst their online peers.
Being offended is about obtaining value and for mobs to obtain power.
The two way street of both trying to not offend AND the listener trying to honestly interpret what is being said goes out the window
Whenever you have a bad actor on either side of communication, it breaks down.
The common wisdom, though, is that the bad actor is always the speaker.
And its simply not true.
The other problem is, as a culture, everyone is responsible for everyone else's emotions. No one is asked to be responsible for their own.
I don't have a problem with codes of conduct per se.
I do have a problem with a culture that constantly asks people to not be responsible for how they process information. Even negative, even offensive information.
Relationship therapists teach couples to use "I" language vs "you" language to express feelings (Google it if you don't understand)
This way you take responsibility for how external stimuli makes you feel rather than making your partner wholly responsible and thus making discussion adversarial
This problem is happening in FOS projects or even just social media in general.
Everyone is a soccer player, falling down, grabbing their leg hoping to get the most people feeling sorry for them, claiming 1% if the bullies and edgelords out there are some dominant social group. It's crap
Hit the nail on the head. This culture has no concept of "thick skin" and interprets any nuanced position in the most unfavorable light. Then they put on a dramatic show of being offended, hurt, or outraged in hopes of accolades from their peers.
This is so great. We have lost the art and skill of critical thinking and exposure to all ideas because some say free speech is fine so long as you only say things that I agree with. We're regressing intellectually and fast.
> This ignores that the web has birthed a global culture of people where participation in online discussion is the majority of their lives.
I'm not ignoring that, I'm describing what I see is an underlying cause. If online discussion tools respected the principle of setting proper expectations for each communication channel, the problem would be much milder, as the problems you describe would be limited to smaller groups of interaction, instead of being escalated to viral dimensions.
But all the rules in the world can't solve for bad actors - both speakers and listeners.
There's a fluidity to human interaction that rigidity of rule sets will never totally compensate for.
And too many rules can be counterproductive and be empowering to bad actors who thrive in increasing beaucracies, at the least by making it difficult for everyone else so they look good by comparison. Then the whole focus gets lost. More time is spent navigating, adhering to, debating rules than the primary focus...
I should know that, I'm a regular Wikipedia editor.
Despite that, for groups where people come from very different origins and cultures, it is better to spell out the expected rules of behaviour to some degree. "No rules" only works when participants are homogeneous enough that all them already know the rules.
> Relationship therapists teach couples to use "I" language vs "you" language to express feelings
On the other hand, when a statement is made about you ("what you did is wrong") you always have a chance to discuss the facts. When a statement is made about personal feelings ("I feel offended by what you did") no discussion is possible any more: I can counter your interpretation of facts, but I cannot possibly argue about your stated feelings. You won, period. This seems to me the danger of the "I language".
> The trick is to create channels with limited audiences, where you can set an expectation of which ideas are acceptable and which are not.
Do you mean that a community could allow argument X, but disallow counter-argument Y? That sounds like a recipe for an echo chamber.
I definitely see the benefit in saying that certain topics are out of scope for a given community. But saying which ideas are acceptable and which are not sounds like codifying the dominance of an official viewpoint.
> I definitely see the benefit in saying that certain topics are out of scope for a given community. But saying which ideas are acceptable and which are not sounds like codifying the dominance of an official viewpoint.
Yeah, exactly. But any anthropologist or sociologist will tell you that any social group works exactly that way, it's an inevitable reality of being social humans.
The trick to support freedom of expression isn't forcing all possible communication forums to accept all possible topics and ideas; it's to create cross-pollination groups where some ideas that are taboo in other forums can be discussed in an adequate context.
University used to be such a forum intended for cross-pollination and having a different set of taboos than the mainstream society, before it was hijacked by the dynamics of social networks.
Pederasty is so far from our cultural norms it’s current form is meaningless compared to a socially accepted version. In a society with active mentoring of youth by people across the gender and sexual orientation spectrum pederasty would reduce the stigma’s associated with homosexuals thus increasing social cohesion.
War is a stress test for societies. By destroying less efficient social structures it promotes long term progress and reduces inefficient practices like slavery.
Heroin is an opioid and can be used as such. It’s current stigma is associated with recreational uses, but it can easily be used for chronic pain in a hospice instead of similar opioids.
PS: IMO the real reason to segregate ideas across forms is to avoid having the same conversations everywhere. Bringing up politics means people talk about politics rather than whatever the original subject was.
> Pederasty [...] would reduce the stigma’s associated with homosexuals thus increasing social cohesion.
Increasing acceptance of gay people by checks notes encouraging adults to have sex with minors.
And before you accuse me of cutting out a part of your argument, you haven't actually given a definition of pederasty that's not the one everyone understands, which is "adult men having sex with minors".
Technically I believe the argument for it is even more fucked up ironically social mobility. Without pederasty the relationship to the mentor would be more encouraged along social clan lines and could lead to a rise of effective caste doms. The recognized costs of the shame and protectiveness towards one offspring means the lowest would be more likely to take such "opportunities" as fucked up as it sounds pimping out your sons is the best way to give them a better life.
It has obvious terrible effects involved with it and the very fact it is being considered is a sign that things are deeply wrong but bizzarely winds up a lesser evil in some ways. Which arguably just makes it more insidious which is a whole other moral topic.
It’s gender specific so men having sex with boys, from ~17 down to pre-pubescent.
Anyway, the point was not to convince anyone just to discuss the topic in a positive manor without provoking a massive negative response from HN. Consider taking some issue you strongly disagree with and making a single positive argument about it. For example, the upside of infanticide?
> War is a stress test for societies. By destroying less efficient social structures it promotes long term progress and reduces inefficient practices like slavery.
War destroys progress and is incredibly inefficient. The mere threat of war creates an endless arms race resulting in half of discretionary spending going to defense.
The reason for submitting to government authority is for protection of life and liberty. War results in destruction of life and reduced liberty, so it's a major failure in that regard.
"Sorry ma'am, but your son died in the Great Stress Test of 1861. I know you just spent your last nineteen years raising him, but we weren't sure if slavery was efficient or not, so we needed him to help settle the question on the battlefield."
The global average military spending is 2.2% of global GDP, the US spends 3.4% of GDP. In a vacuum that looks like a dead loss, but over the last 10,000+ years even minor increases in progress could easily make up for that. Consider the USSR was destroyed by failing to manage that expenditure, in a world without war it could easily still be around. Now extend that back to every poor use of resources eliminated by war like Aztec mass human sacrifice or the southern states use of slavery.
I don’t think it’s acceptable trade off for the direct suffering of war, but it is a defensible argument.
War certainly destroys somethings, but in other ways it spurs invention -- radar, cyrptography, jet engines, computing were all products of world war 2.
And sometimes destroying leads to improvements - the blitz destroyed a lot of slum housing in the London east end, which was rebuilt en mass in a way that wouldn't have been possible without the widespread destruction.
Massive losses felt across the population in the UK led to a national unity and a desire for improvement of everyones lives, leading to things like the welfare state and healthcare for all.
Looking further back in history, the US war of independence is deemed to have had desirable outcomes.
You can still think war is a failure but acknowledge that it can lead to benefits as well as drawbacks.
> War destroys progress and is incredibly inefficient.
Please explain the monumental advancements of technology witnessed during both world wars. Even if they were not a direct result of the war effort, they still succeeded in spite of all technically and scientifically advanced nations being on a war footing during those time periods.
> The mere threat of war creates an endless arms race resulting in half of discretionary spending going to defense.
Please explain why we have not seen a significant drop in defense spending during the periods when the threat of war has lessened. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union when the world was decidedly unipolar for more than a decade.
> The reason for submitting to government authority is for protection of life and liberty.
I would argue that ceding some liberty to government is necessary for peaceful defense of life and property (backed up by the threat of collective force) but I don't believe that a government inherently defends liberty. To the contrary I think that liberty must be actively defended from the excesses of government, preferably by building those protections in to the legal foundation of the governments power so that if they are violated it invalidates the mandate granted and provides legal recourse against the government in favour of those wronged by it.
To be clear, I don't support war and I think that there are much better and less destructive ways to stimulate technological and societal growth but I don't hold with weak arguments either.
> Please explain why we have not seen a significant drop in defense spending during the periods when the threat of war has lessened. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union when the world was decidedly unipolar for more than a decade.
Spiked over 45% of GDP during WWI, and over 50% during WWII. Took a small bump over 10% that I believe was the Korean War, and has been fairly consistently drifting downward since, and is roughly comparable to 1900s pre-war spending.
> Please explain the monumental advancements of technology witnessed during both world wars
The problem is that you can't counter this by showing the monumental advancements that may have happened without the destructive nature of those wars on lives, economies, etc. because, well, we have no idea.
> Please explain why we have not seen a significant drop in defense spending during the periods when the threat of war has lessened.
Because "the mere threat of war" still exists - except instead of Russia, it's now terrorists, Middle Eastern countries, North Korea, etc. Also because the military industrial complex has an ungodly hold over governments.
> By destroying less efficient social structures it promotes long term progress and reduces inefficient practices like slavery.
Sorry, what? Slavery was never "inefficient." The problem is that humans have rights and holding slaves deprives them of those rights. To the contrary, slavery was, is, terribly efficient for the slaveholder.
Slavery definetly is inefficient on the labor level long term. Especially as a generational state that cannot be worked and bought out of. Slaves are effectively encouraged to work only hard enough to avoid punishment and their individual efficency winds up being ignored. There isn't really any reason to try to get better over time except at plotting escape or how to murder every last master around you, even the children.
The really fucked up part is that the advent of slavery was an improvement over stone aged bands warfare of genocide where at best some of the women and children might be forced into concubinge and human sacrifices to dispose of unsustainable mouths to feed.
Agreed! Alexis de Tocqueville had similar arguments about slavery and it's economic inefficiencies. Sadly part of his argument was not based on civil liberties and rights rather his argument was the expense of the "up keep", housing and feeding slaves, versus an individual worker who is free has to provide their own cost of living for which that burden is then lifted off the master/owner. The business owner simply pays the worker for his/her labor, and no more feeding and housing. It saves expenditure burden on the owner and transfers the cost to the worker, maximize profits.
Wonder what he would say to the mechanization of labor through technology and its benefits of ending the institution of slavery and providing owners cheaper or eliminating labor expenditure?
So just another view point on the issue of "inefficiency of slavery" argument.
Your heroin argument is kinda strawman. You should address addiction, health aspect, and criminalization vs legalization.
Modern war not only means crazy lot of civilian casualties, and environmental destruction.
It is literal breeding ground of hate, human misery, all of worst qualities of people. Only a defence contractor would advocate for war.
>> "War is a stress test for societies. By destroying less efficient social structures it promotes long term progress and reduces inefficient practices like slavery."
The struggle between people who believe in this and people who don't is more or less the plot of Babylon 5. The show actually moved me closer to the Shadow position: excessive stability is as much a problem as excessive chaos. Civilization seems to find a balance on the long view.
I agree that there are almost always some guardrails in place, and certain viewpoints that are considered beyond the pale. And so there is a balancing act between an Overton Window that is too wide and wastes people's time with nonsense, and one that is too narrow and prevents bad orthodoxies from being challenged.
How are implicit guardrails better than specified guardrails?
Surely explicit guardrails act as therapeutic discourse, in that it seeks to clarify systematic self-deception. By self-deception, I refer first-and-foremost to the myth of objectivity that often surrounds contemporary debate.
Tone drives people away faster than content. A civil discussion with someone you disagree with is very different than the all caps hate fest you see without any form of moderation.
> Every stable community already has things you can and cannot say
My point is that every stable community has a different subset of things that you cannot say.
It's easy to create a group where pederasty, war or heroin can be freely discussed or praised. The problem nowadays appears when utterances aimed to that specific group are picked up and propagated by the general network, reaching people who were not their intended targets and who didn't share the original channel's assumptions for what can and cannot be said.
I can't think of many instances of someone sharing a "controversial" opinion where they weren't just regurgitating tired old arguments that are trivially discredited. The easy response is: well if they're trivially rebutted, why not just rebut them?
That works once. Twice. Twenty times. It doesn't take long before these "just raising the controversy" comments overwhelm sincere and thought-provoking discussion. A rhetorical DDoS/DoS works the same way a technological one does.
There are a few small, well-moderated communities/outlets where people have gone a level or two past propaganda and stereotypes, but they come into the discussion with an open mind. I can at least feel like, if I found the right angle, I might persuade them toward my viewpoint.
And most importantly: people come into those spaces knowing what to expect. I expect to see some serious discussion over whether or not I deserve equal rights, for example, but I don't feel like it's futile the way I do with people coming in with a roster of thought-terminating cliches and propaganda as a cover for hate.
> regurgitating tired old arguments that are trivially discredited
who judges this? fundamentals of human right are often old, who decides they are tired or outdated?
If they are constantly repeated, then either they aren't considered rebutted, or the rebuttal rarely spreads, and that is the thing that needs to be investigated.
We need to identify "thought-terminating cliches and propaganda" via a bipartisan standard. The current standards seem to be "your propaganda is propaganda, my propaganda is defence".
I find codes of conduct meaningless. They will go on in very general terms about 'hate speech' which is just synonymous with 'anything that anyone feels offended by' now.
I would argue that code of conducts were a symptom of the start of the problem.
The strategy of the grievance class:
- Propose a code of conduct which surely nobody can disagree with, it's great to have rules and be nice to each other.
- Design the code of conduct so any perceived offence falls under it
That was always implicit in group discussions. As others have said, Codes of Conduct aren't creating new rules, they're just making them explicit instead of implicit.
Let me give you an example: you have a group of friends. Two of your friends have recently experienced a miscarriage. The implicit rules in your group have now expanded to include "no dead baby jokes" (depending on how dark your group's humour was, this might always have been a rule). The reason for this expansion is that two members of the group will now be hurt, upset and offended by those jokes. Making a "dead baby joke" is now a good reason to think the offender is an insensitive idiot, who probably isn't someone you want to be friends with.
This is no different from "no jokes about fags" when your group includes gay people. But sometimes, some people insist on being able to make "fag jokes" because "snowflakes are over-sensitive". Of course, they may not know the group includes gay people, and the gay people in question may not want anyone else to know their sexual orientation (none of anyone else's business). So it's better to spell it out explicitly that "fag jokes" are not allowed, even though there are apparently no gay people in the group. This is what a Code of Conduct does.
Yes, there are Purity Spirals that end up pushing this to extremes. But that's a separate issue. Codes of Conduct are still a really good idea.
I agree that if there are rules, it's much better to make them explicit instead of implicit. I also think your example makes sense, but I'm not sure it applies to larger groups or public forums. There are simply too many people to avoid discussing every topic that could offend someone. I'm not saying overt racism or homophobia is okay, but especially when it comes to humor it's almost unavoidable that it can hit too close to home for someone who sees it.
In public discussions there has to be some baseline ability by the reader to accept that they can be offended while the value of what was said to the rest of the audience may outweigh their own feelings. The implicit rules of what is acceptable to talk about, especially online, have been getting stricter to the point of being ridiculous in my experience.
I agree with that. But like I said, that's a different problem. The "stricter to the point of being ridiculous" is a Purity Spiral, and that's a known phenomenom in human commnication that occurs in all sorts of settings. It's not new, and it's not restricted to online conversations. Also hard to escape.
The core reasoning behind Codes of Conduct is sound.
I totally agree. What can taint the idea is having the Code of Conduct intentionally vague or selectively enforced, but the core idea is much better than unspoken norms.
> In public discussions there has to be some baseline ability by the reader to accept that they can be offended while the value of what was said to the rest of the audience may outweigh their own feelings. The implicit rules of what is acceptable to talk about, especially online, have been getting stricter to the point of being ridiculous in my experience.
Quite agree. Thus my proposal to create smaller, more controlled discussion groups. The larger the group, the more difficult it is to build a code of conduct that will satisfy all participants.
I think that's a great idea, at the very least it filters out a lot of spam and ideally gives you more context about each individual so if something controversial is said you can put it into context with them as a whole. I just worry that these smaller discussion groups are becoming more and more rare online, but maybe the current craziness will lead to their resurgence.
Can you point to examples where you feel they're done well? Whenever the subject comes up it's always the egregious ones that are pointed out so I'd like to see the other side.
Anything you see in the news are the egregious instances that get pushed to ridiculous levels. If you've seen a sign saying "wash your hands after using the toilet", that's an explicit code of conduct done well.
I do not think so. A group of friends vs a group of people collaborating through internet is very different thing. I would be okay if rules simply say no discussion or talk outside of work we collaborate on.
But it is very likely same sensitive people will jump and say "how can one be quiet when XYZ minority group is getting harassed/attacked/bullied/doxxed ? Say something don't be quiet on grave injustice." By saying something most likely means always in favor of over sensitive folks. If one tries to bring in different POV which does not fit the offended person's worldview, the person who said something is now racist or some kinda anti-minority douchebag.
So to me COC have one main point that is to attack on people who you do not like.
Like I said, CoC's are being weaponised by Purity Spirals. It doesn't make CoC's useless.
Try organising an event without one and with one, and you'll see. They an extremely useful tool. The fact that (like most tools) you can also weaponise them doesn't make them not useful.
Do we not already have several examples of someone new coming in, pushing the adoption of a Code of Conduct, and then there is a sudden attack on the founders due to some minor quibble? Then there is the usual backroom meeting and whoosh, they're gone. Didn't we see that in, if I recall, Drupal?
It depends on the purpose of the group. There are lots of 18+ groups that discourage politics, and lots more where no profanity is expected. As long as there are other different groups where those are allowed, everything is OK.
In any group you will need to agree on a set of rules about these things. A Code of Conduct doesn't change that, just makes it explicit.
The reason that Codes of Conduct are good is that it makes the life of an organiser so much easier. If Bob is being weird around the ladies (again), then an organiser can take him to one side and point to the "no being weird around the ladies" clause in the CoC. This is a massively easier discussion than without the CoC, where they would have to explain to Bob that his behaviour around the ladies was causing them distress, etc.
Yes, this includes "grey" areas, because it involves human feelings and emotions. Charles might behave in a similar manner to Bob, but not be "weird" about it, and people find him funny not creepy. Therefore he's not breaking the "don't be weird around the ladies" rule. That's down to human perception, unfortunately for Bob.
But that rule already existed, and was already "grey". Without the CoC, the organiser would still need to take Bob to one side and have the chat. Because weirding out the female members of the group is a dick move regardless. And Charles would still get a pass because he wasn't being weird. The CoC hasn't changed anything, just made it explicit.
It also makes an explicit commitment by the organizer that they'll react in some way to complaints covered by the CoC, and tells people how/where to make such complaints. I.e. if an organizer ignores something, they can be pointed to "but you committed to upholding these rules for your event".
> Charles might behave in a similar manner to Bob, but not be "weird" about it, and people find him funny not creepy.
So it's all down to the interpretation (of both the CoC, and whether behaviour falls within it) of the organiser? Especially under such vague standards as "being weird" or "being creepy?
This sound like the exact problem with CoCs. And the "rule-breaking" aspect goes both ways. It's eventually a way to streamline the process by shutting down group dissent. Work fine if the rules, and their enforcement are just; not so much otherwise.
> But that rule already existed, and was already "grey"
No it didn't. The reasoning behind the rule did, but not the rule. Once the rule exists people can appeal to the rule directly without considering the reasoning behind it; Much like arguing that abortion is bad because it is murder, without reconsidering why murder is bad in the first place and re-engaging with that logic in the context of abortion.
> It's eventually a way to streamline the process by shutting down group dissent. Work fine if the rules, and their enforcement are just; not so much otherwise.
What you're missing is that this is something that will happen anyway, explicit CoC or not. Someone with power will always be in a position to judge the rules and enforce them in his own way on someone without power, by definition.
But if there is an explicit code, you are warned in advance of the actions that will more likely trigger enforcement, instead of finding them after the fact.
Therefore, you can decide to avoid those actions, or avoid the event entirely. In some ways, an explicit CoC is giving more power to participants over the organizer, not the opposite.
I was part of a group that had a policy of apolitical(ity)
Until a topic (think BLM kind) came along that people thought should be an exception; The usual arguments: this wasn't politics, this was basic human rights / existence; It was offensive not to allow, is was oppression to not discuss.
Basically, enough people cared more about <topic> than their continued membership, or even the continued existence/stability of the group, that may become fractured by <topic>, that they where willing to leave and make a big stink about doing so, enough to potentially give the group a bad reputation, and leveraged this threat against the policy.
If social norms change and you want your group to have continued legitimacy, you may need to change with them. Not having a code of conduct doesn't make things any different.
Put another way, if as a leader you don't take time to recognize the priorities of those whom you are responsible for, they'll eventually revolt.
In some sense, what I'm saying is that it's not possible to be apolitical. Politics is just lens through which we analyze human interaction. You can't have social groups without politics.
If you mean specifically "politics" in the US democratic/republican party sense, that's in theory a more attainable goal, but keep in mind that under that definition you excuse what is objectively bad behavior (IBM supporting the Nazis, as an example). Not to mention that the political parties in some sense have a vested interest in making things that shouldn't be political issues "political".
And you also get into the question of what is political? Are facts political? Is saying "black people are killed by police at a higher rate than white people" political? You're ultimately just advocating for a different form of censorship, which is fraught with all the same problems as any other form, but additionally with the duty to appear unbiased in how you define what is or isn't political.
That's an inherently conservative position to take. Which you should recognize if you want to take it.
Any social group has a code of conduct. Classic codes of conduct have been in place for generations and are implicitly taught to members accepted in the social class.
The difference now is that these codes are being challenged by outsiders to the former dominant class; and making the new groups work requires the code of conduct to be enumerated explicitly, in order to define and coordinate the new, non-classical values.
How do you manage reading every code of conduct and honoring it?
The trouble I'm having with social changes, expectations, per person pronouns, and other things is that managing all of these interactions can be a crushing amount of cognitive load.
Now that I think about it, it's the same challenge I have with microservices. Formerly simple interactions are now hellza complicated. I'm not fighting the trend. I'm just fatigued.
>How do you manage reading every code of conduct and honoring it?
I don't think perfect adherence should be expected. If there's a code of conduct and someone runs afoul of it, just give them a gentle poke and point them to what they ran afoul of. If they're cool with the code of conduct, great. They fix their behavior and everyone's happy. If they don't like the code of conduct, then they're welcome to join a community with a code of conduct that better matches their outlook. If they continue to stick around anyway and violate the code of conduct after being informed what they're doing wrong, they get the boot.
Where this gets stickier is when you build monolithic communities like Stack Overflow where "the boot" is actually seriously punishing. I only ever moderated little game forums where the consequences of a ban were far less severe. Which is why I tend to think it's better to have small distributed self-managing communities rather than monolithic communities. Makes it easier for diverse outlooks to live-and-let-live without requiring minorities to conform to the majority.
Given small enough communities: no one, and that’s okay. If you start behaving in a way I don’t like after inviting you to my home, I’m well within my rights to kick you out, and there isn’t (and shouldn’t be) anyone policing me on that.
No, this doesn’t work at Facebook scale. I think we had a good thing going on the early web with lots of small discussion boards.
Exposure to unfamiliar ideas is exhausting. Doubly so when the social behaviour that typically becomes second nature in adolescence no longer fits (IMO that’s why video calls are exhausting too - the usual subtle social cues don’t apply).
For some of this stuff, I'm pretty sure the difficulty of keeping up with it is the whole point - it's effectively a way of signalling that you're part of the right group of people with the right views and connections, and what stops outsiders from just learning to imitate the signals is the way things which were mandatory suddenly flip to horribly offensive without rhyme or reason.
> The trouble I'm having with social changes, expectations, per person pronouns, and other things is that managing all of these interactions can be a crushing amount of cognitive load.
Are per-person pronouns really such a big deal to manage? I've known more people who have changed their name in marriage than changed their pronouns.
I can't always remember what a person's name either. No one gives me crap for asking what their name is. I don't feel like asking what someone's pronouns are is a safe question yet.
I'm more concerned about getting crap from someone who only thinks there should only pronouns for their notion of binary genders. For now I just use "they/them" for any given person if I'm not sure, because it's safer than asking in many cases.
"changing your pronouns" has a link to "tying your identity to how you are being referenced" (i claim this from observation). Using the wrong pronoun is such much more likely to be seen as a personal attack than using your pre-marriage name.
Have you seen anyone personally take offense, or just high-profile cases? I've definitely seen a few of the latter (e.g. Jordan Peterson) but the common denominator there seems to be antagonistically refusing to use pronouns or doing so to make the point that you reject them, which is different from an honest mistake.
Yes, i left Open Source projects because referring to co-contributors is such a minefield. I don't wish to work with self-identified transgender people due to this anymore. They take everything so personal even if its not about them.
And just for saying this, same people will accuse me of hating trans people and rejecting their right to exist. But you know what - people with successful HRT who also pass don't exhibit this behavior. They also don't self-identify as trans.
> They take everything so personal even if its not about them.
Is this an actual experience? I've worked with/interacted with quite a few queer people. And I've misgendered people on more than one occasion. Nothing a "shit sorry" hasn't been able to fix.
This forces me to wonder why our experiences are so different. Do the queer people I work with have different norms than yours? Do I have some level of legitimacy among them that you don't? Or is there something else at play?
Assuming you are from the US (im not) and work at Google, i guess its that your ideas about the LGBT community might come from people who actively participate in identity politics. If they do, they have interest in not passing and constantly outing themselves to demonstrate their minority status, because this is what they think makes their voice 'valid'.
If you go trans because you suffer from gender dysphoria, your 'fix' is to become accepted as the gender you identify as.
To achieve it, you do HRT and a surgery (if you suffer from bottom dysphoria), and you present yourself as the gender you identify as, NOT as trans.
This goes so far that these people correct you if you call them trans - they are a "Man" or a "Woman" now.
If these people pass, they also pass as cis and are thus not easily recognizable as having undergone transition.
I'm active in a fan community of an Anime that features dissociation, so it accidentally attracts people with gender dysphoria.
I had affairs with some people from this community and, this way, also got into the gay/trans community, which has an significant overlap.
This is how i learned that identity politics is not representative of queer people.
Heck, even the CSD/gay pride with the rainbow flags isn't representative of the gay community - many sexually deviant people just want to live a normal life and not be associated with pants where your butt cheeks peek out.
I'm one of them.
> If they do, they have interest in not passing and constantly outing themselves to demonstrate their minority status, because this is what they think makes their voice 'valid'.
This is a bit of an outdated view on being "trans". I'll elaborate a bit because this old view on transness I think is the main difference in our views.
As background, I assume we'll both agree that gender is (in western society anyway) stereotypically expressed as a binary: masculine and feminine. The extent and degree of this binary has shifted over time. At one point women wearing pants was unacceptable.
The historical view of transness was that people who are trans wanted to present as the other part of the binary. "I want to be seen as a man instead of a woman". This raises a question: why? The answer follows: "Because I feel like I should be a woman."
If you stop at the first question, your view of trans identities make sense: a trans identity is only valid if it fits snuggly into the existing gender binary. You are a biological male who identifies as a women, or a biological female who identifies as a man. And while both of those work under the second framing, gender nonconforming identities, which don't feel like they should be a woman, but instead feel like they shouldn't be a man (or a woman). I'll note that I'm intentionally simplifying here which has the consequence of erasing some identities like gender-fluidity. The framing still works for those, but the answers are different.
So "old" trans was about perception, "new" trans is about identity. Passing (or not) doesn't make someone's voice valid. Identity does. If you identify as trans, you are and that identity is valid is really how I'd summarize things. There's the potential for abuse of this, but in practice it doesn't happen.
So I reject the notion that one need to be visibly non-passing to be valid in any circle. This I think also addresses much of your second paragraph: there are many people who choose to identify as trans even though they are passing or mostly passing, if only because the shared experience is useful to identify. And they may do so only in certain circles (e.g. Be "out" only in queer circles where they feel more free to discuss their trans experiences).
> many sexually deviant
I'd be careful conflating sexual deviancy with LGBT identities for two reasons. First, "sexual deviancy" has historically been used as a pejorative for LGBT people in the US, and I assume elsewhere. And second, it's not particularly relevant. In psychology, "sexual deviancy" refers to paraphilias or kinks, which are explicitly sexual in nature. But a trans or gay person could be totally asexual. Even still, they could be romantically attracted to same sex people or have some gender dysphoria. Neither implies anything about the act of sex itself.
> The historical view of transness was that people who are trans wanted to present as the other part of the binary.
This is still how trans people think today.
And if you are into language details, you'll realize that 'transgender' literally says that - getting across to another gender.
Same way like transport meant getting to another harbour.
> I'll note that I'm intentionally simplifying here which has the consequence of erasing some identities like gender-fluidity.
> So "old" trans was about perception, "new" trans is about identity.
If the identity of gender-fluidity can be externally erased by your wording, its perception, not identity.
I'm sure the same applies to trans.
The wrong assumption here is that your LGBT status can make your voice valid or invalid.
The idea that interpretation sovereignty for things comes from your subjective identity is appalling.
I'm not sure how you read that into my posting.
> Identity does. If you identify as trans, you are and that identity is valid is really how I'd summarize things.
Only a very privileged person (or lack of social experience) would be in the position to even assume that this is how things work in reality.
Subjectively identifying yourself does not work for anything except your name.
Its all about how others perceive you.
And i tell you, they explicitly told me that they want to be seen and accepted as women.
This is like, the greatest wish of people with gender dysphoria. This is definitely "perception".
> There's the potential for abuse of this, but in practice it doesn't happen.
What about Jessica Yaniv?
> I'd be careful conflating sexual deviancy with LGBT identities for two reasons [...]
I meant 'deviant' literally. As in, "deviance".
Remove the "sexual" if it bothers you.
I don't have contact fears with that word and will use it to refer to myself to reclaim it.
You better not have any problems with that.
You are repeating the mistakes of identity politics.
Like, if it was just a random opinion, fine.
But identity politics are (due to their observably wrong dogma) alienating to both LGBT people and allies.
If people go on like you, acceptance might fall enough that LGBT rights will be rolled back (already happening in the US).
And this will hit LGBT people, not you.
Some trans people find external validation important, yes. But being trans is not defined by external validation (and certainly not external perception), but instead self perception.[0] This is obvious: it would imply that a man in drag is a trans woman, which is obviously untrue.
> If the identity of gender-fluidity can be externally erased by your wording, its perception, not identity. I'm sure the same applies to trans.
No, gender-fluidity can be erased only due to the simplification that feelings are permanent. If we accept that how one self-perceives can, for some, change over time, then that leads obviously to gender fluidity. Like I said, I was simplifying, and specifically the simplification erased some identities. Removing the simplification doesn't erase any other identities. The identities were never invalid. The simplified definition I was using just didn't extend to them.
> Its all about how others perceive you.
Self perception certainly isn't all about how others perceive you. It may indeed be influenced by external factors, but I identify as a man not because of how others perceive me but due to my innate feelings about myself. Dysphoria is a mismatch between self-perception and external validation. The self-perception isn't defined by the external validation, if it were you couldn't experience dysphoria.
So I'll reiterate: trans people are trans based on how they identify, not based on how they are perceived. A biological male who is a closeted trans woman is still trans, no matter how I perceive them. The same person is still trans if they eventually become a passing woman.
> The wrong assumption here is that your LGBT status can make your voice valid or invalid.
When discussing the experience of being LGBT, of course it does. In general, of course it doesn't. You seemed to imply otherwise when you said "because this is what they think makes their voice 'valid'."
Which, like I said, isn't the case. None of the trans people I work with or know believe that being physically non-passing makes their voices any more valid than it would be if they were passing. Let me just reiterate that: None of the trans people I associate put any particular weight on being non-passing, this was something you invented, and it entirely contradicts how the trans people I know define their transness.
In other words, to make that claim is to misrepresent what being trans is for many trans people.
> This is like, the greatest wish of people with gender dysphoria. This is definitely "perception".
Yes, for some trans people that is absolutely the case! I'm not denying that people who are "classically" trans are trans. They absolutely are. Their dysphoria is still driven by a self-perception mismatch.
Let try to approach this another way: if we agree that classical trans identities, those that align closely with the gender binary, are valid, then the question is what about people who have less severe dysphoria? Like if we accept that it is possible for someone's self-perception to completely mismatch their body, why do we reject the idea that there can only be partial mismatch. In other words, they don't perceive themselves as either strictly a man or a woman. This is where you get various non-binary trans identities.
Again, all I'm doing is adding more people under the trans umbrella, I'm very much not denying any particular trans person's experience.
> What about Jessica Yaniv?
I'm glad you asked! Here's Contrapoints again to dive into the concept of "trans-trenders" and specifically Yaniv better than I ever could.[1]
> acceptance might fall enough that LGBT rights will be rolled back (already happening in the US)
If you honestly believe that LGBT rights are at risk because of a perceived backlash to "identity politics" (which, to be clear is a phrase I still don't understand the meaning of), and not simply the US religious right doing the same things it's always done, you haven't been paying attention. Education and normalization does more to protect LGBT people than staying silent.
> But being trans is not defined by external validation [...]
Did i say so?
My observations and your 'definitions' are different.
> Like I said, I was simplifying, and specifically the simplification erased some identities.
Language is inherently symbolic and thus an simplification (an reduction).
This makes "Identity erasure" an very toxic concept - you are guilty of it because there wasn't a way to comply with it in the first place.
> The same person is still trans if they eventually become a passing woman.
Wow. You can't say that - that's really rude and a offense to transitioned people.
They are a woman - becoming so was the whole purpose of transitioning.
You should know that.
> and it entirely contradicts how the trans people I know define their transness.
If that's so, fine. The trans people i know don't even "define" themselves, because here people aren't obsessed with self-identity as in the US.
They only want to be accepted as Women.
> [...] they don't perceive themselves as either strictly a man or a woman. This is where you get various non-binary trans identities.
Only in identity politics.
In the outside world you get people that don't conform to various gender expectations, and the majority of them does not need to make up their mind around that being an identity.
They "can be".
> Education and normalization does more to protect LGBT people than staying silent.
Yes, but then do it correctly.
Identity politics as it is now has resulted in a large number of "shit liberals say"-outrage-memes.
People are making fun of self-identifying because it is so absurd - does "I sexually identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter" ring a bell for you?
I'm sure you have good intentions for LGBT people, but if you unironically argue with concepts like self-identification or identity erasure, people will be driven off.
I'm driven off.
Its neither how things work in practice nor how we will get LGBT acceptance in the future.
> "identity politics" (which, to be clear is a phrase I still don't understand the meaning of)
In the US, identity politics is the most vocal view on LGBT issues.
Its core feature is the strong emphasis on self-identity and that it must be 'respected'.
How the latter happens in detail is subject to being abused as leverage to control other people.
Its only a power play if you see through it, and it rejects the normal-ness of LGBT people, segregating people into groups.
Contrast it to the other parts of the LGBT community, where people are like, normal people.
And happen to have transitioned or a having partner of the same sex.
That's as normal as chewing gum.
Nothing 'special' that needs any kind of extra things to be respected.
Just personal life choices.
I've isolated the statement I was responding to at least twice: "because this is what they think makes their voice 'valid'." You seem to think that trans people believe that, even if you yourself don't.
> Wow. You can't say that - that's really rude and a offense to transitioned people.
I don't see how differentiating between passing and non passing when we're talking about the impact of external perception is offensive, but please elaborate, I'm open to criticism.
> They only want to be accepted as Women.
And as I explained, this limits the definition of Trans to only a very specific type of trans person. It seems like you're saying that those are the right kinds of trans people. Perhaps that's why you're met with friction with those people: you're choosing to invalidate their self-perception because they don't conform to how you think a trans person should be.
In your mind, the trans "identity" is someone in one gender role who swaps to another gender role quietly.
After this point, the rest of your post was really just a rant about how you don't want to accept trans people who don't conform to your perception of them. That's you playing identity politics, it's forcing an identity on to them. And this is why I mentioned that I don't get identity politics: it's not a liberal or US-centric thing. It's a lens. It's a form of analysis of the world, a framework for looking at interpersonal interactions. Forcing someone to conform to an identity is identity politics just as much as identifying with an identity in a way you disagree is. They're two sides of the same coin.
The argument that identity politics forces you to be controlled is the exact same argument that the US religious right used for years to push back against all the "personal life choices" you mention, like marrying a same-gender person. It's the same argument that the US religious right pushes when they try to ban trans people from using the right bathrooms. The argument that respecting someone else's personal choice is an imposition on you. It's the same argument.
> I don't wish to work with self-identified transgender people due to this anymore. They take everything so personal even if its not about them.
> And just for saying this, same people will accuse me of hating trans people and rejecting their right to exist.
I mean, what you posted is a textbook example of transphobia, no matter how light it may be. I've worked with many trans people and have many trans friends, none of them have gotten angry when I've had to ask for their pronouns if I can't remember or need clarification.
Yes, I did. It doesn't change anything. It's still transphobic to lump them together and then attempt to justify your attempt to avoid them on your perceived notions.
As a thought exercise, if you were to change your argument to be one about race, it would be a racist thing to say 'I don't wish to work with black people because they take things so personal'.
You probably missed what i meant with "self-identified", in context of an online community.
A better analogy than the one you provided:
If someone comes to an online community and announces that they are cisgendered and must be referred in way X, i don't want to work with them, either.
This isn't a question of gender, race or sexuality.
Its a question about not being self-absorbed prick that forces everyone around them to walk on eggshells.
Experiencing gender dysphoria is a driving force for engaging in this kind of behavior, this is why my complaint is focused on these few trans people.
> If someone comes to an online community and announces that they are cisgendered and must be referred in way X, i don't want to work with them, either.
This literally happens all of the time, though? It's the 'default'. If you called a cisgendered man 'she' or a cisgendered woman 'he', they would likely politely correct you in the same way anyone else would. The only way you'd avoid that is by collectively referring to everyone in gender neutral pronouns which is certainly possible.
> Experiencing gender dysphoria is a driving force for engaging in this kind of behavior, this is why my complaint is focused on these few trans people.
And this is objectively wrong. People experiencing gender dysphoria is not a driving force in engaging in this kind of behavior (ie what you call 'taking everything so personal') considering, again, I have friends who have dealt with such issues and do not behave in the way you claim.
It really sounds like you're stretching your argument in attempt to justify your own transphobia. At best you're unfairly stereotyping them based on your own experiences and at worst you're behaving in an irrational manner by attempting to avoid them because you seem to think of them being 'self-absorbed pricks'. You're essentially arguing that people should shut up and not mention who they are at all.
> This literally happens all of the time, though? It's the 'default'.
No. Our conversation is a good example of that. The default is to state your business, not your sexual identity or race.
Normal people don't want to be judged by their skin color or sexuality or things like that, this is why they don't lay it out.
Stop taking sexual identity so seriously - its not central to anything.
> People experiencing gender dysphoria is not a driving force in engaging in this kind of behavior
I say, craving validation is the connecting factor. If you have different experiences with that, so it be.
> I have friends who have dealt with such issues and do not behave in the way you claim.
No one of the trans people i had relationships with acted in this way, either.
But in online communities around open source software, there are always a few black sheep that turn really emotional if you accidentally don't "respect their identity", and this includes alot of otherwise innocent behavior.
> No. Our conversation is a good example of that. The default is to state your business, not your sexual identity or race.
Is it? You started your conversation literally around identity, and claiming you chose to avoid people based on that identity. Regardless if they self-identify or not, you're the one that brought identity into this debate. The fact that you seem to choose to downplay sexual identity is rather funny, considering I'm willing to bet if you went out of your way to refer to a cisgender man or a woman as the opposite gender they would eventually get angry. So claiming it's not 'central' is bullshit.
> I say, craving validation is the connecting factor. If you have different experiences with that, so it be.
People want to be identified as who they are. Not sure how this is controversial. If you're talking to someone named John and you keep referring to him as Johnny when he says he doesn't want to be called Johnny, that's 'craving validation' by your argument. Remembering 'John wants to be called by John and not Johnny' is about as difficult as 'Remembering [Person] wants to be called by She and not He'.
> But in online communities around open source software, there are always a few black sheep that turn really emotional if you accidentally don't "respect their identity", and this includes alot of otherwise innocent behavior.
Yes, there are always a few assholes in open source development. This isn't exclusive to transgender people, I've met my fair share of cisgender people that turn emotional if you don't follow their rules. Does that mean I should start avoiding cisgender people all together?
You might come from a social environment where people are much more fragile than in my environment.
I tried to outline a specific behaviour that predominantly comes from self-identifying transgender people. If you haven't experienced these behaviours, we won't find a common ground there.
Yes, there are always some difficult people.
There are red flags to watch out for, and "self-defining as trans" is one of them.
Putting much emphasis on your sexual identity is also a red flag in general.
It's funny that you claim I come from a social environment where people are 'more fragile' when I consider it simply basic respect to call people what they want. It seems like you managed to completely ignore my John / Johnny example as well, so I think it's becoming clearer that you're not really here to debate in good faith.
Also personally, one of the red flags I find in difficult people is those that choose to stereotype an entire group. Usually they'll end up causing further problems down the line by not wanting to work as a team or ostracizing said members they stereotype.
Before understood more about gender identity, yes. I think it's likely more that I was speaking to a person when they were low on patience for reasons that had little to do with me. But it's amazing how vividly remember upsetting the person, and how afraid I can be at times at doing it again.
As a parent of a teenage child, I see it reasonably often between teens and "boomers". Teens absolutely use offense of misused pronouns as a weapon against older folks. But in fairness, older folks also refuse to use preferred pronouns as a weapon back.
But, of course, this is all typical generational strife, and the pronouns are mostly an irrelevant detail to the actual hostility.
So many social and cultural interactions are covers for hostility of various kinds that attempting to sanitise a relatively small subset is bound to fail.
Hostility runs on a spectrum from over-reaction caused by previous trauma to outright aggressive narcissism and sociopathy.
Unfortunately we don't have the social sophistication to reliably identify and call out hostility, or to accurately parse the difference between conscious ill intent, unconscious hostility and ill intent, over-sensitivity, personality disorder issues, criminal issues, and other forms of power play.
It's also not a big deal to accidentally get someone's last name wrong. There is way more social pressure around knowing and always using the correct pronoun for everyone you know.
Most of the people I know are LGBTQ with a large contingent of nonbinary people and trans people. The common theme when people bring this up from the other side is it's nice when people get it right on their own, but it hurts more when people assume wrong and then double down.
Using the wrong one can activate a low-level fear response for people trying to "pass" on the binary, but it's easily quelled by generally being kind. The fact that you're concerned about being wrong tells me you aren't the kind of person they worry about. Conventions wouldn't hand out pronoun stickers and pins if the widespread expectation was that people would just know.
Most of the social pressure you perceive comes from well-meaning cisgender allies trying to use their privilege to mold the world into something a little safer. Sometimes they go overboard. Have you ever seen a cisgender person try to argue with a nonbinary or binary trans person about their own identity not realizing they're talking to a person they're arguing about? It's surreal. They mean well.
I agree that some good will can go a long way. It's also surprisingly easy to just not use pronouns at all.
I was friends with a couple of trans people on college, and I would always either directly address them as "you", or use their name where I would normally say "he/she". It's not a big deal, I just hate that there is a subroutine in the back of my brain shouting "Don't say the wrong word! Don't say the wrong word!". I think that's the cognitive load OP was talking about.
If learning new pronouns was really that difficult, none of your peers would speak more than one language. This is just the way society deals with issues that are personal or to do with respect: you don't ask people why they use Ms., you don't ask why someone hasn't had children, you (probably) don't fistbump strangers, and you feel guilt when you forget someone's name. Similarly, in most of these cases, it's worse to be on the other side.
> You are describing a structured echo chamber. Or worse an internet of endless safe spaces to get just the view of the world that pleases you.
I'd ask you to think how this is any different from anything we had before the internet.
I actually think there is a difference in current communication patterns, but it's not being a structured echo chamber (we already had plenty of those before), and it's not something to be proud of.
The novel effect of social networks is amplifying and concentrating in a single point the worst instances of biased and unsubtle discussion, causing the recipient to burn up from the concentrated heat.
It's a process that replicates the dynamics of lynch mob; at least those were local effects, while now we get to have world-reaching lynch mobs. We need to put up firewalls so that inflammatory speech won't set everything on fire; and structured small communities is as good a solution as any.
In what sense is this not the right way forward? This seems to be the trend that’s been with us for at least 20 years. People increasingly pick the news they want to hear.
People might pick the news they want to hear; but thinking this is "fine" is an appeal to ignorance.
Ignorance is not strength.
For whatever it's worth I was raised dirt poor, central Britain in a city that had been in rapid decline for many decades- Yet I believed, fiercely that Europe was less than Britain, that Muslims were coming for our benefits and our women and that Britains colonial past was something to be admired, we had brought civilisation to the world. I believed that I was born "rich" compared to the rest of the world and I had a birthright to be taken care of.
I don't have to tell you how much it hurt me to learn how ignorant, bigoted and wrong I was.
How much taking in things that were true conflicted so concretely with what I believed that I rejected it outright.
Obviously my opinions have changed, but allowing me to hide from the world would not have done that. Only stepping forward and being exposed to that which causes discomfort allows for it.
Right, but did you believe these things because an algorithm on social media was giving you a limited view of the world?
My own view is that I could limit my intake of knowledge to just a handful of people, but if they were the right people, I’d end up with a more original worldview than if I tried to read “both sides” since “both-sides-ism” tends to reactively assume the people shouting old views loudly represent an entire debate.
I did not believe those things due to an algorithm, I believed those things because I was never exposed to anything outside of my "bubble". People in my City tend not to leave especially if they are poor.
Exposure to the real world had a painful destructive effect, and if I had clung back into my safe little cubby hole I would have done so swiftly.
--
I believe "both sides" is important; but you're right that people scream and drown out any modicum of moderation; but it noble to attempt to at least understand the spirit of the arguments on every side of a debate.
Make your own reasoning about the facts based on the perspectives that are given, but other than that don't allow yourself to be emotive.
Really, this is what journalism is supposed to be, but that kind of journalism dies out because humans love to _feel_ so selling feelings about things is quite easy; this fuels divides. Since news is no longer fact it's merely "view" of the facts, and often not all of them.
While I agree that at first all sides should be considered, often I find people view both sides with equal merit when it is easily worked out that one side holds more merit than the other. (Some examples of arguments holding less merit being ones that go against scientific evidence without evidence to back them up, arguments made in bad faith, arguments made with wilful ignorance of evidence)
I feel you on the growing up in a dogma infused environment, in my case rural England rife with homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and all that sort of general ignorance-based hatred and revulsion. Luckily I also had an internet connection from a relatively early age so I had exposure to outside perspectives or I would've likely had more years of repression and self loathing than I had and wouldn't have had anywhere near the opportunities I've had.
In my mind, journalism should focus less on giving all sides equal weight and staying neutral but more on finding all the evidence, giving you said evidence, and then discounting lies and manipulation of evidence. Or at least on giving you all the evidence for you to digest and come to your own conclusions rather than just a match of he-said, she-said type reporting. I find the issue I've described especially prevalent in some BBC news stories..
Edit: I forgot to add that I also strongly agree with you in the many news organisations and journalists overly sensationalizing and giving opinion as "news" and/or trying to incite emotions rather than broadened perspectives/informed opinions.
There's a concept known as steelmanning - most people aren't good at arguing their case, but their case usually has some kind of merit. You steelman an argument by trying to build the strongest, most defensible form of an opponent's argument, read it charitably and presume good faith and tgen try to take it down. That usually involves understanding why a stance forms and its emotional truth, and engaging with that has a funny effect of making people feel heard.
Not because of social media or a formal algorithim but a less formalized one referred to as "socialization" and decided by prior actions of those who came before, some long dead and some still alive today. It was madd up in part of thoughts of thinking people in different contexts and in part unthinking set in stone doctrines. Just like an algorithim essentially with the tweaks by programmers ans input sources providing the "thinking" and the content and program providing the "unthinking".
Not really. That would assume that the only existing channels are official channels. My description works as well for self-organised, distributed, unofficial channels.
Having an obkom would be helpful -- it's really hard to tell what you are allowed to say. It'd be nice also to have a grace period so there is some fair warning when certain ideas or words will become banned. Orderly authoritarianism is preferable to random, chaotic outbursts of censorious violence. But even just an official obkom rather than unofficial 'volunteer' versions of it would really reduce confusion here.
The Saudi Arabian religious police enforcing public edicts are preferable to ISIS pulling you out of a truck, giving you a theology pop quiz, and then shooting you when you get some answers wrong. The Anglican sacramental Test Act is preferable to a fake regime of toleration.
The problem with explicit code of conduct is that there is always a implicit interpretation of what the code of conduct say and how it should get enforced.
If we could get an explicit code of conduct with explicit interpretation with explicit enforcement then yes, they work quite well. Sadly most communities leave interpretation and enforcement up to the dominant group with an often explicit desire to not have those parts visible.
Wouldn't it be better ti provide people the tools to create their own channels, through personalized filtering algorithms? The idea that a central authority gets to decide what is acceptable and what is not is, in my view, only acceptable in extreme cases which are already covered by law.
Yes, that's why it's important to have decentralised social networks. You can have authorities to decide what is acceptable, but only for small groups.
You bring up some really interesting ideas, but there are certain times where communication is mission critical - and deeply considering complex communicational structures before posting/conveying information can eventuate in serious injury or loss of life. During those times, you simply need to be able to "get the message out" without worrying about the potential offense that you words may cause to a certain individuals.
Again, I sympathize deeply that some people are hurting badly right now, but what should we do when we're dealing with life-and-death situations and there isn't time to craft the perfect message on the perfect platform?
> You bring up some really interesting ideas, but there are certain times where communication is mission critical ... During those times, you simply need to be able to "get the message out" without worrying about the potential offense that you words may cause to a certain individuals.
True, but in those cases, you limit the participation in that channel. They didn't allow everyone to call in on the communication channels of the Apollo project, right?
Of course - and thank you for asking. One of my friends is a paramedic who primarily works in ambulances in LA.
One day, he arrives at a scene after a passer-by called 911.
A homeless man is lying on the street on top of garbage and cardboard boxes. There is urine and feces everywhere - it's a bad situation - and there are used needles lying next to the man.
The man is obviously in medical distress, and is unable to respond. When they try to attend to him, he wakes up and swears at them and swats at them, but then says he feels like he's dying and wants help. When they come close again, he again swears at them and swings at them.
As a matter of protocol, they have to radio in to headquarters and explain their situation.
This is tricky - they have to be politically correct about how they describe him. He's visibly degrading quickly, and may soon die if they don't intervene, but instead, they have to spend previous time on the radio making sure they use all the politically terminology so that no offense is caused - describing the homeless in California is a very politically charged subject and they could be disciplined if they use the wrong words.
If he is going into cardiac arrest, seconds can be the difference between life and death, and they're using them on trying to remember all the correct terminology and socially-acceptable phrasing.
Radio protocol is extremely specific. As is medical terminology.
If they're required to use a term for a person, but haven't been briefed on what term to use, then I think there are bigger problems there and "political correctness" is not the problem. Basic communication is. They will also not be penalised for using the wrong term when there's no briefing on what the correct term is.
If they can't remember what term to use when they have been briefed on it, then they have bigger problems (there are thousands of medical terms they presumably also struggle to remember).
I don't understand. Why does it matter if it's a specific communication protocol? If you have to filter your language when you're in a life and death situation with a potentially dangerous person who has used needles lying around, you've used up precious processing power that could otherwise be used to keep yourself safe and the sick person alive.
For the record - I checked with them - and they told me they were asked to take a test to check if they harbored "unknown biases". They were then sent to diversity and inclusion training, and came out totally confused about what to do and say, but they were assured that the hospital and the ambulance services were monitoring comms and wouldn't look favorably on "potentially offensive" terms.
Trying to describe a homeless man sleeping on rotten cardboard boxes who is covered in urine and feces with needles strewn around everywhere, who is both asking for help and attacking them is VERY HARD to do without using a term that someone could potentially find offensive.
I don't understand: you just did that. What was difficult about it?
(and I'll note that you spent a bunch of time mentioning ultimately irrelevant details. Being homeless, or in an area with feces and urine and cardboard probably aren't relevant to anyone responding. The important facts are that there's a person in need of immediate medical assistance, the area is potentially hazardous, and the person is being uncooperative).
Those are the three things that need to be conveyed.
They're relevant details because they directly affect the health and safety of the ambulance staff, and protocol dictates that they call in on anything that could be hazardous to them. Not to mention that those details could affect the treatment of the patient.
See? This is the problem. The filtering is more important to some people than actually doing the job correctly.
This is why speech must be free, because I don't want a paramedic who's treating me to be debating exactly how to define me to dispatch. I just want them to save my life.
No, I don't see. Precise communication is of the utmost importance in life and death situations. Consider pilots. The communication is extremely structured so as to precisely convey relevant information. Pilots are trained specifically and at length on how to communicate over radios in normal and emergency situations. This is done to make communication more efficient and effective. And these choices are data driven.
You're arguing for essentially the opposite of that.
> They're relevant details because they directly affect the health and safety of the ambulance staff
A person being homeless is not relevant to the health and safety of the medical staff. A person sitting on wet cardboard is not relevant to the health and safety of the medical staff. The area being hazardous is relevant, and was conveyed. You may argue that "the area has feces and needles" is necessary to communicate. And that's fine.
> This is why speech must be free, because I don't want a paramedic who's treating me to be debating exactly how to define me to dispatch
No, if this is your goal what you want is paramedics who are well trained in how to communicate effectively over radios, much like pilots are. This has nothing to do with free speech. Restrictions and regimentation on speech in this context would actually make the communication more effective. For example, specific guidance on what things should be communicated about the hazardous area: that feces and needles are relevant but that cardboard boxes and homelessness aren't. This way, there are fewer wasted words.
> For the record - I checked with them - and they told me they were asked to take a test to check if they harbored "unknown biases". They were then sent to diversity and inclusion training, and came out totally confused about what to do and say, but they were assured that the hospital and the ambulance services were monitoring comms and wouldn't look favorably on "potentially offensive" terms.
In Germany we have a similar phenomena too. Hard to translate, but unemployed people are now called employment-searching people for example. I get it, there are some people that think they are lazy, instead almost everyone wants to get a job. The terms are constructed to counter these prejudices, but unemployed people actually feel more discriminated against because of the blatant paternalism from academics that have no idea about being unemployed or actually working in a free economy.
Social sciences call that framing and I think it is really not constructive in many ways. Euphemisms don't help the people in question. Their last crusade is of course the gendered nature of our language, so every maskuline term has to be changed to be neutral. They could open their own mental asylum by now. To be fair, there are many social workers that really put in effort and have long since given up to fight against this insanity. But those are the one who actually have contact to patients.... CLIENTS! I am sorry, we don't call them patients anymore if their suffering is due to mental conditions....
The usual problem is when a message from such private channel gets spread publicly usually without context and author's consent. We see it often with leaked tapes from politicians' private meetings.
> The trick is to create channels with limited audiences
I truly feel that HN is a safe haven for such notations.
It's a provable, working example where first and foremost is to regard the other's words in a positive light, rather than assuming the worst. Anything deliberately otherwise gets moderated. I figure @dang sends a lot of personal emails struggling to adhere to this.
It's a system that can and should be replicated elsewhere imho.
Ironically, parent's comment here on HN has alerted me (& presumably others) about this diabolical practice (thanks @AHappyCamper), again proving HN as good, receptive platform.
People looking to start outrage mobs aren’t going to care that what you said was acceptable on the channel where you said it. You’re still the speaker, they’re still going to make it expensive for your real-world contacts to implicitly endorse your views by continuing to associate with you.
>> There is no "right" way to convey the issue above without offending someone.
You are not responsible for those people being offended. If people actually respond that way to your efforts they look stupid. Just carry on doing what is right.
Most of them are not actually offended but are claiming you may be offensive to someone else.
I love it when people throw the term "objectively false" at anything they disagree with - in this case, the person is sharing their opinion on what should be reality.
Someone's opinion on how things should be cannot be objectively false.
some of those companies don't really deserve to be trading.
i remember how back in my youth if i said something offensive against the government i would lose my job and be sent to a forced labour camp. that was during communism.
I mean it’s like people forget the gulags were only like 70 years ago. When people were wrongfully imprisoned for no good reason just to meet police quotas from the soviets government super powers. I definitely don’t disbelieve what you are saying.
Google did it to James Damore. People celebrated it, as it opposes their beliefs even though many psychologist publicly said that the gender difference identified in the memo are science backed.
I re-read his memo. I think it was wrong that he was fired, despite the fact that I can't actually agree that his memo was correct. He cherry picked much of his research and actually made a few over arching claims that are not well supported such as biological differences being represented in women vs men across cultures. He reached in a few places.
That being said, I don't know him personally, but I respect that he actually RESEARCHED and tried to have a dialogue, which unfortunately is lacking in today's society on both the left and right. I respect that he has an opinion, he shared it, he suggested changes and he actually seemed to be trying to reach the same goal that diversity programs are trying to reach but offered a critique.
I'm quite upset about how he was treated, and I wish that he took the lawsuit to it's natural conclusion in court rather than settling.
I think we can all agree, the main issue today is in our effort to create safe spaces and make the public forums safe for all, we've completely removed our ability to rationally think and listen to others viewpoints. What is offensive to the sensibilities of one person maybe completely rational and sane to another.
One of the reasons the legal system (supposedly) works is because it attempts to remove emotion from the process to provide a fair trial. I may not like the individual and think that they are guilty, but that doesn't matter. We need overwhelming evidence to determine that they are. We need to learn to put our differences aside and listen to the perspective of the other side and empathize. There is usually at least a grain of truth to what is being said. Without this, it's a pointless shouting match.
I think it was wrong to fire him and that he genuinely had no ill intend. More detrimental are voices that attest pervasive sexism in the industry and that women are oppressed by computer nerds, but it is no competition.
It was in conflict with the goals of management to get more women into tech. I also think such a memo (haven't read it) can put women under more scrutiny, even if it describes general trends that might not be applicable to individuals.
I think he is someone who can easily make the distinction in contrast to his accusers and everyone who studied computer science knows the demographics. Discrimination can be ruled out as a main factor easily. But even if the opinion of his accusers is dead wrong on all levels, management has decided that employment is not beneficial anymore. Science or not.
Backed by much of the media, and many spineless corps.
It was a convenient mistruth (for corps not wanting to threaten their bottom line with unwinnable controversy) that Damore is just a rabble-rouser;
You shouldn't pay too much attention to him, or read his actual memo, (or supporting links for context) - but if you are interested, we vox-plain the important stuff for you right here!..
Damore wrote an essay basically arguing women and minorities should be incapable of joining the software profession based on their genetics.
The effect of which would silence both their work rights and free speech rights.
Google, a private corporation, not a government, decided to stop contracting with him, as they have women and minorities on staff whose employment output likely outweighs his personal need to write long, politically charged, essays at work. To me that sounds like no one's essential rights were violated at all.
> Damore wrote an essay basically arguing women and minorities should be incapable of joining the software profession based on their genetics.
That is completely false and you should be ashamed if yourself for spreading such blatant lies. I urge anyone reading your comment to check for themselves and read Damore's essay, which was well researched, rational and compassionate, the exact opposite of the kind of libel that has been used to slander him. Damore will be a case study at some point when reason returns and people look back and try to understand how it came to be that fools and liars became the arbitrers of what others were allowed to say and think.
I often find that the usual so-called defenders of free speech do not hesitate for one moment with that libel charge whenever they encounter an opinion they happen to disagree with.
We know that "Damore wrote an essay basically arguing women and minorities should be incapable of joining the software profession based on their genetics." is factually false, considering that what should it be called if not libel?
> Google, a private corporation
Which by the way told its employees that they were free to publish their opinions and Damore acted on that premise.
free speech gives you certain right to say what you want to say, and express your opinion. It even lets you give your opinion on other peoples opinions.
It doesn't allow you to state as fact that someone holds an opinion that they do not. You can express an opinion, but there are limits on stating falsehoods, especially wrt other people.
you say "encounter an opinion they happen to disagree with", implying your statement about the memo is just your opinion, but you didn't say it in any way that suggests it was that subjective; and, making any unsubstantiated claim about a person is on shaky ground even if you did make it clear it was just opinion.
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we
don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
" was of course a proposition, not advanced,but the propasition that it could not be debated was put forward.
Newsflash!! This was being debated 30 years ago. No evidence ever found, apart from < 50% women in STEM
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we
don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."
Which could be interpreted, honestly, as saying...
"women and minorities could be incapable of joining the software profession based on their genetics"
That seems an acceptable interpretation only if it also means that "men and majorities could be incapable of joining the software profession based on their genetics."
Because both are encompassed by the more general "people could be incapable of joining the software profession based on their genetics."
And that's of course not the only interpretation possible, but the one you choose. You say it's because of "capability" but you could look at it in terms of "inclination", "interest", "comparative advantages" or other angles.
He literally had a list of suggestions for increasing the number of women in tech.
Much of the thrust of his essay was a critique of the methods being used to increase diversity, not of the goal or the feasibility of achieving the goal.
It was a technical critique. This method won’t work, kind of critique.
"Differences in traits" doesn't mean "incapable". You know what happens if you take a whole population and deprive them of adequate calcium and protein in their early years? You get a "difference in traits" as to their height. Damore made no Essentialist claims about race or gender. He was just trying to be helpful in explaining an observed phenomenon at one causal level back.
Mangalor said "should" rather than "could". Even then, I do not think that it could be interpreted like that. He talks about distributions of traits, the sentence that you quoted did not put minorities in a single box.
Not sure how this differs from a firing unless you are suggesting it was unrelated to the memo.
> his personal need to write long, politically charged, essays at work
You don't know the context. He didn't force the memo on people - he was actively encouraged to provide feedback to a forum on this exact, politically-charged, topic; then that memo was leaked, without his permission, (to unfriendly, politically-charged outside recipients) when someone found issue with it.
The insinuation "write long, politically charged, essays at work" that he abused company resources to do his own thing, versus being encouraged to engage with politics (which google does) and then finding himself on the wrong side of opinion is exactly the kind of abusive framing that hit-pieces used.
> women and minorities on staff
Who saw the memo because someone tried to offend them with it - not Damore. I don't disagree that sensitive topics might not be appropriate for wider audiences, but Damore is not responsible for that. No one was fired for leaking the memo, nor are media outlets being sued for propagating a false, offensive representation of the memo.
To be clear "women and minorities should be incapable of joining the software profession based on their genetics" is not something Damore said, it is something the media said, attributing it to him. It is the media therefore that owns these words and the offence they (and their distribution) caused. Not only did they slander Damore, but they also caused the offense Damore was fired for.
I have just reread the first few pages of his memo. I had forgotten, it has been a few years. It is naive, pompous, and offensive to people who have been fighting against the currents of prejudice and bigotry for generations.
I don't know Damore personally, so this concern might not apply, but I wonder if neuro-atypical folks aren't the hardest hit folks in the current reenactment of The Crucible.
EDIT: And The Scarlet Letter seems relevant as well.
they may get reprimanded, but not meaningfully. I mean Shell was complicit (allegedly) in rape and murder https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/feb/12/o... and they haven't been meaningfully reprimanded by consumers, I doubt someone getting fired for offending some people is going to amount to more than a slap that misses the wrist but moves the hair on the wrist via the vigorous breeze.
> You are not responsible for those people being offended.
There are different ways of communicating the same basic fact. Telling my wife she has a fat ass and telling her she probably shouldn't wear those pants contain the same basic information but will have vastly different outcomes.
The one message carries the side-band information that I am insensitive, lazy or just plain don't care about her feelings and the other shows that I am trying to state an uncomfortable fact honestly while taking her feelings into consideration.
You can definitely choose to go down a route of "these people get offended and it's completely irrational and unjustified, and they are wrong to do so, so to teach them a lesson i'm going to shut my mouth and complain to everyone about how they are bad people that are forcing me to self-restrict my freedom of speech and as a result they are actively helping the slave trade".
Or you might also consider the route of "these people get offended and i don't understand why so i'm going to work to listen to them and talk with them one by one until i do understand on a core level how they feel and where those feelings are derived from, and based on that i will do my best to share my thoughts in a way that is considerate of my deep connection and understanding of all the people around me, and because everyone has built a personal connection to me, they too will be able to accept my feelings and assume charity."
Just depends on which route you derive more self-satisfaction from. You can assume an air of superiority and righteousness in either direction, and that's something that all humans love to feel.
I don't think this is feasible since you would need constant appeasement and the source of offense often cannot be deconstructed by argument. For an idealistic approach it is well intentioned, but that would gradually shift the level of accepted speech towards a form of orthodoxy. The stigmatization of feeling superior for more eccentric speech is an example of that actually.
Look at history where the "moral" authority suppressed speech, it will end up just like that. There are also people that lie about being offended. Reaching out is falling into a trap in that case.
The dichotomy of these "routes" is wrong. A discussion must not be an argument, even if internet exposure lets you believe otherwise, but it can be.
> I'm going to work to listen to them and talk with them one by one until i do understand on a core level how they feel and where those feelings are derived from,
Many of the people who are actually condemned for being offensive are condemned by the media or by some third party who's being offended on behalf of someone else, who we never get to actually hear from, and who might not even exist.
It would definitely be interesting to hear more from AHappyCamper on what offending that they're doing that they're trying to solve.
Are they trying to get support from the government, but government officials are offended that they use the term "Black Market" in their communications and refuse to engage with them?
Are they trying to raise public awareness, but their posts are being flood with replies demonizing them for using the term "Black", and so they feel they're not able to effectively spread the message?
Are their efforts proceeding exactly as hoped, but the media is demonizing them for using the term "Black"? Or maybe a grandma facebook group? And they feel slighted when they are trying to bring about this great benefit for the world?
Are they not actually seeing any offense at all and just want people to beat down a strawman for them?
I think the point is that it’s very expensive to do the former. There are 195 counties, 4,300 religions, n different cultures, languages, m different races, to figure out the right permutation of words that offends the least seems like a daunting challenge. It’s easier to just not speak.
Is there ever a case where, after the first round of understanding and concession is done, that then, another discussion requires more concessions? Or, is there some objective way to determine a boundary line?
Because it works. Because instead of discussing an issue they have found they can hurt anyone who does not wholly agree with their position. Then they celebrate that damage and are encouraged to continue to do so with impunity never once imagining they will be on the other side.
The recent news stories about it happening in newsrooms and businesses should be no surprise when those stories were occurring with colleges for years prior. They learned they can take their heckler's veto to beyond silencing to the point of causing real damage.
People used to throw up the bogeyman of the religious right silencing the masses but instead we have the tyranny of the left to whom ideas are weapons and justification comes by laying claim that physical threat exists in mere thoughts and that justifies real punishment.
Be honest, I can guarantee many here are enjoying it to the point of glee but that is because you have been market researched manipulated by politicians into a certain pattern of thinking and reaction. Now that reaction is turning violent and it will eat both sides.
Again, I empathize with the feelings of people who may feel emotionally threatened by a derogatory comment, but some speech deals with people whose lives are in imminent mortal danger (e.g. those about to be sold on Black Market) and if we can't quickly discuss their cases and potential responses to rescue them, then they will be doomed to a life of untold misery. In such situations, there is no time to filter every comment and every email for potential sources of offense - we need to convey info as fast as possible.
You are right and I do not think you should waste a single thought on the easily offended. They suck. There is no hope for that kind of faked fragility. Somewhere will always claim to be offended by something you say or do, to the point that the only safe thing for you to do is nothing at all (maybe). Much better stay true to your heart and plow ahead with the good work your are doing. Good people will see it and as to the others, fuck them.
> I do not think you should waste a single thought on the easily offended.
Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't work, because these people have the power to have a significant negative impact on your life (get you fired, ruin your reputation etc).
This has become a problem because the internet social networking has opened up the potential of mob justice tar and feathering that is causing people real harm in terms of their livelihood and I'd imagine mental well being.
Could you just say “slave market” or “illegal market”?
Of course, black in this context refers to the transactions being performed in the shadows, and has nothing to do with the colour of the skin of the participants in the market.
It’s all a bit absurd, but it’s also a trivial change to adopt.
Once you start with this type of thinking, it never stops, and instead of focussing on how to save slaves from a life of misery, you're instead having meetings on which words are less offensive in your posts, messages, and internal communiques.
The amount of energy that this takes up is ENORMOUS, especially when you're dealing with something as difficult and dangerous as the slave trade. And what do you do when the new terms you've chosen all of a sudden become not acceptable?
If we agree that many types of non-threatening speech are no longer allowed, it becomes almost impossible to talk and convey ideas, especially in high-stress areas like this one.
Imagine a medic who waits to treat a homeless person who has overdosed because they can't remember the politically correct way to refer to the person, and they need to radio into the command center first before they begin treatment. So the person dies because the stressed out medic couldn't remember the politically correct terminology because they were trying to work out the best course of treatment...
>> Once you start with this type of thinking, it never stops ... you're instead having meetings
Is this an example of the slippery slope fallacy?
There was no meeting required, the idea and action were raised and taken in the same parent post. Parent poster started with that type of thinking and avoided the halting problem.
>> The amount of energy that this takes up is ENORMOUS
Is it possible that learning to use different words in many contexts is the same as the act of picking up a thesaurus? How commonly does it not take such a trivial amount of energy? How commonly do you need to expend an enourmous amount of energy to achieve this end?
>> especially when you're dealing with something as difficult and dangerous as the slave trade
There's a bigger point can be made here, what if you're dealing with a topic you don't know well enough to navigate possible sources of offence? If you don't know, then your 2 choices are learn or ignore, it's possible that both of these are valid choices depending on context.
>> no longer allowed
"Allowed" is quite a vague term for the concept you raise - are we saying law against particular words or are we saying social norm and convention that can be broken in art, in protest, in challenge to the status quo? If it's anything short of a law that expressly forbids particular words, then the rest of your sentence's argument is nullified.
>> Imagine
Or don't. Slippery slope fallacy is a real danger in itself to be avoided.
> Is this an example of the slippery slope fallacy?
Is it? It doesn't seem like it is because...
> There was no meeting required
... GGP's comment started a discussion on this very matter, still ongoing, instead of merely accepting that the term "black market" isn't offensive... Which it isn't.
> Is it possible that learning to use different words in many contexts is the same as the act of picking up a thesaurus? How commonly does it not take such a trivial amount of energy? How commonly do you need to expend an enourmous amount of energy to achieve this end?
You don't find this whole discussion exhausting? I do, it's entirely asinine.
> If it's anything short of a law that expressly forbids particular words, then the rest of your sentence's argument is nullified.
Because people haven't been fired and/or had their reputations ruined even though they said perfectly legal things? The argument is not nullified just because you try to will it so.
It's not. The parent and grandparent conversation stopped where they did. Our discussion isn't theirs. We're not pursuing the slippery slope on their behalf, we're not debating the merits of particular word choices.
> whole discussion exhausting? I do, it's entirely asinine
And yet, you of your own free will continue to engage it. Something doesn't stack up between what you say and what you choose to do but it's your affair, i have no cause to dig deeper so i stop here on this particular avenue.
> The argument is not nullified just because you try to will it so.
Agreed. Your argument
>>> it becomes almost impossible to talk and convey ideas
was nullified by:
>> If it's anything short of a law that expressly forbids particular words
A law doesn't make it impossible for me to use the words - i can choose to use the words but only at the cost of breaking the law. It's fair to characterise that as "almost impossible".
No construct exists with lesser severity than a law which exceeds the "almost impossible" test. QED.
Someone once said "Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in the mud. After a while you realise the pig likes it."
It's not a slippery slope fallacy because it actually happens. We get offended by some phrase, so we invent a euphemism for it. Then a few years later, we get offended by that euphemism, so we invent a more vague euphemism. And on and on. Go to YouTube and look up George Carlin's bit on "Shell Shock".
The proper course of action I find to bad faith is scorn and ridicule until they either look like absolute tools or flee.
They are after social capital so harm and belittle their social status as much as possible in return. Treat them like any other cowardly bully or predator and make yourself offically Not Worth It as a target because their capabilities will be harmed by the proverbial scratched corneas.
"Offended by the term Black Market? That is the offical term for illegal portion of the economy and this is about the ILLEGAL slave trade."
Are you saying in any context? That's not the proposal as i read it.
>> >> Could you just say
>> censoring
For censoring to be the case, it must be that you can't use particular words.
I read the case as
1. the GP's post expressing a desire to show heightened care to a reader
2. your parent posting a possible solution
Taking this to an extreme, if both behaviours above were to become a social norm then some words in some contexts would become extremely frowned upon to the point that you would personally choose not to use them.
They'd still not be censored though. Documents would continue to be written with the offensive terms by those who seek to offend. The words would be used in the socially unacceptable way in service of making a stronger point.
> So what should I do? Just shut my mouth and don't say anything? Then the slave trade will continue to operate freely...
All speech besides threats of violence needs to be free, or we can't progress as a society.
Okay, you got me, he didn't self censor but he was talking about considering self censoring and chose not to. QED no one has ever self censored out of fear of reprisal.
On HN, if you disagree with a comment, you downvote it and punish the author. (Or, at least, that is the common way to respond, and for good reason - the only "disagree" button is the one that hurts the credit of the OP)
This especially hurts new commenters, whose credit is fragile (and who don't know the cap on down-votes). Which keeps the conversation "safe", and the lurkers quiet.
Cynical me thinks this is a reflection of a society that thinks we need to quiet (and punish) everyone who disagrees with them.
EDIT: Replaced "he" with a gender neutral term to be safe.
> (Or, at least, that is the common way to respond, and for good reason - the only "disagree" button is the one that hurts the credit of the OP)
I don't think that's a good reason. You should downvote if you think someone is arguing disingenuously or otherwise writing nonsense that doesn't belong on HN. If you merely disagree, you should upvote instead, and articulate your disagreement in a reply.
I agree with this. It's very frustrating to see people downvoted (even when I disagree with them) when they have articulated their argument eloquently or made an original point.
It happens a lot here, and it doesn't reflect well on those doing it IMO.
I agree with you 100%, and that is what I try to do myself.
I think it is wrong of HN to not have a disagree but great comment button, hence my complaint about it reflecting a negative aspect of society.
But, the common practice is to do as I described. Case in point, my comment was down-voted! I clearly agree with you, and am pointing out an unfortunate fact, but since someone don't like that fact, I lost a point.
>All speech besides threats of violence needs to be free, or we can't progress as a society.
The problem with that simple rule is that there is no simple way to distinguish threats. Take a statement like "I don't think black people deserve to live", technically not worded as a threat, but the sentiment is no different. Similar examples varying in strength, obfuscation and contextual meaning can be produced in unlimited quantities. No hard rule can deal with all this, so have to debate what should and should not be allowed.
No. That’s logically flawed. We’ve seen this already, where this argument is being used to arbitrarily curtail all sorts of speech.
By this argument almost any idea you disagree with could be considered a threat, and honestly, it seems like it is human nature to sort of behave as if ideas that are ‘bad’ are a threat to my safety.
It takes effort to fight that impulse.
We need very narrow exceptions to free speech: specific incitements to violence seem to be one.
Your argument is already assuming its conclusion, i.e. that all speech should be free. But then you also recognize that, no, actually, some kinds shouldn't be (i.e direct threats).
The point is: that line you're drawing is arbitrary. You can define it narrowly and precisely, and I think that's what you tried to do here, but at the end of the day you chose where to draw it.
There's people trying to get things done and then there's people trying to get in the spotlight with virtue signaling. And yes, they are willing to do actual harm to the first group's livelihood to get in that spotlight.
The Middle East IS a hellhole. Speaking directly from there. Rich people in the West just don’t want to admit that, so they can do nothing for their fellow humans and still take the moral high ground. The current left survives only on privilege.
You do realise that that is your prerogative, right? To hold the dissemination of your work against slavery hostage because of a concern that "black market" might be offensive? I don't understand these priorities.
Of course, and thank you for asking. The group I was involved in was repatriating Eastern European women who had been duped. They responded to ads in the paper that were seeking farmhands to spend the summer picking fruit for excellent wages. When the women showed up to the "interview" at the farm, they were drugged and kidnapped.
From there, they were transported to Egypt, where they were smuggled close to the border and "conditioned". Conditioning involves repeatedly forcing them to take strong drugs like heroin, so that they become chemically addicted. The drugs act as an effective restraint. If the girl escapes, she has no way to get a fix within 48 hours, and goes into withdrawal.
Eventually, they are smuggled into slave markets in various countries there, where they are auctioned off or sold via direct sale. Usually, an auto mechanic is involved - he will build the girl into a car for transport. She will be sewed into the seats in the back of the car, built into the dashboard just behind the engine - it's simply awful. Travel can take several days and many don't survive.
I can't say much about how we intervened, but we worked with the authorities to intercept them and repatriate them to their homes in Europe.
Well, if you are genuinely worried about terminology you can call that what it is, the "white slave trade". It's ancient, extensive, and completely, 100 percent, not taught in schools. So there's a lesson there too.
a. Sometimes there isn't time to craft the perfectly non-offensive message. You need to be able to freely communicate, or the hesitation can easily cost someone their life.
b. I'm sure there are people who would be offended by the term you used too. If everything is potentially offense, then at a certain point it becomes very hard to say anything, even if you're trying to stop slavery.
I personally don’t care if I offend someone but the reality is if I do it with my real identity i’m putting my job on the line. So, I withdraw and let the few strongly opinionated ones have their 15 mins.
I somehow think that the people who get insulted and make a big deal about such terms aren't people who actually do something to help with these issues so you wouldn’t need to care about reaching them.
People lose jobs and suffer threats and harrassment if the cancel culture mob turns it's sights on you. It's not something you can just not care about.
The reality of this is that no matter what, someone is going to be upset with whatever you do. The bigger a voice you are the louder the boos become. There are plenty of groups that I am ok with being disliked by.
It comes down to your individual values, what you stand for and what your intentions are. If someone you don't know is attacking you, well that's probably not someone to listen to.
When highly educated people allow themselves to be pinged into outrage, controversy and violence time and time again, yes, the best option is to remain quiet. Taking a different path could expose someone to the most severe personal and business consequences.
It saddens me to say this because it means we got to a place I never thought possible.
I just googled it and found the terms shadow economy or underground economy. You can just use those? Are you really afraid you'll be "cancelled" for using a term that is still extremely common, and if so isn't the answer to use a different term?
Really the only thing I can say is help as many people as possible. If you talk with 10 people and 4 will hate you for the rest of your life and 6 will actually do something to contribute to the cause then you are still ahead compared to staying silent.
Is this "Black Market" in line with what people are talking about when saying offended? And I assure you, the slave trade will continue or discontinue with or without your efforts.
Wait, are you saying that we shouldn't be trying to save slaves and stop slavery? That's like saying we should close down hospitals and stop all surgeries because death will continue with or without our efforts...
I don't understand your first sentence. Please re-iterate.
Free does not mean devoid of consequence in the private domain.
Otherwise, if I am ever rejected by a company in an interview it would be a clear violation of my free speech rights.
It wasn't violent. And I shouldnt be afraid to disclose my opinion that bubble sort is indeed the fastest sort algorithm under all conditions and scenarios.
> But now I have to be worried that I'll insult people by using the term Black Market, and will also insult people by giving off the impression that the the Middle East is a 3rd world primitive place where they buy and sell slaves.
Ha! There is nothing illegal about an underground market. And the real issue is: if any use of terminology can get you blacklisted (another potential faux pas) then you end up not being able to say anything. At a certain point, all language becomes not viable because anything could potentially cause offense, so as a result, you just stop talking... even though you're trying to save slaves.
not all, there are plenty of ways to phrase something without offending people - unless of course the content of what you are saying is itself, offensive :)
We were dealing with life and death situations. The pressure is beyond intense. If you mess up, a girl will be locked in a cave for much of her life. It's not a "calm" environment where you can nitpick every term for political correctness. You just need to convey the info that you need.
Re raising awareness, there is no way to say "We're trying to stop slavery in the Middle East and shut down the human Black Markets" without offending someone.
I appreciate your concern about the naming and I think you are right to have that concern. The problem with this (to be obvious) is that 'black' is being used as an perjorative because there are good markets and bad markets but the good ones don't have an adjective, and 'black' is an attribute which is also used to describe people who are born with darker skin (perhaps unavoidably so, for the forseeable future).
Is there a reason can't you just call this a Slave Market ? I mean, wikipedia has a page entitled just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_market. If you wish to disambiguate from historical you could add 'modern', 'contemporary', 'underground', or 'secret' very easily.
As to the location, it might be the case that the middle east is where you were involved, but I rather suspect that a) not all the slaves sold remain in that area and b) this does not only happen in that area. Certainly I have read of modern slavery occurring here in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. I have certainly read of women from China, Nigeria and Eastern European countries for instance, being trafficked for prostitution in recent years and I'm pretty sure that this is not the whole story. You are doing great work[0] actively working against slavery, right? If your organisation were successful in the middle east, would it then simply close down?
You really can't spend the 30 seconds needed to think about "hmm, maybe be a bit careful about the words I'm using here in case my message gets lost in criticism of my language"?
As others have said, finding a non-offensive synonym for "Black market" takes a single search, about 5 seconds. Is it really that time-critical? Where are you sending these messages that those 30 seconds are "life or death" yet they're spread widely enough to be potentially offensive?
"messing up" involves what, exactly? Because it seems to me that using a racist term is more likely to divert the attention from your message, not less.
> You really can't spend the 30 seconds needed to think about "hmm, maybe be a bit careful about the words I'm using here in case my message gets lost in criticism of my language"?
If I had thought there was a situation where "every second counts" was actually true, it would be human trafficking. You seem to disagree.
> Because it seems to me that using a racist term is more likely to divert the attention from your message, not less.
"Black market" is definitely a "racist" term now? GP only gave it as a potential example, or at least that's how I read it. The point is that wording the message like that is not actually going to divert attention. Except for the few people trying to police speech at every turn—and who will try to harm him over it—even though the message itself did its job (a far more helpful job than the people trying to police speech would ever do, for that matter).
There is a difference in knowing the meaning of a word and knowing the myriad of ways a word can be perceived by your audience. One is very easy the other is a gargantuan task.
All communication is an attempt to create meaning in the mind of the listener. If you use words that the listener perceives to have a certain meaning, but that is not the meaning you intended to create, then your message will not communicate your meaning correctly.
In other words, all words are given meaning by the listener, not the speaker. Your intentions when saying something are irrelevant (but are usually taken into consideration because no communication is perfect).
The point is that the only thing you can control, as the communicator, is the words you use. You can't control your audiences vocabulary and their interpretation, thus the onus is on the communicator to communicate their message, not the listener. It's up to the communicator to understand their audience and make the best faith attempt to communicate that they can, and to listen and learn how to communicate effectively to the intended audience after a failure occurs.
> to listen and learn how to communicate effectively to the intended audience after a failure occurs.
You, accidentally, hit the nail on the head. I'm pretty sure that the intended audience often gets the message just fine.
The mobs trying to police everyone else's speech are never the intended audience; they just butt in to try to control how everyone else talks regardless of how much they actually care about the topic, group or subject matter.
In this particular example, I highly doubt that anyone in the middle of working against slave trade cares about whether anyone used the words "black market". It's only later, if that ever were discussed on twitter or reddit, etc, that one would start finding people taking issue with that choice of words.
> If the "mobs" are receiving a message not intended for them, the onus lies on the communicator to resolve this.
That's just terrific: I joke around with my friends in private chat, there's a leak, a twitter mob gets ahold of the data and doesn't like my joke. They then try to get me at my job, ultimately getting me fired.
All of that was my fault... As said by you.
> Are you currently doing that?
... I don't know how to answer this. The very root comment you're currently arguing against was made by such a person. We're inside that comment thread...
>The very root comment you're currently arguing against was made by such a person. We're inside that comment thread...
Did you make the original statement? I'm confused. You said that people shouldn't be an armchair analyst in discussions. Then you proceeded to do it. I then called you out on it.
I feel like you have removed so much nuance from the discussion that what you are saying is essentially meaningless.
Choose your words wisely, listen, react, respond.
It says nothing about the intent of the listener. A listener can intentionally take a statement in good faith or bad faith. If your statement is taken in bad faith and weaponized against you it's hard to respond over the chorus of the angry mob waiting to skewer the new victim. People enjoy being outraged. Usually, once your side of the story comes out they have moved onto their next cause and could care less what you really meant.
So, as others have said, it's better to just say nothing.
The point is you can't control the listener. You can only control yourself and your statements. If you find yourself in situations where people are weaponizing your statements against you, then you should consider listening and learning from them so that you can communicate effectively in the future. That's all you can do. You can't control other people.
I really don’t see how what you are saying helps in any way. There can be a conversation outside of our agency in the situation. Sure we can adjust our language to the ever more sensitive sensibilities of society but we can also question those sensibilities at the same time. Question their harm and their value.
The problem is that you think the problem is "the ever more sensitive sensibilities of society" but the real problem is that you're unwilling to listen to other people and communicate with them effectively.
You can't control other people's sensibilities. If you find that your actions don't return responses that you want, you should consider adjusting your actions.
What's the saying? Doing the same thing expecting different results is the definition of crazy?
It means/implies under the cover of darkness, or within a "black" box - un-seeable...A market place for anything illegal.
Going full on, we could remove the word "black" from our vocabulary. So hex #000000 would now be "abuefho" (some random made-up word)
until people conscript that for their own designs and use it pejoratively: "you 'abuefho' jerk!"...
Because the words "Black Market" literally mean and describe the place which the GP was talking about every where in the world. This is not only an American or English thing, many of other languages use the same expression (black + market) to mean the same thing.
Genuine question - I hang around in some pretty seriously left-wing, often social-justice-obsessed circles and I've never heard anyone complain about the term black market, or want to pretend that slavery doesn't go on in the middle east. Have you got examples of this kind of thing being commonplace? I have heard people complain that people complain about these things, but never first-hand experienced people's complaints about language beyond stuff that seems pretty benign like "don't use ableist or racist slurs". I would say that I'd be the most likely to see stuff like this - I spend a lot of time online, mostly in leftist and social justice circles, and most of my friend group in the real world aren't too different. I think that the idea that free speech is under attack is entirely a fabrication, and the idea that people get "offended" at this stuff is no more real. The term "triggered", which is so often used by the right to refer to people offended over nothing, is a term specifically referring to people with PTSD or trauma. You'd understand that they might want to be careful with subjects that might "trigger" them - i.e. set off episodes of PTSD - and when people give content or trigger warnings that's what they're talking about. No-one who liberals and the right might call a SJW cares about "offensive" content, and if anything leftist and social justice circles LOVE offensive content, they just hate when people openly and deliberately punch down. It is definitely true that leftists will criticise use of language, but when they do it's often that there's a good reason that is deliberately ignored by those who rail against this criticism (see use of "retard" or "spastic", or the fact that "aspergers" is named after a nazi who wanted to commit genocide on those with autism) but this idea that it's arbitrary or that everything is offensive isn't borne out by reality.
> I've never heard anyone complain about the term black market
It is not the most used term in the world. Why not try gimp, git, white/blacklist, etc?
> or want to pretend that slavery doesn't go on in the middle east
To be frank I was unaware that slavery was a thing in the middle east until I stumbled upon the GP's post so I presume that such a thought is not that rare. Are you sure that you just did not talk about the topic with your friends?
> I think that the idea that free speech is under attack is entirely a fabrication
This is probably due to your personal beliefs. I presume that you consider it free speech as long as your own beliefs are not being censored. Just in another post in this thread you talked about how firing that professor would be an ok thing to do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638867
As for examples of free speech being attacked. Check out the whole Stallman case from last year, or the Assange case, or the Damore case, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23635384 - there was even a case with a ruby github project not that long ago. I personally was accused of being a pedophile and there was a "petition" to ban me from a server that I dwelled on (by someone who was not even a member) because I dared to defend Stallman's right to speech.
> if anything leftist and social justice circles LOVE offensive content
As long as it is offensive against the people who they dislike, yes.
> there's a good reason ... see use of "retard" or "spastic", or the fact that "aspergers" is ...
It is not a fact of nature that there is a good reason to avoid these terms, rather, it is your personal opinion - accusing them of ignoring what you consider as a good reason when they do not consider it as such one is not logically inconsistent.
> Are you sure that you just did not talk about the topic with your friends?
Note that GP mentions that they're involved in left wing/social justice circles. Many of those circles involve activism that extends beyond the US, so being aware of things like international sex trafficking, forms of slavery, etc. is probably more likely in those circles than in an average person.
> Just in another post in this thread you talked about how firing that professor would be an ok thing to do
I don't think GP said what you claim they said.
> As for examples of free speech being attacked. Check out the whole Stallman case from last year, or the Assange case, or the Damore case
Stallman wasn't about speech. He was a missing stair at best, and at worst someone who repeatedly abused his position to harass women. Are you going to argue that sexual harassment should be protected by the principle of speech?
I admit I'm not particularly informed about Assange, but as far as I can tell the charges against him are for soliciting espionage/hacking. In other words, requesting other people commit crimes for him (and in other cases for aiding in crimes). I don't think those things should be protected acts, even if you believe that Assange has been a force for good (which I don't). It's like trying to defend Snowden on free speech grounds. No, he committed crimes. Arguably the crimes he committed were done with a good moral purpose, but he violated multiple laws. Assange doesn't have the defenses Snowden did (whistleblowing).
As for Damore, as someone who spoke with Damore on his "document", I can say that from my personal interactions, HN gives him way too much credit. I formed my opinions on his document from my interactions with it and with him, prior to any media attention, and the martyrdom he is given is undeserved.
The UCLA professor is under investigation not for "reading the letter from a birmingham jail" but for refusing to self censor after multiple students requested that he do so (and he can't be fired anyway). It's more complicated than "he read a speech".
While I don't know anyone who goes off the rails on someone who about terms like "black market," I do think there are academics studying terms like these [0] and how they effect culture and society as a whole. I also think they would communicate in such a way as to say "Hey it's not cool to use that word because it promotes institutional racism, can we use another term instead?"
>This commentary addresses the widespread use of racist language in discussions concerning predatory publishing. Examples include terminology such as blacklists, whitelists, and black sheep. The use of such terms does not merely reflect a racist culture, but also serves to legitimize and perpetuate it.
I argued with a family member about this just the other day. She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive on Twitter. I asked her what happens after we get him fired? Can he earn back the worthiness to again feed his family? Will he need to denounce his views or just stop spewing them publicly? Will he just need to collect unemployment for the rest of his life now that we've deemed him a heretic unworthy of work?
The answers of her and her friends bounced between "I don't care what happens to racists like him" and calling me a racist for "defending" him. One participant said that he'll just have to work a job making far less like "the rest of us." As if there's a cap on how much money racists are allowed to make. I read everything he said that offended people, and I didn't see anything racist, as far as I can tell, he just hates protesters and "PC" culture.
I just can't shake the first 3 words of The Constitution from my thoughts lately. Very nice of the LA Times to include a picture of it at the top of the page. We are not two separate entities in this country, the government and the NOT government. We are all The People. And we should all uphold the rights guaranteed in The Constitution to all of our fellow citizens.
> I asked her what happens after we get him fired? Can he earn back the worthiness to again feed his family? Will he need to denounce his views or just stop spewing them publicly? Will he just need to collect unemployment for the rest of his life now that we've deemed him a heretic unworthy of work?
As someone who's a devout Christian, it's quite interesting to me to see how the same anti-patterns which plague zealous religious movements -- intolerance, judgementalism, lack of an avenue for repentance / rehabilitation, unquestionable dogmas, inquisitions to root out heresies, factionalism, etc -- plague the progressive movement as well.
"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me." - The Apostle Paul
Far too many people today, many of whom I suspect have a recent inclination to harboring particular political views at all, are missing the entire point of politics - that it's a debate.
It's the great debate, the one that we set up entire electoral systems to have, and built entire buildings in which it would be held.
Today, a dangerous number of people are outright enraged by having their dogmatic political beliefs challenged, and they'll go to great lengths to ensure that you can't share yours.
It's a mess. Years ago, attempts at political conversation were more often than not met with indifference and you had to find like-minded people interested in having them. We used to bemoan that too few people were engaged in politics. Who knew that it would be this much of a mess once they were.
I am not surprised by this at all. Somewhere I read that 'The more strict the scriptures, the more interpretation is magnanimous and compassionate' And 'the more liberal the written text, interpretation will be very strict'
Whenever I hear term 'climate denier' not even 'climate change denier' I know speaker is stewing in his own superiority and least bothered about actual improvement.
I'll go a step further. All this yelling at people may shut them up, but it doesn't change their hearts. It may even harden them.
Someone's a racist? Getting them to stop lynching people is necessary, absolutely. Getting them to stop using the n-word is needed for a civilized society. But more deeply, they need their heart changed, not just their external behavior. They need to see "those people" as being of equal value to themselves.
Well, the only thing I know that can change hearts that way is the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Note well: I did not say "going to church". That's not the same thing.)
I think the common root between the two is a belief in having found a universal and unquestionable Truth from which it logically follows that anyone that denies that Truth must be "evil".
The thing is that these groups (yeah, yeah, always with the generalizations) preach empathy but have no trouble to get people fired, their families too if possible. I think they behave this way because of pressure from social media and racism and sexism are used as some form of emotional sink.
Maybe that is too harsh on them in contrast of people just flaming random people by random characteristics, but they do have real institutional support.
She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive on Twitter.
The thing with situations like this is that it's not that the crowd is reporting that a crime has been committed. It doesn't even matter what was said, it's just that thousands of people are threatening that they will boycott their product. Companies and organisations just need to realise that those people were never their customers anyway and will have forgotten about it tomorrow. A Twitter campaign to get an employee fired should be treated as no more than a DDoS attack and mitigated the same way.
I saw a large thread on a subreddit about music asking others to boycott a specific store because the CEO made a campaign donation to Trump. Several people sounded like they were actual customers...
But the kicker is that in the end it turned out that he didn't even make the donation.
I see things like this all the time on Facebook. It’s quite annoying.
One that was circulating was for boycotting anything Peter Thiel had significant involvement in because he is a major donor to Trump. Not much of a surprise but Theil is either a board member or has invested in many companies... So, the list was large and purely virtue signaling. It had other major donors on it too.
I don’t know if this cancel culture really works for large companies. Most companies have taken money or have board members or high level employees that are on opposing sides of the political spectrum. (With some of both sides who have donated heavily to political campaigns...)
This is something which I have become more aware of after reading "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. I am now wary of posting any thoughts online which go against the tide of popular opinion. One of my takeaways from that book was that the cost of saying anything controversial online can be limitless. It's scary how mob "justice" and the rampant virtue signalling these days can ruin lives and careers. It's not just governments policing speech: the public is just as guilty.
The issue isn't necessarily that he doesn't deserve to have a job, but he certainly doesn't deserve to take advantage of what is demonstrably a position of power and influence over others to spread hate in a public forum. Freedom of speech is treated as this unassailable privilege in any arena but if the speech in question is, for example, a violent fatwa calling for the death of an author, as in the case of Salman Rushdie, I think it's entirely justified for a public forum to suppress that. Let those who want to spread violent or damaging ideas find a private platform for it and leave it to them to find an audience.
Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve been Publicly Shamed” touches on this. Less from the angle of PC culture and more about anger on Twitter. I think it’s a good book and interesting even if you disagree with the conclusions.
> She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired ...
> ... he'll just have to work a job making far less like "the rest of us."
How much do they think PIs make anyways? It depends on school, but adjuncts only make ~$1250/credit and typically have no health insurance [0]. They all have side gigs to make ends meet.
I recently read a story (AITAH) where a persona who worked as a university professor (a neighbour) was throwing branches into someones back yard and trespassing (to smoke). After the police didn't do anything, they contacted their work (the university) and later considered social messages of the form "University professor did <this>". I was fairly uncomfortable with this; I feel these kind of things need to be handles by e.g. courts or similar, not in via social pinion where a persons profession is leveraged against them.
I also dislike arguments of the form "If they believe <this> how can they treat <some demographic> fairly", or even "People of <some demographic> will feel uncomfortable working with them"; but I accept they have some validity.
I feel a true answer is more complicated; i.e. before we answer these problems, we consider:
- is someone not know to express racist opinions therefore not racist?
- what political-compatibility criteria is needed to work with someone?
- if person A doesn't want to work with person B; is that persons As problem, or person Bs?
- how objective are hiring/firing/promotion criteria? to the extent that they are subjective, what goes into that, and what is fair? Are promotions fair if they are random, so long as they are not biased wrt race/sex/etc? Or is a random process unfair because it is arbitrary? If it is biased towards arbitrary criteria that is not the usual demographics (e.g. ppl who wear glasses) is this fair?
- what moral obligation do employees have in their private lives? Does this obligation differ by job type? Do all jobs have obligations e.g. do corp contracts imply them too; and are employees compensated wrt these obligations?
People with racist or otherwise regressive views know that these views will (rightly) get them criticised by the majority, and so they won't couch them in those terms precisely, but it's often very clear when you take context into account. I can't speak for this exact case, because we don't know what his exact words were, but it's telling that even your defence of him describes him criticising protesters at a time when protesters are being shot and having chemical weapons used on them by the police, a state militia who can kill pretty much anyone without threat of consequence. If your stance in this case is to support that militia, their murders and their use of chemical weapons, then I think that it's not remotely unfair to say that you not only do not support the black lives matter movement, but that you support the continuation of black people in the states being murdered without recompense.
When you have such a significant power over someone's higher education and therefore their life earnings, I don't think it's unfair to scrutinise these people's views further than had they little structural power.
What amazes me most is the cascade of reasoning. It's the most obscene misuse of logic, that might be fine only if it comes from a toddler.
"criticising protesters" leads to "support militia", that leads to "support their murders", so he "do(es) not support the black lives matter", therefore wants "continuation of black people being murdered".
Imagine that for a guy that had his car turned upside down by protesters and was complaining about that.
Okay, so you can check their academic CV and ask for colleague references. Quite another to ruin their professional career for a personal view on Twitter that isn't about planting bombs in black churches, or the like.
I disagree and think that we need more nuance in our speech and understanding, not less. There are a lot of moral issues you just listed, from violent vs peaceful protesting, the limit of authority with police, black lives matter, free speech, and race. And you summed it all up with if someone disagrees with any of those that they are racist or regressive.
But there are a lot of complexities and nuances to each one of those moral issues. Each one really needs a discussion.
Even just separating out BLM, there is the core moral anti-racist belief behind the statement (which I think most people would agree with), but there is also the political association affiliated with the Democratic party that in their belief statement supports abortion, transgenderism, and many other issues that are still at contention in our country. Talking with many of my conservative friends, they have no issue with the race movement of BLM but will not align themselves with a political organization that supports abortion, particularly as they see it as a genocide targeted primarily at inner-city blacks.
Again, we need more nuance, not less. We're already polarized enough. One issue is that peoples' views are not being scrutinized, they're being thrown into a bucket of "racist" and cancelled. Any time a straw man is used to silence a group of people based on mass categorization, it's contributing to division and not unity. These issues, and politics in particular, are and should be complex.
> People with racist or otherwise regressive views know that these views will (rightly) get them criticised by the majority, and so they won't couch them in those terms precisely, but it's often very clear when you take context into account.
When the word racist is being attributed to everything and anything including opposition to complete open borders by bullys and funnily enough, racists it is understandable that people may want to take cover.
> because we don't know what his exact words were, but it's telling that even your defence of him describes him criticising protesters at a time when protesters are being shot and having chemical weapons used on them by the police, a state militia who can kill pretty much anyone without threat of consequence.
It is also quite telling that "When those protesters are also burning down cities and attacking people" is strangely absent from your description.
> If your stance in this case is to support that militia, their murders and their use of chemical weapons, then I think that it's not remotely unfair to say that you not only do not support the black lives matter movement, but that you support the continuation of black people in the states being murdered without recompense.
Very few are in full support of everything the police do but binarizing the support to all or nothing is ridiculous.
It's awesome for real racists that now every minor bullshit is considered racist. Suddenly there's a lot more of them, they're in pretty good company and the term has been diluted into meaninglessness.
Another victory for social justice. Brexit, Trump, you guys just can't stop winning.
There's a disconnect that keeps running through a lot of the arguments from the conservative side which I don't understand. The examples given in this piece are a) the right of street protesters to be heard without being attacked by government officers vs b) the right of people to not get fired for what they say by private organizations like the New York Times.
This disconnect keeps coming up, and it's extra weird because conservatives have traditionally been the bigger proponents of corporate freedom to fire whoever they want. But now many conservatives seem to want some kind of new labor protection laws.
Maybe what is going on is not really about free speech but more about quickly changing cultural norms. It used to be OK to make blatant racist and sexist jokes in an office setting but at some point that changed and now you can easily get fired over it. That's not a change in free speech restrictions, it's a change in what is considered culturally acceptable behavior between private actors. But changing cultural norms aren't something that should be somehow regulated by the government.
The disconnect goes away if we see person opinions as something people are rather than something which people say.
This happens also to be a common thread in the disagreement between left and right. When something becomes a voluntary chosen action it can be controlled, limited and stopped by the government. When something is a personal trait it should be protected and given status as a right.
To take the example of a street protestor. Should companies be allowed to fire political activists? When we see it as a personal trait a lot of people find the answer as no. Should companies be allowed to fire people who choosed to say bad things? Many say yes. The issue becomes how people frame the question and what values get attached to it.
Yes. Person with Tourette should not be fired for saying things that others don't.
(discussing norms, not free speech as legal rights below)
The norms in private organizations (companies, universities, associations) are different for different people.
1) If you are representative of an organization, what you say in private reflects your organization and it's reputation. It's established norm that personal values and opinions publicly expressed can't deviate from that of the organization. This includes many low level customer service jobs.
2) Low level managers, teachers and coaches are in position of authority and their whole identity is involved. Leader can shout their mouth about their political opinions and people working under them are not in position to talk back. That's not proper position to be politically opinionated. There are some norms limiting to their self expression in private, but it's usually context dependent.
3) Low level workers without public position or responsibilities over other should get most leeway to be whatever they are outside the job. When I was working in the floor level warehouse, the coffee break was the most politically diverse environment. Anarchist and far-right guy sitting next to each other debating angrily about women's rights, unions, Jews, holocaust. Nobody considered taking it upstairs because it was offensive. Only cases of bullying were considered out of line.
it is not just conservatives that do not grasp that
The 2 statements are the difference between a liberty minded person and the authority minded person
Liberty mined (or libertarian) can easily separate their personal beliefs on what is "proper" but still allow that other people may view differently and as long as they are not harming them (or anyone else) should be allowed to live their life in the manner they deem "proper"
Authority minded people (or Authoritarian) can not do this, they believe their worldview is the "right" or "correct" world view and that must be imposed upon everyone, by force if necessary.
These 2 mindsets exist in both "Left" and "Right" political orthodoxy
The world is not this simple. There are some speech that should be protected and some that maybe should be banned. (Eg. criticism of the workplace [see also calls for forming a labor union], whistle-blowing of illegal activities ... and on the other end, maybe abusing and harassing people based on their skin color, voice, and other elements of one's "phenotype", and maybe there should be some very basic beliefs that ought to be protected.)
Both of these absolutes (full libertari[ani]sm and full authoritarianism) are doomed to fail, and even throwing them out as some nice first principles to start from seems to be borderline useless. (At least it seems the last 10+ years of politics is throwing memes at each other that have been reduced to absurdity.)
And yet the 'liberty minded' person in this case is the one imposing a government restriction upon what individuals and businesses might otherwise choose to do.
Since virtually nobody agrees that no form of speech or other expression should ever be a fireable offence, the debate actually comes down to discussion of which types of speech should and should have protections in the sphere of employment. You'll find a large set of people with a general presumption in favour of protecting political speech including some which they find disagreeable, but even involves debating where to draw the line, because speech which is ostensibly political can to differing degrees also be abusive, damaging to staff relations, bringing the company into disrepute, contrary to professional ethics, directly undermining the organization's position etc. And of course who should be given stronger-than-average protections is also a matter of some debate, and you'll usually find plenty of people arguing for government protections on the freedom of conscience for racists but not homosexuals and vice versa. Some people believe in restricting employers with more general presumptions in favour of speech than others, but assessing which ones and why is more useful than simply claiming the other side is more authoritarian, especially when those arguing for fire-at-will for any reason also consider themselves to be doing so on libertarian grounds.
Genuine question here from someone who is the "virtually nobody" that you describe in terms of being a complete free speech absolutist and seeing attempts to shut that down as perhaps the worst thing happening in the world today pretty much guaranteed to end in complete disaster, and simultaneously not seeing what the issue is in terms of "while you're at work" limits on sensitive discussions.
It's one thing to tell the employee what they can say on the job to their colleagues or customers when they're not hired to talk to colleagues and customers about sensitive topics (this doesn't even need to be an explicit prohibition, it can take the form of "that's not what you're being paid to do, and while you're doing it you're not doing what you are being paid to do, so please shut up and do your job"), and an entirely different thing to tell them what they can't say period in any context at any time on penalty of being fired for wrongthink, which frankly is just a modern take on the time honoured and previously much bloodier purge process updated for modern non-violent sensibilities, which still taken to its logical conclusion has the exact same results.
Mark my words; this batshit insanity has ended badly already and it will continue to escalate into a continuous spire of catastrophic idiotic badness as long as it is tolerated.
> It's one thing to tell the employee what they can say on the job to their colleagues or customers when they're not hired to talk to colleagues and customers about sensitive topics (this doesn't even need to be an explicit prohibition, it can take the form of "that's not what you're being paid to do, and while you're doing it you're not doing what you are being paid to do, so please shut up and do your job"), and an entirely different thing to tell them what they can't say period in any context at any time on penalty of being fired for wrongthink, which frankly is just a modern take on the time honoured and previously much bloodier purge process updated for modern non-violent sensibilities, which still taken to its logical conclusion has the exact same results.
It's still a matter of degree [and which jobs, and which views, and what constitutes 'outside work'] though. It's certainly possible for someone to do an awful lot more damage to their company by views or actions taken outside work than stuff that you as a self-described free speech absolutist are comfortable tone policing inside work
Insisting that someone stick to doing their actual job, while they're at their actual job, isn't tone policing. And the fact that they could do damage to their company by their speech outside the context of their employment is nothing wrong with the employee, it's symptomatic of the cancerous state of modern western society (and as an expat, I can tell you it's mercifully absent outside the west) and the idiotic cancel culture nonsense, currently in the process of ending extremely badly.
> And the fact that they could do damage to their company by their speech outside the context of their employment is nothing wrong with the employee, it's symptomatic of the cancerous state of modern western society (and as an expat, I can tell you it's mercifully absent outside the west)
I can assure you that there are no shortage of people on the receiving end of non-Western boycott threats for making comments deemed to offend, say, religious sensitivities in India or support calls for democracy in Hong Kong. The idea the rest of the world is some paragon of free speech or labour relations is not one well supported by reality.
And needless to say there's no shortage of things that can be said or done outside work which call into question one's suitability for the role or commitment to actually helping the company succeed which have nothing to do with 'cancel culture'.
> I can assure you that there are no shortage of people on the receiving end of non-Western boycott threats for making comments deemed to offend, say, religious sensitivities in India or support calls for democracy in Hong Kong.
The best defense that can be mustered is that the worst authoritarian and theocratic dictatorships of the world do the same thing so it's no big deal? To be fair to you I guess the truth of the matter is that really is the best defense. It just happens to be terrible.
> And needless to say there's no shortage of things that can be said or done outside work which call into question one's suitability for the role or commitment to actually helping the company succeed which have nothing to do with 'cancel culture'.
It's just a coincidence that what we actually hear month in and month out year after year is professional offense taking victims out to collect scalps on behalf of their cancerous idiotic ideology, right?
> The best defense that can be mustered is that the worst authoritarian and theocratic dictatorships of the world do the same thing so it's no big deal? To be fair to you I guess the truth of the matter is that really is the best defense. It just happens to be terrible.
It's not a 'defence' but a simple refutation of your claim that companies coming under pressure from some quarters to fire employees for sentiments they have expressed is a uniquely Western thing (Bit of a stretch to suggest India has been amongst the 'worst authoritarian and theocratic dictatorships' since its independence too...). Just because local populations in much of the world are seldom bothered by comments perceived as insulting to black or gay people doesn't mean they all extend the same tolerance towards people they perceive as insulting their national pride, family values, religion, behavioural norms, officials they need to curry favour with etc.
> It's just a coincidence that what we actually hear month in and month out year after year is professional offense taking victims out to collect scalps on behalf of their cancerous idiotic ideology, right?
For someone who claims to be averse to 'professional offence taking', you're trying remarkably hard to find an angle sufficiently obtuse for you to drag my bland statement that companies think all sorts of different behaviour outside working hours gives them cause to fire people into your culture war...
> It's not a 'defence' but a simple refutation of your claim that companies coming under pressure from some quarters to fire employees for sentiments they have expressed is a uniquely Western thing
And it's not a refutation at all, because the examples you cite are themselves restricted to particular jurisdictions (and I'm sure of this because I spent the past ten years travelling the entire world and never saw anything of the magnitude I've seen coming from the west during that period), and the incidents are far more excessive breaches of the local cultural etiquette in incidents where they do end up causing outrage, whereas in the west you can be legally hounded by professional victims for not using their pretend pronouns, and people make art forms out of misinterpreting things to be as offended as possible for no reason at all obviously because it gives them power whilst those who would like to pretend it's not the fatal problem it clearly is choose to continuously ignore or minimise it, even while cadres of the discussed movements in question are out burning down cities, looting, and other typical obvious indicators that things have gone seriously wrong, this discussion itself being a perfect case in point.
> (Bit of a stretch to suggest India has been amongst the 'worst authoritarian and theocratic dictatorships' since its independence too...).
Pointing out that the worst authoritarian and theocratic dictatorships are the nearest analogs to the "me-too"-ism you cite doesn't imply that applies to India in particular, my reference to theocratic dictatorships was mostly regarding middle eastern jurisdictions at any rate.
> you're trying remarkably hard to find an angle sufficiently obtuse for you to drag my bland statement that companies think all sorts of different behaviour outside working hours gives them cause to fire people into your culture war...
Not at all, I'm not even disagreeing with that statement. I'm simply pointing out it's symptomatic of a disease rather than a positive or neutral thing that should just be accepted.
> And it's not a refutation at all, because the examples you cite are themselves restricted to particular jurisdictions (and I'm sure of this because I spent the past ten years travelling the entire world and never saw anything of the magnitude I've seen coming from the west during that period), and the incidents are far more excessive breaches of the local cultural etiquette in incidents where they do end up causing outrage
I've travelled the world too, but with my eyes open :)
In that time I've visited countries where literal lynch mobs hunt people accused of participating in the beef trade or having sex before marriage, countries where the mildest of perceived criticisms of royalty will earn you a minimum three year jail term in addition to the lasting enmity of locals, and countries with excruciatingly forced politeness and elaborate systems of honorifics which are a lot harder to grasp than she/her. Those are the nominal democracies, not the ones with supreme leaders or religious absolutists. And there's still well over a quarter of the world where homosexuality isn't merely grounds for firing and shaming your family, but also a criminal offence. Perhaps you believe these cultural norms are more intrinsically worth defending than politeness towards transpeople, but it's safe to say that culture warriors who've been no-platformed by the side of the 'trans debate' they want to silence are raking in donations rather than languishing in jails.
So I'm afraid I find it laughable to hear that people who espouse illiberal views on minorities in the West are unique in the magnitude of their victimhood because they might attract so much attention their book becomes a bestseller or they become elected President of the United States.
One of the consequences of greater levels of free speech is greater exposure to criticism, justified and otherwise.
> I've travelled the world too, but with my eyes open :)
Clearly not, since exactly as I already said, the examples you cite are restricted to specific jurisdictions it's quite easy to avoid, although the one you go to with the example of "excruciatingly forced politeness" has me scratching my head about the problem, frankly.
> Perhaps you believe these cultural norms are more intrinsically worth defending than politeness towards transpeople
I don't really care about any of those cultural norms frankly, and the position of free speech absolutists has nothing whatsoever to do with "politeness towards transpeople". Being able to describe reality without censoring the truth is an essential function of analysis and thus improvement of that reality. Prohibiting or policing it inevitably results in the degradation of that reality because the problems you're not allowed to discuss can't be addressed, either. This is the fundamental reason for free speech absolutism, not concerns about "lol it's fun to trigger the transpeople / leftists / marxists / religious conservatives" or whatever other juvenile nonsense passes muster for the straw man you're trying to present it as.
> but it's safe to say that culture warriors who've been no-platformed by the side of the 'trans debate' they want to silence are raking in donations rather than languishing in jails.
And what exactly does that position have to do with saying it's not a big deal that free speech is being continuously eroded in the jurisdictions where it's traditionally been taken for granted and the idea of that erosion was seen as absurd not two decades ago? You cite another group of people who'd like to erode it in the other direction and you think you've actually made an argument as to why it should be eroded? Because almost everybody has gone mad, or has always in fact been mad and it has simply become more obvious as time progresses and social media displays their madness for all to directly observe?
> people who espouse illiberal views on minorities in the West are unique in the magnitude of their victimhood because they might attract so much attention their book becomes a bestseller or they become elected President of the United States.
I honestly can't even parse this sentence into something that has a relationship to material reality, do you think people defending free speech have a problem with minorities and that's baked into the position or something and you're just jumping to that conclusion immediately without actually examining it at all?
> One of the consequences of greater levels of free speech is greater exposure to criticism, justified and otherwise.
And that'd be just grand, because those trying to restrict that speech are in desperate need of greater criticism, and it is entirely justified.
> Clearly not, since exactly as I already said, the examples you cite are restricted to specific jurisdictions it's quite easy to avoid
Please, enlighten me. Name me a state which conforms to your ideals of 'free speech absolutism', where people are free to say whatever they like on any topic without any risk of public outcry or legal repercussions. I'll wait.
> do you think people defending free speech have a problem with minorities and that's baked into the position or something and you're just jumping to that conclusion immediately without actually examining it at all?
No, I believe that your display of visceral hostility towards the speech of 'professional offence takers' and insinuation that being asked to use particular pronouns is a burden to which all other requests/demands to comply with cultural norms pale in comparison is an indication of a type of speech you value over others, in this case the speech of the person offending the minority group over the speech of the offended party. People actually defending freedom of expression as a general principle don't tend to argue that the most uniquely horrible threat to freedom of speech worldwide comes from those using their own speech to argue that a particular person is a bigot their company or university shouldn't host. Partly because they care about securing people's right to advocate boycotts even if they don't agree with boycotts, and partly because much of the rest of the world is entirely comfortable with jailing people for wrongthink.
> Please, enlighten me. Name me a state which conforms to your ideals of 'free speech absolutism'
My point wasn't that there was, it was that the things you were pointing out were easily avoided by not going to the jurisdictions in which they were prevalent. Ironically, the answer to your question not that long ago would have been what is considered western countries.
> No, I believe that your display of visceral hostility towards the speech of 'professional offence takers' and insinuation that being asked to use particular pronouns is a burden to which all other requests/demands to comply with cultural norms pale in comparison is an indication of a type of speech you value over others
Well, you're wrong once again. I don't care if objections to free speech are rooted in leftist marxist arguments for subversion, snowflake tier nonsense about feelings protection, or brutalist fascist arguments for protecting the prestige of the state, they're all equally as bad as each other and I do not value any particular objection any higher than the other. The simple fact is though the ones that actually are eroding free speech in the western world today are very firmly on the emotional and leftist side of the political spectrum, which is why those are the ones I'm attacking directly in this discussion. All other forms of infringement on free speech pale in comparison to those.
> in this case the speech of the person offending the minority group over the speech of the offended party.
Once again, complete nonsense, if you're preferencing a right to free speech of special interest group A over group B, then you're by definition not a free speech absolutist. My view is that stupid people ought to be able to say stupid things without being silenced by other stupid people, and you analyse the trainwreck at the end to figure out where the actual truth lies, and without that process you never get to figure out the truth to begin with.
> People actually defending freedom of expression don't tend to argue that the most uniquely horrible threat to freedom of speech worldwide comes from those using their own speech to argue that a particular person is a bigot their company or university shouldn't host.
This is completely false, this is typically the exact kind of people that other free speech absolutists including myself are ringing alarm bells about precisely because they are the ones most effectively eroding free speech in the modern world, and having people like you come to their defense despite the magnitude of harm their idiocy entails.
> Partly because they care about securing people's right to advocate boycotts even if they don't agree with boycotts
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at all, but for what it's worth I'm completely comfortable with the idea that people ought to be able to boycott whoever they please for whatever reason they please and that has nothing to do with freedom of speech, unless of course you're mandating the global boycott of party x in order to impose a chilling effect on their freedom of speech as party y, which is abhorrent, yes.
> and partly because much of the rest of the world is entirely comfortable with jailing people for wrongthink.
Which is why it's such a great tragedy that the last vestiges of the place where this was not the case has now vigorously reversed course on that state now means by magnitude, the modern west is one of the least free places in terms of speech. That is utterly horrific.
So in a world in which the President of the United States openly expresses envy of how Kim Il Sung is treated by his compatriots, calls the free press 'the enemy of the people', sees reversing Section 230 as a pre-election priority and even feels the need to wade into stuff as trivial as NFL to insist they use firings to chill protest, you are trying to argue the only things free speech absolutists should be concerned about come from people with comparatively little power on the left of the political spectrum saying they are offended by things. Right.
The allegedly much worse examples you've cited of the left eroding free speech are the 'me too' movement involving women talking about their experiences of sexual harassment [an exercise of freedom of speech you found so abhorrent you compared it to Middle Eastern state and cultural oppression of women] and transpeople requesting people use pronouns you apparently disapprove of.
I think we both know that we are not going to reach agreement here, but one thing we both have in common is that clearly neither of us are free speech absolutists.
> So in a world in which the President of the United States openly expresses envy of how Kim Il Sung is treated
The fact that a politician is narcissistic is as unsurprising as it is irrelevant to the discussion topic at hand.
> calls the free press 'the enemy of the people'
To be fair, the attacks on the modern "free press" pulling them up for their transparent lying on a great deal of issues are frequently perfectly justified, and the fact that they are called out for lying isn't restricting their free speech, it's pointing out that they're full of shit. If they were restricted from speaking to begin with there would be no need to point out when they were lying and being manipulative after the fact.
As much as they are full of shit, lie through their teeth, and constantly push narratives that don't hold up to the slightest scrutiny, I still don't believe they should be silenced. That's what free speech absolutism actually means.
> you are trying to argue the only things free speech absolutists should be concerned about come from people with comparatively little power on the left of the political spectrum saying they are offended by things. Right.
I'm not arguing that at all, being a free speech absolutist is arguing that all infringement on free speech is abhorrent. It's simply a point of indisputable fact that the majority of modern infringement on free speech comes from the left and their associated cancel culture cancerous nonsense, the fact you can't even accept this is frankly baffling, but likely emblematic of your observation that it will be impossible for anybody who is aware of that blatant indisputable fact to come to agreement with you.
> The allegedly much worse examples you've cited of the left eroding free speech are the 'me too' movement
Completely incorrect once again, my previous reference to me-too'ism was regarding your defense of the erosion of free speech in the western world being ok because there are other complete shitholes in the world that erode it in a different way, it had nothing to do with the movement you misinterpreted it as.
> but one thing we both have in common is that clearly neither of us are free speech absolutists.
I will leave it to anyone uninvolved unfortunate enough to still be reading this to judge whether your rush to insist that it's perfectly normal for presidents to enthuse about how North Korea does political discourse and that the increase in rhetorical, legislative and physical attacks on the 'enemy' in the media by the right in recent years is 'frequently perfectly justified' is the argument of someone sincerely worried about chilling effects on all speech.
Once again, that simply has nothing to do with free speech, politicians being narcissistic amoral psychopaths is basically in the job description, some of them more obviously than others, but basically all of them. I don't like or approve of any politicians, so your attempts to paint me as some kind of political follower of what you perceive as "the enemy" is frankly just funny.
But whatever you have to do to get yourself past the fact that you're desperately defending some of the most reprehensible conduct in the world today overturning a long standing commitment to what used to be a highly functional and useful set of norms for social communication I guess. If I were in your shoes trying to demonize anybody that disagreed with me would probability be the card I'd be reaching for also.
>>And yet the 'liberty minded' person in this case is the one imposing a government restriction upon what individuals and businesses might otherwise choose to do.
Where do you draw this conclusion from? What government restrictions do you believe liberty minded people are calling for?
>>Since virtually nobody agrees that no form of speech or other expression should ever be a fireable offence the debate actually comes down to discussion of which types of speech should and should have protections.
I am not sure what this is even referencing. I have read this line a few times and I am not sure what you are trying to convey
It sounds like this is a restatement of the grandparent ,you are talking about what a company should or should not do, vs what a government should or should not prohibit with the force of law.
A company choosing to fire someone for X speech is vastly different than a government protecting an employee from being fired, or forcing a company to fire someone for said speech
Government action is authoritarian by its very nature. I do not believe people should be fired from their jobs for their speech but at the same time I do not support government intervention in the free association of those businesses, that would have far worse consequences
>And of course who should be given stronger-than-average protections is also a matter of some debate
It should not be a debate at all, Equality under the law should be universal. This is one of the core problems today is we keep trying to fix past injustice with more injustice under the law
The only way to break the cycle is to make every individual the exact same under the law.
> What government restrictions do you believe liberty minded people are calling for?
People claiming that people shouldn't be sacked for expressing certain views also claim their actions are motivated by the imperative of protecting freedom of conscience and individuals' essential liberty. People firing people for expressing those views are often openly stating the belief those views are 'incorrect' and that enforcement action must be taken against those with incorrect views.
Hence my contention that reducing the debate to libertarian vs authoritarian is unhelpful, particularly when it leads to the position that everyone not equally committed to both upholding universities' rights to censor speech and abolishing Civil Rights Acts is authoritarian with a capital A.
>>People firing people for expressing those views are often openly stating the belief those views are 'incorrect' and that enforcement action must be taken against those with incorrect views.
No that is absolutely not the case, companies today are responding to the Mob not their own self determination on the issue.
Which is what I and others have a problem with, not the a company on their own, of their own free will choose to fire someone but because the mob demanded it or their head
I have to admit I'm even further from understanding your position now: companies should have the right to enforce absolute conformity on their employees and fire them for whatever arbitrary reason they want to, but consumers absolutely shouldn't have the right to boycott in the event they find extremely objectionable?
No no, they should have the right to, we as a society should just discourage people from exercising their agency in that regard.
That way no one needs to make laws to enforce conformity. It's just enforced by social norms. It's the speech version of Jordan Peterson's "enforced monogomy" concept.
Granted even in this sardonic explanation, I'm not sure how deep the rabbit hole is supposed to go. Using your agency to protest <a bad act> is discouraged so we should use our agency to discourage the discouragement. But then we're just deciding that discouraging <a bad act> is itself a bad act. And so the whole thing is self-contradictory.
You're exactly right and I think it's important to consider that the LA Times' position as a sort of authority figure when it comes to speech (being a major news source/ media entity) may be an underlying interest in how the arguments made in this article are put forward. I imagine a whole lot of editors of the last few newspapers that are independently owned had some very interesting thoughts when the workers at New York Times pushed out some of it's leadership over an article Tom Cotton could have just as easily put on his website.
I agree that it's about cultural norms but I think the cultural norms are the cost and limiting factors of free expression being greatly reduced. I imagine an entity like the LA Times has an interest in defining how free speech works in the news room and subsequently the readers of that news source. I also imagine that idea of free speech would protect leadership in the newsroom from subordinates if everything published has to go through said leadership.
> idea of free speech would protect leadership in the newsroom from subordinates
If protecting the management from the workers is your goal, typically you invoke the right of the owners to dictate how work is organised, I'm not sure how you make that into a "free speech" issue.
As the work of the editor is explicitly to direct and reshape the speech of the employees under them, why would "free speech" protect the ones doing the censoring?
That's the point it wouldn't. It's not a question of free speech but rather the assurance that periodical's leadership can be protected from their workers or general criticism about poor direction that their periodicals are taking or are being forced to take due to changes in the media landscape.
Put more succinctly, imagine someone blaming the failure of their news organization on their readers opinions of free speech as opposed to their own shoddy workmanship, or an inability to compete with more modern forms of media.
And I was specifically referring to the ideas of free speech that the news outlet is striving to defend or at least define.
The disconnect is, that there are some opinions that are protected (religion, and recently also gender identity) but there are other opinions that aren't (political views or anything roughly correlated with any political party). (I use "opinion" in a broad sense here, as "something you choose" as opposed to "something you're born with" such as sex and race) There are obvious downsides of firing people for any such opinion that (1) people feel extremely passionately about, but is (2) ultimately irrelevant to the job at hand.
I would go even further than acceptable behavior. Today we know for sure racism and sexism are dangerous beliefs. If I own a company I don't want that people around. So unless there's a law that forbids me to fire someone for being openly racist or sexist, I will fire their asses without thinking twice.
Isn't there an inherently coercive/disruptive nature to street protesting, especially wrt large partisan groups?
e.g. extinction rebellion holding up bus/rail services, BLM protesters wearing masks, chanting and large groups showing up at sensitive places, such as the white-house, or police-officers homes.
Yeah, but this is to some extent just an interesting side-note. At least I know several people who are liberals but don't agree with lacking "political correctness" being sufficient cause for "canceling."
Regrettably, that is what's lost in all of this. Protesters against other opinions and belief systems strongly defend free speech so long as you are saying what they approve of.
The world, in general, is abandoning the past two centuries in which freedom has risen, to become illiberal, and enforce intellectual orthodoxies. It is more obvious and markedly so in in places like Turkey, but even here in the US we see those who would blacklist all political enemies and dissenters. These efforts will ultimately fail here, but not before grave harm is inflicted; history will judge us as harshly as we judge the McCarthy era.
There were Communists in the government in the McCarthy era. There were quite a few Communists, much as there is still racism at large in the USA today. And yet you will note that successfully rooting out spies is not why McCarthy is remembered, but rather, for his self-aggrandizing campaign of paranoid repression.
I think part of it is the decay of discourse. People don't know how to discuss ideas in good faith. They just know how to troll, yell, make unfounded wild accusations, and meme. Basically we have a junior high level of public discourse.
People aren't open to hearing reasoned arguments either. A reasoned argument doesn't deliver the dopamine hit of a rant or a catchy meme.
In that environment the only thing possible is to deplatform. I mean what else is there to do? Nothing is being accomplished anyway.
Maybe we should just turn off social media. Deplatform it all.
It's not "social media". It's Twitter, specifically, because of the design decisions of that platform (obvious things like the message length limit, and slightly more subtle things like the way that replies from other people are hidden, encouraging you to pile in).
A chaplin recently had to resign in apology at a distinguished academic institution for ... making factual and insightful comments about the George Floyd incident.[1] McCarthy eventually was shamed and disgraced by his casual destructiveness. "Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Saying someone "didn't live a virtuous life" is not factual. In this case, it's an irrelevant and tasteless opinion about a victim. It implies Floyd somehow deserved to be shot in the back and killed.
> It implies Floyd somehow deserved to be shot in the back and killed.
No it doesn't. This is wild hyperbole. No one deserves to be shot in the back.
However, people are painting him out to be an angel - quite literally there are multiple artworks of George Floyd with a halo and wings [1]. The reality is he was human, and one with a complicated criminal past who was jailed 8 times [2] including for drug offenses. Is saying that someone with a criminal record like that "didn't live a virtuous life" really a fireable offense?
It's maybe important to note that the phrase 'He was no angel' is a common (extremely dark and sarcastic) joke in left-leaning circles around these kind of tragic murders because there is always, without fail, some right-wing effort to paint the victim as some sort of low-life who had it coming one way or the other.
Let's be clear: no one, regardless of how much they've fucked up in their lives, deserves to be murdered in cold blood by the police while they pose no threat to anyone.
To restate: a non-violent suspect's past offenses are not germane when the discussion is about the police summarily executing that non-violent suspect in the street.
Any attempt to confuse this point with ideas about how the victim wasn't perfect, about how they could have done better in the confrontation or not committed a crime in the first place, is an attempt to deflect blame onto the victim.
These kinds of arguments are prima facie disgusting and deserve no quarter in civilized discourse.
"deserve no quarter in civilized discourse." This is a dangerous opinion. I would argue that the entire point of civilized discourse is to provide quarter for even opinions you radically disagree with, after all people hold these opinions and isn't discussing them in a civilized manner rather than dismissing and villainizing the people who hold them the only way to progress? Otherwise you have two sides that aren't discussing anything with each other and resort to violence, legal challenges, and pressure on employers rather than attempting to connect with each other and share another view.
> These kinds of arguments are prima facie disgusting and deserve no quarter in civilized discourse.
Declaring "no quarter" in actual war is saying that if the enemy decides to surrender to you, and lays down his arms, and hoists the white flag, sticks his hands in the air, then you will shoot and kill him.
Declaring "no quarter" in actual war is therefore a violation of the Hague convention. It is "especially forbidden," in the same paragraph as poisoned weapons.
You are defending your actions with a metaphor that celebrates war crimes.
I also found the "no quarter" phrasing interesting by the parent poster. As countless people have found out across history, those who show no mercy will in turn receive no mercy when they need it.
If pushback against the intolerant aspects of progressivism is occurring even on HN (of all places!), they may need that mercy sooner than they think.
It's interesting that this is the place you decided to make an argument about 'no mercy'. Because as a rhetorical question for you using the same analogy: What do you think will happen to the police when they show no mercy? Perhaps that might explain why people find the arguments attempting to justify the extrajudicial execution of someone to be disgusting.
>Is saying that someone with a criminal record like that "didn't live a virtuous life" really a fireable offense?
Talk about wild hyperboles!
“In the wake of George Floyd’s death, most people in the country have framed this as an act of racism,” Moloney’s email continued. “I don’t think we know that. Many people have claimed that racism is a major problem in police forces. I don’t think we know that.”
The Chaplain has said enough things that association with him became a liability for an institution like MIT, that is all.
The new orthodoxy requires this quote to be something awful, and upon reading it, that was my immediate thought as well. "He really said that?".
But it really isn't. In fact, it continues to be an opinion of a large section of the society. He is only saying that the police are not totally racist, maybe only a bit! Disagree as much as you want, this is an opinion beyond the pale now?
And the fact that the culture causes MIT to believe this to be a liability is exactly the point.
>He is only saying that the police are not totally racist, maybe only a bit
Let's not be facetious here, shall we?
He said that we don't know that racism is a major problem in police forces. In fact, we do know that; the structural racism is what many people are protesting against.
Structural racism manifests itself in the rules and protocols, in traditions and patterns in actions. To say that it is a major problem does not imply that the majority of individual policemen are racists. What it means is that the black people are disproportionately affected by the negative effects of policing, including brutality.
To say that "we don't know that" is unacceptable ignorance for a public figurehead of a reputable institution.
No, it is not. Unless by "we" you take to mean the chaplain in question - in which case, it is unacceptable ignorance.
Let me reiterate.
He said that we don't know that racism is a major problem in police forces. In fact, we do know that; the structural racism is what many people are protesting against.
Structural racism manifests itself in the rules and protocols, in traditions and patterns in actions. To say that it is a major problem does not imply that the majority of individual policemen are racists. What it means is that the black people are disproportionately affected by the negative effects of policing, including brutality.
To say that "we don't know that" is unacceptable ignorance for a public figurehead of a reputable institution, because it implies that MIT doesn't know that.
But MIT does. We do. You, perhaps, don't, and it does not look good, but this is a chance for you to learn.
It might imply racism, it might imply that there are major issues with the police use of force in America. It might imply major problems with a lack of training of US police officers, both in techniques used to control someone but also when it's appropriate to use those techniques and for how long.
It might even imply, and I reckon it probably does, that there are some sociopaths in the police form that are wholy unfit to be police officers. These people need rooted out and fired. I would probably put the officer that killed George Floyd in this category.
I'm also sure there are racists in the police force who treat black people unfairly, these people also need rooted out and fired. I'm sure there is a LOT of these types.
But from the video, it doesn't imply that the police officer was racist or that his death is the result of racism. We simply don't know if the outcome would be different had George Floyd been white.
We can't even really tell from teh video if he was intentionally trying to kill George Floyd, I suspect he wasn't. I suspect that his death was a gross mistake, a result of insufficient training and a sociopath police officer. I very much doubt it was racist cop intentionally killing a black man because he was black, on camera, in front of witnesses recording it all on their phones.
The officer that killed Floyd made a gross mistake.
Each of the three officers that were on the scene and watched Chauvin kill Floyd also made a gross mistake by not intervening in an active murder that lasted over 8 minutes.
After the murder, all the policemen involved made a gross mistake by lying on the police report about Floyd resisting arrest, and describing his death as a "medical distress".
Then the people in the justice system made a gross mistake by not opening a murder investigation and not charging anyone.
And the entire police department made a gross mistake by not making any arrests in regards to the murder they knew happened.
All these gross mistakes were happening as the video was widely circulated, and people were out there demanding justice.
And after many violent protests, there are still good chances that the justice system will make another gross mistake and acquit the people involved due to the concept of "qualified immunity", which is, of course, also a gross mistake.
Along with these gross mistakes happening on a regular basis across the country, the repeated pattern of gross mistakes makes me wonder if our police and justice systems are... a gross mistake.
"George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been. He had not lived a virtuous life. He was convicted of several crimes, including armed robbery, which he seems to have committed to feed his drug habit. And he was high on drugs at the time of his arrest. But we do not kill such people. He committed sins, but we root for sinners to change their lives and convert to the Gospel."
But most media outlets just quote "didn't live a virtuous life" in their own paraphrasing, as well as "I don't think we know that" - that strengthen those implications by removing any context that would otherwise soften them. It's very easy to assume was justifying the killing, given that no contrary quotes are given.
That's not to say that what he did say is ok/wise/sensitive, but much of the press are clearly sensationalising this.
The utterer was a Chaplain. This is a main aspect of what they are hired for: to remind us of the moral judgments of the religious tradition they were trained in. They're not just psychotherapists who wear funny clothing, and they aren't PERSONALLY setting those rules about the virtuous life. Maybe you don't want chaplains, which is an argument, but that's separate.
So someone gets shot and the chaplain doesn't remind us of the sins of judgment or wrath. He reminds us that the man shot in the back was a sinner??
Even assuming agreement with his religion, he's not even a good chaplain. His own religious texts say he shouldn't judge, and here he is judging a dead man he never met.
The news article you link to is interesting because it contains one inflamatory remark while omitting any context or full text of the email. While I probably strongly disagree with him as well as well as what he wrote in his email the tactics used: Taking the most distasteful sentence (or part of a sentence) they can find and concealing anything else, has been used time and time again in many contexts in order to generate outrage without thought or understanding. This is what I find disgusting about modern news, it's more an outrage generator using incomplete out of context quotes than increasing information about the world.
I don't think equating racist power structures in police and government to red scare communists is a good analogy. The fear of communists was mostly made up in rhetoric. The protestors on race relations are pretty clear on why they're upset.
The US and the West faced for 45 years a totalitarian system that had conquered a dozen neighboring countries and had a powerful military. How far was "too far" in combating that?
As mentioned, there were Communist spies in the US government, far more than was generally understood at the time; we know that now thanks to the Venona files. That doesn't change the fact that Joe McCarthy was almost always correct only by accident. (You shoot in a random direction often enough, you'll hit someone eventually.) Worse, his excessive rhetoric likely for years discouraged legitimate rooting out of said spies.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a communist. You don’t have to agree with it as a political philosophy (I don’t), but it’s no worse than being a capitalist.
Let's not go down the "those aren't real communists" route. The communists in the West were by and large always very cozy with the SU. Hell, they loved Stalin so much and wanted to hear so little that Orwell sat down to write a fable to explain the issues to them.
One of the most famous moments was the waving of an imaginary list with known communists embedded in the government. Regardless of your view on the 'realness' of those who actually were communists, the point is that it was largely speculative who was part of them. The concerns of the BLM protestors are not that there are hidden racists, but overt bad actors with tangible track records of oppressive behaviors.
Another of the famous moments was when McCarthy called out Frederick G. Fisher, a young lawyer, as a proxy attack on his political opponent, Joseph Welch. "Before this moment, I never appreciated your cruelty," remarked Mr. Welch, noting, "you have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher." He asked the Senator: "Have you no decency, sir?"
He was offended, and thought it indecent, that this young man, a nobody and a nonentity, should have his name paraded front of the entire nation, accused of betrayal, his reputation jeopardized not by any proceeding undertaken for the sake of justice, but rather, in the mainfestly unfair court of public opinion, for the sake of his outrage machine.
Eighteen months ago this nation witnessed Nicholas Sandmann, a random eleventh grader from Covington, Kentucky, excoriated on national television. There are those who still believe it was justice, that the boy had it coming, and declare that he has a "punchable" face. If someone has stood up and called this indecent, it was little noted. CNN settled a lawsuit over the matter, but has not issued an apology; our outrage machine has rolled on to other matters, and will continue to do so with little heed to justice.
I never said they weren't "real" communists, I said there's nothing wrong with that.
There is a difference between communism and nazism.
Communism is simply the belief that the workers should own the means of production. It's like being a "witch". You might think it's complete nonsense and doesn't work in the real world (I'd agree with you), but if people want to be witches (or wiccans or whatever), they should be allowed to be.
Nazism, on the other hand, is an inherently evil ideology. Hopefully, I don't have to explain why.
And once again, you've mistakenly conflated communism with totalitarianism (which is what 1984 is actually about).
> Nazism, on the other hand, is an inherently evil ideology. Hopefully, I don't have to explain why.
The situation I was referring to has nothing to do with the Nazis: it was after WW2 when the East/West conflict ramped up and Berlin was divided in two sectors (Soviet/Western controlled), but surrounded by the Soviet controlled sector of Germany. The Soviet Union then decided to enact a blockade to stop transports to West Berlin and starve the population to force the Western Allies to give up Berlin. It's what lead to the massive air transport operation dubbed "Raisin Bombers" that sustained the West Berlin population.
> And once again, you've mistakenly conflated communism with totalitarianism (which is what 1984 is actually about).
Yeah, yeah, "this time, it will all be different, we won't have concentration camps, we won't have purges, we won't have mock trials". At some point you can accept that some mechanism in your system leads to the undesired outcome, and that, even if you have not yet discovered it, there is most likely a causal relationship.
First, it's not "my system". I'm not a Soviet apologist, I'm not a communist, and frankly I don't even think communism is a workable system of government.
But I would the same exact things about libertarianism.
Just because I don't agree with something doesn't mean I think people should be prosecuted for it.
I get that you're trying to say that there's something inherent in communism that causes totalitarian states, but you are confusing correlation with causation.
Whatever terrible things have been done in the name of communism (and absolutely, some of the worst attrocities in history have taken place under communist rule), the same or worse things (slavery, genocide, oppression, colonialism) have been done under capitalist rule.
And this causes virtue signaling on the part of companies, which then causes employees' livelihoods to be directly tied to their ability to express acceptable beliefs in the correct way.
Sure, but there are more underrepresented groups than the ones currently adopted by woke culture. Folks with English as a second language are having a hell of a time with the rapidly evolving speech codes. One cannot even go by the annotations in the OED anymore.
Why are we beating around the bush even on anonymous platform like this one?
What do "conversations", language policing, social media activism, etc actually do to improve the situation? Where are the actual actions and involvements like volunteering for actual work in a poor community?
Why is the suggested action so often giving money? Buy this book about how to be a good white person, donate to local BLM chapter, support this twitter activist on Patreon, hire a racial issues consultant for a company seminar?
If anybody really cares about black lives they should be deeply concerned with gang violence, human trafficking, drugging minors, etc. Where are the conversations about that?
For me it is clear that a lot of individuals are taking advantage of a real problem for their own goals and purposes, even wiling to do more harm than good. And now we are debating whether it's worth to sacrifice certain freedoms not to offend them.
> If anybody really cares about black lives they should be deeply concerned with gang violence, human trafficking, drugging minors, etc. Where are the conversations about that?
There's no question that BLM is being hijacked by groups with entirely different agendas - most of whom couldn't care less about black lives.
...but this argument is a logically flawed whataboutism. It's entirely reasonable to protest a lesser problem. It doesn't mean you don't care or work to fix the larger problems.
BLM has as much in common with black lives as ANTIFA has with anti fascism as Democratic People's Republic of Korea has with democracy. Just empty slogans.
Like with the Paradox of Tolerance, the absolutist free speech position paradoxically leads to loss of free speech. Speech that is "truth to power" has to be defended. But defending the opposite kind—lies spread by the powerful—is helping them silence dissent.
There are people/orgs/governments that are experts in twisting the idea of free speech to their advantage. They know very well what to say to change clear opposing voices into a "controversy", represent indisputable facts as "opinions", and play free speech card when called out on it. They can keep doing it until people who genuinely want to evaluate all sides can't keep up with all the distractions.
And there are lots of cases when people are just being assholes. They enjoy that they can troll as much as they want and "freeze peach! slippery slope!" magically elevates any stupid shit they say into an important political message to be defended at all costs.
Right now, the "powerful people" are shaping the narrative far more by what they censor, than what they say. Preventing particular sides from sharing their views shapes the debate far more than adding noise to another side.
> But defending the opposite kind—lies spread by the powerful—is helping them silence dissent.
But that just moves the problem to the question of "who is powerful?", doesn't it? Everybody feels that their side isn't in power because their goals and ideals haven't been completely achieved, so obviously they are the powerless who are speaking truth to power, and therefore the other side are the powerful who are spreading lies to silence dissent.
That doesn't help. I think there's a good chance for anybody that they are wrong in their perception of who is in power, their perception of what "the powerful" want, their political convictions and theories of life, so any kind of distinction of what speech to suppress and what to allow is pretty much a coin flip with regards to this "allow & support speaking truth to power".
Who is more powerful: The President of the United States, or me?
While it's indeed possible that there are ambiguous cases, that doesn't invalidate the idea in general. Unless you legitimately believe that it is always impossible to determine when there is a power imbalance in a relationship. But we make that decision just fine in many other situations, so I don't know why speech would be different.
> While it's indeed possible that there are ambiguous cases, that doesn't invalidate the idea in general.
Compared to you vs the US president, I'd say all cases are ambiguous. Are we just measuring the president and then say "that's what the people in power believe", or are we determining everyone's power level and opinions and then weigh both to find out what part of those in power believe X?
It's impossible to do accurately, and you won't get a binary picture even if you managed to do it.
There are a lot of downvoted posts in this thread that make reasonable arguments and that are promoting discussion. I disagree with a lot of them, but it’s awkward for this to be a story where people are heavily downvoting people they disagree with
It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help.
However, in opposition to my own idea, I consider that simply requiring a more effort wouldn't necessarily change the groupthink problem, but would just stifle low effort downvotes.
Let's consider then the whole idea of votes in the first place. Are downvotes considered "speech" in an abstract sense? Should they be protected in the same way disagreeable opinions are? Is the level of effort necessary to express the speech relevant to the level of protection it deserves? Would restricting downvotes in any way be considered a speech restriction?
So these are all interesting aspects to the problem that cause me a lot of internal debate.
To reply to a part of your comment: I've come to realize that most downvotes can be mitigated by simply adding in disclaimers, explicit assumptions, general kindness and general positivity [1].
In that sense HN really made me a more civil person to discuss with, while I am still able to write controversial opinions when I happen to have them.
So on balance, in my experience, the downvoting has been a good development for me.
[1] There was a year where I was arguably mildly depressed about my job situation. I graduated had all the bells and whistles, and worked amazingly hard for it (I almost burned out twice). Yet, I couldn't get a prestigious job. And for me, that was the whole point. Why work hard if it doesn't get you anywhere? I gave up on a lot of things.
The tone in my comments during that year was more negative than usual despite my opinions being similar. I experimented with being more positive than I actually felt, while still expressing the same opinions, and noticed I'd be downvoted less and upvoted more.
>I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help
I think old school sequential forums were actually much better, outside specific niches they're harder to find these days though. Having the things everyone strongly agrees with at the top where they're the first to be read just encourages flamewars straight out of the gate and a lot of stuff just got lost in the middle to never be looked at again. But when casually reading you see replies from everyone, there's no distinction between controversial opinions and group think approved ones. One of the few I frequent regularly is actually a political and has posters with the full spectrum of beliefs, but the lack voting makes things much more pleasant than a similar topic on here or reddit would be.
There were a couple of other advantages too, bumping threads meant the conversation was over when it stopped being discussed, not when an algorithm decided it was no longer interesting.
Sequential forums can be good for discussions. It was definitely nice to be able to bump a discussion that was older than 16 hours to unbury it.
I like ranked forums for Q and A content though, Eg, like stack overflow or even reddit when I’m trying to answer a technical question.
Mostly though, nothing can replace a good forum culture. I just meant to encourage that with my remark, the downvote button itself is only bad if people use it recklessly
In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h, so people eventually saved them for really bad / offensive / spam comments instead of punishing people for their opinions (except a few who even wrote scripts to downvote certain people systematically...).
The problem is in my opinion that once people begin to act like this, their victims behave like this also. If you get punished for arguing against somebody, you learn to stop arguing and just downvote that person instead. It's a chain reaction.
If so, it must be a sort of "hell" downvote, which has no effect even though the UI seems to indicate that it does... I don't think this would change behavior as described above.
There could be two kinds of downvotes:
* "I disagree" downvote
* "This comment has no value" downvote
First downvote can be used for arguments like "let's increase taxes to the rich because, this way we can build more fair society, European countries have shown that high taxes..."
Second downvote can be used for comments like "Let's tax these rich bastards".
I want to also mention reddit voting system which I kinda like: they have downvoting, but they also have a sorting by "controvervial": top comments are the comments with high number of both upvotes and downvotes, such comments really help to see the full spectre of opinions in discussions, while the universally true and not interesting comments everyone agrees with like "we should not kill people", are below controversial comments.
The ideal solution is definitely to split ratings, both for upvotes and downvotes. Slashdot did this, and quite a few forum scripts have plugins for it, where you can rate posts based on things like whether you agree/disagree with them, if they're funny or informative, if they're spam/low quality etc.
Having it work that way would significantly discourage using upvotes and downvotes as agree/disagree buttons, and make it much clearer what the community thinks of any particular post or piece of content.
One of the common threads on some limits to free speech is the notion that lies are not protected. Libel, perjury, false advertisement, slander. I treat downvoting similarly: I only downvote things I know to be false and figure the speaker either knows it to be false or reasonably should know.
Since I only downvote in the rare cases where I believe a person is being dangerously disingenuous or unreasonable, I often don't feel there would be any value in replying. If they are misrepresenting facts or I believe they are not reasonable, why would I attempt to reason with them?
Instead if I think the person is just confused or hasn't considered a different perspective, I won't downvote and might reply. Often I will just ignore it anyways, since I am ambivalent about the possibility of reasoning with people over the internet.
One of the problems with upvote/downvote is that it is binary, while topics of discussion in the social rarely aren’t. In the social space of forming opinions, many things happen in a grey spectrum, and need not be polarized all the time (upvote / downvote)
Having multiple different reaction buttons would legit be nice:
I agree
I disagree
Thoughtful
Contentless
I learned something
I changed my mind
This way we could eg. express that we disagree with the post, which was thoughtful and a good effort, and didn't change our minds but still learned something.
One huge poison in a lot of modern discourse is that accepting your interlocutor has a point should mean you start to agree with them. Why? Some of the best things I've ever read in my life didn't change my overall stance on a subject, but gave it a lot of new nuance and depth, and appreciation for the person talking.
With the exception of spam, that's a feature. If something offends you, you should consider why.
Upvotes are useful in reducing spam, as without them, I'd have to repeat a sentiment to show agreement. In my experience (anecdata warning!) that nicely leads to both the best post for an argument, and the best rebuttal, sharing visibility.
Neither combat the problem of "fake news", because frauds don't have to be well done if the local community agrees with the sentiment.
What I would be interested in is a more sophisticated ordering than by net number of votes. For example, I'm sure some people's upvotes correlate well with my own (and probably some people's downvotes correlate with my upvotes!) If comments could somehow be ordered by how likely I am to upvote them, based on historical correlations between my and others' votes, that seems like an interesting approach.
If we must have the one-click convenience (I'm not convinced it's necessary) I'd prefer to have few labels like "I disagree" "Not true" "Off topic" "Pls read the article" "Disgusting" etc. instead of downvote button, perhaps also similar for upvote.
I'd really like "I learned something" as a vote button. It's poisonous to think that I agreeing with something means I have to adopt the other person's stance on an issue, and if I disagree I have to denounce their contribution as horrible and bad.
Some of the best stuff I've ever read didn't change my overall stance on the issue, but gave it nuance and depth it didn't have before, and more respect for the person on the other side.
I would rather view in chronological order. I think that it should be an option. Sorting by "controversial" as suggested in another comment should be another option.
> It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help.
I actually don't see any value in downvotes. It's usually used when people disagree, which obviously leads to silos of thought and suppressing ideas. If somebody is being particularly disruptive and unproductive, then they should be flagged, but otherwise I wish downvotes would be removed from HN. It has no place here.
Especially on HN, where I thought the idea was for people to have reasonable discussions about things, downvotes are frustratingly counter to that. If you disagree with something, it's too easy to just downvote and move on. And people pile on without saying anything. And in the end, nobody learns anything because nobody's actually talking about what's wrong with the comment.
Then again, I get the feeling nobody here actually wants to learn anything from fellow users if they happen to represent different ideas. I guess that's by design?
As far as I know the convention of HN has always been that downvotes can be used to express strong disagreement and that discussion of downvoting is regarded as unproductive and a bit boring.
This is the problem. The upvoting-downvoting is a good idea in principle but it does not (and cannot) take human subjectivity into account, which is what makes it fundamentally flawed. By the way this is an extension of the same problem as with silencing opinions or comments online or in real life.
I don't think downvoting them is going to change their mind by making them reassess their convictions after being subjected to the same treatment they support.
To me the limit in freedom of speech is when one calls for violence. As I truly believe in free speech, every exception you make to free speech, is arbitrary. If we have to everyone's exceptions into account, it's over with real free speech.
I personally can't be easily hurt by people I don't know well, but also understand that other people are easier hurt. This can be due to their current situation or things from the past that can more easily hurt their feelings.
I also want to stress that there's obviously something as politeness, empathy and social behavior. These should be encouraged at all times. But we all know some people simply can't behave and sometimes you even yourself can make an insulting remark
But due to free of speech, I do believe that people who are rude, insult others and make insensitive jokes, should be allowed to do so. Without any limit. How terrible it is what they say
They practice their freedom of speech. And we shouldn't punish them, other than telling them how we feel about what they say and making clear it can hurt the feelings of others.
On the other side we should invest in becoming more resilent to insults etc.
Obviously I see a task for parents and maybe even schools.
Thet should invest time in teaching children how to deal with rude, insensitive, insulting people and make them more resilient e.g. by boosting their self confidence.
For me that would be the best solution to keep an open society where people can speak freely. Making exceptions will kill it.
After all what can be insulting to person 1 can mean totally nothing to person 2.
As great as free speech is, I don't think western political systems will survive it if it's not accompanied by transparency and accountability. Humans are hard wired to perceive their environments as local. They are not local anymore. The bar of plausible deniability has sunk two inches into the mud we stand on for any dumbass political justification.
I don't want restrictions on free speech, but I also feel absolutely screwed by the way society functions right now.
“I trust you guys. I love you guys. We'll keep this space open. This is the last stronghold for civil discourse. After this shit it's just rat-a-tat tattity tat-tat ta tat tat TAT.”
“I seen Candace Owens try to convince white America, ‘don’t worry about it he’s a criminal anyway', I don’t give a fuck what this nigga did… I don’t care if he personally kicked Candace Owens in her stink pussy. I don’t know if it stinks, but I imagine it does."
“There’s something so true about this genre when done correctly that I will fight anybody that gets in a true practitioner of this art form’s way, because I know you’re wrong. This is the truth and you are obstructing it. I’m not talking about the content, I’m talking about the art form.”
I love Chappelle - but he's not an angel, and didn't serve the free speech cause well with his personal attack (she took it sportingly) on somebody genuinely brave in speaking off-message.
I’m with you that the personal attack was rude, and he likely lost support for his side on that issue by including it.
But I don’t agree that the effect extends to lost support for free speech in general. It is commonly understood that rude speech is the most important kind of speech to defend, since it is the “front line” where the forces opposing free speech are most active.
Dave is surely aware of this too. He says rude things all the time, probably intentionally, because when documented they become fortifications which are actually harder to break through. I’m pretty sure he has outright declared an intention to get things wrong sometimes, but I can’t find the quote.
Sure (and good points), but in the context here - quoting Chappelle on civil discourse and free speech I think it's important to question the consistency when such uncivil jibes are aimed from a position of power at a hate figure.
In context, the phrase “civil discourse” has an alternative meaning that you arrive at by substituting the first dictionary definition of the word “civil”:
> 1. relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, as distinct from military or ecclesiastical matters.
It’s a brilliant argument that works on two levels: violence is the only alternative to free speech, and raw and ugly honesty can lead to greater understanding.
I would not call it bravery. She started her career as an anti-conservative blogger and then realized there was money to be made in being conservatives' token minority friend.
That is somewhat revisionist I would say, She was cancelled by the left like many have been over the years, because while she was "anti-conservative" (though not really) she was far more moderate than the Extreme Authoritarian left accepts
You don't find it slightly ironic that you are defending her when she was "cancelled" for setting up a website with the express purpose of doxxing people who didn't want to be identified?[1]
I think it was you who claimed this on the Scott Alexander story:
> One of the biggest problems in modern society is the lack of respect for privacy and anonymous speech. anonymous speech has been a cornerstone of the advancement of civilization many times through out history including playing a critical role in the formation of the United States as well as the US Constitution
It seems to me that she was criticised by the left (and many on the right!) for attempting to start a pretty distasteful service.
I dont believe I was defending her. i believe in facts and the statement was factually inaccurate, She moved more conservative and started her conservative persona after the left rejected or ejected her from their circle.
Not sure how correcting the record with facts is "defending" some one but I guess in times of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act
I absolutely am not a fan of her or her works on the doxxing site
You seem to think her rejection by the left was some kind of extreme act ("far more moderate than the Extreme Authoritarian left accepts") and yet she was actually rejected for setting up a doxxing site!
It's not an extreme act to reject someone for that, and nor is it a moderate act to set one up.
Again we are back to revisionism. The Authoritarian left likes nothing more than to doxx people, it happens every day on twitter and it is a critical part of Cancel Culture
No, Candace "if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine" Owens is not brave because she gets called out for being a sack of shit.
I think they're misunderstanding the difference between freedom of speech and not having any negative consequences accruing to you for said speech.
Yes, we all agree that government must not censor speech.
However, all us other individuals and non-government organizations are certainly free to decide who to associate with and who not to associate with. You are free to say whatever stupid shit you want in public, but the rest of us are well within our rights to ostracize you, fire you, etc as a consequence of learning that you, due to your free speech, are an ignorant/repulsive/racist/evil person.
> "...any negative consequences accruing to you for said speech..."
I see this argument all the time but it's pretty clear that progressives would be livid if an organization/business chose to impose "negative consequences" on one of their won for their progressive beliefs. Quite a double standard.
That is the legal situation, but the question then arises if it is desirable for a society to develop in the direction where such ostracisms happen a lot. I think there is an argument to be made that speech which is overly constrained by societal norms at some point would lead to similar negative consequences as speech constrained by the government. I am not saying that we are anywhere close to that point, but it think it is an important point to keep in mind.
In mainstream news (ap, CBC, bbc, others), increasingly people and groups are being labelled as racist without any discretion. Eg, people out protecting Churchill statues in the UK are labelled as racists in several stories[1]. Surely, there is at least one racist in the group, but increasingly every single person who doesn’t tow the line is being called out - entire police departments, mayors, city councils, schools, news organizations - everyone is either supporting the cause or else is a racist, with no evidence or scrutiny being applied. How can entire police departments be racist? Entire companies?
[1] to be fair, Churchill was a racist and a colonialist. He opposed Ghandi. He also helped defeat fascism and naziism and is an important historical figure. Defending a Churchill statue does not automatically make everybody in the vicinity a nazi.
Cause the statue was defended by far-right group. It is not act of defending statue that makes him Paul Golding racist, but the fact that far-right groups are defending the statue while left leaning are against it is definitely notable.
You've not linked any of the stories. Do they actually use the term 'racist'?
People loathe being called racist, to the point that if you point out someone is accidentally doing something unhelpful or discriminatory - not calling them racist - then you have to worry about them becoming emotional about it.
They were also labelled as racist by right wing newspapers that venerate Churchill and defend the historical value of statues of slave traders, on account of the groups organizing it and how the crowd behaved.
If you’re in a group with people you don’t know very well and some of them say or do something utterly stupid, you are not automatically one of them. Eg, some people were looting during the protests but it would be ridiculous to say the entire protest is just a bunch of thugs
If the protest which gets the media coverage for fighting police is an organised group of football hooligans run by prominent far-right activists, and there are widespread Nazi salutes, it's probably not incumbent on the media to 'some of them were good people' away the nature of the group you've joined up with.
Even the also in-attendance group of veterans which was very angry at media coverage for suggesting there might be racists descending on London acknowledged in their rush to disassociate themselves that the larger and longer lasting football hooligan protest which got into the actual fights was explicitly racist.
Then the early black lives matter protests were nothing but a bunch of anarchistic rioters and looters. And every cop in those police departments is racist. And all those city councillors too. It isn’t true though and the point is you can’t just go around labelling people like that willy nilly. You can’t just group everyone together based on what the worst of them do.
Imagine a world where every honest cop quit in order to avoid being associated with the bad ones
I don't agree with the point you're making at all here. OPs point is that if you attend a gathering with people you don't know, and that gathering turns out to be heavily represented by white supremacist groups, you are going to be labelled with it.
You're furiously defending an argument that you've made, which is exactly the point that is being made repeatedly in this thread, that's it's very difficult to have a discussion on many of these topics because the debate turns to this very quickly.
In the same spirit, gentleman11's point is that if you attend a gathering with people you don't know, and that gathering turns out to be heavily represented by looters and rioters, you are going to be labelled with it.
> You're furiously defending an argument that you've made
More like trying to show to DanBC that their line of thinking is illogical. Regardless, I do not see anything furious about it.
There's nothing illogical about describing as racist a group of people who make Nazi salutes, who attack black people, who spray racist graffiti.
I'm pointing out that this is a simplistic, dishonest, framing:
> Eg, people out protecting Churchill statues in the UK are labelled as racists in several stories[1].
A more honest framing would be "people out protecting Churchill statutes, many of them making Nazi salutes and chanting racist slogans, are labelled as racists in several stories".
> There's nothing illogical about describing as racist a group of people who make Nazi salutes, who attack black people, who spray racist graffiti.
However that's not what you were doing; you were stating the point that being with a group doing x means you will labelled as x.
> If you're in a large group, and many members of that group are by any definition racist, you're going to be called part of a racist group.
Now whether you meant that that is a case of will be vs should was not covered but that was what the original point was.
The new point about framing would be in relation to the original point made where all in the protest centred around protection of the statues were labelled racist for doing so by major news organisations.
At a guess there's at least two frustrations made in that that I can immediately think of
1) the lack of nuance from the papers (probably a hopeless ask given the way media operates in general for any story they handle but something worth discussing)
And 2) the hypocrisy displayed. We've seen the recent riots described as "mostly peaceful protests" time after time when a simple look at the stories and videos coming out show anything but yet the difference in the media descriptions of the two is pretty glaring would you agree?
> However that's not what you were doing; you were stating the point that being with a group doing x means you will labelled as x.
I still say that. If you attend a demonstration organised by a far right group (FLA), heavily promoted by other far right groups (Britain First, EDL), and prominent members of the far right (Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Paul Golding) then you're going to be called racist.
You're desperately trying to say these crowds were people interested in statues and merely peacefully protesting to protect statues. That shows a complete lack of understanding of i) who organised the demonstration ii) the language used to organise the demonstration iii) the behaviours displayed during the demonstration and iv) the commentary across the political spectrum condemning this demonstration as racist thuggery.
> yet the difference in the media descriptions of the two is pretty glaring would you agree?
At some point you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that in the UK the far right pose a far greater risk of harm than the left.
The people you're desperately trying to defend were drunk, coked-up, racist, football hooligans on a rampage. That has been fairly and accurately described by UK news media, including those on the right.
I haven't said anything about defending these crowds at all, you're welcome to point out where I defended them; I've pointed out the likely frustrations of op about two facedness and lack of nuance in the press.
I can perfectly see there are people in the protests making the nazi salutes just fine and I follow the logic behind getting the label if you hang with them, and as you'll surely agree in just the same way that those involved with the recent floyyd protests will be labelled as opportunistic thugs looking to destroy property and assault people.
> At some point you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that in the UK the far right pose a far greater risk of harm than the left.
No, no I don't; both sides seem significantly detrimental in different ways and I don't have to permit free reign to one group of sociopathic bullies just because they are the enemies of a different one.
> the same way that those involved with the recent floyyd protests will be labelled as opportunistic thugs looking to destroy property and assault people
This is so disengenuous as to veer into the realm of absurdity. You seem to be completely ignoring the actual intent of the two groups in attempt to conflate them to defend your argument. Not to mention both side-ing them is an absolute joke.
The intent of the floyd protests wasn't to loot and destroy property. It was to protest his death. The fact that some took this opportunity to do so does not affect the actual intent which was upheld in many other places and protests.
The intent of the other group was explicitly racist. Organized by far-right groups and quite literal Nazis.
No the intent as described many times in the comment chain was protection of the statues; that was what spurred the counter protest.
Both sides began under good intent; both sides had bad actors who caused trouble; both sides get labelled.
And as DanBC said multiple times, that was not the real reason why they were out there. You seem to be ignoring all context for why they were out there and who organized it in attempt to equate the two in a disingenuous manner. At this point it's obvious you're not here to argue in good faith.
Unfortunate as it is but neither you nor DanBC are the global authority on other peoples "real reason" for doing things no matter how you feel on the subject.
Context is also a poorly thought out point to bring up considering plenty was provided; numerous examples of destruction of statues given before, no sign of slowing and future targetting given often and loudly.
Why are you repeating the same thing over and over while ignoring the argument given?
Oh well, here, let's repeat it. "There's nothing illogical about describing as looters and rioters a group of people who break windows, steal from shops, set buildings and cars on fire."
You can extend the same argument to have racist undertones by including all black people for example because there are some criminals among them. Racism is bad not because it is racism but rather because it is yet another instance of prejudice and generalization.
With all the talk of people doing Nazi salutes it seemed like you could open any news story about the counter-protests and you'd see clear evidence of Neo-Nazis but it was anything but, even when people point to videos [0] that are supposed to demonstrate the Nazi salute it's a struggle to even figure out who is supposed to be doing it. Another video [1] of that same scene is even less supportive of the claim of Nazi salutes. The discussion on such videos at the time always devolved into bickering about how strict the salute had to be before it counts on videos that were overwhelmingly of people with one or both arms in the air, closed fist salutes, people literally pointing, stills out of context, etc, on videos that were always accompanied by football chanting. I don't think I saw a single example of a strict or even semi-strict Nazi salute from a couple of days of casually looking up the news on the counter-protests despite every thread having a dozen people that were quick to point out that the protestors were racists doing the Nazi salute.
As far as the EDL / Britain First goes, this is literally the first time I'm hearing that the leader of Britain First showed up, it seems like it was drowned out of the news completely. Are there any pictures of said flags or the scale of their involvement? I don't recall seeing any at the time and I can't find any pics at all. Edit: Found one [2], it's of the leader.
> this is literally the first time I'm hearing that the leader of Britain First showed up
It's somewhat frustrating that people who do not know who attended the demonstration are telling me that I'm wrong when I say it was mostly comprised of recognised far right groups.
The protests were organised by far right groups such as FLA / DLFA, with calls from people like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Paul Golding for people to attend.
It was extremely well publicised at the time too: Golding even gave the PA a quote in advance about why he was going, every mainstream media outlet mentioned him in their reports and Twitter throbbed with speculation about whether he was breaching his bail conditions.
Maybe in some circles it was well publicised but in many articles around the time it's nothing more than a single sentence mention, e.g., [0] which is near the bottom, [1] or [2] which are closer to the top but still not really the point of the articles. The Telegraph link from DanBC's post mentions them a few more times for comparison.
>telling me that I'm wrong when I say it was mostly comprised of recognised far right groups
I'm not trying to tell you that you're wrong or that far right groups didn't attend and I'm sorry if it came across that way, I was hesitant to even make a reply for fear it would come across as a defence of groups I'm ideologically opposed to over protests I don't agree with. The only point I wanted to discuss really was the Nazi salutes since 'protestors defending Churchill statue perform Nazi salute' seems to be the sticking point of social commentary on the counter protests, but the supposed video where it happens is questionable. But I'm happy to be proven wrong on that, just like I was the involvement from Britain First which is why I edited the post, so again sorry if it seems like I'm trying to downplay their involvement.
At some point a word becomes so overused it loses all meaning.
The guy who created the word genocide also created the word vandalism. He intended for both actions these words described to be looked at with abject horror and thus applied as infrequently as possible so that they would retain their meaning.
Your first example isn't about speech. The school had a policy of a white absence day (which is batshit, but whatever) and he expressly violated that as an act of protest and got fired for breaking the rules. He'd been clearly opposed to it from the start and not censored.
Be very careful with that second link, that story was spun like crazy in conservative circles, and even weeks later it's impossible to find an account of what happened from anything other than the lecturer's perspective. I mean, that Free Beacon story is one of the worst examples: find me anywhere in that story that quotes a student or explains what they were upset about. The go to Google News and search for the guy's name, and you find a giant list of stories from conservative outlets (and none from mainstream sources) all with the same odd skew to the reporting. I think the jury is still out about what exactly was offensive, I'm guessing it wasn't just because he read an MLK speech. UCLA has not said anything yet.
The David Shor one is a good example though. Something crazy happened there and no one understands why he was fired.
The first example says the school didn't make it mandatory for white people to stay home, it was just highly recommended. It doesn't look like he broke any rules, the school had just hoped everyone would fall in line and he was fired for not agreeing with them.
I had to go look that up again. It wasn't about this one incident. He wasn't even fired, he resigned after becoming the center of a huge protest movement on campus directed specifically at him (a self-described member of the conservative "Intellectual Dark Web"), then after suing the college for failing to protect him, and the resignation was part of the resulting settlement. Then he did the FOX tour and wrote an op-ed for the Journal and settled into his life as a conservative martyr.
Yeah, he wasn't fired to keep him from complaining about white absence day.
He, and most of the rest of the IDW would not consider themselves conservative at all. In fact, only JPeterson considers himself conservative out of the commonly touted members. Dont misrepresent people because they dont fit your narrative
This is a dangerous way of thinking and doesnt help to close divisions that are opening up all over society at the moment. He is a left libertarian by his own admission and there are countless examples demonstrating this fact. Because something has some political overlap in some areas, does not mean it is of the same political ideology as whole. Individuals on both the left and right can agree on freedom of speech for example without being considered a puppet of the other side of the aisle. The same can be said on views about gender, immigration ad infinitum. There is a culture war, correct. But he did not pick a side based on its conservatism, rather he picked a side based on postmodernist ideology
This one[0] gets the noggin' joggin'. Cambridge defends one of their profs saying "White Lives Don't Matter" yet were quick to rescind their invitation for Jordan Peterson for "controversial" comments [1].
And on the other hand, saying "White Lives Matter" got not only the man saying it fired. His girlfriend was found to be guilty by association and also fired.
That's not true. His girlfriend was fired previously for posting racist messages on Facebook and then refusing to go on a sensitivity training course offered by her employer.
That article is a summary of a daily mail article, so it's bad journalism squared.
Ah, that's new information to me. Still she was fired immediately after this statement of her boyfriend, so there is obviously a connection to that, in addition to what she said herself in the past.
> Data scientist fired for retweeting study showing non-violent protests are more effective
This is a blatant misrepresentation. The tweet talked about "race riots" and Democrat election results. Many people would argue that the point of direct action is not to sway electoral votes toward the Democratic party.
And particularly, that election was in the middle of the southern strategy switch, and the Democratic party didn't define itself as the left wing of acceptable politics in the nation as it does today. Particularly the Southern Democrats hadn't overwhelmingly converted over to Republicans yet. It was only after the Civil Rights Act was passed (which was six days into the race riots mentioned, so real actionable change that came from them) that the Dixiecrats really started switching, and that took time (a few elections worth).
> It was only after the Civil Rights Act was passed (which was six days into the race riots mentioned, so real actionable change that came from them)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law on the second of July 1964, had been in the works since before Mr. Kennedy's (unrelated) assassination in 1963; it passed the House 290–130 and the Senate 73–27: I really doubt that six days' rioting can be credited with passing it.
A lot of bills of all had been in the works for years and were only passed after some swell of public opinion.
For instance the Patriot act didn't come out of nowhere, but it's provisions had been shopped around for years prior. With 9/11, they had the votes necessary to move forward with it.
There was no switch. Go look up members of congress who switched political party during that era. Wikipedia has a list. You'll find two, one in the house and one in the senate.
Had there been an actual switch, you'd expect to see numerous members of congress switching sides.
The "party switch" narrative is a lie. It's to cover for the fact that the republicans kept voting for civil rights until they were finally able to pass it. Today, being the party in opposition to civil rights wouldn't be seen as OK, so a false version of history is pushed to cover up the truth.
A better explanation for the change in voting is that party preferences changed once the issue of civil rights was no longer under consideration. With that gone, other political goals were able to determine party preference.
It wasn't a switch as in politicians jumping ship from party to party in most cases, but instead a high level policy switch of voters, purging politicians from one party, and gaining new ones on the other as Dixiecrat voters felt betrayed and were welcomed into the Republican party as a new policy shift of that party.
Framing this as the civil rights act being solved and now voters focusing on other issues is ahistorical, and essentially just propaganda.
The "party switch" is ahistorical, and essentially just propaganda.
Republicans, who for years had been fighting to pass civil rights laws, didn't one day suddenly decide to become the party of Jim Crow, KKK, and slavery. That's democrats, who even today (now that the old stuff is unacceptable in public) have low expectations for some races.
Purging politicians from one party would be great. We can start with the Virginia governor who went to a party in blackface, with his fiance in classic KKK garb. We have pictures, matching pictures of him in the same plaid pants, an awkward admission of guilt, and still he remains in office. This is 2020. He is in office.
Next up would be Biden. There is plenty of video of him saying... that word... to rudely refer to black people. Oh wait, he's the party's presumed 2020 candidate for president!
Nothing deep has changed. It's just being smarter about public relations.
Free speech != hate speech. There's a big difference between stating a reasoned point of view that some might find offensive and stating something that's intended only to offend. The first is essential to a free society and deserves our enthusiastic protection. The second is only destructive and should be shunned.
Behaving offensively is not strictly in the eye of the beholder. If you hate something/someone, do not share your opinion unless you're willing to provide a reasoned argument to support your conclusion. If you're not willing to do that, then we're done listening. That's not free speech.
Free speech should always be constructive, never just opinion -- especially a destructive one. The purpose of free speech is to make a positive contribution, support your assertion with facts and logic (and emotion, if you like), and then always be willing to discuss to the merits and demerits of your argument using civil discourse. Absent facts AND logic AND civil exchange... THAT'S NOT FREE SPEECH. It's just one person sounding off, often motivated by hate. That's not just offensive, that's intended only to offend. It's an assault on others. And assault is a crime.
Yes, the US First Amendment defends the free exchange of ideas. But if you're not willing to listen as well, to think, discuss, and consider alternative points of view, then protected Free Speech should not apply to you. Take your lust to offend and go away. You're not welcome here.
These sound like guidelines for a discussion site, but I don't think there's a basis in the law for the US freedom of speech to be freedom of constructive speech or freedom of civil exchange.
There are plenty of hateful people and group that say reprehensible things in public and face no government sanctions. And, as much as I dislile the reprehensible things they say, I feel that's appropriate. The governments of the US should not be in the business of deciding what can be said or by whom, and historically has done a poor job when they have.
Any venue claiming to be a free speech venue but policing hate speech isn't really a free speech venue after all. More so if the policing is ad-hoc and capricious.
Of course, HN never claims to be a free speech venue (and certainly isn't). And I don't think I would participate in many group discussions in a legitimately free speech venue either --- there are a lot of opinions I don't want to hear, and I am content for them to be voiced somewhere else, but then, I avoid the public square in real life as well.
Public speech has long been limited by law: slander, libel, sedition, public nuisance, public safety, violation of NDA, violation of gag orders, indecency, and more.
Your argument is only that no amount of hate speech is too much. But I see no principle in civil rights that defends the repercussions that ensue from purely bilious expression, any more than the claim that mercilessly berating some individual unto suicide should be an act of free expression. Verbal misconduct often leads to penalties in civil court. The question here is whether it should also lead to criminal penalties, as speech that is intended only to injure.
It seems to me that a civil society cannot coexist with the unfettered right to speak hate. One of the two must win out. I hope it's civility. So far, I think it's been hate.
But that reduces the term to be meaningless. Unless you attempt to draw a line between what is and isn't hate, you cannot address it by law or even in discourse.
If we want less of it, first we must define it. Only then can we draw a line so we can say, "Free speech stops here. Beyond this, the cost is too high (and the benefit too small)."
The courts have drawn lines in the past when it comes to speech inviting bodily harm. Weaponized speech intended only to injure is little different.
In the Canadian Charter of Rights (which is like the Canadian equivalent to the US Constitution), there is a concept of reasonable limits.
This allows a right to be limited to the extent that it is justified in a free and democratic society.
In practice, this has been used in Canada to prevent a variety of objectionable conduct such as hate speech and obscenity.
There's all kinds of limits on the limits themselves, and well defined tests and criterias for what can qualify as an appropriate limitation which since IANAL goes a little over my head.
I'm bringing it up simply because the concept of having an absolutely applicable in all circumstances free speech right is not a concept used everywhere. So I feel the idea that those who defend free speech should defend it also when it's offensive isn't universal, and in Canada, the charter of rights doesn't make it so. It's an interesting contrast I believe.
>the concept of having an absolutely applicable in all circumstances free speech right is not a concept used everywhere.
It is as a moral concept. I'd argue (as a Canadian) the Canadian legal concept of "free speech" doesn't really resemble the moral concept at all. Which is shameful. Unobjectionable conduct doesn't need protection.
You've been downvoted, but it's a fair point. You don't need freedom of speech to express ideas already accepted by the mainstream and by the state. That's permitted even in the most oppressive regimes. Freedom of speech is, by definition, concerned with unpopular speech.
To quote Noam Chomsky, "If we do not believe in freedom of speech for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all." That's not to say you're entitled to not be fired for any reason that makes you a liability to a company, but I'm seeing far too many people applauding political violence. "Punch Nazis" is now the standard internet response to any right-wing demonstration and those who repeat that slogan always fail to see the incredible irony of it.
Punch Nazis is bankrupt in any case: Punching an ideologue makes you feel good, but it won't change their mind. So it serves your own need for righteousness but little else.
"But it worked in WWII", someone will say. No. They didn't punch Nazis in WWII. They killed them. They took to them with rifle and bayonet, bombed their towns and factories, and forcibly dismantled their party and government.
You don't need to convince the person if you're unilaterally revoking their right to live. You just shoot, bomb, and stab them. Punch a Nazi is bankrupt because it doesn't solve the problem it purports to. You reduce Nazi headcount by convincing them and by giving people sane alternatives so they don't end up throwing their lot in with clowns celebrating Hitler's birthday or by straight up killing them, and Punch does none of those.
I support freedom of speech, whether I agree or disagree what you have to say, or if I am offended by it (which I probably am not, but just in case). Freedom of speech shall also include the freedom to not say if you don't want to, but if you do want to say (or write), then you should say (or write), please.
It was a (mis)quotation of Voltaire: I may not agree what you have to say but defend your right to say it.
You are free to speak and exercise your freedom of speech no one really disputes that. You are not, however, anywhere guaranteed or granted the liberty to a platform for your dialog. That is the problem that we are encountering today, people are thinking that there are attacks to freedom of speech and confusing that with the freedom of an establishment to defend their property from damages. I think we can all agree that art is a medium for free speech but if you graffiti private property without the permission of the owner of said property than the owner of that property has the right to remove the graffiti. Likewise the operator of a website has the same right to remove content they may consider damaging to the value of their property. The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make. It does not preserve the right to defame, demean, or slander others or their property or to damage the property in a way contrary to the desires of the owner of that property. No one is stopping you though from making your own platform to spread your own message. Although it is also the right of those you may purchase services from to terminate those services if they feel that it devalues their property. For instance if a dns provider decides that website is offensive it is their prerogative to terminate services as a private owner. Same with any content provider, isp, hosting service or social media website. No where in the law does anything grant you an unlimited ability to say anything you want in a private forum and any private forum is entitled to moderating the content on its properties. I wish people would stop conflating free speech as some sort of absolute. It is not. The only case where a platform must provide services outside of the strictest sense of an intended audience is in through US Code Titles that may be applicable by law such ADA accessibilities (these codes are of course regional and may not apply outside the region in which that service is provided).
Can we also ban speech/hate/discrimination towards short men? I mean, it is genetic and it is also known that short men get payed less, have less dating options, aren't represented in top management positions, top sports, modelling, etc.
It is even ok and funny for a good part of the population to insult them publicly and reject them.
If you see a tinder/online post 'black men aren't real men' everyone would jump on them and crucify them, but 'Manlets 6'0 under are just little boys' is even shared and laughed by many.
ps: I don't want any ban, but free speech is free speech, unless inciting violence, no amount of hurt feelings should mould what we are allowed to say, otherwise pretty much every race/religion/physical aspect/intelligence/etc will be somewhat offended at a point in time
There's a great episode of Snap Judgement with Daryl Davis where he talks about his interactions with KKK members. I haven't seen Accidental Courtesy, but I'm curious to see how BLM members respond to Davis in the documentary. They have wildly different intents.
Shouting people down in public and on the internet doesn’t change opinions. People just talk more quietly or take more care with whom they share their thoughts and opinions.
Cancel culture, outrage culture, and the general “social justice” movement is not much more than a wide scale attempt to silence dissenting thought. Build your own bubble, and shout down anyone who thinks or speaks differently. Yell and call it “offensive.” The genius of it is you get to decide what’s offensive, and move the goalposts as you see it. Brilliant!
Once you’ve successfully filled your world with only viewpoints that you don’t find problematic, you can be shocked when a man like Donald Trump wins the Presidency.
People in the United States need to thicken up. Learn to hear a thought different from your own. Stop retreating into a stupid safe bubble where your thoughts and ideas don’t have to be challenged. Grow up.
I don't find it to be controversial that questioning someone's humanity or personhood isn't simply "offensive." I find it very surprising that people chanting anti-Semitic nonsense continue to find acceptance and defenders in the United States.
To have a tolerant and open society you need to be intolerant to those who are intolerant. Why is this new or subject to debate?
> To have a tolerant and open society you need to be intolerant to those who are intolerant. Why is this new or subject to debate?
It's a somewhat gross simplification of Popper's original:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes Popper discusses] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
- Karl Popper, "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945)
Doesn't the social justice movement nowadays look rather much like Popper's second paragraph?
I agree with you and right now antifa and BLM are the ones preaching intolerant rhetoric. They can’t for the life of them figure out that we just need to put the past behind us and see that we really have it good right now. They don’t see how much toleration they get despite their intolerance of American Principles, the founders of America, and capitalism. I even heard recently from Larry Elder’s interview on Great American Thinkers (I think that’s what it was called.) that BLM is anti Israel which shows that they are anti Semitic themselves. BLM would have every white man or woman acknowledge the sins of their forefathers as if they were their own.
Although sometimes I like playing the keyboard warrior as I did just here in my previous comment. I also feel there are good people that are in the movement of BLM. I sympathize and empathize with those that are hurting right now. I also believe BLM is not fully responsible for the rioting really I don’t know who to blame for that but regardless lawlessness is not cool. I believe in BLM the concept but not the movement. BLM the concept to me is that BLM because some black people feel and at times, if not very often are discriminated against who get nasty looks anything really. I don’t back down with what I said though. Just as there are people in BLM that do the following there are also people in ALM that are being intolerant, anti Semitic possibly racist and the like. I think they too should be treated with intolerance to an extent. They should not feel welcome making those comments, because they should make a change. I still agree that we should defend The right to free speech that we disagree with, but that just means to me that the government shouldn’t infringe on those rights. We have the freedom to speak our words from possible government intervention, but not a freedom to choose the social consequences. I think people forget that part of the Republican platform in America is standing for individual liberty. As I’ve been told recently if we are color blind that may be bad if we are unaware of our own personal things that make us an individual that’s also bad. Individual liberty to me means standing up for everyone including the little guy but you can’t stand up for the little guy at large expense of the group just as you can’t stand up for the group at the large expense of the minority. That principle I learned from the book Economics in One Lesson and also Our Republican Constitution. If BLM the organization donation’s list goes through ActBlue can you really say it’s a bipartisan movement? I believe the Republican Party still aligns with the principle of BLM the concept but the organization and it’s movement seems to me to drift to partisan politics.
More about ActBlue:
> Powering Democratic candidates, committees, parties,
organizations, and c4s around the country.
> I also feel there are good people that are in the movement of BLM.
There are good people in any movement, especially if it is sufficiently large enough. And you will certainly find much virtue even in people advancing vile causes if you take stock of their character apart from advancing the vile cause.
Social justice itself is a pile of toxic thought patterns trying to fight for goals that are by and large good. They just do it twelve different kinds of wrong. If a person doesn't think there are good people protesting on the streets and in the movement just because they genuinely care and want to see things better, I'd posit they should go get some new eyes. They just have a nasty brain virus infection.
> To have a tolerant and open society you need to be intolerant to those who are intolerant
Do you have any proof of that? From what I can see, the US has been, for the past 200 years, the most tolerant to intolerance, and also (one of) the most tolerant. Weimar Republic (pre-Nazi Germany), had prohibitions on anti-Semitism, yet it didn't help. I'm sure there are also counterexamples, but regardless your claim doesn't exactly follow.
Is this ignoring that we not only had a Nazi movement back before the war but also the fact that we put Asian Americans into camps, had a long period of treating Irish Americans as 2nd class citizens? This is without going into the big issues of slavery much of which still show signs today in how our police system treats black Americans.
What part of all of that makes us the most tolerant exactly?
Unfortunately, too many people tend towards binary thinking. "Either you're with us to the last detail, or you're the enemy and we'll do everything to destroy you." All attempts at nuanced dialogue are thus drowned out by the extremists. This is not a healthy dynamic for social peace.
No doubt. My comment that says “You have to accept the bad with the good” is at -2. People don’t actually want free speech, they want people to speak the way they want.
Firing, cancelling, and silencing anyone with a 'bad' opinion doesn't convert them to a 'good' one. Instead it makes them more hostile and causes them to double down. I'm pretty confused how America keeps going down this path even after an actual 50% of the entire population revolted against the 'good' ideologies and voted in Trump with religious fervour.
Pretending that people with different views don't exist, or that their views don't matter, doesn't make those views go away. Marginalising and attacking people for views they hold just hardens their resolve.
Is it really a case of wanting to silence those views? To me it looks more like PR. "We don't associate with people with bad opinions, so we're good".
I would even go so far as to say that "companies" don't really care. The reason being is that for firing someone, you must have hired them first. But they consider there's something to gain, image-wise, by taking this kind of stand. This, they hope, can be transfered to dollars, so it looks like a good strategy.
> Firing, cancelling, and silencing anyone with a
> 'bad' opinion doesn't convert them to a 'good' one.
However it can prevent people with "different views" from evangelizing effectively. Look at the anti-vaxers, "chem trails", or 5G conspiracy theorists: the majority of these paranoiacs didn't independently arrive at these theories.
> However it can prevent people with "different views" from evangelizing effectively
How'd that work out with the Trump election and the massive resurgence of outright racism and sexism? How far does one's subjective view of the world around them have to diverge from reality before they stop and think, huh, maybe this doesn't work at all. Silencing dissenting views has never worked in history. Not once. It just increases internal societal pressure until it reaches a critical point and boils over, usually in a physically violent upturn.
> Silencing dissenting views has never worked in history
There may be a grain of truth to that, but I don't think a historian, even one who agreed with its thrust, would feel comfortable with it as a blanket statement.
I don't really want to have this sort of heated debate this evening. Sorry.
> It's simple. Name one historical example where this strategy of systemic censorship of an ideology worked and didn't blow back.
It worked majority of the time. It typically stopped to work only when power to be ceased to have power.
Both nazism and communism were extremely successful in this. The monarchies did this successfully for very very long time. It ceased to work only when their lost power for unrelated reasons. Saudi Arabia is going strong.
The suppression of nazi ideology post WWII did not lead to blow back either.
> It worked majority of the time. It typically stopped to work only when power to be ceased to have power.
Which is to say it has never worked. Because all power structures eventually collapse and yet the ideologies they tried to suppress remain and rise again. And sometimes, it's actually the resurgence of those suppressed ideologies that destroys the established power structures. As is the case in the USA right now.
> The suppression of nazi ideology post WWII did not lead to blow back either.
By that measure, nothing works ever, because every system dies one day regardless of what they suspend. Such standard is completely useless. Also, "ceased to have power" typically means failure to suppress.
That being said, Nazi Germany did not lost because of internally suppressed people raising, they lost because foreign forces won on battle field. They were quite successful in keeping control.
> You can't be serious.
I am serious. There is nothing to suggest that contemporary German issues have anything to do with post WWII suppression of Nazism. They don't.
> However it can prevent people with "different views" from evangelizing effectively. Look at the anti-vaxers, "chem trails", or 5G conspiracy theorists: the majority of these paranoiacs didn't independently arrive at these theories.
That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If everytime someone tries to blow the whistle on something, they are called a conspiracy theorist and allowed to be censored, you are basically giving the people in charge infinite power and zero accountability.
> However it can prevent people with "different views" from evangelizing effectively.
I really don't think it does, it just drives them to spaces where you don't personally see them and these spaces typically reinforce and strengthen their beliefs because they go unchallenged there. It also makes it easier to suck in others because those beliefs aren't being discovered in an open forum where they can be challenged. There's also a lot of cross pollination, the 5g nutters for instance have been driven from (or never part of) mainstream circles, so now their discussing things in their own spaces with other craziness thrown in, it will get mixed in with other craziness like being a jewish conspiracy to take over the world or some rubbish.
The internet gave us a brief period where every groups craziness was open for everyone else to see, now we're reverting to make things were like before the internet.
>I'm pretty confused how America keeps going down this path even after an actual 50% of the entire population revolted against the 'good' ideologies and voted in Trump with religious fervour.
About 60% [0,1] of "the entire population" voted at all, and out of that population, votes for Trump and Clinton were split almost evenly, with Clinton still getting a slight majority of (a couple of million) votes, which isn't actually relevant due to the electoral college. At the end, the margin that decided the election was about 80,000 people[2].
I'm assuming good faith on your part, but the premise that half the country revolted against political correctness by voting in Trump and handing him a mandate is a populist myth. Trump is the result of having gamed the system slightly better than his opponent and nothing more, with far less than half of the population voting for him, and many doing so because he was the only option their party provided.
You're splitting hairs. Fine, it's not 50%. It's 48% or 45%, of the voting population. What does it matter? The point stands that a statistically significant number of people hold a set of ideologies and views that has been marginalised.
Before the 2016 election I would never believe that someone like Trump could win, because the media and prevailing signalling from America was that Trump-esque beliefs were a tiny minority. Clearly that turned out to not be the case. And that's the lesson from marginalising and suppressing 'undesirable' views. It doesn't make them go away. Here they are, dominating America. Deplatforming those people, depriving them of public voice, censoring their views, all that did was harden their resolve and create a massive blowback effect that shifted people on the moderate side of the spectrum towards radical.
You can argue about fine detail stats all you want, but America is currently being run by Trump and all the so-called undesirables have risen to mainstream status. Which is what my comment was all about. I'm sure you'll agree that if winning the presidency merely takes a 'slight' advantage in gaming the system, then the vote was already split on a knife's edge.
I am just going to assume the GP already knew everything you just said and reply that you are missing the point.
Change 50% to 30% and his point does not change. There are large number of American who voted for Donald Trump with religious fervor, and unless you are planning to do a Thanos, you will have to come to term with them.
Exactly. I think seeing people being attacked is also causing others to double down. I don't know what to expect, but I wouldn't be surprised based on my conversations with conservatives who have been mostly silent if it backfires again and Trump wins in a landslide.
For free speech to work you must have an educated populace. I think America today is a great example of what happens if you have the former without investment in the latter.
For the past five years or so, I prefer discussing current events with conservatives - not because I think they are closer to truth, but because they are willing to be a good sport in a conversation. This has nothing to do with political parties, which are both dumpster fires. Maybe Republicans started earlier with Tea Party and got worse, but Democrats are heading in the same direction after Occupy Wall Street. And I realize that conservatives are not super tolerant of rowdy burn cars/block highway protests. But in actual intellectual conversations, they are the champs. Sad because I though tech liberals were supposed to be brainy and open minded.
I think you've simply found the "able-to-have-these-convos conservatives" to have these discussions with and haven't found the "able-to-have-these-convos liberals". Note that I hate using these categories. Anyway, in my personal experience almost all the people I can think of that I have deep political discussions with who may fall into the latter camp almost never discuss politics online, for various reasons.
You might get cancelled for discussing things with the wrong people, despite what you say. Especially if you get on a podcast to discuss things with a conservative figure.
One might get cancelled for liking or sharing the wrong Tweet or FB post. Even if the content of the liked or shared comment is non-controversial, if the wrong person said it, you can get cancelled.
I remember when my left leaning daughter made one of her very first tweets, it was a policy question related to immigration. (It was related to questioning why the US has birthright citizenship -- a topic being covered in one of her HS courses.)
In seconds the hate tweets and retweets started from progressives...I jumped out of bed (it was kind of late at night) and ran into her room to suggest/implore that she delete the tweet and her entire account and never share anything like that again.
Saved her life that night. Though, I am thankful that she did learn her lesson without much cost.
Gay people were heavily censored in the early 90s outside of cities like San Francisco and West Hollywood. It wasn't until Will and Grace premiered in 1998 that the needle began moving toward acceptance.
Acceptance of an idea is not at all the same thing as the ability to express an idea.
Free speech protects the expression of ideas, no matter how disagreeable or vile some demographics may find them. And LGBT ideology was certainly viewed as vile by the majority of the population for many decades and would have been completely stomped out from discourse if not for free speech protections. Want to see what would have happened to the LGBT community without strong free speech protection? Look no further than Russia.
The necessary cost of free speech is allowing speech one disagrees with. People who enjoy the benefits of free speech but fail to understand this core tenet boggle my mind.
According to Wikipedia [1], comedy TV shows with LGBT characters by decade (which is probably a good proxy). Ellen's "coming out" episode was in 1997.
70s: 12
80s: 11
90s: 28
00s: 45
Willing to wager the trend is similar to movies.
We had (just the ones I can recall off-hand, but had to lookup years):
Paris is Burning ('90)
My Own Private Idaho ('91)
Fried Green Tomatoes ('91)
Philadelphia ('93)
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar ('95)
Jeffrey ('95)
Birdcage ('96)
Bound ('96)
In & Out ('97)
Boys Don't Cry ('99)
Of course, most of these role were filled by cis people.
As of 2015, same-sex marriage is legal across all 50 states (no idea about territories). Progress can sometimes can incredibly ugly, and I wish it wasn't, but a win is a win.
Which was entirely reasonable. ...because the point of the military isn't to discuss your gender alignment.
The unfairness of it became obvious when every other enlisted man would talk about their latest sex partner and the gay person had to just stand awkwardly silent.
...but the policy itself was rooted in a reasonable desire for soldiers to focus on soldiering.
I'd love to see the list of all the other mundane things you weren't allowed to talk about because they distracted from soldiering. It only seems reasonable if you only consider it in an idealized vacuum.
> The same free speech that is protecting racists today is the same one that prevented Gay people from being censored in the 90s for their "deviant" behavior.
You mean the guys I went to college with that went into a bar together and got beat up for it?
You would prefer that, after being beaten up, they were also arrested and convicted of spreading "gay propaganda"?
You are intentionally conflating homophobic violence with 1st amendment protections, to make it seem like they didn't have the latter. Please debate more honestly in the future.
Traditionally free speech was a 1st amendment issue. In recent years, the term has been used more broadly to mean there should be no consequences of any kind for any form of speech. Consider the examples in the article:
> Universities have faced demands to rescind admissions offers for incoming students and discipline professors over disparaging remarks (such as those of a Cornell professor who faulted a protester injured by police officers in Buffalo, N.Y., for not getting out of the way).
This has nothing to do with the 1st amendment. It appears the concern of the author is that people have encouraged universities to take action.
> A controversial (and, some said, fascistic) New York Times op-ed piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) fed a clamor that cost two top editors their jobs.
In this case, readers cancelled their subscriptions because the editors approved a piece that contained misleading information and lies. The editors (not the guy that wrote it) were fired.
> Philadelphia Inquirer Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski resigned under pressure — apparently for many reasons, but the proximate cause was an egregious three-word headline equating looted buildings to lost lives.
In this case, it's a free speech issue for a private business to fire someone for incompetence.
I do wish we'd return to the narrower interpretation as being a 1st amendment issue, but that's not the reality now, and it's not what the article was talking about. Free speech today refers to any negative consequences for expressing your views. I can't think of any recent cases where free speech came up and the 1st amendment was relevant.
I don't understand what the distinction between free speech and the 1st amendment has to do with your point (which I don't think you've explicitly stated, so I'm left guessing). Both state and non-state suppression of gay advocacy would/did impede gay advocacy, just as it today impedes racist ideas, so despite the tone of your post, you don't actually disagree with that? More importantly
> Traditionally free speech was a 1st amendment issue. [..] I do wish we'd return to the narrower interpretation as being a 1st amendment issue
I strongly disagree. The 1st amendment shields speech from state suppression, but that is not remotely the only threat to free speech - as your example of the guys that got beaten up shows. While the line where people's reactions to speech can be labeled "against free speech" is very blurry, claiming it's only a free speech issue if the government is involved is absurd. I'm sure if Visa and MasterCard refused to do business with anyone that voiced pro-LGBT views, or if social media giants censored those views, you'd agree their ability to speak freely was being limited - the definition of a "free speech" issue.
While mostly true, I think there is a social contract of modern democracies to let people have their opinion, even if it is bigoted and wrong. Don't you think consequences have increased significantly?
Associating an employer with the opinion of employees if prejudice itself for example. Not wanting to drive that point of course. Should I be more offensive with my indictments?
Western society is moving past the ideals of tolerance and free speech. Philosophical ideas like this are now pretty easily dismissed as artifacts of a rasist, sexist system.
Losing your job for saying the wrong thing, makes some people us feel like we are "making progress" but it's the capitalist PR machine protecting its interests. We express ourselves through curated systems directly controlled by huge corporations and the change we see is basically only in these same systems.
Free speech means you dont get put into jail, or worse, for the speech you exercise. The right to free speech does not mean you are entitled to no negative consequences for your speech in the private domain.
Free speech doesn't mean that you get to do opeds (otherwise clearly I'm being repressed because this comment of mine wasn't included in the NYT on their oped page), or that they shouldnt affect your admissions, which are significantly based on like 10 essays you write anyways.
Anyways, the NYT Cotton op-ed example is highly disingenuous. Tom Cotton suffered no negative consequences, and no one was unhappy with him. The NY Times also defended the op-ed and never once said they regretted publishing it or wouldn't in the future.
The NYT only took responsibility for egregious factual errors, that should have been caught during an editorial process, and the opinion editor was fired because he spent days defending the article, including in an all hands on deck internal meeting, without having read it!
That's literally the first job of an editor. To read an article so they can "edit" it.
> Free speech means you dont get put into jail, or worse, for the speech you exercise. The right to free speech does not mean you are entitled to no negative consequences for your speech in the private domain.
I'm not sure where you came up with that definition. Free speech as whole is much more expansive than that. From Wikipedia: "Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction."
Free speech as legal concept means exactly what you claim (via the 1st amendment). But there's a broader concept to consider as well. Just because the government isn't arresting you doesn't mean your speech can't be restricted. People in the private domain targeting you for you speech can lead to an effective restriction on your speech.
Now, I'm in agreement with you that the NYT case isn't really a a great example for this at all, since Tom Cotton has many other avenues for exercising his right to speech, and it was NYT who faced the backlash, not him. But I'd say the David Shor[0] case, and Justine Sacco case[1] is great example for showing the effect private actions can have on restricting speech. It's likely that both these individuals will be much more careful when they speak in the public sphere again.
My point isn't that we should make this sort of "harassment" (for lack of a better word) illegal. That would just be restricting the free speech of the critics instead. But we should recognize that restrictions on free speech come from more than just the government, and work to build a culture where these kinds of restrictions are more rare. That would have the added benefit of strengthening public discourse and debate.
For example, I personally helped work against slavery on the Black Market in the Middle East, and I wanted to raise awareness of this issue.
But now I have to be worried that I'll insult people by using the term Black Market, and will also insult people by giving off the impression that the the Middle East is a 3rd world primitive place where they buy and sell slaves.
There is no "right" way to convey the issue above without offending someone. So what should I do? Just shut my mouth and don't say anything? Then the slave trade will continue to operate freely...
All speech besides threats of violence needs to be free, or we can't progress as a society.