[HN Gopher] Even my bigoted critics deserve free speech
___________________________________________________________________
Even my bigoted critics deserve free speech
Author : hncurious
Score : 70 points
Date : 2021-08-22 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spiked-online.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spiked-online.com)
| rvz wrote:
| > The university also cited another tweet in which she used the
| word 'coconut'. Now she is suing the university for breaching her
| right to free speech. Isn't it funny how the woke left suddenly
| supports free speech whenever its free speech is under attack...
|
| Whatever it is that has attracted the critics attention to the
| author for them to resort to name calling and ad hominems which
| are also racist, they have now realised that they have to see
| themselves out.
|
| Very ironic for the Twitter account of the Race Trust.
|
| > The real shame is that Khanom or the Race Trust did not try to
| challenge my politics or arguments. .... These attacks haven't
| persuaded me to alter my worldview...
|
| To resort to ad hominems probably means that they can't challenge
| the author or change his mind with convincing and logical
| arguments. They have done an own goal and proved the author's
| point once again.
|
| EDIT: You do realise that they deleted their Twitter account?
| That's why I said _' they have to see themselves out.'_ Also I
| don't see 'name calling' or 'ad hominems' as a useful way of a
| convincing someone else since that is not an argument [0].
| Instead, that was the first own goal.
|
| Now the second own goal by the 'Race Trust' is in the main
| argument that the author makes which is cancel-culture which he
| disagrees with. This issue has now transcended into real life and
| the university cancelled the author of the tweet.
|
| Regardless of the viewpoints of the 'Race Trust', such
| cancellations just makes the situation even worse than it was
| before.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar.
| It's against the site guidelines because it makes threads
| tedious, nasty, and predictable.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the rules more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| Note this one:
|
| " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "
|
| Edit: we've had to ask you this numerous times before.
| Eventually we ban accounts that keep ignoring these requests.
| rvz wrote:
| I edited and clarified my comment with context and added some
| substance to it and deleted another one in a different
| thread.
|
| Perhaps you'll _now_ find that my comment is more _'
| thoughtful and substantive'_ and the rest of the comments in
| this thread have already descended further into mini flame
| wars.
|
| The worse thing about it is that some don't even have any
| evidence to substantiate their own comments. Oh dear.
| dang wrote:
| Other people posting crap comments doesn't make it ok to
| post crap comments. That just leads to a downward spiral.
| We moderate these things where we see them; if other people
| are doing just-as-bad things and I haven't replied, that's
| because we only see a cross-section of what gets posted
| here. There's far too much to read it all.
| orwin wrote:
| > To resort to ad hominems probably means that they can't
| challenge the author or change his mind with convincing and
| logical arguments. They have done an own goal and proved the
| author's point once again.
|
| Maybe. Either that, or people actually working in social
| science, or on critical race theory already read his points,
| responded to the ones that were new (ahah) and left it there,
| ignoring him and fellows commentator as they should.
|
| Again, you can be conservative and sociologist. Baudrillard did
| inspire a lot of those (they seems to become more and more
| marxist as teihr theories are refined but still). I don't
| understand why people take thos "journalist" seriously.
|
| Did he at least read the classics?
|
| And i mean, not even CRT author ( did not read them, this
| subject does not interest me). But i think the minimum you can
| do before trying to critic CRT is read Marx and Hegel (you have
| new book with integrated critics that are quite good) and
| obviously Derrida and Foucault. Bourdieu and Baudrillard maybe
| if you want some context for the first one and if you want more
| "conservative" views for the second, Wittgenstein because
| everybody needs to read Wittgenstein, and i'm forgetting
| Habermas who should have been the first one.
|
| Its really not interesting to debat such people, i did try. I
| spend two hours on trying to explain some core principles and
| left it here. At least now my friends understand what
| deconstruction is and stopped putting this under "leftist
| stuff". I think most conservatives agreed with Baudrillard
| hyperrealities (the liberals posting as conservatives did not
| but were still interested). It is just not worth the time.
| throw3849 wrote:
| I do not really care about western politics. But by your
| standards it is one racist calling out another racist. I just
| wish there was AI filter to scrub this stuff from my feed.
|
| Author wrote this on twitter:
|
| >> Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory are political and
| do not belong in schools.
|
| https://celebpie.com/calvin-robinson/
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop routinely using multiple throwaway
| accounts? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site
| guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a
| community, users need some identity for other users to relate
| to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no
| community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| I am 41 years old. And I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have
| become far more intolerant regarding free speech. It is just not
| possible to say anything which is unpopular without inviting
| vicious attacks or even real threats. In part social media
| platforms are to be blamed. They somehow bring the worst out of
| everyone. The guy who is/was willing to listen to me patiently is
| now issuing death threats to anyone on Twitter. Somehow these
| trends are now transgressing to real life. These days people just
| don't think. They only react.
| cjensen wrote:
| Your claim that people have become intolerant of free speech is
| unclear. For example, speech which generates "vicious attacks"
| in response is still free speech. The responses are also free
| speech.
|
| True threats should be reported to the police. That's not
| intolerance, that's just plain illegal. On the other hand if by
| "real threats" you mean hyperbolic threats, those are also free
| speech.
|
| Free speech is not a guarantee that others must listen, or that
| they must listen patiently. That is not now, nor has it ever
| been, the definition of free speech.
| beervirus wrote:
| The big platforms will silence you for saying things that
| clearly fall under free speech.
| dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp wrote:
| The big platforms have no ability to silence anyone.
|
| They have the ability to limit your use of their resources,
| which is well within their rights.
| beervirus wrote:
| It's within their rights (currently...) but it's still
| problematic.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I don't know that I agree, because once a thing becomes
| part of the public square, the rules change.
| [deleted]
| cjensen wrote:
| Platforms have a First Amendment right to silence voices
| they don't like on a platform. The First Amendment protects
| both a person's ability to say things, and the person's
| ability to not say things. As a general rule, both people
| and the government cannot compel someone to say or
| reproduce an opinion they don't want to.
| [deleted]
| horseradish wrote:
| Free speech is a far larger concern than what the First
| Amendment covers.
|
| Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares
| are large enough that there is a public interest in how
| they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of
| people are on the big tech platforms while the
| alternatives are negligible and choked out by network
| effects. They are now a gray area between state and what
| is typically understood by private entity.
|
| There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google,
| Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people
| what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've
| already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's
| vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate,
| and these platforms _are_ now our media for such debate.
|
| It's not clear yet what the best mechanism or remedy for
| this will be, but citing the First Amendment alone is not
| sufficient to resolve the concern. The First Amendment
| only applies to government, and the cultural and social
| issues around free speech have always been much broader
| than that.
|
| There are older precedents for regulating speech on
| private platforms in an earlier technological period:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine.
| Perhaps we need an updated version of that. I wouldn't be
| surprised if the platforms themselves were ok with it,
| since I don't believe they wanted to get into the truth-
| regulation business in the first place. They're doing it
| because they're subject to intense, inner and outer,
| political pressure.
|
| Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I
| think it's factually the case that those pressures are
| coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion
| which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes
| many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing
| is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big
| platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of
| political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting
| factor which I think is against the public interest (even
| though I personally agree with some of their views).
|
| We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power.
| This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for
| so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it
| could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even
| forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was
| never that way to begin with!
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares
| are large enough that there is a public interest in how
| they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of
| people are on the big tech platforms while the others are
| negligible and are choked out by network effects. They
| are now a gray area between state and what is typically
| understood by private entity._
|
| In the lawsuit against Trump for blocking people on
| Twitter, the court ruled that Twitter was a public square
| for the express reason that government policy was
| discussed and promoted there. Therefore, Trump (as a
| government figure) could not block people.
|
| Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has described
| how they're directing Facebook to monitor and remove both
| people and content which was otherwise legal but simply
| unacceptable to the Administration.
|
| The first situation demonstrates the gray area but the
| second makes a case that Facebook was acting as an arm of
| the government.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > In the lawsuit against Trump for blocking people on
| Twitter, the court ruled that Twitter was a public square
| for the express reason that government policy was
| discussed and promoted there. Therefore, Trump (as a
| government figure) could not block people.
|
| No it didn't. It ruled that _trumps account_ was acting
| as an official government account, and so trumps account
| fell under stricter regulations that govern how the
| government can communicate. Twitter was still able to ban
| his account though, because Twitter isn 't the
| government!
|
| > Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has
| described how they're directing Facebook to monitor and
| remove both people and content which was otherwise legal
| but simply unacceptable to the Administration.
|
| No, Facebook used the government as a source of official
| information. They then chose to remove other information.
| The government wasn't telling Facebook to remove stuff.
| The choice to make the CDC authoritative was Facebooks
| choice. They aren't acting as an arm of the government.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _No it didn 't. It ruled that trumps account was acting
| as an official government account, and so trumps account
| fell under stricter regulations that govern how the
| government can communicate. Twitter was still able to ban
| his account though, because Twitter isn't the
| government!_
|
| Again, I suspect you missed a bit:
|
| _" U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan
| ruled on May 23 that comments on the president's account,
| and those of other government officials, were public
| forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their
| views violated their right to free speech under the First
| Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."_
|
| Ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-
| twitter-idUSKCN...
|
| When governments use social media as a way to
| communicate, it changes their standing as at least one
| court has ruled so far.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| The key part being "under the presidents account." The
| president using twitter does not change _twitter_. The
| president is held to standards of _the government_ ,
| which is not allowed to block people. But the rules that
| affect the government don't affect twitter, they only
| apply to government officials using twitter.
|
| Twitter is still allowed to block people who reply to the
| president, or, as they did, ban the president.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| The White House claims to be an active participant and
| directing their attention to things to be removed. In
| case you missed that press conference, here's a
| transcript and video:
|
| > _QUESTION: Thanks, Jen. Can you talk a little bit more
| about this request for tech companies to be more
| aggressive in policing misinformation? Has the
| administration been in touch with any of these companies?
| And are there any actions that the federal government can
| take to ensure their cooperation? Because we 've seen
| from the start, there's not a lot of action on some of
| these platforms._
|
| > _PSAKI: Sure. Well, first, we are in regular touch with
| the social media platforms, and those engagements
| typically happen through members of our senior staff, but
| also members of our COVID-19 Team._
|
| > Quote continuing: _Given as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this
| is a big issue of misinformation specifically on the
| pandemic. In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken
| or we 're working to take, I should say, from the federal
| government, we've increased disinformation research and
| tracking. Within the Surgeon General's Office, we're
| flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation._
|
| Unless you believe Psaki is lying which I hadn't
| considered.
|
| Ref: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/p
| saki_wer...
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Unless you're claim here is that Psaki is threatening
| Facebook, there's nothing remotely illegal happening
| here. Facebook is like "hey, tell us about
| misinformation" and the government is like "hey we think
| this is misinformation". And then Facebook reviews the
| posts they flagged and removes some of them.
|
| The argument you're making is akin to "Its illegal for
| Psaki or a white house staffer to ask for airtime on CNN,
| because that violates CNN's first amendment rights" (or
| perhaps more subtly "because then CNN is acting as an arm
| of the government", but that's still wrong).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It's worth noting that the Fairness Doctrine was applied
| to things like radio where you had to have a license, and
| which were more limited. It was not (at least after a
| couple court decisions) applied to other media like
| newspapers, which could operate without a license.
|
| Google, Facebook, and others do not require a license to
| operate. Anyone can establish their own website to
| counter points made on those platforms. The Fairness
| Doctrine would seem (even if it still existed) to be non-
| applicable to the various web platforms.
|
| A more updated version of it might be more expansive, but
| would probably run into issues with compelled speech.
| Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can
| make a website if they want, it's hard to justify
| compelling a platform to host content.
| horseradish wrote:
| I agree that's worth noting, and I'm not suggesting a
| literal revival of the fairness doctrine, just noting
| that there are past precedents for regulating speech in
| the public interest. You're no doubt right that it would
| run into legal difficulty, and actually the corporatist
| supreme court would be expected, amusingly enough, to
| side with the illiberal left on this issue.
|
| This is a canard though:
|
| > Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone
| can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify
| compelling a platform to host content.
|
| Anyone can make a website that no one reads, but not
| anyone can make a public square. As I said above, the
| alternatives are choked out by network effects, so the
| internet is not "pretty wide open" in any way that counts
| for public debate. It used to be, but that was before it
| consolidated into an oligopoly. That is why the public
| interest and free speech questions necessarily shift to
| _these_ platforms. In the world we now live in, it 's
| distracting to offer the prospect of "anyone can make a
| website" as if it were a realistic alternative.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It's not a canard, it's well-founded by examining
| precedent. The courts already decided that compelled
| speech (the Fairness Doctrine) didn't make sense without
| scarcity of a medium or difficulty to publish through the
| medium. The precedent is that newspapers (which is a
| harder field to enter into than starting a website)
| couldn't be compelled under the Fairness Doctrine because
| it wasn't licensed and was wide open. That's absolutely
| _not_ a canard here (do you know what that word means?).
|
| Starting up a website is even _easier_ than publishing a
| newspaper so it would be very bizarre for that precedent
| to somehow not be applied in this instance.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > There are massive and obvious dangers in letting
| Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of
| people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and
| they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly
| wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of
| open debate, and these platforms are now our media for
| such debate.
|
| I'm highly concerned about BigTech regulating the speech
| of others particularly when the others are experts in
| their respective fields, and BigTech has none, but is
| merely parroting an authoritarian government perspective.
|
| When we normally debate a view, people present data from
| opposing viewpoints and we sort it out over time. Sides
| present data. Sides explain relevancy and over time, we
| determine greater accuracy. That cannot happen in an
| environment where gatekeepers control the speech and
| dictate the tone and content of it.
|
| > Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I
| think it's factually the case that those pressures are
| coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion
| which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes
| many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing
| is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big
| platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of
| political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting
| factor which I think is against the public interest (even
| though I personally agree with some of their views).
|
| > We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power.
| This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for
| so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it
| could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even
| forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was
| never that way to begin with!
|
| I think this is very well written, and can be related to
| much of the modern authoritarian use of power, of
| compulsion, by BigTech in cahoots with government.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> I am 41 years old._
|
| We are pretty similar in age.
|
| _> I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more
| intolerant regarding free speech._
|
| Which people, and what speech?
|
| I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who
| were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as
| gay.
|
| My parents stressed about petty church politics because good
| standing in the local church had a _direct_ effect on their
| ability to get and keep (completely secular) jobs.
|
| They put out yard signs for candidates they secretly voted
| against.
|
| If you weren't a white right-of-GOP-center conservative
| evangelical christian, life was an exercise is constant self-
| censorship.
|
| From my perspective, "cancel culture" doesn't really seem
| particularly new. On average, people enjoy more expressive
| freedom today than they did in the 1980s.
|
| So, again: which people, and what speech? Perhaps a few major
| metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re: speech in the 80s; I
| wouldn't know. But in most of America, your golden age of free
| speech never actually existed.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Perhaps a few major metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re:
| speech in the 80s
|
| The 80s and early 90s were the time of police riots in many
| cities and heavy gang activity. Neither of those indicates a
| good result if you said the wrong thing to the wrong people.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Well then, I guess his golden age of free speech never
| actually existed anywhere. Go figure.
| 3grdlurker wrote:
| I've seen people deliberately seek to offend marginalized
| groups with their language, though, and then they cry out about
| being cancelled and how speech is no longer free when the
| people they provoked _naturally_ respond to and fight back
| against their posts.
|
| I don't believe that people have become less tolerant. I think
| that the reality of disagreement as a fact of life has just
| been amplified by the constant connectivity afforded to us by
| social media, and people (especially those who like to provoke
| debates) have a hard time accepting that not everyone is going
| to agree with them, and that there are real social costs to
| deliberately positioning oneself as edgy or unpopular or
| hateful, as there has always been.
| barnesto wrote:
| "provoke debates" the greatest of all evils. how dare people
| try to engage in debate.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'll second the poster that this is not "trying to engage
| in debate".
|
| There are some members of TPUSA at the university my wife
| teaches at. They specifically chose to, as a group, take a
| course taught by a transgender teacher. They, clearly
| through some training, determined that they'd be able to
| write deliberately transphobic hate speech in very specific
| portions of the course because their writing in these
| locations is protected by privacy laws and other such
| things. When called out on this, they responded by claiming
| that their intellectual freedom was being snuffed out and
| proposed lawsuits.
|
| That's the shit I see. Organized attempts to use the levers
| of the law to harass and intimidate people from groups they
| don't consider to be worthy of their respect. And as soon
| as people resist, an unpaid army of free speech advocates
| leap to their defense.
| emerged wrote:
| It really does us no favors to hide the things people want to
| say. All their thoughts and intentions are still there except now
| we don't know it.
| zanethomas wrote:
| Thanks for that! So many people fail to appreciate the value of
| free speech. We put up with stupid, ignorant, crack-smokin crazy,
| bigoted speech so we can hear the voices of people outside the
| mainstream who have something valuable to say.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| I don't know, i mean in theory i love that view. Also, if
| someone says something wrong, instead of silencing them, how
| about we just use evidence to show why they're wrong?
|
| But then on the other hand you have, to give a random example,
| someone like Andrew Wakefield - he might be bat shit crazy but
| he is smart enough and functional enough to gain a medical
| degree and become a qualified doctor, a seemingly well
| respected one until he went off the rails and committed fraud
| in his research in order to claim an autism link to mmr
| vaccines.
|
| To me it seems he's not stupid, he's not crazy. He's passed the
| same qualifications as his peers, but he is a fraud.
|
| A fraud that has caused who knows how many child deaths, albeit
| indirectly.
| zanethomas wrote:
| I regularly smack the anti-semites on gab upside the head
| with a cluestick.
| jclulow wrote:
| How can you hear them over the noise? Modern communications
| technology has given everyone who wants one a megaphone. I'm
| not sure the old calculus really applies exactly to the present
| circumstance.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Polite reminder that "Spiked!" is the journal formerly known as
| _Living Marxism_ , after a phoenix rebrand when they were sued
| out of existence for libelling ITN over the Bosnian genocide.
|
| Polite request that if you believe in free speech at any cost,
| don't downvote this comment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Marxism
| valec wrote:
| hacker news only cares about free speech when it can be used to
| dunk on "the left"
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| This is a left libertarian (leaning of the editor of Spiked)
| dunking on the left, so it still applies.
|
| Not surprising, to be honest. The mainstream left is
| increasingly less libertarian (especially because of cancel
| culture).
|
| Can't say HN feels particularly pro free speech though.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Spiked! is not a left-wing outlet, libertarian or
| otherwise. They're a group of former doctrinaire Marxists
| who swung to the equally-doctrinaire libertarian right
| after the fall of the Soviet Union. There's a whole nexus
| of organisations around them, and they have made a good
| living out of being professional contrarians. Their
| influence in British politics has been nearly wholly
| malign, both when they were on the left and now they're on
| the right. They are excellent self-publicists. Their
| funding is _probably_ the same US right-libertarian dark
| money pools as the Tufton Street groups, though it 's hard
| to be sure as their finances are characteristically opaque.
|
| Speaking as someone is _is_ on the libertarian end of the
| British left, these guys are not our allies.
| orwin wrote:
| Upvoted, interesting.
|
| So formerly Trotskyist turned humanist libertarian, i can
| already tell you that their permanent revolution ideals failed
| when they stopped caring about emancipation.
| luckylion wrote:
| I fail to see the point of this comment. Are you suggesting the
| opinion of Calvin Robinson should be disregarded because it's
| published on a website you don't like?
| moonchild wrote:
| It is stated in an inflammatory manner, and 'don't downvote
| this comment' is certainly not appropriate, but I think the
| charitable interpretation is that the purpose of that comment
| was to provide context for the linked article.
|
| It behooves us, in such a situation, to create _valuable_
| discussion of said context, rather than focusing on the
| negative aspects of the parent comment, thereby creating yet
| more negativity.
| cjensen wrote:
| Worth noting that in the US, this could not have happened. The
| First Amendment covers academia which receives Federal Funds.
| There's even an organization which is dedicated to defending this
| principle in court[1].
|
| [1] https://www.thefire.org
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> The First Amendment covers academia which receives Federal
| Funds_
|
| This isn't true.
|
| 1. Private colleges and universities that receive federal funds
| (e.g., the form of Pell Grants, government-originated student
| loans, or even research grants) have no obligation to offer
| faculty any amount of intellectual freedom. (Tangentially, this
| is highly unlikely to change as long as evangelical Christians
| are a non-trivial bloc within the GOP; tons of bible colleges,
| religiously affiliated colleges/universities, and seminaries
| rely on federal funds in one form or another. The evangelical
| world has a vested interest in maintain the financial viability
| of these institutions without sacrificing their character.)
|
| 2. Even at public universities, this _still_ isn 't true.
| Government employees enjoy asoundingly expansive free speech
| rights compared to private sector employees, but, crucially,
| _only in their capacity as private citizens!_ Public statements
| made in pursuit of official duties are _not_ generally
| protected under 1A. NB: the tweets came from an official
| account.
| bob229 wrote:
| Critical race theory is cancer
| throwawayboise wrote:
| "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
| people what they do not want to hear."
|
| -- George Orwell
| jollybean wrote:
| So what we 'need to hear' is academics calling each other the
| n-word?
|
| Or the 'c-word'?
|
| This is a misapropriation of Orwell.
|
| Why do people have difficulty with the difference between
| 'slurs' and 'ideas'?
|
| And the difference between 'civil rights' and 'private
| organizations'?
|
| -> An academic, talking about a 'challenging idea' maybe using
| data points that challenge public norms or 'trigger' people -
| should be allowed to do so. Probably, using a word - any word -
| to talk about that word - or in historical context, said by a
| character in creative expression - should be fine.
|
| -> But using racist slurs _against_ other people in civil
| discourse is totally inappropriate. If I called a co-worker a
| 'negro' or 'slut' I would expect to be fired.
|
| _And neither of those things have to do with Free Speech_.
|
| If you're quoting Orwell, do it in the right moments, because
| the more oppressive types will point out that using the Orwell
| defence in these scenarios is literally tantamount to
| supporting intellectuals calling each other the n-word in
| public, which is plain rude.
|
| Then they can discretid the entire range of people concerned
| about 'Free Speech' as just irrelevant radicals.
|
| When media companies, governments, corps and universities are
| banning people for having ideas they don't like (or saying
| 'verbotten words' even in a legitimate context) then you trot
| out Orwell and issues of Freedom of Expression.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > using the Orwell defence in these scenarios is literally
| tantamount to supporting intellectuals calling each other the
| n-word in public
|
| Please explain how this could be "literally tantamount"? I
| don't understand that phrase or how this statement could be
| true.
| jollybean wrote:
| The point is very clear and that someone is using Orwell to
| defend academics calling each other slurs in genteel
| settings.
|
| Obviously, that has nothing to do with Orwell, or even
| 'Free Speech'.
|
| As for 'literally tantamount' - the phrasing is poor, and
| would work better with only one of the two words, probably
| better just 'tantamount' or frankly neither. But it's
| completely moot. It doesn't change the fairly obvious
| implication of the statement.
|
| Free Speech is important, Orwell is important - but neither
| have anything to do with arbitrary ad-hominem slander among
| intellectuals in public.
|
| The author of the article is effectively making a personal
| plea, not really an intellectual one. Really what he's
| saying is 'I'm not that offended, don't dump this woman
| because she said something really raw'.
|
| Even if you remove the slur, the a statement such as
| "People think you're an idiot" is just terrible, playground
| rhetoric. Why would a University want to work with someone
| who makes arguments such as that that wouldn't even work
| well on Reddit?
|
| Use Orwell for where it was meant to be used.
| overeater wrote:
| How strongly does this hold in cases where the speech is
| actually effective? I'm genuinely interested in a discussion
| without taking a side, because I feel like when people advocate
| for free speech, they are mainly thinking about unpopular
| unconvincing speech.
|
| Say, someone with a new brand of Nazi-ism is actually
| converting most of the people they talk to, using a combination
| of half-truths? Or even what if they are converting people by
| using celebrity endorsements and charismatic language? So no
| misinformation, but rather salient anecdotes, facts, and
| science?
|
| What if someone's speech is effective at making people afraid
| of exercising opposing speech? What if someone's speech
| convinces people to attack the capitol? Maybe they don't plan
| the attack itself, and it's merely implied that the state of
| the world is completely unfair in a way that only a revolution
| and changing of constitutional rights, could a better world be
| restored?
| caslon wrote:
| Firm believer that private companies should be able to censor
| whatever they want here!
|
| > What if someone's speech is effective at making people
| afraid of exercising opposing speech? What if someone's
| speech convinces people to attack the capitol? Maybe they
| don't plan the attack itself, and it's merely implied that
| the state of the world is completely unfair in a way that
| only a revolution and changing of constitutional rights,
| could a better world be restored?
|
| The _government_ should not be censoring this. Private
| companies, as always, should feel free to censor what they
| want, regardless of positions.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > The government should not be censoring this. Private
| companies, as always, should feel free to censor what they
| want, regardless of positions.
|
| They aren't merely censoring, they are also libeling them
| by attaching a misinformation/disinformation type of label,
| or adding their own speech to it.
| overeater wrote:
| Thanks for that thought. So what if we're back pre-WWII,
| and people were on the public streets giving speeches about
| joining the Nazi party? You'd support their right to spread
| their message, knowing what would happen?
|
| And I'm really trying to get at the point that this speech
| is actually effective. Not sure why people are downvoting,
| because I don't think this has been discussed before.
| ryanschneider wrote:
| Painfully, yes, being pro-Nazi in the run up to WW2 was
| entirely legal:
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941
| 323...
|
| As much as I deplore their views I don't think they
| should be legally barred from expressing them. Of course
| MSG has every right to decline hosting the above event,
| but the government shouldn't be the arbiter of who can
| say what when in public.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Private companies, as always, should feel free to censor
| what they want, regardless of positions.
|
| And what about when the government threatens private
| companies with new regulations or other actions if they
| don't suppress certain types of legal speech? Is there a
| point at which extralegal government pressure to suppress
| speech violates the first amendment?
|
| What about when companies "voluntarily" decide to supress
| anything that disagrees with the offical stance of the
| government and thus grants the government indirect control
| over that entire category of speech?
|
| Giving companies a complete free pass for censorship
| creates a huge backdoor that allows government censorship
| thrive with plausible deniability.
| neonate wrote:
| That's from the unpublished preface to _Animal Farm_
| (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/06/hear-liberty/), which
| warned his British readers not to be too pleased with his
| satire of the Soviets:
| https://orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go.
|
| It was omitted from the novel under ironic circumstances
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Preface - "For
| reasons unknown, no preface was supplied, and the page numbers
| had to be renumbered at the last minute") and only rediscovered
| in 1971.
|
| It is Chomsky's favorite Orwell piece, one he mentions all the
| time (e.g. https://chomsky.info/20101010_2/) and has probably
| done the most to popularize.
| https://www.google.com/search?q=chomsky+animal+farm+preface
| pjc50 wrote:
| The problem is more serious when it's things that people
| desperately do want to hear but turn out not to be true.
| beefield wrote:
| Does that also apply to outright lies, threats and defamation
| in mass social media - assuming I do not want to hear those?
|
| And, am I obliged to listen and/or give a thoughtful response
| to anything I do not want to hear?
| listenallyall wrote:
| Typically, labelling something as a "lie" is a bigger un-
| truth than the actual thing being labelled. Very few comments
| or opinions are wholly untrue end-to-end. Most things have
| some kernel of truth... perhaps there are unfounded
| assumptions, exaggerations, selective interpretation, etc.
|
| The person labelling something as a "lie" is usually doing so
| in order to outright dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth
| without actually having to prove it's wrong in its entirety.
| croon wrote:
| So, Trump's lies about a rigged election. I'm labeling it a
| lie because it is. How am I a bigger liar? I'm open to
| hearing any explanation you have, as long as you're open to
| hearing my rebuttals.
|
| Your generalization is a bad one, not because it has
| exceptions, but because it likely has as many as
| confirmations.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Please state exactly what the lies are. That the election
| was rigged? Are you claiming that not a single district
| in a single state was compromised in any way? I'd like to
| see your proof. My point is not that Trump is correct...
| but just like I said, there are likely some kernels of
| truth in the statement, while you labelling it a lie is a
| shortcut to dismissing his entire argument without
| showing any proof yourself.
| canarypilot wrote:
| Gosh, what an argument! We can make hay from that
| position!
|
| It is certain that some people on the placebo course of
| many randomised drug trials improve against the stated
| condition, so we ought not to completely disregard
| placebos as a viable treatment for many illnesses! Are
| you saying that not a single placebo has ever impacted
| the outcome of a medical trial any way, even if just from
| the psychological benefit of imagining you are being
| treated? I'd like to see your proof.
|
| Horoscopes, I'm certain some portion of them come true!
|
| Certainly kernels of truth exist in the origins of the
| majority of world religions, and even many super hero
| origin stories; we ought not to dismiss the possibility
| all of those are (simultaneously, regardless of
| contradictions) legitimate!
|
| I can't fathom what logical high ground you thought you
| were taking with this comment, but you ought to spend
| some time reflecting on whether it lives up to any
| sensible values of critical thinking.
|
| I suggest holding to the ideal that the burden is on
| those making extraordinary claims to provide
| extraordinary evidence. Otherwise we'll all be
| worshipping our spaghetti.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Please state exactly what any of the truths are.
|
| There has been plenty of debunking of the specific
| claims. If you have some specific claims that you don't
| think have been debunked, I'd like to hear them.
|
| There are indeed examples where calling something a lie
| (or conspiracy theory) is a bigger lie. If this is one of
| those, you should have no trouble finding specific
| supporting claims that aren't also lies and haven't been
| expressly debunked.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The leak of of the "China" virus from the Wuhan lab was an
| outright lie just one year ago. Today it is a viable theory
| investigated under orders of the sitting president.
|
| Characterstically, Facebook and other media companies didn't
| suffer any consequences for suppressing public discussion on
| this matter.
|
| (I don't hold any view about this theory. Comment is about
| absurdity of the idea of claiming that something is an
| outright lie, and also about hypocrisy of a so-called "fact-
| checkers")
| robbedpeter wrote:
| You're obliged by dint of living within the same megatribe as
| the rest of us assholes. You're obliged to think for
| yourself, because the question free speech always, inevitably
| boils down to is this: who decides the propriety of speech?
| And the answer is that, because of human fallibility and
| malice and corruption, the content of speech must be left to
| the individual. The more you constrain speech, the more you
| restrict a society's ability to self correct.
|
| Censorship concentrates state power and should always be
| carefully exercised and limited to an absolute minimum. It is
| a tool that has never been exercised by a government or
| institution for the betterment of a society. It has been
| universally corrupted and used for authoritarian control
| throughout history. Trusting modern corporations to somehow
| competently manage such a historically treacherous and
| corruptible means of social manipulation is naive at best.
|
| So yeah, that means your signal to noise ratio is gonna have
| to be lower than you'd prefer, and you're going to have to
| trust yourself and others in society to muddle through. It's
| the least bad because it doesn't preclude intellectual and
| ethical advances via morals and tastes of the day.
|
| Strangely enough, the more liberal and unconstrained speech
| is, the better quality of life gets for that society. The
| clearest example of this is the abolitionist movement that
| led to the end of slavery. If the US had exercised censorship
| and projected the majority views as the filter of appropriate
| speech, history may have gone much differently. Instead, loud
| people made annoying speeches in public that offended and
| provoked society to address the problem. If the ability to
| overcome great evils like that means that society has to put
| up with qanon, anti vaxxers, and flat earth dweebs, that is a
| price we should be happy to pay.
| zanethomas wrote:
| Is that a rhetorical question?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Credible threats and defamation are legally defined and can
| have criminal or civil consequences.
|
| Lies, yes. People are free to utter them. Nobody is obliged
| to listen, or let them go without a response, as may be
| appropriate.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Credible threats and defamation are legally defined and
| can have criminal or civil consequences. Lies, yes. People
| are free to utter them._
|
| Credible threats and defamation are legally defined and
| have criminal or civil consequences because we recognize
| that they overtly cause harm. Fraud too. What in your mind
| is the fundamental difference between causing harm by
| defamation, which is literally just lying in a particular
| context, and causing overt harm by other kinds of lying? In
| order to credibly differentiate them, saying that one is ok
| and the other is not ok, we must have some distinguishing
| essential characteristic. Significantly broader categories
| of lying definitely and overtly cause harm, so what to your
| mind brings a moral imperative to allow one but not the
| other?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > we must have some distinguishing fundamental
| characteristic
|
| I think our court system does a good job of defining this
| already. Our court system is extremely conservative
| regarding the types of speech that it allows the
| government to punish people for.
|
| If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the 1st
| amendment, I guess.
| watwut wrote:
| Critical theory is being outlawed in variety of contexts
| right now and it is legal.
| xupybd wrote:
| I might be out of date but isn't this being removed from
| government funded schools?
|
| I don't think that is free speech related?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| If the Seuss estate pulling three books is censorship,
| then surely the government telling faculty what they
| cannot teach is censorship.
| xupybd wrote:
| I'm a big fan of free speech but have not thought about
| it in terms of schooling. Does this mean that the idea of
| a curriculum is at odds with free speech?
| watwut wrote:
| Well, people talk about censorship when teachers
| voluntary changes book list.
|
| And these laws are literally all about scaring schools
| and teachers from saying things that make some people a
| bit uncomfortable.
|
| So, yes, the way we use term free speech, it falls into
| that.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _I think our court system does a good job of defining
| this already._
|
| I'm not sure that it does. Short of "I know it when I see
| it"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)
| what definitions of the essential characteristic of good
| speech vs bad speech do we actually have if not overtly
| causing harm?
|
| > _If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the
| 1st amendment, I guess._
|
| The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed when we got
| consumer protection laws, so I don't think so.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > what definitions do we actually have?
|
| By definitions, I am simply referring to how courts have
| ruled in the past on this stuff. Which is to put very
| strict limits on what the government can do.
|
| > The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed
|
| The courts have traditionally ruled pretty darn strictly
| on what the government is allowed to do.
|
| You should compared the supreme court precedents that we
| have in the US, to other countries, and you will see just
| how much more strict the US is, regarding what the
| government can ban.
|
| So yes, based on how strict courts have been in the past,
| if you want to redefine how speech laws work in the US,
| you are going to have an uphill battle.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Which is to put very strict limits on what the
| government can do._
|
| Based on what, though? What specific essential
| characteristics define the cases where it is deemed
| acceptable to restrict speech and how do the same exact
| criteria not also apply to many other scenarios as well?
|
| Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature
| or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true:
|
| 1) No such essential characteristic exists, which means
| that our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
|
| 2) Some essential characteristic does exist, but we just
| look the other way sometimes, which similarly means that
| our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
|
| 3) Some essential characteristic does exist that is
| actually applied everywhere that somehow morally
| differentiates "fraud" from "deception with intent".
|
| I don't see truth in 1 or 3, so I think we must be doing
| 2.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > What specific criteria are used in the cases
|
| If you are actually looking for the answer to that
| question, there are a multitude of supreme court cases
| that you can read.
|
| Just go google supreme court, 1st amendment cases, and
| reach the actual primary sources.
|
| People teach whole classes on this stuff, and the
| specific reasonings that our courts give, for their
| strictness.
|
| It is a complicated, but we'll established topic, for
| which you could read many many books on.
|
| And if you truly are looking for the answer, as to the
| many nuances to that question, you need to read the
| actual court cases yourself.
|
| > Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature
| or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true
|
| Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you can
| learn in an afternoon.
|
| There are people who spend their entire lives studying
| it. And you are not going to come up with some clever
| insight to it, in an afternoon.
|
| Instead, you are going to have to actually do the work,
| and study the topic, for you to understand it fully.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Just go google supreme court, 1st amendment cases, and
| reach the actual primary sources.
|
| Such as the case that gave rose to the "shouting fire in
| a crowded theater" idiom
|
| The reason why it takes a lifetime of study to understand
| what sorts of speech are actually protected is because
| the Supreme Court has had some very inconsitent decisions
| (such as the one I mention above) that require tortured
| reasoning to align with the first amendment and other
| case law.
|
| Id there are indeed some clear criteria, you should be
| able provide a reasonable summary of them; it should not
| require a lifetime of study. If the average american
| can't be said to understand what their free speech rights
| are...can you really say that they have thoae rights in
| prqctice?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > can you really say that they have those rights in
| practice?
|
| Yes, because the court system has traditionally been
| extremely strict, most of the time, in defending free
| speech, compared to other countries.
|
| So yes, I can confidently say that the court system has
| defended free speech in the US, much more than in other
| countries, most of the time.
|
| > If the average american can't be said to understand
|
| Courts protecting a right that someone doesn't understand
| is still better than the courts not protecting it.
|
| Sometimes our rights only matter to us when we really
| need them, and it is still better that they are protected
| in those cases.
| shkkmo wrote:
| So the court only strictly protects those rights "most of
| the time" and that creates a complex legal situation that
| requires a lifetime of study...how then can the average
| citizen know what they are allowed to say and trust that
| when they actually really need those protections that
| they won't end up as one of the other times where the
| court values government control over freedom of speech.
|
| We'll see if the Supreme Court has anything to say when
| the US finally get Assange extradited and puts him on
| trial for his speech. I don't have a lot of confidence
| he'll get any protections.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| I'd had assumed that you would want to give an answer
| that clarifies your stated position instead of deflecting
| and sending me off to
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Do_your_own_research.
|
| If one's position is "I think our court system does a
| good job of defining this already", one should be able to
| point to an established definition that doesn't also
| apply equally to many other antiregulated contexts.
| Otherwise what the court system is doing a good job of is
| not "defining".
|
| > _Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you
| can learn in an afternoon._
|
| Laws are numerous and capricious. I'm not asking about
| laws. I'm not even asking about history. I'm asking about
| any existing philosophical position that differentiates
| what we _should_ restrict from what we _should not_
| restrict. If we start from the notion that capital-F
| Fraud is bad, which we must since we regulate it, surely
| we should be able to say why it is so and apply the same
| reason elsewhere.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Oh, the stated position is quite clear.
|
| The stated position is that you are going to be
| completely unable to understand, in an afternoon, the
| nuances of a topic, for which people spend their lives
| studying.
|
| Thus, if you actually care about the topic, you need to
| read the supreme court cases or the numerous literature
| on the topic.
|
| Otherwise, you are not going to be able to understand
| what the supreme court even does, or why they do it, when
| there is thousands of pages of reasoning, on this stuff.
|
| > surely we should be able to say why it is so and apply
| the same reason elsewhere
|
| And I am saying that such discussions require you to
| actually read the primary sources here, which is books
| and books, and court case after court case.
|
| Sorry, but complicated topics are not solved by people
| debating a paragraph here and there.
|
| Yes, you will actually have to take a class on this, or
| read books on this, to understand it.
|
| Sorry, that's just life. When you ask extremely general
| and expansive questions, about philosophy, such as "what
| is the difference between different speech",
| unfortunately these are topic for which there is
| lifetimes of work discussing it, and you are not going to
| be able to have a debate in a couple paragraphs on it.
| xupybd wrote:
| You don't have to listen to anyone. You should be able to
| make that choice without prevent someone else the right to
| free speech.
|
| No one has the right to force to you to listen.
|
| Typically the the limits on free speech are base on the
| injury they cause another. If you lie about someone and it
| causes you harm you can sue them. If someone harasses you you
| can sue them.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Sadly, _1984_ seems more guidebook than warning in our day.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm a liberal, but social media should be a common carrier.
|
| We can't amplify only approved thoughts. If we do, we'll wake up
| in a world where many of the things we think and feel are
| wrongthink and used against us.
|
| Edit: We're not done improving the world. Putting control
| structures in place now will freeze progress and make us slide
| backwards.
| [deleted]
| geofft wrote:
| As far as I can tell, social media _was_ acting like a common
| carrier here - the @racetrust account was not shut down by
| Twitter. They appear to have deleted their account on their
| own.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Social media can't be a common carrier without destroying
| social media's business model.
|
| We already had a "common carrier" model in the form of usenet,
| which turned into an absolute shithole when the average person
| was given access to post whatever he wanted.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| That is a very classically liberal point of view, in fact.
| geofft wrote:
| > _No Platforming and censoring opposing voices only leads them
| to thrive underground._
|
| Frustratingly, the article offers no evidence for this claim.
|
| I understand the argument that censorship and deplatforming are
| bad because they are morally wrong - that it doesn't matter the
| effect they have because they are inherently bad tools to use.
|
| But I don't really understand the argument that they're bad
| because they're ineffective. When you drive something
| underground, it thrives _less_ than it would on the surface, no?
|
| We have plenty of examples of censorship being effective. Take
| opposition to the US invasions of Iraq, for instance. Anyone who
| opposed it - even the Dixie Chicks, famously - was deplatformed
| and attacked in the media. There was no reasonable debate about
| whether it was a good idea. And it turned out it was not a good
| idea, and there were no WMDs, and it was a quagmire. But because
| opposition was pushed underground, it had no political power.
|
| Or take another superpower. The PRC has no moral objection to
| censorship. And certainly there are non-moribund underground
| dissident political and religious movements, coded ways of
| referencing 4 June 1989, etc. But could any argument be made that
| the PRC has made a tactical mistake in pushing these movements
| underground, that they're thriving _because_ they were
| underground and would be less successful above ground?
| zanethomas wrote:
| > No Platforming and censoring opposing voices only leads >
| them to thrive underground.
|
| > Frustratingly, the article offers no evidence for this >
| claim.
|
| See Gab, Rumble, Locals, Bitchute et al ... that's where people
| banned/censored by big tech can still be found.
| tstrimple wrote:
| If only the rejects from other platforms congregate on gab,
| they can't mainstream their toxic views with the general
| public. That's an example of deplatforming working.
| hello_marmalade wrote:
| The problem is that it causes those people to become more
| extreme because they get put into an echo chamber.
|
| It's like putting a petty thief in with hardened criminals.
| They're not coming out better than they went in, they're
| coming out much, much worse.
|
| It's the difference between seeing people say racist things
| on Twitter, and having someone shoot up a church.
| Extremists aren't created out in public.
| slibhb wrote:
| > We have plenty of examples of censorship being effective.
| Take opposition to the US invasions of Iraq, for instance.
| Anyone who opposed it - even the Dixie Chicks, famously - was
| deplatformed and attacked in the media. There was no reasonable
| debate about whether it was a good idea. And it turned out it
| was not a good idea, and there were no WMDs, and it was a
| quagmire. But because opposition was pushed underground, it had
| no political power.
|
| Decades later, the most common position among Americans is
| increasingly that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea.
| Censorship did not work in the medium-run.
| orwin wrote:
| Had the war been won in 2 years and a successful succession
| regime put in place in less than 5 years, censorship would've
| been successfull.
|
| There is still places where you can buy "Freedom fries" in
| the US (until at least fall 2019, i've not been back in the
| US for obvious reasons)
|
| You don't need it to work in the long term, you need it to
| work short-term and hope that you're right. Until the myth
| you created is deconstructed you are good. I'm not a huge fan
| of Baudrillard, but the point he raised in "The Gulf war do
| not exist" (he talked here about the first war) was basically
| unchallenged, and the myth of this war still stands. And i
| think Baudrillard have been well received in the US, no?
| watwut wrote:
| > Censorship did not work in the medium-run
|
| It worked perfectly. No one is preventing you saying it was
| mistake, because it literally does not matter.
|
| It made War possible and the soldiers are still there.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Take opposition to the US invasions of Iraq, for instance.
| Anyone who opposed it - even the Dixie Chicks, famously - was
| deplatformed and attacked in the media.
|
| I know of lots of people who participated quite vocally on
| protests against that war. None of the were fired or kicked out
| of any organization. I don't think I would consider that
| opposition "underground".
|
| > But could any argument be made that the PRC has made a
| tactical mistake in pushing these movements underground, that
| they're thriving because they were underground and would be
| less successful above ground?
|
| I think it is a tactical mistake. I think that trying to censor
| such a widely known and iconic event made the rest of their
| censorship and propaganda less effective because it makes the
| censorship so much more obvious.
|
| I do think censorship can be effective, especially against
| ideas and knowledgeable that are just starting to spread. I
| think the more brutal and authoritarian you can be, the more
| effectively you can censor things.
|
| However,I also think that there is clearly truth to the
| concerns about censorship with high personal consequences
| pushing widely spread ideas under ground. I think whether
| underground ideologies grow or shrink has a complicated
| dependency on network topology. I think it's pretty clear that
| underground ideologies tend to become more extreme and harder
| to reconcile without violence.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Do you really think most educated people in PRC don't _know_
| about 1989? They know, they just think it would be deeply
| unreasonable to raise this kind of controversy in public when
| the government is making the average Chinese 's lives so much
| better. It's a very complicated game, and there are _multiple_
| sides pushing opposition underground.
|
| Opposition to the Iraq war was a very similar story, where many
| and perhaps most people were hopeful that promoting democratic
| values in the Middle East would actually _work_ , and nip the
| root causes of Islamofascist terrorism in the bud. Of course
| the reality was very different.
| kfprt wrote:
| They _know_ what they are told and that is enough for them.
| There is no incentive to open pandoras box.
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