Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive

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.

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.

This is objectively false, you can get fired for offending people both at your job or outside it.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

- Wield it as a tool to push out any dissenters

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?

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.

I mean facebook is already doing this, on purpose or not (right now the blame is on the algorithms). Either way this is not the right way forward.

Needless to say, they became corrupt very soon, because no one was allowed to say a word against them.

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

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.

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.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/

>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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't understand your first sentence. Please re-iterate.

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.

Can you see how that is a recipe for attacking people and ruining their lives based on something that in the end might be imagined?

Do you see how easily that becomes ... anyone who disagrees with any opinion I have is evil?

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.

Another victory for social justice. Brexit, Trump, you guys just can't stop winning.

Reminds me of the 10 minute hate from 1984, which was also intended for catharsis not outward justice or remedy.

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.

You will eventually be damned whatever you do.

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.)

But the kicker is that in the end it turned out that he didn't even make the donation.

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

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?

(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.

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.

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/06/17/mit-chaplain-resigns-over-emai...

You mean like how underrepresented groups regularly experience the workplace already?

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.

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.

1) Crowdsourced moderation. Well, everyone is using manual moderation anyway.

2) Silencing others. This is a misfeature.

3) Finding the best content. Upvotes are enough for that.

That said, I'm not sure this will reduce groupthink. Twitter has no downvotes and plenty of groupthink.

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.

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.

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?

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.

https://tribuna.com/en/chelsea/news/2020-06-25-burnley-fan-b...

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.

When everyone is racist, effectively no one is.

You missed out the bit where some of them were doing Nazi salutes or carrying EDL / Britain First etc flags.

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.

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.

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.

    > Firing, cancelling, and silencing anyone with a 
    > 'bad' opinion doesn't convert them to a 'good' one.

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.

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.

[0]http://www.electproject.org/2016g

[1]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/10/13587462/...

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/do...

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.

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 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.