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Comment by unyttigfjelltol | Hacker News Reader

>speaking ill on certain topics is modern-day heresy

The AUP would be more transparent if it simply banned "modern-day heresy". Folks would then be tagged as tech-heretics, and many would wear that badge with honor.

Calling questionable, unproven, unpopular or ambiguous information "misleading"-- it's a doublespeak. Worse, having my cloud drive spontaneously dumping or blocking my data because some algorithm or faceless reviewer disagrees with the content-- that's totally unacceptable as a consumer proposition. Is my Android phone next simply because I'm posting an HN comment Google might disagree with? Seriously, it's completely unworkable from a consumer position for Google to arrogate to themselves that power.

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That's not how heresy works. People don't point fingers at you and hiss "heretic!", instead they judge you and think you're a terrible human being who does terrible things so they shouldn't help or associate with you. You can't "simply ban" heresy.

If you're genuinely interested in convincing people across the aisle to stop trying to ban stuff like this, simply yelling that it's "totally unacceptable as a consumer proposition" and "completely unworkable" and "doublespeak" is barely an argument. Evidently, many consumers are accepting it and will continue to accept it.

> That's not how heresy works. People don't point fingers at you and hiss "heretic!"

I mean...yes that's exactly what they did. Excommunication, run out of town, branded, marked, labeled in public, put in stocks, jailed, killed, yelled at, or just straight ostracized. These are all tactics that have been used in the past to label and punish heretical beliefs. They could absolutely still be used and, if you look at "cancel culture" in the right/wrong light, that's exactly what's still happening.

My point is not that people don't ostracize heretics, it's that "heretics" aren't a real category that people identify explicitly. Heresy is not a thing, people don't think "you were a heretic" as the reason they're ostracizing you (look, maybe 12th century peasants did, that's beside my point, we're talking about modern politics). People who want to ban these things don't think of this as "banning heresy", they think of it as "banning a bunch of terrible things to benefit society". If you're just going to dismiss these people's perspective as banning "heresy", you're just talking past them. You're not earnestly engaging them in argument.

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