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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

He didn't travel in the last 30 days I read, and the incubation time is shorter than that. I.e. he caught it after coming home.

Vincent has been a very bad source of information for the COVID pandemic. He has famously been against vaccine boosters, and even declared he didn't think he needed one. Even now as the need for second boosters is clear (and the need for first boosters completely justified and verified) he still says they aren't necessary. This is on top of him downplaying every variant like Omicron and saying they wouldn't be a problem (and then they went on to be huge problems). He should not be platformed IMHO.

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Based on your opinions, I don't think you should be platformed.

Kind of stinks when it's used against you, doesn't it?

The solution to bad ideas is more ideas, not "deplatforming" or whatever mealy-mouthed word is currently being used to make censorship marketable these days.

So would you consider @dang to be some mealy-mouthed censor when he admonishes and possibly removes content here that goes against community guidelines?

That fully depends on the content of the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My question is simple: is there any speech that should not be tolerated here? Yes, or no?

Manner restrictions are different than content restrictions.

There’s speech that doesn’t fit the community’s guidelines in terms of the manner it is expressed, but I don’t believe there are any ideas that should not be tolerated here.

Hitler did nothing wrong.

Do you still stand by your statement? Should that idea be tolerated on this forum?

Sure. Why not? Make a cogent argument for the idea.

I’ll disagree, of course, but in the exceedingly unlikely event that you present a strong argument, it’s still an opportunity to hone my own counter-argument.

Context matters in my opinion. If you say this to a person whose jewish family has survived the Holocaust, then I would say this statement is an indirect verbal attack. You could as well say "Your family should have been killed". Verbal attacks are an attempt to hurt people, just like physical attacks are, and therefore in my opinion it is fair to ban them to some extent.

I don't even think this has anything to do with free speech, as in freedom to express your thoughts. The key with free speech is that everyone is entitled to that. Verbal attacks are often an attempt to stop others from expressing their thoughts, so I think they are fundamentally an action against free speech.

That being said, as a German, I don't agree with the German blanket bans of certain expressions. Context and intentions always matter, I think.

I think that I don't agree with this, entirely.

Most, if not all, meaningful speech risks offending someone.

Framing uncomfortable beliefs as attacks grants a form of "victim power" by which anyone can claim to be a victim of your "attack" as a means of shutting down speech.

This isn't a hypothetical, I see the technique used frequently.

I agree that this is a possibility and a risk, but I think that a bit of common sense goes a long way. One of my classmates tried to frame everyone who disagreeed with him as nazi, but nobody fell for it, because it was obvious that he just tried to evade criticism. There also needs to be some leeway - for example a German court has ruled that a public service worker could not be fired for calling his boss an "old asshole", because they've known each other for very long. Context matters.

Good to see that Godwin [1] holds.

The answer is yes, absolutely.

And I'd happily engage you to try to convince and educate you, in a respectful way, why I believe that's incorrect.

Because that's how we raise ourselves up.

Censoring, reviling, shutting down and abandoning people who hold these sorts of beliefs only serves to reinforce them and drive them into echo chambers of radicalization.

So yes, by all means. Express any thoughts, ideas, opinions or dreams you have.

By actively participating in the marketplace of ideas, we can let the best ones rise, and the worst ones defeat themselves.

Through discussion and debate, not force or cooersion, of which censorship is an insidious form.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Why not try something along the lines of:

"We need to kill all the ** to keep our race pure"

Is that speech that should be tolerated? Karl Popper would say no, and I agree with his reasoning.

At a broader level I think the solution is simple. Any person must be able to decide who he/she personally wants to listen to. in forums this can be implemented by a feature that allows you to hide certain people's comments based on your own judgement. At HN and most other forums the moderator or others decide if a person's comments are to be visible to others.

I really have a hard time understanding what the drama is about.

I am totally fine with banning verbal attacks on others, just like physical attacks are typically banned IRL too.

Basically the same rules can be applied, for example a counter attack in defense is a lighter offense than an unprovoked attack.

I think that this does not particularly limit someone's ability to express their opinions, ideas and beliefs.

Outright incitement to violence against others is easy to recognize as speech not worth tolerating.

But here it gets interesting: hate speech wrapped up as "opinions, ideas, and beliefs". At the risk of downvotes (what ev er), I posit that Fox News engages in high level hate speech (not every minute but enough for it to count).

Case in point: Tucker Carlson's "The Great Replacement" agenda. It's thinly veiled white nationalism -- basically arguing that white people are under attack from non-whites. Yes, it gets discussed by him as "what if" and "how come" but it has an agenda that is prepared to be enforced by violence by those who are spooked by it.

I don't have an answer for how to deal with this, but it is in the end hate speech and is not healthy for society as a whole.

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