It gave them the excuse to build their own platforms in which their ideas could spread uncontested and at the same time made them more alluring to the masses because “forbidden” knowledge is so alluring to humans that perhaps the most famous myth in history is about how our species lost the perfect existence because of it.

You cannot make anything forbidden and expect that by doing so it won’t spread because it is forbidden. As long as there is a demand for it it will continue to spread and if the Streisand effect holds it will spread exponentially. This applies to ideas, drugs, guns, and pretty much everything. If the people want it they will get it. Alcohol is the perfect example: we tried to make it illegal and all it did was increase crime, violence and people kept drinking as much if not more than before. Fast forward to today people drink less than ever because they have learned the health effects of it. Give people the tools to tell right from wrong, correct from incorrect instead of trying to bubble wrap their world and then act surprised when they feel betrayed because someone told them there is another point of view (false as it may be). Let them see both point of views and let the very absurdity of the opposite view discredit itself.

If we cannot trust that people can make the correct decisions why then would we insist on democracy?

It’s not about the factuality of the information though, it’s about the subjectivity of the label. Harmful, hateful, etc are not objective measurable labels and so they can be used to shut down any sort of speech. The paternalistic position that we need to protect people from falsehoods or harmful ideas is frankly condescending. Like I said elsewhere if I cannot believe that people are capable of separating truth from fact, then I must also believe that they are fundamentally incapable of making decisions and therefore I need to take away any ability for them to make any kind of significant decision. I will not follow this line of thought in my life or politics, because then who gets to decide who is capable of making decisions? The experts in their ivory towers? The only experts with apodictic knowledge are physicists and mathematicians, everyone else operates on degrees of certainty, they can be wrong. And furthermore who decides who are the experts? This is a return to aristocracy or monarchy, but instead of divine authority it is credentialist.

If we want to stop people from believing stupid shit the solution is not to attempt to bubble wrap their world as it were, but rather to give them the tools to discern good information from bad information.

If I’m to believe that I need to protect people from “bad” ideas and that they are not capable of discerning right from wrong, false from truth, them I will also have to believe that democracy itself is wrong because clearly we cannot allow these monkeys to make any decisions. Now while my heart of hearts might believe this to be true, I do not have apodictic certainty in that and instead I truly believe that education can make people take better decisions and help them discern right from wrong. As such I can never believe in labeling speech as allowed or not allowed, rather I would like to invest my energies into fostering curiosity, truth seeking and knowledge as perhaps the highest human virtues. So instead of burying speech we should be educating kids.

Also X kind of proves my point, the platform is alive but much less relevant than before. This is the bad ideas discrediting themselves in action.

This is about the only good reply because it’s honest. Very based.

Ok I understand that you, like me are a chimp, but we need to try to overcome tribalism as much as we can. By that I mean stop thinking that anyone belongs to the opposite tribe of yours simply because they don’t subscribe to dogmatic political agendas. I’m not taking any side except the side of logic and reasoning. Prohibiting or restricting speech or ideas has never stopped them from spreading or otherwise gaining traction if the ground for them is fertile. So what’s even the point? We used to have the KKK on tv and through the sheer idiocy of their ideas they still failed as a political organization.

Invest your energies on fomenting curiosity and truth seeking in people not on removing “harmful” speech. Those are arbitrary labels that we can apply to anything, as Trump et all are showing.

I don’t know that I believe in that sort of paternalistic attitude what I do know is that Google et al have no business dictating what is or isn’t misinformation. It’s a double edged blade.

People will believe whatever they want to believe, you cannot suppress whatever you believe is misinformation. There are lots of things for which there is no apodictic certainty that gets passed of as fact and no one questions it or calls it misinformation.

Also it’s not that it wasn’t a perfect solution. It’s that it is not a solution at all. It actively made things worse in fact.

People in the streets say crazier shit every day, are you also gonna stop them from saying it? Fuck that man, the audience is the one that needs to learn to be discerning.

Fuck outta here with this fuckhead logic.

This is not a bad thing actually. “Deplatforming” idiots clearly did not stop their ideas from spreading so might as well allow people to say whatever inane shit they want instead of getting them riled up for “censorship”.

I know it’s not real censorship but technicalities hardly matters. What matters is how people feel.

Two decades of “just learn to code bro”, will do that to a profession.

What’s that supposed to mean? It’s the truth, you can’t just act the same as the people you criticize and expect not to be criticized about it.

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For me the wisdom is that for all the good a strong federal government could do, it inevitably was going to be used for ill and we are seeing that play out in real time. Which is what traditional republicans always said.

But to a point I do think the founding sin was writing in the constitution that all men are created equal and still allowing slavery. Many (if not most? I’m not sure here I know they all owned slaves as that was the thing to do at the time) who signed that paper knew that this sin would destroy the union and it’s obvious they were right because all of American history has been the shockwaves of allowing slavery instead of making it illegal from the very beginning, and to this day it is still playing out. Thats what happens when you weave in contradictions into the foundation of your country, event those contradictions cannot coexist.

Fair. The same style of organization was the intention under the constitution still. Just a little bit tighter wound.

The idea always was that people should be free to live in a place where they agree with the laws, so each state would have broad powers to organize itself and make its own laws and then every person could decide to live in a place that was organized in the way they wanted. The Federal Government was only to handle military (which is still constitutionally not supposed to be a standing army, but congress votes to maintain it every two years), international relations, regulate relations between the states themselves and tariffs. This has always been the traditional republican position, and time has proven the wisdom behind it. But now it’s too late to turn back I think.

You just described the United States as intended there at the end. The whole thing was designed to be something more like the EU than what it is today.

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In reference to how socialism will truly come about, Marx literally criticized the kind of thinking that dominates left wing thinking nowadays.

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No you can’t. It collapses on the weight of its own contradictions. Any imposition of socialism without the right material conditions is doomed.

Sometimes I wonder how many “Marxists” really have read Marx.

I can’t say if they killed drug dealers or not but drugs are absolutely moved via boats like these. Drones is a lot more advanced that Caribbean drug smugglers usually use.