Censorship takes a lot of different forms imo. Self-censorship usually takes place because one or more other forms of censorship are already at play.
There's authority based censorship, like the banned books list. People legitimately believed that Catcher in the Rye caused serial killers at one point and definitely cast judgement on those willing to admit they'd read it. At the time, reading the book could cost you in social capital which I think is what PG is alluding to. From what I read, PG just wishes we didn't exercise moral judgement - which I get. I came from a religious background that weaponized their morals for ostracization or for hate, meanwhile, nobody within the system recognized they were doing that because they were blinded by the righteousness of their morals. In that way, morals are sticky webs.
My curiosity drifts in a different way - assuming you can't rid the world of moral addiction - why were the people who believe such foolish morals (like banning books) not punished post facto? Folks with a laundry list of morals will often use the word "consequences", but where are their consequences when this moral falls out of style and has senselessly ruined lives?
Conservatives are banning books and outlawing kinds of self-expression, kinds of self-identity, in many countries, RIGHT NOW.
What opinions, in 2004, or 2022, does Paul Graham not think one can express safely? I'm skeptical it's the list of opinions that the state is actually being used to suppress, just opinions that many people find morally objectionable.
> Conservatives are banning books and outlawing kinds of self-expression, kinds of self-identity, in many countries, RIGHT NOW.
I agree, conservatives and liberals using morality as an excuse to cause harm are problematic.
> What opinions, in 2004, or 2022, does Paul Graham not think one can express safely
If I had to guess he's probably thinking on the war and what he's allowed to and what he's not allowed to say. The USG certainly wasn't telling him no; it was individuals and their morals who created an environment of fear and walking on eggshells. I'm not sure how that differs from what we experience today. That said, I think what PG is talking about is the long-term frailty of morals. They change constantly, because they're largely based on hegemonic personal perceptions. To me, the overarching argument is to let morality take a backseat and let people question the world for themselves.
Liberals haven't done anything of the sort, and no one "is using morality as an excuse to cause harm". Morality is about the harms that exist in this world. Conservatives have false beliefs—about trans people, homosexuality, etc—leading them to do things that are good, but are actually evil. No liberals are using state power in anything like the same way, and disagreeing with people is as old as people.
If he can't take a public stand on an issue of the day, because some people will disagree with him—why should we listen to him on any issue? What's he self-censoring? Something important? Millions protested the invasion of Iraq; why didn't they self-censor? And if he were standing with me in 2004, talking about WMDs and how right Bush and company were to have plotted this—he would face my moral disagreement.
Morals are not "long-term frail". Just the morals of rich men like Paul Graham. Right and wrong exist. There's a battle in the public space right now because some of the things happened are wrong.
In my experience, it's not fruitful to argue with folks like you. You're just going to believe what you believe, as if politics and current events are football or religion. Best of luck.
But honestly, I stated my "priors" unequivocally, with specific examples of current legislation that's coming from only one side, and you went "both sides", didn't answer a specific thing, and left in a huff?
What conclusion do you actually think I'm drawing about this interaction. You posted on my comment.
You didn't mention any current legislation specifically, just that there's legislation on-going.
> you went "both sides"
I don't know why people like you act like this is a bad thing. The left isn't good, or really great. In fact, it kind of sucks, just a little less than the right. White-bashing has become common place and acceptable in left-leaning circles, misandry has taken off like never before, when I was living in San Diego I watched self-proclaimed leftists in Ocean Beach dressed in all black, helmets, and baseball gear beat the shit out of people with bikes, knives, and CS gas. A prominent antisemite has been allowed to not only stay in office but also continue in committees and receives praise to this day.
On the other hand, you're right that the right has allowed bad behavior to make it into the actual representational ranks with those like MTG (there are more, just an example). From my perspective, that doesn't make the left any much better than the right, other than that they have some material functions within the DNC that allow them to keep those kinds of people (who are still constituents) away. I do think the RNC needs to implement these functions, and I understand why they didn't, but the US never would've gotten a world with Donald Trump had the right implemented super delegates the way the left does.
Maybe instead of acting like the left is a rosy and immaculate institution you should examine the fractures in the facade that people try to cover up with warm rhetoric.
Current lists of the laws I have in mind, YMMV, but there's some good stuff in here (by which I mean assaults on freedom of expression from one and only one political quadrant).
I could go on and on but you'll see it or you'll find reasons not to.
This comes from one political quadrant.
There is no other side to this issue, which is the issue I've been discussing.
I don't know what to tell you to get you to see that substituting some rioting anarchist self-proclaimed leftists who have no representation in our politics for the liberals I referred to is insulting to my intelligence.
Some things from that indexer you linked are problematic, but others certainly aren't. As I said, I don't question that the right does bad things with their power. I do question your denial that the left does. It seems odd to me that so many right and left folks don't question their own camps, or worse, have gotten to the point where they play no true scotsman with bad behavior:
> I don't know what to tell you to get you to see that substituting some rioting anarchist self-proclaimed leftists who have no representation in our politics for the liberals I referred to is insulting to my intelligence.
I guess one primary differentiator in our views is that you view the actions of representatives as more important than the actions and hegemony of constituents. I do not.
The tiny minority of black bloc protesters aren't anyone American politicians constituents, and you're attempt to associate them with anything I've said just shows your bad faith in taking the rest of my words seriously at all.
One side is making laws banning speech and criminalizing identity, yet every single article about this talks first and foremost about some nebulous threat to free speech, and when questioned for real examples, real measure of the phenomenon, are only met with dissembling.
I absolutely do question liberal politicians; their failures are extremely frustrating. Far left antics don't touch them at all; as for The Squad, they're some of the most responsible politicians in this country. Those are my judgments. What I don't countenance is that anything like the problems with liberal and left-wing politics measures up against the systemic assault on human freedom being waged around the world by right wing political parties, making actual policy.
If you had an example of a liberal or even left-wing law that suppresses speech I feel like you would have supplied it. Some things are not balanced. Some things are not true. Some things are not right.
That area is near where I lived and where I'd visit often. I guess to you it's not a problem, but to me it was very visible. Also entirely anti-liberal and they faced very little if any formal condemnation.
> Far left antics don't touch them at all; as for The Squad, they're some of the most responsible politicians in this country.
Ilhan Omar is the antisemite I was talking about, and it wasn't some one-time occurrence either [1]. AOC, to me, is an agitator similar to Matt Gates or Ted Cruz. As for the rest of the "the squad" I have no idea what they do.
Liberals suppressing free speech is almost entirely grass roots, it's a certain type of liberal constituent that's grown over time. As I said earlier, the DNC generally has a mechanism for keeping them out of office, but there are notable exceptions. I don't think constituency is something to ignore though.
A notable example of how these constituents do things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
While I don't agree with Brendan on a lot (if you search through my account I've argued with him on here before), using extra-legal measures to force someone out of a position especially after they've tried to make amends was fairly sickening. The cherry on top was that it was over two past political donations during a time when those views were certainly mainstream. Examples like this aren't really hard to find and, no, I'm not going to sit here and enumerate them for you. Especially as you've been bragging about how intellectually superior you are.
No she isn't, and if you're going to come out with specific accusations: fucking prove it.
8 arrests. Wow. Looks like they burned your whole town down. Except that didn't happen, and the police won. The Democrats did this to you? No. Far left activists in masks.
Seems like Brendan Eich had a raw experience. He also seems like he's doing fine. "Extra-legal"? Nonsense word.
Maybe too many people are losing their jobs due to accidentally saying mean things about gay people; maybe this is politically lopsided; if so, quantify it.
Again, if you think it's anything like the equivalent of the laws listed in those prior links, you're simply refusing to reckon with what I'm saying.
I think I'm finished. Wish HN allowed for account deletion.
If we blame the author for a work focusing on an abstract topic not directly concerned with injustices happening at the time, no scientist or philosopher should have done anything since no one would be free of guilt by that measure (including, of course, us forum commenters).
I doubt humans can even socially function (let alone progress) if we let the countless injustices happening every second occupy the entirety of our minds at all times—and it is the seemingly abstract works in philosophy, science that lay the necessary foundation for concrete progress that hopefully contributes to resolving those injustices.
That said, is this just an elaborate justification for my own inaction? Should it be the next obvious thing that used to be unthinkable to talk about (like racial equality in the early times of chattel slavery) that a conscious person ought to withhold meaningful but not-directly-helping contributions to humanity until—I don’t know the exact measure here—say, the world is free of suffering and violence?
This is a fair point, that he is discussing abstractions.
I almost wrote "I wish people would read moral philosophers on moral philosophy, not tech founders."
He does give some examples, and they seem to fit in two categories: things done by tyrants, and other people thinking you should expand one's moral categories.
I think it's clear that the ones that bother him, in his actual life, are the latter.
> The idea that all humans don't self-censor by default in front of all sorts of people
...is not the idea pg's essay is talking about. In fact he calls the advice to self-censor by default (Wooton's advice to Milton) "wise advice". He's obviously aware that people self-censor and he obviously doesn't think that's a bad thing in itself.
> people disagree with him and that makes him uncomfortable.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
You're right, I'm not a mind reader, I don't know if "discomfort" is the right word; my original comment was snark, meant to draw attention to the moral divergence between his examples.
But honestly: the stuff about "racial insensitivity" and the words "divisive" and "inappropriate" DO get somewhere in the ballpark of "uncomfortable". I'm trying for a neutral word to capture it. None of this is anything like the historical examples—totalitarianism, religious persecution—that inflate his abstract case. These are still problems today on a scale that dwarfs "cancel culture" and "self-censorship".
He gives historical examples. Instead of giving contemporary examples, though, he hand-waves in a way that absolutely will make one side nod vigorously with their priors. Its BS. Tech executives keep getting treated like moral philosophers because they wink and say "why not phrenology?" in order to pose as victims. Galileo was oppressed by religious conservatives engaging in a moral panic. That's happening now, too.
Why do you think that his giving a variety of examples with different moral weights is a problem? The fact that big moral issues exist does not mean small ones don't, nor does it mean all small ones should be ignored until all of the big ones are fixed.
> Instead of giving contemporary examples, though, he hand-waves in a way that absolutely will make one side nod vigorously with their priors.
He addressed the question of contemporary examples in a follow-up here:
I am not saying that he is giving different "moral weights" to anything. I am saying he is invoking an extreme moral context: religious persecution, totalitarian wartime governments. Then he starts talking about how some things (he won't give any example but adverts to some social justice code words as bad) are moral threats like this, insofar as they make us hide our beliefs.
They are not. He is making a bunch of category mistakes. There are in fact numerous specific threats to free speech and human freedom in 2004 and 2022: there are people with specific beliefs, specific identities actually being targeted today. It seems to me that people who want to discuss censorship in the abstract aren't interested in the actual moral challenge this poses.
Taking it at it's word, PG's article should prompt you to explore a thought space you think should be self-censored in many environments. Can YOU give me an example that might convince me? This is a safe space ;)
Oh, they would so blow our tiny minds that to even think through one hypothetically would ruin the entire article? So I should just imagine how horrified someone (anyone?) in 1830 would be by the fact that I think black and white people, men and women, are moral and political equals? (That's what you just had me read.)
I'm not sure we read the same article. (For example, the things pg says people in the 1830s would be horrified to hear do not include the thing you mention--and of course there were plenty of people in the 1830s who agreed with the viewpoint you mention and said it, loudly, so it was hardly something "you can't say" in that time period.) I don't agree with your vituperative criticisms, but I doubt we'll get anywhere with further discussion.
"If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible. We would seem depraved to them."
The way I put it is a legitimate if somewhat more abstract (but historically literate) gloss on this. My point is that PG is saying is dumb and ignorant and does not support his fantasizing about being Galileo. I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
I'm not sure what you're implying---that pg is seeing censorship where there isn't, or that he's naive for not intuiting that it's everywhere, all the time.
In my understanding, he's worrying that it's everywhere, all the time, in the self-censor sense.
> In my understanding, he's worrying that it's everywhere, all the time, in the self-censor sense.
I don't think he's worried about self-censorship in itself. If he's worried about anything in this essay, I would say it's the possibility of losing the option he describes here:
"The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know."
I am implying, and in no way do I take myself to be doing anything more noble than shitposting here, that the kinds of forbidden opinions he is probably imagining himself to suffer for, are radically different from the kinds of opinions that people who actually end up suffering for their opinions have.
MY big opinion that I'm violating right now: Never Post. Especially about "cancel culture".
> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary...
There is an argument that people should not be held responsible for decades old views, as well as the argument that people should be given an opportunity to learn new social norms instead of being immediately canceled. But to say that these issues are just as arbitrary as fashion is a completely different argument --- and a specious one at that.
> Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed.
There's some truth to this that's worth pausing on.
But it's a fallacy (probably with a fancy name) to say "it made you mad therefore you worry it's true".
A statement could be false yet incite anger because it's demonstrably harmful.
Also the statements that people “worry might be believed” may not intersect with the statements that could be judged as plausible by an intelligent, rational person. There are a loooooot of dumb people out there, with uncomfortable levels of individual and/or collective power. When that cohort falls for something that smarter people see as blatantly false, it still can have nasty consequences. We should be angry at anyone who deliberately attempts to make them fall for it.
Anger is a manifestation of fear, which in turn stems from insecurity. If you are confident, there is nothing to be afraid of and becoming irate about.
This makes it a useful measure sometimes. If a thing you say causes anger, it may or may not be true—but it definitely indicates your counterpart’s sensitivity to and bias against it being true; the chance of it being false is thus elevated.
Were I to spread lies about horrible things the Jews were doing, Jewish people around me would become angry and, yes, fearful, depending on my ability to make or find platforms, not because they'd be afraid I was telling the truth, but because, historically, those lies have been early warning signs for violence against Jews, including state violence.
Making it more personal: Would you get angry were someone to falsely accuse you of a crime? Would it frighten you? Would those emotions come from a lack of confidence in the truth, or a lack of confidence in your support system and, ultimately, the justice system to separate fact from fiction?
Empirically, many people seem to be willing to believe deranged conspiracy theories about Jews. That doesn’t mean those theories are correct or credible in any objective sense, but the risk is exactly that people might believe or take seriously those claims.
The thing is, if you really want to prevent antisemitic violence, censorship is not going to help. If someone claims that the Jews rule the world, you can argue, “so why did the Jews end up on the wrong side of the Shoah” and if they claim the Shoah didn’t happen, you bring out all the documentary evidence that it did happen. If censorship is on the table, the anti-Semite can—as he does in many countries already—censor all of the documentary evidence that demonstrates the barbarity of his position.
Hate speech: I have encountered that at times, have you? Anger is pointless, because that is what they want. Allegation of a crime: probably not going to anger me if I did not commit it, but may make me afraid if it is made by law enforcement.
Fear is natural if hate has the potential to spill into action, but anger is a signature behavior of a cornered creature—it will not lend credence to any of your counter statements and is useful in a very, very limited range of scenarios. Keep your cool.
To circle back to the topic at hand, any anger stems from fear/insecurity (which may or may not be warranted); when it happens unexpectedly when discussing a random topic, like in TFA—no one wishes death to anyone, and yet someone gets mad—then it is a useful indicator.
Exactly. This whole essay seems to provide no way to distinguish between moral fashion and actual morality.
Is he trying to say that there's nothing moral under the sun? That there are no evil ideas? Do I even need to put forward examples?!
And providing no framework or tools to distinguish between the two and just telling everyone "go for it" is dangerous. I'm mad at the idea. And no. I don't think it's because it might be true.
Mostly all of the "morality" people live by are fashion.
Sure you can craft some example of "pure evil" if you want to but they hardly have any relevance in people every day life.
For all the popular "morally right" things to do or not to do we just craft a set of exceptions that are in fashion.
"You should tell the truth" yes, probably you should but should you always? what if you can prevent trouble if you lie? what if you can save someone form getting hurts by lying? what if you omit something etc. etc.
"You should not take a life" except if self-defense, defense of someone else, if the person poses an imminent danger to you or someone else, the person is military personnel form a different country, the person is unborn etc. etc.
A lot of morality is of course fashion (and "relative", if you want).
But failure to articulate universal moral rules concisely, doesn't mean there's no concensus.
Circumstances and relevant context can be very complicated and laborious to describe, but there are still many cases where overwhelming majority of people would agree on what's right and what's wrong.
But morality claims to define right and wrong based on logic not consensus.
Consensus changes and is also often confused with "acceptance" like for example a majority of people accepts some kind of legal abortions that doesn't mean they think it is morally right to do it.
In a world of modern disinformation, we can no longer presume mad vs non-mad statements based upon our own worldview. Different people have been told different things throughout their lives, and if nothing from another PoV pierces that bubble, then it simply seems normal to them. And that can go for any person, not just "the other side" be it R vs D or any other two groups.
There are plenty of things you "can't say" in San Francisco which are self-evident truths in conservative parts of the U.S., and vice versa. On the other hand, anyone can watch Fox News, or read The Nation, so those ideas get around everywhere. Probably people mostly migrate to communities where they feel comfortable / agree with others too. So how big of a problem is this now?
I would say it's still a substantive issue. I live in SF and I came from a very conservative state; moral community wise I fit into neither and it does make the areas I mentioned a tad uncomfortable to be in. That said, I'm only forced to work in one.
That ideal hasn't been a reality in my lifetime, nor in my parents'. How do you think non-religious folks were treated in rural parts in the 1960s? Even some cities -- my dad couldn't get a job in Salt Lake City because he wasn't Mormon. In 1917, women were beaten and tortured for picketing for suffrage. Martin Luther King was assassinated for voicing the wrong opinion.
Ah, yes. We’re regularly seeing those atheists out there hanging religious people. Such a shame.
Let’s not really act like the secular are anywhere near the way the religious are. Most of the secular just want everyone to have secularism be an option and not have religious choices forced upon anyone.
The ACLU historically defended many unpopular speech cases, and even now they will fight for some types of unpopular speech, and this was all definitely within our lifetimes.
I think using the phrase "out of touch" is pretty telling here. Out of touch with what? The general cultural consensus? If you read this essay, the entire point is it's better to be out of touch, and if you're too in touch, you probably aren't actually thinking for yourself.
The entire point of the essay is Paul felt bad when someone told him one of his opinions was bad and so he wrote a 5000 word sub-tweet to make himself feel better rather than trying a moment of introspection.
The children can say whatever they want. Their ideas are hip. It's the more conservative leaning (older) folks who'll have their car tires slashed, or be hit in the face, or just be cancelled (deleted from social media) for supporting the wrong candidates and causes.
"Deleted from social media" is a pretty weak definition of "being cancelled".
Regardless of whether you agree or not "cancelling" is more about large scale boycott of a person and the media or services associated with them. It's not "Just" about blocking someone on social media, and it often has significant impacts on the business or the individuals who are being cancelled.
As near as I can tell, people complaining about being "cancelled" are being punished for violating the TOS of the social media platforms they are on.
If you are spouting heresies in a respectful good-faith debate, the worst that generally happens is you get yelled at/laughed at, and usually by community members and not the mods.
I think when someone complains about being "canceled" or suffering negative consequences from something they said, you kind of have to look at what they're saying. The reasons then often become clear...
This old Tweet [1] always comes to mind whenever someone feels they are being unjustly picked on for their views.
That brings up the question of whether these social media platforms' terms of service are themselves censorious and intolerant to some degree. The first answer to that would be "yes", since otherwise terms of service wouldn't even exist and no one would ever be banned for anything they said or did in or out of the platform. The second answer would be "maybe", especially for platforms that pride themselves on being paragons of open discussion. (I think that "maybe" should be a permanently ongoing, self-reflective maybe.)
Having frequented a few of the paragons of open discussion, I can tell you that they regularly ban users as well.
My takeaway isn't necessarily hypocrisy (although a few of them are certainly full of that), it's that moderation is hard because of the never-ending wave of people trying to clog up public discourse for a variety of crappy reasons.
Jeff Atwood (one of the founders of Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, developer of Discourse) has some pretty insightful things to say about community management.
Yes. Anecdotally I have noticed (in real life and online) some people view being "cancelled" (deleted) from a Social Media as a badge of honour and will gladly enumerate the accounts they have had that were banned but their ever-important message that got them to boot is never mentioned. If you dig deeper it's usually some form of TOS or hate-speech.
There is no such thing as "hate-speech" there is just speech that (some) people hate and almost anything fall user that if it has some kind of complexity. That's one of the core problems with hate-speech laws and ToS. You can not moderate it fair because its entirely subjective.
You're conflating laws and enforcing those laws in a legal sense with the capability of a private or public company to control what is published on their platform. It is the reason a president was removed from social media platform(s) and this action was considered fair and constitutional. In this context the concept of hate-speech absolutely exists.
No, I'm not. You actually just did that.
I talked about hate-speech laws as one thing and hate-speech in ToS and similar rules/guidelines as another thing. They are absolutely not the same or similar but face the same problem namely that they can not be enforced fair because they are subjective. "hate-speech" is subjective. Its not like incitement of violence/lying under oath or other speech related "boundaries" that are rather exactly defined.
This is not about private or public companies and what they legally can or can not do. Its not that they can not write in their ToS that you aren't allowed to say X and then if you say X they ban you. That would be the expected way how thing go.
But in reality the say you aren't allowed to say "hate-speech". And then you say X and the people who didn't define hate-speech define X as hate-speech and ban you. This is a problem because it give endless opportunity to abuse
The people who make the rules also interpret the rules and enforce the rules. So anything is hate-speech if they hate it.
That's not a proof that hate-speech (objectively defined) actually exists, its a proof that it subjectively enforced and that is a problem.
Another example. Lets say a platform forbids the use of the n-word. People can disagree with this but still use the platform and follow that rule and they should be fine. But to actually be fine they need to know the way this rules is interpreted. for example is "n*****" against the rules because its just a substitute? And if so what about "n-word" also against the rules? What about "******" or a single "N"? what about context? can I write the full word if I quote an album/movie title? etc. etc. The problem isn't whether the rule is "good" or if someone agree or not with the rule. The problem is can people who want to follow the rules be booted of the platform anyway by simply declaring something they did as against the rules.
The answer is yes. If "hate-speech" is in the rules with no definition then p much anyone can be booted for basically anything they say.
And yes the law allows this because by law they do not even need a reason, there is always something in the ToS that says that the "service" can be terminated at any time. So the argument that something is "constitutional" is pointless. There is a real problem that somehow need to be fixed. The problem doesn't go away if we just all repeat over and over that no law was broken.
That's like saying large companies avoid paying fair taxes but they do it in a legal way so its not a real problem its "constitutional" they have to do this or their shareholder could sue if they voluntarily pay more taxes.
But the problem isn't that a law was broken so clamming no law was broken is a fooling argument.
Also the president was not removed from platforms due to hate-speech. Your example actually somewhat represents a case where they didn't even bother to twist or interpret their ToS/guidelines somehow to justify banning the president but instead they just did it. And again they LEGALLY can do that. By law they do not even need a reason. That doesn't mean its not a problem.
Again you're confused. In most cases people are not getting banned/cancelled on social media for breaking an actually enforceable law in the legal sense. They are breaking a TOS put forth by the owner of that social media site. Twitter banning someone for inciting violence is no different than a mod banning someone on a web forum for disagreeing that ATI video cards are not the best. You can't call people the n-word on facebook. If you don't believe that is real I'm not sure I have the energy to expand on it for you (perhaps someone else can).
No, you are confused, no one questions that people are indeed getting banned for "hate speech". This just doesn't proof that "hate speech" is an actual thing with a definition. It just means that it is in fact used to get rid of people for various reasons.
Breaking the ToS is also not the problem here the problem here is that ToS are written unspecific, specifically when they put things like "hate speech" in it because no one know what will fall under it and what not. The whole point of rules should be that people should be able to understand and comply with them easily. Instead they are used as a general propose banning reason for anything the owner may not like.
>Twitter banning someone for inciting violence is no different than a mod banning someone on a web forum for disagreeing that ATI video cards are not the best. You can't call people the n-word on facebook. If you don't believe that is real I'm not sure I have the energy to expand on it for you (perhaps someone else can).
It its not about the rules, who or why someone put them up or that they have the right to do that. Its about mutual agreement as to how the rules are interpreted else they make no sense. "Hate speech" rules make no sense because no one know how they are interpreted.
Lets say I open a forum and say in the rules "no hate speech" and then when someone says "I hate dogs" I ban them for "hate speech". Clearly I can do that since its my forum and I can do whatever I want. But that doesn't make "I hate dogs" actual "hate speech" nor does it proof that "hate speech" is a real thing. All this does it give me backdoor to remove almost anyone I want for a "pseudo reason" which I didn't need in the first place but it makes it look like I just enforce the rules and remove the bad guys.
And that is exactly what these platform do. If people would get banned for no reason given then people would question it so they put up reasons like "violated community guidelines" and similar stuff and then people assume it was the users fault. But is it the guys fault who wrote "I hate dogs"? Is that hate speech? And if so did he knowingly broke the rule? He could only know if "hate speech" is defined somehow but it isn't. Everything the platform owner hates is or can be defined as hate speech at any given time.
Hence my original post that there is no such thing as "hate speech" its a made up term to include whatever someone wants it to include.
All terms referring to ideas are made up. We made them up; the animals sure didn't. Your technical point falls on its face there.
Hate speech for sure is a real thing. Is calling someone the N-word hate speech? Not always. Context matters - there are some corner cases where it is clearly not.
But mostly, calling someone the N-word or other racial slut is a hateful act.
This word has such a long and nasty history that it is extremely clear its meaning. There are very few corner cases e.g. Hate Speech exists.
Your complaint is less that it doesn't exist, and more that mods are seemingly expanding the meaning by making judgment calls on the intent of speech.
Using another example to try and explain it, if someone said, "Why are the Inuit so lazy! They just don't want to work." (Something I cannot imagine anyone saying, btw) Well. That is a negative and purjorative generalization of a racial/social group, and whatever -ist label you want to put on it, that too is hate speech. If you walk it back a bit and get a little more wordy with the language, where it may not be as explicit making that generalization, a mod may or may not decide to ding you for it. It then depends on their reading of your intent.
Some mods get it right (I would say most), but some get it wrong, and there are a few who use TOS to enforce their own biases. That hardly negates the existence of Hate Speech.
Forum moderation is hard, as I said in a previous post. You will not always agree with the mods. And indeed the mods do not always get it right, and sometimes there are bad mods. The key is to try to first understand the TOS and second mind the social norms of that forum (just like you would at work or at church).
Above all, the same basic rule applies in online forums as it does in work or church: Just try not to be a dick.
Tech giants deciding what political ideas are delete-worthy, in the places where most people get their information and hear political arguments, is not the same as boycotting...
> In the digital age, we are nearing the point where an idea banished by Twitter, Facebook and Google all but vanishes from public discourse entirely, and that is only going to become more true as those companies grow even further. Whatever else is true, the implications of having those companies make lists of permitted and prohibited ideas are far more significant than when ordinary private companies do the same thing. [1]
There's a difference for sure, though in some cases one follows the other. I agree that there should be consequences for powerful people who preach hatred, when the consequences don't require giving even more power to tech giants and employers (a good example might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaBaby#Homophobic_remarks)
The "gone too far" wokeism stuff seems to be openly mocked, almost everywhere, all the time.
Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Those posts get shared 100x more by people mocking them than by people agreeing with them.
Maybe you could give an example of something specific?
> Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream.
Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse.
Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?
I would describe that experience for the trans person as a “vehement feeling or expression”, and inflicting a violent state on someone qualifies as “an instance of violent treatment or procedure”.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Sure, words can be used in less literal context, like "an ocean of thoughts swirled violently in his head". But simply declaring "deadnaming is violence" because it causes "vehement feeling or expression", would make millions of things violence. Your partner breaking up with you is violence. Your boss giving you a bad performance review is violence. Etc.
These are good illustrations of the problem with the popular "NYT op-ed" type arguments for the claim "speech that upsets someone is violence".
These folks argue (with scientific citations!) that words can cause physical pain and stress, and that actions that cause such things are basically tantamount to violence. What's the difference, right? If I feel bad, what does it matter whether you said mean words to me or you punched me?
The problem is, words can cause stress in all sorts of situations because social interactions can be inherently stressful. There is no non-stressful way to end a relationship or deliver a bad performance review. But sometimes it needs to be done.
Punching someone is extremely different. It's not at all something that normally has to be done, unless perhaps you were just punched first. Physical violence is fundamentally different from speech because speech has an absolutely vital dual purpose of communication, which physical violence doesn't have.
To avoid calling a huge variety of legitimate speech acts violence, we'd have to redefine violence in some tortured way, like "stuff that causes harm and stress unless it was necessary/justified".
I don't think we should redefine the most emotionally salient words in the English language just so that activists' favorite slogans can be retroactively deemed logical.
The problem is, when you start referring to things that used to simply be considered "rude" as "violence", then there's no sense of scale to everything, and the people using that terminology tend to come across as hyper sensitive.
Violence has scale to it too. We have people smashing their keyboards on the desk - which is a violent action yet relatively harmless… all the way to whatever scene you’d like to pluck out of Game of Thrones. It’s all violence and there’s a wide spectrum on it.
It's not professional, it's abusive and it's harassment. But it is literally not violence by the common definition. Slogans like "silence is violence" are designed to provoke attention to an issue by intentionally shifting semantics from where they are normally understood.
> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?
No, but if something is bad, it doesn't follow that it is every kind and degree of bad thing. Something can be impolite without being immoral, something can be immoral without being violence, something can be violence without being murder.
Personally in this case I would say it's disrespectful, and it's against my own moral code, but I know how people like this think. For the most part they're not evil or trying to hurt. They are taking principled stands at great personal risk. They have their own moral compass and it's not the same as yours or mine.
If it were up to me, I would stop interactions between the two, then do my best to educate and persuade the offending party, and professional sanction would be a last resort.
Why are we being pushed to flatten all moral distinctions? I don't understand. Flattening all distinctions makes our thoughts crude and unwieldy. Who thinks this is a good idea and why?
Could it be that redefining our moral vocabulary dissolves the signposts of our moral world, and allows illiberal, extreme positions to masquerade as liberalism?
> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?
That's beside the point, since not being rude to others for no reason is very much part of mainstream professional norms. The question you might ask yourself is rather: "is this one person acting violently towards the meetup organizer by not using their preferred pronouns and updated name". There are people who would answer this in the affirmative, but this implies a pretty loose understanding of what qualifies as "violence" in the first place, which leads to all sorts of unforeseen implications. There's a very good reason why etiquette is generally regarded as trivial when compared with more tangible ethical challenges, and "use the correct pronouns, styles and honorifics when addressing So-and-so" is the quintessential example of etiquette.
I think if I find myself in a profession that is overly concerned with things other than the work of that profession then it is time to find a new profession, or at least find new circles within the profession to associate with.
They probably shouldn't use the old name of the person, as people can change their names for all sorts of reasons, and there's not really any good argument for refusing to use a person's updated name at their request.
However, pronouns are rather different, as there is an established usage of using 'he' for males and 'she' for females, i.e. in reference to the immutable quality of a person's sex. If you don't believe in the ideology of gender identity, it's more honest to keep using a person's sex-based pronouns, regardless of their preferences to the contrary.
I know someone who knows someone who ran an art gallery on the west coast. Most of the artists were black and the gallerist was a white man. At one point he made some offhanded remark that "don't worry, the white artists have an area over there..." Guess what happened to his career after?
These stories are everywhere, and are why people think things have gone too far.
employers have much more power than individuals. even if the public is mostly opposed to wokeism , companies, fed. govt., and universities still seem intent on pushing it.
That still doesn't disprove wokeism's influence on the whole "things you can't say" dynamic. Leo Strauss has famously pointed out that censored ideas often end up being conveyed in a disguised manner, generally involving some kind of reverse psychology where a purposely clumsy or hyperbolic argument for X is used as a signal of believing not-X. So it may be that these seemingly "extreme woke" ideas are being purposely targeted to an unsuspecting Twitter audience as a broader challenge to wokeism itself, and that much of the mockery simply misses the point.
Sure. There have been numerous mainstream articles as well as a recent segment on John Oliver that liken teaching CRT to teaching about the fact racism exists. This is becoming a mainstream viewpoint, that "banning CRT" in classrooms is banning talk of racism.
None of these articles mention any of the more controversial CRT viewpoints that you can find by...reading the wikipedia article. It isn't exactly a hidden secret that CRT purports that any racial disparities must be due to systemic racism, though we can use some logic to quickly falsify some its main beliefs.
“Transwomen are women” is a religious precept on the left yet the overwhelming majority of people can see the obvious truth that they are in fact men in dresses with a serious disturbing sexual fetish.
The overwhelming majority of people just don't care at all. What does it matter to me if you want to dress as a woman and be called "she"? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Life is very short and if somebody finds that way of living theirs to be fulfilling, I see no reason to waste mine being agitated by it.
There are two comments above mine, one by a person who has learned some very important life lessons and is at peace with himself and the world, and one by – someone else.
Is there any adult alive who does not have a potentially disturbing sexual fetish? Even "asexuals" get tarred that way. So, you cannot distinguish them on that basis, even where it is true. (I know a trans person who is also a furry. Figure that one out!) It is of course possible that some subset of trans people are as you say. Is it your business to sort out which are and which are not?
What will you say about a trans person who is also "ace"? It is far from uncommon for people to come out as trans in their 70s, long after fetishes have lost their grip on most people.
So, if you are among that "overwhelming majority", you are just obviously wrong, on several counts.
Your “obvious truth” displays the standard ignorance around this topic. If you were intellectually curious and not pre-judging based on an emotional response you might find yourself digging in and learning the science and lived experiences of trans folks. Alas.
30 years ago people still said the same kind of uninformed stuff around gay people. Do you feel similarly about gay people?
Perhaps the commenter you are replying to hasn't, but I've looked into this extensively, listening to the lived experiences of transgender-identifying people, reading their forums, poring over the scientific research into gender dysphoria, and listening to the arguments on the gender critical side too.
From this, I can only conclude that transwomen, being of the male sex, are not actually women, but are simply men who want to be women, to the extent that they attempt to masquerade as such in everyday life.
Most of them will wear attire more typical of women, and many seem to be driven by a deep-seated sexual desire of themselves as a woman. So while it was put rather crassly, I don't see how what this commenter said was particularly inaccurate.
Not all on the left share that belief, there's plenty of us gender critical leftists around, who still understand the material reality of who are the women and who are the men.
It boggles my mind how this has become the cause célèbre amongst certain other factions of the left in recent years. Particularly given how it relies on misogynistic stereotypes and is effectively erasing homosexuality.
Discussions of "wokeism" should keep in mind that one of the most visible cases of being "canceled" is Colin Kaepernick, and you'd hardly call those blackballing him "woke." Meanwhile other less-accomplished QBs still bounce around from at least backup job to backup job...
But beyond that... people have been getting blackballed forever in this country.
So it's very important in this discussion to make it clear if you're complaining about just:
a) people facing repercussions for saying 'conservative' things
or
b) people facing repercussions for other things as well
or even just something like
c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter
> c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter
Ding ding ding! This is the fundamental problem. We collectively seem to care entirely too much about the fringe people who bother to vent their minds on Twitter.
A lot of influence with no responsibility, that is the hellish combination. If the Twitter mob drives somebody to suicide, no one is going to punish them.
Power without responsibility is a wild combination, very unstable.
I think we have to resolve that a real person (or at least a discrete identifiable group) has the actual power, and the responsibility lies squarely with them. That may require them to take heat directly rather than fire some random employee the Internet has decided to hate, but I don't think they get to deflect responsibility for taking the easy out.
That doesn't necessarily address the suicide part, except to observe coldly that the person directly responsible for the suicide is the only one who can stop it, unfortunately. So they have to figure out how to stop the assault from reaching them.
I don't have any particularly good answers, this is a fairly hard problem to solve. Probably some combination of things, up to and including involving law enforcement and giving them the tools to identify people and hold them accountable (as much as we'd like the Internet to be an anonymous place, that may be a pipe dream). Of course, what constitutes breaking the law? If someone on the playground taunts you, they're not breaking the law, and the risk to you is pretty low. But if a million people on the Internet taunt you, this is a different thing.
I don't think Kaepernick is really relevant here because he didn't piss off most people, he pissed off 32 mostly white billionaires in their 70s and 80s. IE, it's less that he got "cancelled" by society in general but rather he got cancelled by an insular cabal. That culture really doesn't reflect the culture of society as a whole.
They are little different from millions of others, aside from their excessive power. Wokeism enforcement (as distinguished from being woke, itself) could even be interpreted as a defense against their hegemony.
The Iraq War minted hundreds of them, mostly in Dick Cheney's camp. We will be living with that legacy for generations.
Mostly yes. Buying a professional sports franchise is rarely a true business decision; it's a chance for these people to be the king of their own kingdom. It's a vanity project. These owners go against the wishes of fan bases and media all the time
If he had been winning football games, he’d still be playing football. Witness the legions of other non-cancelled football players who’ve done way worse (but still win).
Colt McCoy is older and still has a backup job. Lots of other crappy QBs bouncing around for years too... If not for the right-wing shitshow, someone would've taken a flyer in the last five years on a QB who once led a team to a superbowl appearance.
We also, if we want to say it's just about results, can look at Dave Chappelle, who falls on the opposite side of the "woke or not-woke" line but remains famously un-canceled despite that. So I could see someone reaching the conclusion of "the lines of 'what you can't say' aren't as strong as they're made out to be on either side, if you can bring in the money" OR the conclusion that it's not a one-sided "wokeism" thing... but "this is purely a woke thing and it's a huge problem" seems unsupportable.
Right, like, teams are still courting Deshaun Watson who is, if the accusations are true, a pretty awful person. Because Deshaun won games. I think the ostracism of Kaepernick was super unfair and ugly, but I also think he was playing himself into being a career backup.
Kaepernick’s career was going downhill before he started protesting. He was already the backup by then and frankly already had a reputation as an egotistical jackass. If you want to be an egotistical jackass in the NFL, it’s possible, but it will limit your career options even if you have the talent to back them up, which Kaep didn’t at the end. He’s also went on to sabotage his own comeback opportunities at least once. Probably the best comparison I could make is Kyrie Irving, and the only reason Kyrie isn’t out of the league is the NBA CBA.
It certainly did. Although, it seems like the opposition to it is in full swing.
Wokeness (as portrayed in popular culture) hit its peak during the George Floyd protests and subsequent publishing of the Harpers letter. Since then, an entire ecosystem has risen in opposition to ideas of wokeness.
Alas, the reaction to this opposition has not been to find a new consensus. Rather, communities have sharded and further polarized. Now, fervent ingroup loyalty is mandatory while the difference between each ingroup keeps expanding.
This is especially noticeable in the most radical communities on the left and the right. From draconian Trans-bans to radical no-questions asked trans-acceptance, these communities have started dealing in absolutes. The more nuanced anti-woke have coalesced around Substack and honestly make good money. But, they rely on word of mouth to reach their readers. The other side of the anti-woke use viral video and aggressive youtube algorithms to reach their viewer base. However, the nature of these algorithms means that strong emotion is promoted over nuance and reason. Finally, there are celebrity faces like Rowling, Chapelle and Rogan, who can't really be deplatformed and serve as lightning rods for criticism, while smaller voices get the necessary protection to build out their platform.
The sad part of this, is that you can't be apolitical anymore. There are only 3 acceptable positions. 1. Strong support and be embraced, 2. strong opposition and lose your friends but gain new anti-woke friends and lastly 3.stay silent while nodding to those in strong support.
Now, if your profession is one is wholly in-group for the woke, then you will be in a difficult situation. Academia, print journalism and legacy media practically force you to be #1 or #3. If you are in a more technical field like tech, it doesn't really affect your life. But, if you choose to interface with social-sciencey aspects of big-tech such as ResponsibleAI, DEI or hiring, then you will also be forced into #1 or #3.
Also, Trump's visibility in media has been reduced.
I believe that Trumpesque utterances were driving certain demography crazy and it overcompensated by going all in into wokeness and doubling down. And while Trump was president, there wasn't a chance to escape his daily, uh, serving of wisdom, which served as an irritant that had to be scratched, scratched, scratched, scratched.
Nowadays Trump is much less prominent in the media and some people started rethinking their previous fervor.
I think the term "woke" has been hijacked by some people to refer to anything minorities do in a disparaging manner, so I would need more concrete examples of what that means.
Linguist (and heterodox thinker) John McWhorter has written about this shifting usage:
> For example, it’s only recently that he noticed the term “woke” being used beyond black Americans in just the way that “politically correct” was used before it was a pejorative. And already, he observed, it is beginning to take on the same baggage as PC once did.
Yes, because it is locked in a feedback loop with the folks who have recently decided to start saying the quiet part out loud. If people could just all around stop acting like jerks, everything would be much quieter. But nobody thinks they are the jerk.
Maybe it's not so much an indication that reality has gone too far so much as it is that we aren't all equally aligned with reality.
You say that you are a little afraid to speak up but realistically you are being deliberately dramatic. Shall we start a campaign to get you booted from your job tomorrow because you are being dramatic? It's not a crime nor a reason for outrage. You face at worst a down vote
People get in trouble for decade old social media posts all the time. There's a lot of weird vindictive people that will go through ten years of twitter posts to be like "gotcha". The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing.
Social mores actually move relatively slowly. In 1950 it was OK to be bigoted say towards gay men. In 2022 it is not. In 2022 people may be bitten for something they said in 2012 but it wasn't because such bigotry suddenly became unacceptable in 2013.
The vanguard of decency and tolerance had begun advancing in the 60s and was well under way in the 70s. Forty years later they had failed to apprehend the indefensible nature of their position which for most of the roadkill on the road to reason had been underway for their entire lives.
> The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing.
One could also try not being 40 years behind moving social mores in a way that currently makes your children embarrassed to be seen with you and will in 10 years be seen as indefensibly bigoted or hateful because if its going to get you fired in 10 years its probably already pretty bad you just didn't notice.
I agree with them on most issues. I appreciate them raising and theorizing about their more fringe issues. What I don't appreciate are their tactics and aggressive enforcement.
'wkeism' as a tool reminds me about authoritarian states introducing laws that are impossible not to break by design and then applying them selectively to obliterate any dissent.
I don't think "wokeism" has gone too far, I think accusations of it have. There are plenty of high profile sex offenders and homophobic/transphobic celebrities who continue to get work.
Instead what I see is misrepresentation of what "wokeness" is; I often hear conservatives say they're "not allowed" to discuss race/sexuality/etc., when in actuality what has happened is most of American has just moved on from finding homophobia and racism entertaining.
I think your post encapsulates what irks a lot of people about the "woke". There's no room for nuance or analysis, just a lot of overdramatized labels (nazi? really? you are aware of what the real nazis did right? stop cheapening history just to increase the temperature of the debate)
Huh? Clearly this entire topic is a meta-topic. I have no particular axe to grind at the moment.
> Maybe just talk about something specific instead of just some broad “woke has gone to far”.
Well, I'm not the one regularly calling anyone I disagree with a Nazi Sympathizer. I'm not sure I've ever needed to, because the actual nazi sympathizers tend to be pretty explicit and proud of their views, and easy to avoid. People are free to lob that around labels like that if they want, but it's going to result in me not taking them seriously. To me, when I hear someone being called a "nazi sympathizer" I just assume that means "I really dislike that person"; which is very unfortunate in a boy-who-cried-wolf sense because I absolutely would like to know who the true nazi sympathizers are.
>"Wokeness has gone too far, but I don't really have any concrete examples, I just guess it has somehow haha"
I mean you have to have something to make such a claim in your op. As for Trump, yes maybe they are not precisely but lets be honest
- Using fascist political tactics
- Said explicitly "Hitler did a lot of good things", doesn't seem a great move to have on the record unless its just to appeal to more radical people.
- Hired officials with ties to white nationalist groups.
- Empathised with neo Nazis in Charlottesville, eg Proud Boys.
- Endorses violence on external/opposition groups.
So come on, while themselves are not technically a fascist he definitely responsible for eroding democracy and liberalism. They are a right wing populist. I think it's fair to say sympathiser considering all of this. I feel they deliberately make it murky, more like leaving the door open to more radical people, while still being palatable for the less radicalised. A pretty serious and dangerous situation. Far more than some perceived "woke-ism".
I'm amused you "quoted" me for something I didn't say. If there is a specific thing I hate about the "woke" it's that they're dishonest.
I have no love for Trump, but if you want to be all political Obama kept all the worst policies of the Bush presidency (especially the wall street stuff). Worse, he escalated the drone strikes. IE, murdering people. Trump strikes me as run of the mill bad, so when I hear histrionics I generally assume its from someone that has no context of history. Your argument style is to put words into other peoples mouths. Stop fighting straw men.
Hey do you want an example of where wokeness has gone too far? Fallon Fox. They legalized a man beating the shit out of women because he identified as a woman. In my view, that's too far. Unless you want to put words in my mouth again, none of my world view celebrates a man beating up women. So congrats, theres a specific thing.
Would current white supremacists be for or against being conflated with Nazis of times past? Don't they still do the whole swastika thing, even? Do they reject the label? And if so, is that only because of the baggage that comes with it?
> The government of Texas seems to hate trans people.
They banned sex changes for minors. That’s not “hating trans people”, that’s just a policy you disagree with when it comes to defining the degree to which a minor is legally capable of consenting to an adult irreversibly altering their body.
The Texas law is based on a theory of there being a fundamental right to procreate, which is harmed by the sterilization effect of many gender-related procedures. If you could come up with a theory of harm for braces, you could make a case for banning them too. But I doubt it would be as grave a harm as removing sexual function.
A subset of people have discovered they can harm other people by exercising "wokeism". They should not be confused with people who work to be woke. There are very strong differences among the latter over Bernie, or almost any other political axis.
>the last American president was a right wing racist Nazi
If you go and ask the actual Nazis (or NatSocs as they prefer) they'll tell you they don't like him because he was not a right wing racist Nazi. CivNat maybe (but if he really is he toned it done a lot to pander to minorities) certainly not a Nazi.
You will die and be forgotten. Everything you do will be erased by entropy. Billions and billions of years, endless collisions and mutations, a cooling down of the universe until time itself stops.
Human beings are very sensitive because we all live on top of a foundation of delusions which protects us from the life-invalidating truth.
I've come to believe that every single person is insane. When you look into minds and see a humanity dripping with delusions spun up by life seeking a way to avoid confronting its futility...you can't help but feel this way.
I was only able to see it after I had a near death experience. Those who have never gone beyond the threshold won't ever get it until the very end.
May I offer one proposition? Sanity and insanity (as with morality) are meaningless propositions outside of social interaction. So there is no sanity or insanity in the nature of the universe except in this regard. It is merely the evolution-bequeathed state of human consciousness as a survival machine.
I'm using insanity as a description of a delusional state of mind, i.e., a mind that is constantly playing make believe. "I'm a free person...I'm a good person...What I'm doing is important...etc."
Strictly speaking, you're correct. If a mad man talks to coconuts on an island, and no one is around to observe him, is he really mad?
However, we are a part of nature and social contexts will be with us as long as we survive. I think the separation between us and the universe is artificial. We are the universe. What else would we be?
But what I think I'm trying to get at is that utterances such as "I'm a free person...I'm a good person...What I'm doing is important...etc." can be truth statements within the context of their respective systems. 'I am free, a good person, important' etc are meaningless outside of this context, of course.
I'm thinking the disconnect here is with being.
As an example, let me reference a king. What is a king? A son of king? That's one way. Appointed by a constitution? That's another. But is there an inherent 'kingship' outside of such definitions? Heredity is a property of the idea, not of kingship. So we can have a king but never a king which is a king. But regardless he can order my head cut off. In terms of a king as we define a king is the son of a king, then it is a truth claim to state that Arthur is a king. A social construct, a fantasy, is not precluded from instantiating something with 'power' in the world.
In a way, I think experience by definition is to 'play make believe'. Our experience by definition is always going to be at least one step removed. We do not perceive the world; we perceive constructs derived from sensory data.
Why I state insanity/sanity is meaningless in terms of being is that I don't see such as being applicable. As an example of what some might call insanity let us take: believing something is present which in fact is not there. Such is defined as irrational. It is contrary to the senses, as there is no sensory input to indicate such. However, if a hominid cognizes a lion in a bush, aka paranoia, and runs, there are generally two possibilities: 1) fruitless expenditure of energy decreases the individual chance of survival or 2) believing a predator near which cannot be perceived provides instances of escape where reliance on purely sensory data would have proved inadequate. Here what can be termed insanity has a chance of informing mental models of reality in ways that sensory data is too limited to do so. In this way, it can often enough better represent 'reality' in terms of survival.
Even our man with the coconut could derive a survival advantage from these activities, in the sense that social creatures generally require socialization or risk cognitive decline, therefore impairing their chances of survival.
(Survival is, of course, a short-term proposition which we extend implicitly into eternity, in one fashion or another, but evolution is a moment-to-moment phenomena.)
Anyway, I'm by no means trying to argue with you. I'm more musing than anything.
Quite right, the ghost of Wittgenstein. These utterances are moves in language games. A pawn is a nonsensical entity within the game of checkers. However, that doesn't mean a pawn is "meaningless." It was a being constructed for a particular purpose within the game of chess. It is an illusion that the game of chess and the pawn object(being) are separable. Chess cannot exist without pawns and a pawn cannot exist without chess. The operation of plucking a pawn out of the game of chess is an invalid operation. Thus, we cannot even speak of pawns outside of chess--we must remain silent.
In other words, you can't even say my utterances are meaningless "outside" the system in which they were constructed because they cannot exist outside the system. A pawn in a game of checkers is not a pawn. A pawn in your pocket may resemble a pawn, but it does not function like a pawn because it is not in a game of chess...thus it is not a pawn because it cannot do as a pawn does.
I appreciate your philosophy, but from my standpoint, it is unnecessarily muddying the waters.
Some people believe they are living for things that are objectively false. Just imagine a grocery clerk who believes he will someday become the king of France--in 2022, which makes Descartes original comment about this seem even more absurd.
Every day he does his mundane job with unparalleled enthusiasm. He is awarded employee of the month every single month.
One day, an ambitious coworker asks him how he is able to do his boring job with such high energy--what's his secret?
"I am just biding my time until I become the king of France," the madman replies. "I'm not a grocery clerk...I'm a future king! Every bag I fill with groceries is but one step further towards my glorious coronation."
And so it is with all who think they are going somewhere spectacular with their lives. The bleak march to the grave is enchanted by dreams of an end that cannot be.
My "utterances" are not philosophical, but descriptions of what I observe to be happening around and within me. If you want to understand what I mean, you gotta play my game.
I like your comment about the coconut man. Yes, it's true that delusions can have a survival advantage. In fact, I would argue that delusions are not errors, but survival adaptations. Sometimes we just don't know what people are trying to keep alive. I know people who try to keep alive an idea of themselves in spite of their own physical body.
A terrible thought indeed, one which you can never escape after seeing it.
However, unless you want to live in misery, the delusions are all you have to enjoy the ride, what little time there is. But the thought always returns.
This sentence carries a lot of weight and I don't think it's terribly truthful, or at best, speculative.
Galileo wasn't in trouble with the church because "it would get people thinking". He was in trouble because he was directly opposing the power and teachings of the church. Whether people would "think" about it I don't feel is terribly relevant, let alone something you can definitively say. Do we really know that the church was worried people would "think for themselves", or just that.
This implication is that the church knew Galileo was right. It also implies that these "things you can't say" are universally good and beneficial to society. With falsehoods neatly hand-waved away by conflating them with "people in Pittsburgh are 10 feet tall". Well, people believe the earth is flat, vaccines cause 5G, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and a whole host of other things that are harmful to society in varying degrees.
Being shunned for your ideas isn't evidence that you are Galileo leading the world into a bright new future. More likely you are, at best, the eccentric who should be ignored and your idea is that people in Pittsburgh are 11 feet tall.
Even this isn't correct. The only thing the Church told Galileo was that he couldn't state his hypothesis as fact. And this was correct; the science/technology to prove the hypothesis was not yet extant. (We tend to misapply our own hindsight here.)
Good remark. Many people believe that Galileo was burned but it’s simply not true (I don’t even know where it comes from).
IIRC the most serious punishment he got was a home-arrest which he got after being rude to pope (which he was after he was forbidden to state his hypothesis as fact).
Also as a side note: Galileo didn’t form a hypothesis good enough as it predicted planets’ movements poorly. It was Kepler who formed much more accurate model and it got accepted by the Church.
There are also some other misbelieves about the Church like that they forbidden spreading the theory of evolution (while in fact they forbade priests to criticize it openly).
Is it fair to judge a historical figure for owning slaves in the 1600s? No. The ethical quandries of racism and the Abolitionist movement didn't start in earnest until the late 18th century.
Is it fair to judge American historical figures for owning slaves at a time when half of the country had already made it illegal? YES. You're now judging that person by the standards of their time. See also, Christopher Columbus.
Let's fast forward 200 years.
Is it fair to judge someone for being racist if they've grown up in the deep south, and are a product of the Jim Crow era, and were surrounded by propaganda about how the Civil War was not fought over slavery, and so forth? No.
Is it fair to judge the same person who goes to university, reads about the decades of systemic discrimination that endured even after ostensibly the Civil Rights Act passed, and whose reaction to "Black Lives Matter" is "No, All Lives Matter" based on an uncharitable superficial reading of the message? Yes.
The question isn't about whether you hold some opinions today that are considered "not woke". The question is whether you are holding the line for progress too low: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiSiHRNQlQo
A Mexican driver was fired for stretching his fingers when driving. Somebody thought he was making a white supremacy sign and started the classical social media shitstorm.
For a blue collar immigrant worker, losing their job overnight might be pretty serious. They usually have fewer savings to rely on.
You're right it is hard to beat that. And mostly everyone can see it is absurd. It is also probably absurd to extrapolate this event to a representation of an entire culture or political affiliation. I would challenge you to ask ten liberal people you know what they think of this.
Does it matter what they think? Actions matter more than thoughts. Even the person responsible for this hasn't done anything to stop or reverse the decision.
> NBC 7 spoke to the man who originally posted the picture on Twitter. He has since deleted his account and said he may have gotten "spun up" about the interaction and misinterpreted it. He says he never intended for Cafferty to lose his job.
Is one to come to mind. Students and other teachers are deprived of a lecture because a small vocal minority of students are upset that in an unrelated interview, the professor expressed a fairly mainstream view of preferring "equality" over "equity".
Only a few years ago it was still acceptable, even in very trans-friendly places, for cis people to have a generalized preference for dating / having sex with cis people. Now the position has shifted and it’s much more likely than before to be considered transphobic. The acceptable thing is to consider each person on an individual basis without regard to whether they are trans. Granted, the only consequence so far seems to be being labeled transphobic, but that itself can have worse consequences if people believe you’re worthy of the label.
I suppose jk rowling and her views about women's rights and how trans-rights are clashing into them? The consequences are that have been many attempts to cancel her (some successful).
I told a close, longtime friend(A) that a mutual friend(B) was not an avowed, violent white supremacist. Friend A ended our relationship and told me I am a white supremacist. Friend A has also expressed a willingness to commit acts of direct violence against white supremacy.
Over the years many people pointed to "Real Time with Bill Maher - Ben Affleck, Sam Harris and Bill Maher Debate Radical Islam" as the start of public toxic woke-ism.
I suggest watching it if you have not seen it (10min long) but it basically boils down to that if you disagree with someone you can call it racists instead of formulating an argument. There is ofc no evidence that anyone on that show on that day is actually a racists but somehow people just accepted that it was valid to say anyway.
The consequences is that people said it more and more and other similar terms whenever it somehow fit.
An opinion if it can be made to look like it affects a specific group of people is attacked as being against these people. It basically made a subset of he most pathetic and weak ad hominem fallacies acceptable and thus broke the way people had public discourse.
Useful reading on the twists and turns of gay marriage policy in the US.[1] People have been fired for being a few years out of step with the timeline.
The U.S. State Department has classes for returning overseas staff to get them up to speed on changes in the US since they left.[2] This is said to be especially hard for teens.
Paul Graham has a sophomoric understanding of art and philosophy, at best.
As with people such as Elon Musk, he attempts to leverage success in one narrowly defined area into an authority over vast domains of human knowledge.
When I was fifteen, I thought his essays were profound. When I was fifteen, I thought many things were profound. It has been many decades since I was fifteen.
While that may or may not be true, you haven't actually offered any sort of refutation or insight into the topic at hand. While I'm not 15, who should I find more credible, the guy making a dispassionate general argument that makes sense, or the old hipster being like "whatever pg is laaaammme"?
(Also how is what you're saying unsayable? People say this on practically every PG essay here. It's very obviously quite sayable)
Isn't that always the case? Someone says 'you can't say X anymore', which by definition means saying X.
Nothing here concerns 'that which can't be said'. If something truly can't be said, it's utterance is physically impossible, therefore being concerned about suppressing such or such being suppressed is a moot point. We are discussing things that can very much me stated, but which carry consequences of a certain nature.
Passion and dispassion are indicative of neither factualness, nor truthfulness, nor sensibility. This is a matter of form. A call for the death of a minority can be delivered with utter dispassion and pure reason and a plea for such a minority's salvation from such can be delivered with utter passion and vice versa.
'Making sense' depends on assuming my knowledge to be the horizon of that which is knowable. Something might not make sense, but it might not make sense because I lack some knowledge. (Is it a language I do not understand, or is it gibberish?) However, such might also make no sense because it never 'had sense to begin with' (a concept which could be considered dubious, but which I will go with for the moment). I, in this scenario, however, lack the knowledge to know that by definition. So does such not make sense because of a property inherent in its being, or does it not make sense because of my ignorance? While all that I can do is 'make sense' of things through my understanding, if I allow myself to conceptualize, or act on the assumption of such a conceptualization, that my knowledge is a totality of knowledge, I potentially commit an error which endangers me. (Though, conversely, there are those who would argue that anything less than absolute surety in oneself will lead to hesitation and destruction.) Secondly, this assumes that what 'makes sense' does so because of its inherent truthfulness. However, a sensible statement and a truth statement do not necessarily have to be synonymous. It would make sense, for example, why someone should not be allowed to insult God's representative on Earth. Sensibility always necessarily carries from certain assumptions which eventually cannot be evidenced.
I would even be tempted to say that the gamut of credibility is, besides possibly being wide bordering on infinity, probably shaped like a Klein bottle.
> old hipster
Well, that's not such a nice thing to say to someone as they're coming up on a birthday.
That's a lot of words that don't answer the specific question of what you actually disagree with. (For what it's worth though happy birthday! I just turned 37 so im well aware of the fun of being a cranky old person :))
HN discussions have too short of a half-life, and I'm too lazy to type that much (and, yes, that is taking into account that my posts already tend to be verbose.)
And to be overly generous to myself, you never actually asked for that information, just stated that I failed to provide such. Your actual questions, I did answer to a minimal degree.
As for anything else, I'll be productively lazy and possibly appropriate the results of the labor of someone else when it becomes available.
At this point, I think it more resembles lying to children about Santa Claus. I don't understand why people do it.
I feel no need for subsequent generations to recapitulate my mistakes. I may have learned something the hard way, but I have little interest in encouraging or participating in what amounts to a de facto practice of 'cogitational embryological parallelism'.
Consider this: [almost] all popular (found by/landed from google) questions on StackOverflow are simple/easy for experts in corresponding topics. There are two camps: one think that it makes StackOverflow useless, another—the exact opposite (SO is an immense time-saver). People can solve problems even if they are not experts on the topic (you can't be an expert in many areas at once).
"I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era."
A recipe for this era would simply be to list banned posts on Twitter. Which we can't peruse because they are banned, proving the essay's point. You can't say what you can't say, but you can speculate on recipes for discovery.
It would be a valuable public service for someone to collect banned utterances and publish them to provide assistance to those of us who can't read the room any better than Sanskrit, so that we can avoid non-obvious heresies. But then they'd have to publish things that can't be said.
That would be simple if twitter was the only forum. There's things that can't be said on Parler and Gab, too: stuff that was a minority (soft-censored) opinion 10-20 years ago, stuff that's still illegal to say in authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, but approaches plurality in certain Western contexts.
Do non-obvious heresies really get people banned/canceled? I can’t remember any examples of when I’ve seen something banned and didn’t think “that was uncalled-for and they definitely had it coming.” But I’m happy to be disproven. Does anyone have counter-examples? Situations where people got banned for truly innocuous things?
Person-A was in an online forum I was part of. Person-A said to Person-B, who was getting emotional in a discussion, to not act emotional, as it was a factual discussion.
Person-B accused Person-A of being insensitive to women, as it turns out Person-B was female.
Person-A did not know Person-B was female, as Person-A didn't use forum avatars, and the name Person-B used wasn't an obvious female name in Person-A's culture. In other words, Person-A could prove not knowing the gender of Person-B.
This was not sufficient, and Person-A was banned from the forum.
Ironically, Person-B was one of those loud "women and men are as competent as each other" sorts, which leads one to wonder why she needed special handling.
The icing on the cake: Person-C defended Person-A, knowing that the gender of Person-B was not known at the time of the comment. Person-C was banned from the forum.
The forum, by the way, was a professional forum of one of the largest tech companies. Everyone here would know the name of the company, and being banned from this forum essentially was a light way of getting onto a blacklist of several other tech companies. This actually eventually led to Person-C quitting technology entirely a year or two later.
Browsing banned posts on Twitter wouldn't be effective at all. Twitter openly and freely allows content that most of us would find abhorrent (racism, nazism, violent threats) and regularly ban content that is misleading and dumb and dangerous but not offensive at all (covid is fake, vaccines are more dangerous than the disease, etc)
Has the observation that moral fashions are invisible held up well? I feel like a preponderance of my Twitter feed is commentary on moral fashions — wokeness, the drive towards cancellation and deplatforming, the pernicious effects of Trumpism on our norms of discourse — or responses to that commentary.
Of course you could just push it back a level and say that the fashions underpinning that commentary are invisible. But that feels a little bit like Sagan’s “ there’s a dragon in my garage” parable: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Dragon_in_My_Garage
I think the idea is that they're invisible in the sense that nobody announces them to the general public. Moral challenges to the status quo used to be communicated explicitly by heads of reform movements or revolutionary struggles. You had anti-slavery leaders, anti-Satanist leaders, feminist leaders, AIDS epidemic leaders and so on. Now the moral changes are spread online memetically and are implicitly adopted by people along the tried-and-true liberal-vs-conservative lines (usually with a minimal level of understanding), and then power structures start to implement them as rules to look good to what they perceive is their important audience.
"A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. ...
And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say?"
The reason for all their regulations are likely, that they live very crowded. The closer people live together - the more rules they come up after a while, to keep things somewhat stable.
Otherwise there are of course plenty of things you cannot say in holland, if you don't want people to be shocked.
Thanks for sharing. I love PG’s authenticity. His thoughtfulness is inspiring.
In this piece there are a few items that jump out as glaring oversights and they speak to how brittle the entire structure of the argument is.
First, his conclusion is “if you think you shouldn’t say something, don’t.”
Pragmatic advice, but it essentially means that this piece is not an argument against self-censorship.
His solve of “have a few friends to share verboten thoughts with” is already how closed door social systems work. In-group signaling with taboo beliefs is a core feature of tribalism. Coupled with historic wealth/power inequality it is a de facto abdication of how the social bubble we create around ourselves enables us to imagine we are doing what is best for all when we have no idea (nor curiosity) about what other people’s actual experience is. That’s why we need DEI first principals.
I find it interesting that he references two domains in a hypothetical sense that are very, very different in experience.
First, parenting. He wasn’t a parent when he wrote this. Imagining we need to see children as innocent seems like a reasonable explanation. But in my experience the issue with cussing is that when you become a parent a protective instinct kicks in - you don’t want the social group to punish your child in your absence & you worry about collective ostracism if the group concludes you are a “bad parent.” It’s warranted. I’ve experienced it and it is brutal.
Second is fashion. Fashion is only invisible to those who don’t care about it. For those who do, it is an art form. There is a vast difference between “the fashion of the day” and the function/philosophy of fashion. In this respect he both misses and catches the point - fashion is architected by active participants and consumed by passive ones. “Moral fashion” captures the “issue of the day” of the IYKYK crowd that runs corporate/tech communities. It’s signaling, little more. He’s spot on in calling out that no issue that everyone talks about deserves to be regarded as “the issue” on its own merits. But he misses the point that fashion is amazing and an incredible expression of the human experience. I don’t get the sense he personally cares much about fashion.
The subtext to all of this is that there has been a powerful, violent set of social groups deciding who was allowed to be treated as a person and who was not.
Where we are today as a society has been deeply shaped by that.
Some of the people in those exiled groups are co-opting shame & blame. I think his point is that doing so only creates a new power structure that repeats old patterns, it doesn’t solve for something better.
So we are back to his first conclusion - which is you either actively or passively participate, but you don’t argue with it.
I think there’s another choice:
I will not shame anyone, for any reason.
Shame is the tool we keep reaching for & its cost is clear - we lose connection with our own humanity & each other’s.
That’s what I see as the new choice we can make for ourselves - letting go of the assumption that we can anticipate how our actions and words affect others, being open to learning, and taking responsibility for ourselves.
For me that has meant a studious avoidance of participating in media culture.
It is possible to contribute to making society a more inclusive and supportive experience w/out chasing the latest outrage fad. In fact, it might only be possible if we let go of “allyship” - which no one seems to want - and instead:
* make space for others to share their feelings
* let go of blame (of ourselves or others)
* support the voice of those with first-hand experience
A really cool new TV show that explores all of this is “Work in Progress.” Alongside “Schitt’s Creek” it’s really profound how friendly it can be to embrace a variety of identities in society without making ourselves or others wrong.
His problem in 2004 (the year the United States launched an attack on a foreign country): people disagree with him and that makes him uncomfortable.
The idea that all humans don't self-censor by default in front of all sorts of people is pretty myopic.