This is especially what I'm sceptica about, as well as the banning of publications such as Mein Kampf.
It seems to me that the proportion of those that were first unconvinced, and then read such material and become convinced by it is negligibly small. Rather, most of the followers never actually read the publications and mostly got into it to feel part of a group as their friends were followers.
They're typically publications that were never read by either the proponents, nor the detractors who wish to ban it.
> Most of the censorship cases i can think of have been religious or conservative groups and in all those cases i thought the call for censorship was misguided. There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is Islamic terrorist propaganda and fake news.
There is very few news that is not fake — the addage of “All news is accurate, except that one article about that one field one happens to be a specialist in.” seldom fails to hit the mark.
That you need to specifically single out “Islamic terrorism”, opposed to simply keeping it about “terrorism” as a general concept also betrays a deal of specificity in your view, which is often the problem with censorship — that not all are censored æqual.
That population is every person ever born - no one was born believing in Anti-semitism or Nazism.
>> and then read such material
Wait - we're not just limited to first order effects, someone who reads may relay those ideas to another in a different form. E.g. by starting a social gathering of some sort.
>> and become convinced by it is negligibly small
The Nazi party membership reached over 8 million people.
>> There is very few news that is not fake
Poor wording on my part, i meant specifically Islamic terrorist propaganda not fake news more generally.
No one is born tob believe in anything, however one typically has opinions on matters by the time that one is capable of reading.
>Wait - we're not just limited to first order effects, someone who reads may relay those ideas to another in a different form. E.g. by starting a social gathering of some sort.
And even there I feel the reading of material in print is negligible as a proximate cause to inspire that.
>The Nazi party membership reached over 8 million people.
And most had never read Mein Kampf. They were members because their friends were — most Christians have of course also never read a Bible from cover to cover.
But the written bible needs to exist or the religion will fade out, correct? No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.
>> most Christians have of course also never read a Bible
Why differentiate between them reading and them being read to by a pastor for example? What's the difference?
Christian churches often choose to host bible classes, why would they promote use of scripture to further indoctrination if it's not effective? Why would they read to the congregation from the bible?
By name perhaps, the same ideas will always live on under a different name.
> No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.
The practices have lived on under a different name.
> Why differentiate between them reading and them being read to by a pastor for example? What's the difference?
A pastor has also never read the entire Bible to them from cover to cover; most haven't the faintest idea of what is in there.
> Christian churches often choose to host bible classes, why would they promote use of scripture to further indoctrination if it's not effective? Why would they read to the congregation from the bible?
You will find that they tend to omit the passages that are considered controversial, and that would lead to the Bible's potential banning.
No they don’t. My point was we don’t actually know what the minoans believed. If it’s not written down it’s doomed.
>> The practices have lived on under a different name
They haven’t. That was the whole point. We don’t really know what practices they followed.
>> from cover to cover
Why does a written work have to be read from cover to cover in order to convey an idea?
If essential use was made of the written work even in part, your assertion that written works are not important is nullified.
If you don't know what they believed, then how would you know whether it lived on under a different name, or not?
Despite the extinction of their civilization and our inability to translate their language, we do know quite a bit about minoan religion through the study of artifacts and the accounts of their neighbors. Contemporaneously the Homeric epics were carried on in oral tradition for hundreds of years before the greeks wrote them down. And yet despite ready access to greek mythology you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive today who believes it to be true. The absence of a text does not eliminate the idea it conveys, nor does conveying an idea lead automatically to its adoption.
No
Dr Jeremy B Rutter:
“ Since Linear A is as yet undeciphered, there is effectively no contemporary textual evidence regarding Minoan religion. Even if Linear A were deciphered, it is unlikely that much information regarding Minoan cult practices, much less Minoan religious ideology, would be forthcoming above and beyond the names of the divinities which the Minoans worshipped.”
— we know basically nothing of their religious practices except that we think they existed based on artifacts found and some reasonable hypothesis.
>> you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive today who believes it
What does belief have to do with whether an idea can be communicated or not? It’s sufficient to be able to say the idea was XXX
What does belief have to do with a religion dying out? Everything!
Without writing, the greeks could get people to carry on their religion. With writing their religion died out. Clearly the spread of ideologies is not as simple as "writing spreads it and the absence of writing kills it."
And most news isn't fake, luckily. All news is biased, true, but that doesn't mean it's fake. Which is a big difference. That the press isn't doing itself a lot of favours by being what it is today is also true.
Agreed - poor wording on my part above, i meant specifically islamic terrorist propaganda when i said fake news.
>> making it harder to access radical content is maiing id harder, but not impossible, to become radicalized
Agreed but harder is a good outcome. I'm fine with "better, but not perfect"
Since you took the extra effort to exactly specify what exactly should be censored, under your definition, would you be OK with Anders Breivik's manifesto?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
It is also the problem -- when people want to use censorship as a tool to selectively ban some bad but leave other bad alone. Who decides which bad is bad, and which bad we should conveniently ignore?
That's an incorrect assumption on your part. As i said originally:
>> There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is ...
That's all the Islamists are: a conservative religious group which believes in gun ownership and the use of violence. The difference between the people posting with gun+quran and the people posting with gun+bible is razor-thin.
You can label these materials as censorable because you, likely not a follower of islam, believe that material from islamic uploaders talking about a revolution and indoctrination do not belong on your platform.
yet here we are, with thousands of christian, america-first indoctrination videos, calling for an uprising against everything from vaccines to elections. IT IS THE SAME THING.
you do realize this is a "are we the baddies?" situation, no?
Case 1: Leaked Podesta emails and CNN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjDLcvOB1og
"It's illegal to possess these stolen documents. It's different for the media. So everything you're learning about this, you're learning from us."
Learning from us, get that?
Numerous legal scholars weighed in on that hot take, just one of the examples.
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/law-prof-smacks-down-cn...
Case 2: Washington Post calls ISIS Leader al-Baghdadi "austere religious scholar"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/washington-post-headline-abu-...
So here we are, being told by YouTube that sources calling the leader of the world's most vile and brutal organization an "austere religious scholar" and deliberately misinforming public about what they can and cannot read are called "credible and authoritative sources".
When your supposedly single reliable source of truth (the media) is so obviously and shamelessly biased, how can you not question the source of "truth" and those who suppress other viewpoints?
I'm reminded of a seemingly prescient quote from 1999's Alpha Centauri:
https://www.quotes.net/mquote/2347
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
Or the US involvement in civilian deaths in Yemen.
Your examples both got proper smack downs. My examples are still censored - you or i have never seen pictures of the conditions the kids are stored in (and if you think you have, double check its authenticity). Would be reporters for the Yemen are suppressed well before there’s any risk of them deciding to just skip mainstream media and post online instead. End result is an information vacuum and we can’t have an informed discussion because neither you nor i knows what’s actually happening.
It’s a private company platform, if you don’t like my policies go start another facebook or whatever.
Why should we faithfully assume that people will produce that material if given the chance? There are plenty of "common misconceptions" in existance. (but i note that i think your argument here is the most convincing of the replies).
Also, will they do it in a timely manner?
>> I'd like the opportunity to make that decision myself
Is it possible you're not equipped to make that decision for yourself? In the way that a 12 year old child is not best placed to decide about drinking a bottle of vodka. Or in the way that if a doctor shared every detail about your ailment - you might still seek their guidance to help decide an appropriate treatment.
Mostly the "someone is wrong on the internet" phenomena. There are a large number of people who like arguing things and debunking. They just need exposure.
> Is it possible you're not equipped to make that decision for yourself?
Well, yes.
It's also possible, qnd indeed just as likely, that we should not have allowed the common pleb to vote on the grounds that they don't have the free time or the long-term planning to make good decisions on how the country should be run.
I'd consider both hypotheses equally likely.
"It's cold outside, put a jacket on or you'll catch a cold!"
This isn't debunked yet but it's had plenty exposure over decades at this point.
Some things are just too boring to question so plenty of people continue to put on a jacket to avoid catching the cold, which does nothing, rather than washing their hands before touching their face, which could stop some spread.
Eric S Raymond's all bugs are shallow thing appealed to me but hasn't really worked that way. I think that's a similar story.
I think this premise of exposure always solving radical ideas is likely to be false but it's not without merit because exposure and illumination are such great tools in other cases that are very like this problem.
I'm sightly surprised that someone would just come out and happily admit that they've been radicalised by the internet and are comfortable being a racist.
(Annoyingly, there's so many meanings of "racist" that it can apply to anywhere from 99% to 1% of the population, depending on which of the main definitions are used)
>... HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.
I'd just note that noticing differences between races, eg black people are blacker is not racism really, it's more discriminating against races.
Scores on Raven's progressive matrices certainly correlate well with all sorts of things (working memory, income, ability to do computer programming, ability to write a popular story), so I guess it depends in how you are defining "intelligence".
If we censor fake news, I am also in favor of censoring you.
I’m ok with censoring that stuff.
Most of the censorship cases i can think of have been religious or conservative groups and in all those cases i thought the call for censorship was misguided. There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is Islamic terrorist propaganda and fake news.