There are also arguments for avoiding the breakdown of communication by expressly favoring the most strongly censored and unfashionable ideas at any given time and striving to platform them everywhere, even irrespective of their actual merits. This is what Herbert Marcuse calls for in his Repressive Tolerance. The point there is not to defend society against anything inherently problematic, but merely to push the very notion and social norm of a "managed", fad-driven discourse to its breaking point. It's a "chaos monkey" approach to the whole problem of communication 'filter bubbles' and 'echo chambers', or pretty much the trollish 4chan model under a different name.

Most of the people getting caught up in all this banning aren't rabid racist or misogynist or whatever ism or ist they are being smeared with. They are non hateful individuals who don't fall in line with the "current thing" and have a non-approved view point. The woke crowd somehow has been given a monopoly on who has a voice in the modern era. Is someone a "transphobe" and intolerant of trans people because they think the definition of a woman is the same as sex? This isn't intolerance this is a disagreement on the nature of reality.

I accept the right of others to say things I find absolutely abhorrent because I recognize that I sometimes say things I believe to be perfectly rational and someone else finds intolerable.

Fighting disagreeable speech with more free speech is harder than just banning it, but generations that follow will be better off for it.

Just seeing the Russia v Ukraine conflict and seeing how one country can enforce a narrative by law and arrest people as being sympathizers of an “intolerant” regime should be enough to make people aware that regulating verbal “intolerance” is a bad idea.

>Just seeing the Russia v Ukraine conflict and seeing how one country can enforce a narrative by law and arrest people as being sympathizers of an “intolerant” regime should be enough to make people aware that regulating verbal “intolerance” is a bad idea.

The fun bit here is understanding that there's no way to tell which country you're talking about

The irony of course being that the American political demographic, MAGA, with the biggest grievances regarding tech “censorship” also appear to be most willing to make excuses for or deny Russian war crimes.

I can go on Twitter and see a lot of examples of this and generate that impression, but then I don’t see it in real life.

What’s real? How do we know our perception of reality isn’t being distorted by algorithms and sampling bias?

The question would be a lot easier to resolve if the major MAGA thought leaders would stop making excuses for genocide. Anecdotally, my dad is MAGA-leaning right, and while he opposes the invasion and is happy to see the Russian army destroyed, his immediate response when I brought up the mass graves was “how much of that is propaganda though?”. Skepticism about what we are told about a war is always warranted, but right wing Americans are being actively persuaded right now to deny or doubt Russian war crimes despite overwhelming evidence.

What overwhelming evidence? At this point it’s allegations. The crimes haven’t actually been investigated.

They should be. But “overwhelming evidence” should be rephrased as “lots of allegations.”

Photographs corroborated by satellite and drone imagery, which is consistent with the public arguments being made by [Russian state media](https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with...) (yes I’m aware the translator has a horse in this race and no I do not read Russian myself but obviously she is not the only one who has reported on the content of what Russian state media is saying needs to be done) calling for ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I’m sure my inability to think critically has caused me to irrationally preclude the possibility that these civilians simply killed themselves.

Now also corroborated by radio intercepts: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/possible-eviden...

Ukraine has stationed soldiers in schools. Russia bombed schools for that reason.

Is Ukraine committing war crimes? I am not pro-Russia by any stretch, but the actions taken by both sides in that war aren’t so black and white.

Watching this war as a dispassionate observer, it’s a study in propaganda. Zelensky broadcasting using a green screen to make it look like he’s on the streets for instance. The famous “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo” quote. The so called Ghost pilot who supposedly shot down a bunch of Russian fighters (which didn’t happen by the way.)

There is also the stories of torture — stories being given to the media by the Ukraine government. At least some of which are unverifiable: https://www.reuters.com/world/pentagon-cant-independently-co...

Other media outlets have run stories of torture based on materials given to them by a government that has a vested interest in anti-Russian sentiment.

And still other confusion on the air strike on the materai it y hospital: https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/03/testimony-mariupol-hospit...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/02/11/ukraine-attacks-military...

So we aren’t making excuses for Russia (why would I, an American in Texas, give any fucks about Russia?) — but we are used to the media lying and lying over the past several years.

Case in point: Hunter Biden’s laptop. Whether or not it matters, the point is that a bunch of media and intelligence types told us it was “Russian disinformation.” Yet two years later WaPo and The NY Times have confirmed the authenticity of the laptop contents. Two years after they made a big point of suppressing or discrediting it.

So we’re supposed to believe those same media outlets when they are getting hand-fed by one of the participants in the Ukraine War?

A lot of people have lost the ability to think critically. Read the North Korean News Agency sometime. The language isn’t much different than how the western media frames the Ukraine War. One sided, with a strong propaganda diction.

Was the Russian invasion wrong? Possibly. But what’s the other side of the story? What’s the background? What exactly was the situation in the Russian-speaking regions of the Ukraine? Are there actual neo-Nazis in Ukraine? What’s the real story of the Azov battalion?

War is messy. Propaganda can never be trusted. And calling the other side a war criminal serves a valuable purpose. To be clear, I am not saying war crimes haven’t happened. I am saying that such claims ought to be dispassionately evaluated. Using schools to base troops and them complaining when Russia bombs a school — that seems a bit ridiculous. That’s the same tactic Hamas uses. And it works. It generates sufficient international outrage because apparently a large portion of the world lacks the ability to think critically

So no, not making excuses for Russia — but also not blindly cheerleading Ukraine. I don’t know enough about the background of that conflict to have much of an opinion. My opinion is more in line with media criticism rather than any version of the facts.

Congrats on your contrarianism. Forgive me if my simplicity and inability to think critically causes me to think less of you.

> Read the North Korean News Agency sometime. The language isn’t much different than how the western media frames the Ukraine War. One sided, with a strong propaganda diction.

May as well just go ahead and believe North Korean propaganda at this rate. Maybe the world is covering up the truth. We haven't been there so we really can't know though (honestly).

You can go and watch Putin's speeches directly. He goes from saying it's to simply protect Russians in Donbass, to saying it's actually to stop NATO's expansion (countries should be free to choose their alliances--people ally with NATO because they don't want Russia invading their country, and invading their country only makes NATO seem more necessary), to saying it's really that Ukraine is entirely controlled by Nazis and needs to be de-nazified... by sending in the nazi Wagner mercenary group to kill a country run by a Jewish president who pretended to be gay on TV, to outright denying the historical existence of the Ukrainian people or their country and that it's just supposed to be Russian territory. All these speeches were in the span of literal days and show he just gave up on trying to hide his actual reasons.

You can completely ignore all western media if you like. You can completely assume all of what Ukraine says is absolute lies. All you need to do is listen to the words directly out of Putin's mouth and it's immediately obvious that it's the most transparent bullshit to justify a land grab that there ever was.

Would you want a corporation or government to decide for you which of your neighbors you shouldn't tolerate, without letting you get to know them, or would you like to make an informed decision yourself?

No Corporation has decided anything like that. Corporations are responding to their customers requesting those users to not be tolerated. This isn't Twitter banning anyone because they want to. It's Twitter deciding that enough users have decided that tolerance has run its course. They were in response to campaigns of users to deplatform those who we consider harmful.

Corporations seem to be responding to tiny but very vocal mobs of activists. These groups don't necessarily represent the majority point of view.

Are you sure? I know a huge number of users that advocate for Users that expose bigoted views or misinformation to be de-platformed. See the recent Joe Rogan podcast push. That wasn't a tiny percentage of users.

Arguments aren't axioms. Karl Popper is not some inherent authority.

There are well known excuses.

And this in turn makes you intolerant, and I won't tolerate this.

Free speech is important and should be protected, even if k__ disagrees with what you said.

This is actually a good point, and it's important to realize that even Karl Popper acknowledged this. He explicitly argues that some limited tolerance should be extended even to the intolerant to the extent practical, since this helps promote the norm of tolerance in the first place even when intolerant ideas might otherwise appear to be prevalent. The Paradox of Tolerance is more about acknowledging that limits to tolerance must exist somewhere than an actual argument for narrowing those limits.