Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end

Re:Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end by paisawalla on Thursday September 01, 2022 @02:08PM (#32680559)

Eliminating the word fascism from discourse, and replacing it with a description of the thoughts and attitudes you find intolerable, would clarify your claims are here. It's not an invitation to argue about those views mind you, but if you had said "whoa, it's totally fine if we don't have racism, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, etc expressed anywhere in polite mainstream society" then suddenly it becomes clear

1. you expect us all to have about the same definition of those terms (yours), and

2. you expect/condone zealous policing of those boundaries, (because these are by definition intolerable and one does not lightly oppose the intolerable)

Taken together, it's pretty clear how good intentions lead to puritanically speech-constrained society. The real tolerance paradox is that even the intoler (-ant/-able) speech must be tolerated.

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Re:Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end by russdill on Thursday September 01, 2022 @03:43PM (#32681984)

Tolerated is taking on a wide range is meanings here. On one the of the spectrum, absolutely no, part of a free society is not forcing people to tolerate speech they find intolerable. If I go to a TED talk about fixing poverty and the speaker talks about his plan for eugenics and a final solution, I will walk out. In the other end of the spectrum, the government may disappear people who's speech they or the society that votes them in intolerable.

You can be anywhere along that spectrum without it being some inevitable slide towards the government disappearing people. Freedom to associate is a form of expression.

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Re:Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end by paisawalla on Thursday September 01, 2022 @11:43PM (#32686340)

Toleration here means commitment to combat the bad ideas in the sphere of debate, and not to work the refs e.g. by appealing for bans. It doesn't mean you have to listen to it, but that your strategy for opposing it is to debate against it, not prevent it from being said and heard.

[ Parent | on HN ]