I imagine you disagree with the vast majority of them (blasphemy laws, lèse-majesté laws, obscenity laws, etc.)

They all thought they were the good guys, that their actions were just and improved society and the people within it. Undoubtedly many of these people were far more intelligent and better educated than you are, yet the culture they lived in blinded them to faults in their thinking.

So my question is this: what kind of obscene narcissism gives you the idea that YOU are the one who finally figured out which stuff should REALLY be banned and which shouldn't? Is "matthieuh" really the endpoint of the history of ideas? Are YOU the man who sees clearly, who transcends his culture, where others could not?

Such lack of skepticism and self-doubt can only be the result of intense, willful ignorance.

Not all people value the same things. That we can't give up freedom for security is still just an idea. How much of western culture is really better than something else and just not because we're prosperous.

Freedom of thought IS right.

This is news to me, and I grew up only a few miles from Lancaster...

Children take on ideas to which they are exposed, adults evaluate ideas before accepting them. Suppressing opposing viewpoints is therefore treating me like a child.

Somebody has to decide what is classified as disinformation. If you have the government do it then whoever the people elect as a censor may make bad decisions. (This is historically what has happened.) If instead you have independent media outlets do it then you have the same problem. Citizens may choose the outlet that publishes disinformation.

The difference is that in the absence of censorship the choice is made by the individual. If 51% of people watch Fox News and Fox News reports disinformation, 51% of people are affected by the disinformation. If 51% of people elect a censor who prohibits everything but what is reported on Fox News then 100% of people are affected, which may lead to a feedback loop in subsequent elections.

It's not that you don't have anyone whose job it is to prevent disinformation from being reported. It's that the person whose job that legitimately belongs to is called a journalist, and you get to choose the ones you like.

And it's not an "opposing viewpoint" to me, it's just completely harmful. In my opinion, things like being against gay marriage, or being racist are objectively wrong and not things that are up for debate.

I happen to strenuously disagree with communism (perhaps because I have been studying Chinese since the Cultural Revolution, and Russian even earlier, so I have read a lot of communist literature over the decades) but I would try to be respectful and hear you out if you desired to convince me that my point of view is wrong and yours is correct. Hacker News isn't exactly the place for a debate about the rights and wrongs of communism, but I think the key principle is that everything has to open for discussion in a public place where adults can join in to debate differing points of view.

What makes you think there must be a causational relationship between these two things? Or for that matter, if we assume for the moment that one did cause the other, how can you be sure which caused which? Perhaps the FN has become more and more mainstream as a result of more and more French citizens drifting towards the right.

> "And it's not an "opposing viewpoint" to me, it's just completely harmful."

I don't really understand why being an opposing viewpoint and being harmful are mutually exclusive to you. You do oppose their viewpoint (very strongly it seems), so it surely is an opposing viewpoint.

It's probably more that the growth of the FN is a result of people becoming "more and more reactionary".

Come up with something you want to maximize, that most people will agree with, like human health, and find ways to quantify it. Then you can at least start to see which policies lead to which results.

This is what is ironic with the Charlie Hebdo situation because France and left parties here don't support real freedom of speech, but they always say they do.

I think any idea should be allowed to be expressed and anything less is counter-productive in the end.

I like this Noam Chomsky quote :

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”

In a way, it is a way to protect ourselves from oppressive speech or at least to have other people adhere to the oppressive speech.

Do they? Where did the ideas come from in the first place, then, and how have they ever been rejected? I don't know enough about you personally to make any inferences in this case, but usually when a sentence like the above is spoken, it sounds like it was bowdlerized: the word "other" was clearly intended in front of the word "people."

If oppressive speech is to be suppressed--even in a post-revolutionary society--which platforms are to be policed? And with what resources? I'm reminded of John Milton's well-known metaphor, from "Areopagitica," of "that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his park gate." To use another metaphor, ideas spread by every channel. Do you suppose we could dam them all?

That being said, this in no way implies that people are fated only to have the ideas to which they've been previously exposed or can't actively search out and take on new ideas.

You could say the exposure is necessary for the idea to be held. With marketing this is, of course, true. And in other aspects of life, certainly none of us comes into the world every morning with a blank slate of a mind. But would removing every expression of an idea, remove that idea? Perhaps in a generation's time? (It can't be done, but it's an interesting question to ask, all the same.) We do know that there was a time when certain hates--homophobia, for instance, to use an example from upthread--did not exist, at least not in a human mind. Yet they're here today. Did they require public fora?

I can be exposed to an idea or an advertisement and subsequently walk away from it, having rejected its worth or its relevance to me. Without having done so, I cannot claim any agency in my thinking. Whether this kind of agency is worth protecting is another question altogether. The liberal ideas of free speech assume that it is.

This, again, in no way precludes people from activating their rational faculties and rejecting those messages. But in those cases simple repeated exposure is often enough to win them over.

Your assumption seems to be that consumers, or at least the vast majority of them, critically engage with marketing material. Psychological literature definitively doesn't bare out such an optimistic conclusion. So such an argument seems to me at the very least scantly informed, but more than likely simply an apologia for a cognitive bias that is pro-marketing and pro-classical liberal notions of human agency.

Not unpredictably I was shouted down by everyone in the room. Maybe this says something about the people I associate with. Perhaps.

If we disagree with someone why should we be offended? Wouldn't it be better to just say "I think that is a silly idea, lets move on", rather than heaping yet more attention on the opposing views.

I would possibly make an exception to my theorising above. When the marauding hordes are coming over the hill it might be time to dispense with the eye-rolling. It may be prudent to act prior to this occurring. I'm not convinced I know where we go from here.

Being offended by Abbott, while a normal response, isn't something she should have mentioned. It makes the argument personal, and derails any possible logical argument.