[randomstudent]

This attitude is naïve to the extreme... You're surely aware that prolonged suppression of certain ideas can and often does decrease the prevalence of such ideas in the population? And that such suppression might even make certain people change their minds?

I'm not arguing that this is the right strategy, only that it is often extremely effective.

[justadeveloper2]

There's nothing naive about it--what is naive is assuming there is some entity out there with the godlike power to determine what speech is good and what is bad. It's either all on the table or none of it is. What we can't do is succumb to the lowest elements of society and that includes not only bigots, but reverse-racists (@see: South Africa), and this idea that low-information/low-intelligence people are somehow intellectually equivalent and all deserve the same respect. I don't mean to sound elitist, but come on--we had a mob destroy a statue of Lincoln in Chicago because apparently all statues are bad now?

The point is, there's some really dumb stuff going on and it's time to take back intellectualism from the ideologues and demand and end to the childish behavior and that might as well start with the baseless mistreatment of the Trump family as well as the baseless mistreatment of all conservatives, moderates, and other non-far-left, non-progressives.

[Icedcool]

I present the Streisand effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

That prolonged suppression only works specific environments where control is total.

The USA is not that, and censorship attempts often provide further platform for the information.

[randomstudent]

Hm... Interesting :) Is there any research about this? It does seem likely, but I can certainly imagine a world in which most attempts at suppression work and we celebrate the cases where it doesn't because it's ironic. Is there any evidence that the effect is not just a case of survivorship bias?

[Sacho]

I only have a cursory knowledge of history, so I'm not aware of this. All the cases I can think of where a certain set of ideas were suppressed usually ended up in failure, e.g. Christianity, Protestantism, various heresies, civil rights movements like Gandhi and MLK...

[randomstudent]

Counter-examples: Nazism (I guess you might argue that after being suppressed it's making a comeback, but that's tenuous at best), dozens of Christian heretic faiths you've never heard about, the genocide of the Native Americans (where's their culture now?), the pre-colombian civilizations of South and Central America, the Roman Empire, Egyptian monotheism under Akhnaten...

Keep in mind that listing the ideas and ways of life that were suppressed and utimately survived is a textbook case of survivorship bias: you remember the ones who survived, and forget the ones that didn't. Some of them no one knows about because they left no records.

EDIT: the dangerous sentence here is: "All the cases I can think of". Those are not an unbiased sample of the real world cases.

[Sacho]

> Nazism

Nazism has only been suppressed in Germany as far as I know(how effective has it been?). Was it ever suppressed in the US? One of the crowning moments of the ACLU's support for civil rights was to stand up for a Nazi march - it's hard to call that suppressed. Can you compare Germany to the US and see whether suppressing and not suppressing Nazism has had a significant effect? Or perhaps there is a roiling Nazi sentiment in each country, which isn't affected in a significant way by suppression? I am honestly not sure.

> dozens of Christian heretic faiths you've never heard about

These were usually expelled from the country or genocided

> the genocide of the Native Americans (where's their culture now?)

genocide

> the pre-colombian civilizations of South and Central America

genocide?

> the Roman Empire

Not really suppressed

I think I'm seeing a pattern, and it's one of the things that frustrates me in this discussion. People talk about suppressing Nazis, but they claim they are interested in just suppressing speech(which has plenty of negative effects already!). The rationalization to ignore those negative effects is what you proposed - Nazis are so dangerous that eradicating them will be a net good. However, all the examples of successful suppression you're giving me are genocide, or at least go way way beyond mere speech restriction - in all of them the people who had the suppressed ideas were hunted down and killed.

Is just suppression of speech actually effective? If I agree to it, swallowing all my concerns about the negative effects, and it fails to work, will we be looking towards more suppression, with a possible end-game of hunting down and killing the Nazis?

[randomstudent]

> Nazism has only been suppressed in Germany

Yes, I thought it was obvious from the context. The original version of Nazism was suppressed by invading their country, killing 7 million people in the process, hunting their leaders, etc.

> the Roman Empire

Hm... They were conquered by foreigners, and the empire desintegrated, but it's debatable whether the real change in culture was internal or not. You're right and it doesn't fit here.

> Is just suppression of speech actually effective?

This is a different question then... You're asking if suppression of speech with tactics you deem acceptable is actually effective. I don't know.

I do know that killing people who hold certain ideas is often effective, and that was the point I was trying to make. Merely putting people in jail for violating the free speech laws might not be enough (I don't think just imprisoning dissidents without the threat of capital punishement or outright genocide has ever been tried at scale).

So maybe we don't disagree as much and we were actually arguing for different views, right?