[ender7]

On the contrary, silencing voices is a necessary thing. All societies have to determine what speech is allowed and what isn't. There are lots of things you can say in general American society that will get you censured. Claiming that black people are biologically inferior to white people, for example. Claiming that women are biologically inferior to men, though? Some still seem fond of that one.

This all boils down to the fact one group is trying to add a number of new entries to the list of censurable topics. It's fine to disagree with that, but then you have to state a) what topics you think shouldn't be added to the list and b). why. When people walk around loudly complaining about how they can't say anything anymore without being specific as to what they want to say, it suggests that perhaps they know that those positions are not really defensible.

[EDIT: To explain things a little more. Societies must limit some forms of speech because some speech limits who can be a member of a society. "We should murder all Asian people" is not compatible with a society that contains Asian people. And no, it is not fair to expect Asian people to have to constantly defend their humanity to others who have nothing to lose in the argument. Much as it's nice to think about abstractly entertaining every possible idea, when some of those ideas actively push out or dehumanize members, the society is forced to choose between accepting debate on the idea or excluding those members. So yes, if you want to complain about how SV society shuns people for not wanting to experiment on human embryos or whatever, go ahead. But assuming that all ideas should be up for debate is ignoring the fact that some ideas are incompatible with your fellow society members. And you get to choose between debating those ideas or having those people in your society as equals. You do have a choice, but you can't have both.]

[ThrowawayR2]

> On the contrary, silencing voices is a necessary thing. All societies have to determine what speech is allowed and what isn't. There are lots of things you can say in general American society that will get you censured.

In the 1950s, during the Red Scare, saying or doing things that showed that an indivdual was a socialist or Communist, including labor union activism, would have been enough to cost a person their job and get them ostracized from society. Quite a few were even jailed. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)

Had you been a member of the left in that era, would you have have agreed that the loss of your job / jailing was a, in your own words, "necessary thing"? Would you have agreed that leftist positions were, again in your own words, "not really defensible"?

I mean, honestly, I don't get it. Do modern liberals really think McCarthyism was a good idea that just happened to be aimed in the wrong direction?

[darawk]

> On the contrary, silencing voices is a necessary thing. All societies have to determine what speech is allowed and what isn't. There are lots of things you can say in general American society that will get you censured. Claiming that black people are biologically inferior to white people, for example. Claiming that women are biologically inferior to men, though? Some still seem fond of that one.

It is unclear that either of those notions are false. It is also unclear that either of their opposites is false. An environment that squelches debate of interesting, but sensitive questions is not a healthy one. The question of whether men are inferior to women (or vice versa) is definitely an interesting one, though perhaps poorly posed. Men and women are different in various ways, some of those differences may adapt each better to different tasks. Boiling that down to 'inferior' and 'superior' is facile. But the enterprise of elucidating those distinctions should not be taboo. It should be treated carefully, because the knowledge that may come from its investigation can lead people down dark paths, but that does not mean the question shouldn't be asked.

[asabjorn]

I could not disagree more. You do not preserve your right to free speech by defending the popular opinions. The way you loose your rights is when someone that hold unpopular opinions gets their rights limited. Are you so sure that all the opinions you hold and will hold can be expected to be rightthink for as long as you live?

If you study history the decline of many great countries have started with a censorship of unpopular opinions and shaming as well as ostracizing of anyone that think wrong:

  - Struggle session in Communist China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

The end destination for this kind of thinking is Orwellian thoughtcrime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime).

[johndevor]

> On the contrary, silencing voices is a necessary thing.

Couldn't disagree with you more.

The best antidote for bad ideas is sunshine.

The alternative is totalitarianism.

[electrograv]

Wouldn’t it be far more effective (and safe) to defeat bad ideas with evidence and reason?

[awalton]

Utilitarianism will let you justify anything if you frame it right, including white supremacy, fascism, etc. This isn't something evidence and reason alone can handle.

Ethically and morally, as a society, we have to choose what behavior is okay and what isn't. What's happening right now is that we're verbalizing the changing of those definitions to include things like "'Grab them by the pussy' and other transparent actions of sexual harassment are not tolerable ways to treat women in 2017," in response to a wide number of people coming forward to complain about it all at once, for possibly the first time in history.

And understandably some conservative people who grew up in the "Mad Men" era (when these kinds of things were acceptable) are unhappy with those changes and inevitably writing articles like this one, thinking that the vast majority of people being upset with them for their now antiquated beliefs and speech is equal to the suppression of that speech. No, we aren't chilling your speech. Society is asking you to change your behavior and mocking you for not being able to. We went through this with women's suffrage, the civil rights movement in the 60s, and now we're going through it again with the #MeToo movement.

I'll defend to the death your right to say something stupid. That is your constitutional right in this country, and we have to stand by that to keep our democracy alive. But you had better believe I will call you stupid to your face for saying it, probably with a sarcastic and mocking tone befitting your stupid statement.

[asabjorn]

What many are having an issue with is that we see some agendas pushed using techniques from totalitarian regimes.

When two sides have different solutions to a problem or opinions, but one side feel morally justified to seek the firing of the other and have the power to do so we are not talking about an abstract concept of moral theory anymore.

There is a reason why functional societies follow the rule of law instead of the rule of the mob.

[rectang]

That's what's happening: bad ideas are being defeated. But if those bad ideas are still near and dear to you even while society moves on, it feels bad.

Not everyone has to be persuaded. Some will have to be left behind.

[Veelox]

I think part of the issue is the tactics. The original post was pointing out that the way that bad ideas are being defeated is through force, not through reason. If the law says "Be happy or else" everyone is "happy". The problem being pointed out is that SV is becoming a place where you must believe the right things or else. The or else part is what makes it McCarthyistic.

[rectang]

It's hard for me to get worked up over this when the injustices suffered by those who are now being heard were many times worse.

[asabjorn]

Two wrongs does not make a right. For instance, I fail to see how you can fix things like racism, bigotry and sexism with more of the same.

[rectang]

The indefinite perpetuation of a one-sided wrong does not make a right, either. Relentless oppression must be broken.

[Veelox]

Just to clarify, it is okay to treat people poorly because people were treated worse in the past?

[rectang]

Many people continue to be treated worse today. But those who are accustomed to dominance cannot tolerate even a single setback without screaming bloody murder. Their endurance is paltry compared to that of the historically oppressed, and their empathy and perspective even more lacking.

[nsxwolf]

If the bad ideas are being defeated, why does their need to be “consequences” for hanging on to them?

[joshuamorton]

It would, unfortunately that doesn't work. If it did, no one would believe that the Earth is flat.

[sn9]

That's a completely insane counterargument.

Care to bet what the historical trend has been for the percentage of the population that claim the earth is flat? If evidence didn't work it would be flat or random.

[joshuamorton]

Over what timescale?

[sn9]

Centuries, since the Enlightenment.

[mc32]

I think there should be a difference between having a thought and doing something illegal based on that thought.

Someone can talk about selling illegal or unproven drugs and have opinions on how illegal drugs should be legal even if they are dangerous. That should all be allowed even if in practice it would be negative to society at large.

On the other hand if they acted on that belief then that should not be accepted by society and should be punishable.

Likewise, someone could have the opinion that whites are inferior racquetball players, so long as when selecting racquetball players in a professional team they do not select based on that opinion (given discrimination/selection based on race/skin is illegal).

[jerf]

Silicon Valley is not silencing the voices that claim that the round earth conspiracy is brought to you by the lizardoids that rule the Earth because their spaceships are spraying you with radioactive toxins in the contrails. Silicon Valley is silencing the voices that are saying things that literally billions of people on planet Earth believe, and on the order of half of the country that Silicon Valley happens to be located in believes. In some cases quite a bit more than half, if some surveys are to be believed.

I'm seeing this line a lot on HN today, but I think it's a dangerous rationalization of why it's OK to take away their free speech rights, and absolutely, positively nothing more. There is no other philosophical virtue to this position.

I think it's a reasonable line to say that if Silicon Valley is outright silencing something a billion people believe, and doing it quite frequently, there is quite likely a problem. You are welcome to deplore the fact that a billion people believe it, and will probably find another billion people standing with you on whatever matter you are deploring, because that's how this goes.

"When people walk around loudly complaining about how they can't say anything anymore without being specific as to what they want to say, it suggests that perhaps they know that those positions are not really defensible."

No, it's because they're avoiding an obvious trap. You trick someone into naming the list of censurable thoughts, then you immediately grab a big ol' mob of censorious folk anxious to score some political points (and they are readily available and hot to trot) and start censoring them because they said the bad things. It is impossible to name the topics being censored without the conversation immediately becoming exactly the one you are trying to turn it to, about how the censored topics really deserve it, and so it's not really censorship, right?

First commit to not censoring the topics, then perhaps you can get some discussion going. In the meantime, you are being deprived of that discussion, and perhaps should be less confident that you understand the issues than you think you do, because... how would you know? You probably don't actually know what your opposition thinks. What you know is almost certainly (statistically speaking, based on my interactions with the ever-more-doctrinaire and ever-more-insular HN) what your side wants you to think the opposition thinks, which is very, very far from the same thing.

Further, I acknowledge that ender7 may not personally have the power to censor very much. However, Silicon Valley as a whole does, and it is actively using it, and it is not only not ashamed, it has used faulty logic like this to convince itself it is being positively virtuous in the process of statistically removing the opinions it doesn't like from the Internet.