[simias]

Who cares about what that guy wanted or didn't want. The question is whether we should let people distribute his manifesto for the sake of freedom of expression or if we consider it to be dangerous and worthy of a ban. The opinion of the guy who committed this heinous crime is frankly irrelevant IMO.

If I was to commit some atrocities tomorrow and write a pamphlet outlining my motive and calling for others to do the same thing while adding a note saying "look, they'll try to censor this!" will you, out of principle, argue that my manifesto shouldn't be censured because that's what I would've wanted? If so, why?

[jimktrains2]

> The question is whether we should let people distribute his manifesto for the sake of freedom of expression or if we consider it to be dangerous and worthy of a ban.

Speaking as a us citizen, that is crazy talk. Why should the government be let to decide what is "too dangerous" for me to read? It seems incredible that first world democracies still engage in that kind of censorship.

[simias]

What you describe is the USA way, but it's not how it's done in many (most?) places around the world. There are plenty of things you could say in the USA that would be illegal hate speech in most of Europe. Conversely showing a female nipple is taboo in the Land of the Free, while it's mostly not a big deal in western Europe. This is actually the source of many problems with the governance of the web since most high-profile websites tend to conform to American codes (which means that you can't post "the origin of the world" by Gustave Courbet on Facebook, but you can post racist comments all day long).

Obviously the risk is not that reasonably educated HN readers could stumble upon this manifesto and start a massacre, the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people. People become radicalized on the web, actually the shooter himself kept spouting "memes" straight from /pol/ and other alt-right websites. Similarly many Islamist terrorists who carried attacks in recent years also radicalized online, feeding on propaganda websites and fake news.

Does banning 4chan or the manifesto achieve anything? I'm not sure. But dismissing any attempt to curb this very real problem as "crazy talk" is not really constructive criticism.

[jimktrains2]

> the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people.

You can literally make the same argument against fox or Breitbart. Or cnn, nyt, wapo as the president continuously tries to. He should remind you why the government should have limited powers.

And yes, the general fear of sex and sexual is maddening and counter productive.

[simias]

I have no issue at all drawing a line between Breitbart and a mass murderer manifesto. I find this "slippery slope" rhetoric rather disingenuous and non-constructive. With this type of argument you can shoot down any law, any power given to the government. "First they force you to wear seat-belts and the next thing you know you live in communist dystopia".

I guess it makes sense if you're a libertarian/anarchist or something in this vicinity but if that's the case this discussion has been rehashed millions of times before and I don't think we'll find a common ground here.

[Causality1]

I would rather live in a country where fifty people are shot by a madman every year than one in which 3,395 people are arrested every year for "offensive" online comments, which was the UK in 2018. If these restrictions were being imposed by an outside power we would gladly spend fifty lives a day in a war to prevent it. Principles are more important than comfort. Praise Talos.

[psychoslave]

As a French citizen, this is nothing new in principle: we already had law that forbid negationist material and so on. That makes nothing for social peace of course, it only brings more weight to the "see how they try to hide you the truth" bullshit.

But this seems to clearly intensify. We now have laws passed "to regulate things against Fake News during election period"[1], in a climate of already large distrust of population against politics.

It's really unclear how this plain censorship is not replaced with a mandatory warning, which would give the opportunity to let people judge by themselves (or at least decide to trust the authority that the material doesn't worth their attention).

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_France/Fausse...

[oarsinsync]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance is worth reading

[jimktrains2]

Just because something is not illegal does not mean that society need to be tolerant of it. E.g. I she'd no tears for the neonazis who lost their jobs after being outed in Charlottesville [1] (though I don't support through name and shame that brought it about). However, I don't think it's correct for the government to censor their writings.

Another instance, I think fox and Breitbart are scourges for their disinformation campaign (not that they're "conservative" or have an "agenda", the wsj is also conservative and has an agenda), but making them illegal is a line too far. It provides too much power to a government who already has too much.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl...

[FeepingCreature]

Eh, if a murderous white supremacist has a strategy we should at least ask if the strategy can work before we exactly play into it.

[simias]

You're giving a lot of credit to a meme-spouting serial killer. It's not like as if it was step 34 of his master plan, he merely got a gun and started shooting at innocent people. I'll take my chances and keep ignoring him and not giving him a platform.

In my opinion his main objective was to get attention and put his nauseous ideology in the spotlight. I don't know if banning it is the right solution but frankly I won't waste my time playing devil's advocate for a mass murderer.

"First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".

[reitanqild]

> I'll take my chances and keep ignoring him and not giving him a platform.

Hopefully society will not do that.

The content might be repulsive but we are better off knowing how they think than allowing only them to know the contents.

Crazy manifestos are probably just like weapons in this regard, ordinary people won't care to get one if they are illegal, bad guys will.

As a kid I got a good explanation of how badly certain ideologies failed even if they looked reasonable.

I also got an intro to safe handling of guns, especially the part about never ever pointing a gun at anyone, loaded or not, except in wartime. I was quite young then but it sticks, like a whole lot of other stuff from my childhood.

I'll try to give that to the next generation together, together with an explanation of how insanely stupid such manifestos are - and a crash course in unarmed fighting (disable or confuse opponent, get away).

Young people should know what exists or it will take them by surprise.

> "First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".

Definitions of "terrorist" differs and while I and you can agree on this and many others I really really don't want to have more power than necessary in the hands of any government.

Read history and you'll see that most cruelties in the last few hundred years were commited by states against their own citizens, not by random blokes with weapons.