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by rainonmoon 904 days ago
Ideas don't confront each other, people do. And when the people representing one set of ideas refuse to engage in good faith and instead promote discrimination based on race, gender, and sexuality, they should lose the privilege to have those ideas amplified. 10 years ago it was not controversial that you should become a social pariah for broadcasting hate speech. This whole situation would be utterly juvenile and ridiculous if it wasn't so harmful.
1 comments

> And when the people representing one set of ideas refuse to engage in good faith

How can you possibly know that, if you prevent the people in question from speaking? Or are you extrapolating the behavior of all members of a group from that of a potentially non-representative sample?

Anyway, even if someone engages in bad faith, it can still be valuable to let them demonstrate that bad faith to the world. Not in every community or platform, necessarily, but somewhere. (Substack, unlike most social media, has no algorithmic feed; you see content only from authors you choose to visit or follow. So you won't be bothered by bigots there unless you choose to seek them out.)

> discrimination based on race, gender, and sexuality, > hate speech

These terms are often used with many different meanings, can you define them as you are using them here?

> even if someone engages in bad faith, it can still be valuable to let them demonstrate that bad faith to the world.

I think we've heard enough from them. The talking points are tired, the joke is always the same joke. There's nothing to learn here. And besides that, back when it was pretty normal not to indulge this offensive clown show, we had no issue discussing issues of hate speech without allowing it to proliferate. Imagine that.

> These terms are often used with many different meanings, can you define them as you are using them here?

This is exactly what I mean by bad faith. Come on, man. Every single time an advocate for platforming hate speech gets into a debate, they immediately run to hide in a rhetorical quagmire, hoping someone will follow them into it. Find a bigger idiot, I don't play those games.