[lern_too_spel]

Some things are categorically false, and those conclusions can be reached rationally. That seemed to be his only point, and he did not say anything about preventing anyone (like Carroll's Queen of Hearts) from believing six impossible things before breakfast. That would be authoritarian.

In a democracy like ours, stopping the Queen and others from enacting restrictive and harmful policy based on impossibilities only requires convincing arguments. People are still perfectly free to believe in Creationism, but convincing arguments have removed it from curricula.

[Joker_vD]

> stopping the Queen and others from enacting restrictive and harmful policy

Like regulating the production, sales, and use of opiates. Or tightly restricting the abortions. Or forcing people to wear seatbelts while driving (and two years ago on this very HN I've seen lots of people complaining about state-mandated vehicular safety, so no, the seatbelts are not an uncontroversial topic). There are many other examples of the authoritarian nanny states unduly restricting bodily autonomy of people.

Crucially, most of those policies aren't really based on truth or falsity of anything but simply on a value call. Forcing people to wear seatbelts may or may not actually reduce vehicular injuries (in fact, some research indicates that wearing seatbelts makes one more prone to reckless driving) — they're mandated anyhow, simply because some people believe it's the right thing to do.

[lern_too_spel]

Or forcing people not to have abortions. That is the only authoritarian policy discussed in this thread. You claimed that he was forcing you to not say that abortion is bad. That is not the case. You are free to hold and espouse whatever irrational beliefs you like.

He simply stated that these irrational beliefs need to be stopped from turning into authoritarian and harmful policy. The way to stop that is by convincingly arguing the rational side. There is nothing authoritarian about making those arguments.

[bit-anarchist]

It bears reminding that omission of a policy is a policy of its own. If the anti-abortion side is categorically proven to be the rational one after the pro-abortion side was implemented, it means that democracy wasn't leveraged to prevent harmful policies, it was employed to enforce harmful policies.