Driving groups whose ideas are incompatible with a free society underground is perfect. That's exactly what we should do! The danger is size of audience. If some proportion of people are vulnerable to getting recruited by fascists, say (and I believe we're all agreed that they are), then the absolute best thing you can do is make it difficult for the fascists to put their message where people will see it, and make them worry about putting the message out in case it's traced back to them! If you let them advertise and recruit freely then pretty soon you have more fascists recruiting even more freely, and then the idea starts to become mainstream and even more people sign up, and the next thing you know the fascists are in charge and nobody's free any more.Ketraar wrote: ↑Sun, 2. May 21, 19:27Yes I agree, but the people are the problem not the fact that some one was allowed to say it. The argument is not, are people idiots and mostly behave on instinct even if they can manipulate a microwave? The answer to that is, yes. The question here is, where do you draw the line of when, who or what is ALLOWED to be said, who defines that line and is it sensible to even have such a line.
Anything anyone can say has the potential to hurt some ones feelings, inspire some one to invent the cure to cancer or join a suicide cult, in some cases this is true for all with the same speech. At the end of the day its just speech, words. You cant physically harm anyone with words, it will always require some one to perform an action for words to have consequences and this is why allowing the most speech as possible is key to a democratic society, INCLUDING some hate speech, some idiotic speech and the likes. It doesnt mean there should be no consequences from the speech, in some cases even legal ones (but very limited). But pre-emptive trying to silence groups WILL NOT solve anything, in fact all it does is push these groups to the "underground" and unless all people care is to not be bothered, this is the last thing anyone should want.
MFG
Ketraar
The check here is easy: do we do more harm to a free society by a) allowing a particular idea to spread and dealing with the consequences or b) not allowing that idea to spread? Option b does some general harm to the overall freedom of society, and so we should avoid deploying it where possible. But when the consequences of option a are "now the fascists are in charge", "now everybody is dead of a deadly pandemic", and so forth, obviously b is preferable.
Arguments suggesting that it's uniquely impossible to draw this line for speech are obviously nonsense. For example, the government says you need a license and insurance before you can drive a car because the harm to people's freedoms from installing that restriction is less than the harm to people's freedoms by letting untrained, uninsured people drive. We, as a society via our elected representatives, have decided that this restriction - and the stringency of the license test etc - is the correct balance for the overall good of society. This restriction was brought in when the changing nature of society (i.e. the availability of the car) made it necessary. It's one of countless examples of cases where the government has legislated "this thing is fine but this other thing isn't", "this thing is fine but only subject to these checks", etc. Again, this is the very nature of a free society: some freedoms are curtailed to protect the overall freedom of the whole society. If your society develops a road deaths problem, then you bring in restrictions as necessary to reduce that problem. If your society develops a fascist problem, then you bring in restrictions as necessary to reduce that problem, you don't sit on your hands going "but their freedoms!" until they take over and remove yours.