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Aeolus451 on 07 October 2017
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StarOcean said:
DarthMetalliCube said:

Fair enough.. Though I'd counter with a few key points -

For one, why focus on the negative? Free speech will inevitably bring out some horrible speech, but it will also bring out some great speech that might have otherwise been suppressed. Hell, I believe we probably wouldn't have many of the technologies, religions, and theories, and philosophical concepts we have today if not for the free exchange of ideas.

Second, this "supression of hate groups" sounds nice in theory, though I'd aruge that attempting them to silence them through force or threats would only serve to boost their cause and give them more power, as they'd be able to claim victimhood by pointing to these attempts of silencing them.

Additionally, how do you decide who makes these decisions of who can say what? Who decides what speech is tolerable and what isn't? And what makes them qualified? Do they have some sort of agenda of their own that might make them want to suppress certain speech? What makes these people in power so special, and the keepers of information/morality?

And again, the suppresion of free speech IS ironically a sort of Nazism/Fascism, so those attempting to silence it would ironcally sort of BECOME what they're trying to silence in some ways.. Authority figures and governments are just as capable of hate - who's to say they can't abuse this power to merely silence OTHER forms of hate (or worse, ideas they falsely VIEW as hate) while enforcing their own? They're still only human after all..

The whole practice, of placing such empasis and importance on mere words and ideas, sets and extremely bad precedent and sets the stage for a chaotic, oppressive society from my view, full of an extrememly angry and repressed masses of people.

 

Aeolus451 said:

Oh we're really gonna disagree on this. I'm against that because depending on who's the people in power or arbiter that could easily lead to a totalitarian state. it could be abused too easily. Also, "hate groups" will exist regardless of what you do. You can migate their overall influence by countering their arguments/moves with reason and logic. You're not trying to convince them that they are wrong but rather show to everyone how foolish their ideas are. That's fairly easy to do when there's alot of holes in their arguments. 

Allow anyone to speak openly and freely. That way it's much easier to track any persons of interest with troubling ideas versus them just remaining quiet and trying to change things behind the scenes.  Suppressing open speech doesn't stop the spreading of ideas because you can't watch everyone all the time. They'll still talk behind closed doors. If you try to control that, it will lead to authortarism and you won't stop what you were aiming for. The reason why a lot of hate groups have died off or weakened into insignificance is because people have been challenging their ideas for a long time. 

 

I don't think either of you understand that I know that it cannot be accomplished now. Unfortunately, it will only be accomplished by means of vastly superior intelligence which will come in the form of AI in the coming decades. 

Then again, they'll probably also realize humans are bad for the planet and continuation of other species and wipe us out anyway. So, perhaps it can't happen. But it doesn't take away from me not believing in free speech. It's too flawed. 

It's already being accomplished. It's why hate groups aren't in control of the government. Their idealogy is flawed and most people see that. I don't agree with throwing away everyone's rights to get a few people. The math don't add up in that.