distic
2yr ago
Well, my personal problem with libertarian arguments is precisely that they are absolute and unbounded. I think it is actually a trade-off between freedoms. Most of the time freedom of speech must win but sometimes it is harmless if it does'nt.
distic
2yr ago
As I said somewhere else, there is no reason why monarchy would collapse. There are other european monarchies: Belgium ; Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, Netherlands, and Sweden. None of them has a monarch as "beloved and omni-temporal" as Elisabeth, yet the monarchy survives. It survives because no one has any interest in killing it. You would get a lot of trouble, a constitution to change, and more importantly a president that could be a competitor to the prime minister. It is threatening for the parliamentary nature of the regime, as the personification of politics strengthens the power of presidents everywhere.
The idea of monarchy is based on a popularity contest is as anti-monarchist as you can get. A political regime where the head of state is chosen according to his popularity is called a Republic. In a monarchy, it's the continuity of the institution and the tradition that give the monarch legitimacy. If Charles abdicate, it means that he, or his family, or even worse the people, can actually choose who the monarch will be. Then, just end the monarchy and elect a president, because that is what you are asking for.
distic
2yr ago
I'm not sure you get it. I do not think the important part of it is about "making everybody else live according to my principle". Most people do not care that much about what others do. It's more that my freedom to live some kind of life enters in conflict with the freedom of someone else. For example, if someone wants to live without ever hearing "nigger", this person has to enforce a ban on the word. The person might not really care about what people do everywhere where they aren't, they just don't want to hear it. But the only reasonable way to enforce the "don't say nigger to me" rule is to find allies that do not want to hear it either and to ban it almost everywhere.
You may reply that it is not the same kind of freedom, as the freedom to say something is a freedom to act, while the freedom not to hear something is a freedom to a feeling or a non-feeling. But what about rape? The rapist is the actor, the victim is just feeling something. Or what about smoking in restaurants? A rape acts on the body of the unwilling victim, but so does the word "nigger" with the ears, and so does the smoke with the nose. Politics is often about finding practical compromises between opposed freedom.
If free speech is usually preferred to censorship, it is because without it, some truths cannot be said; that the government can start to live in a fantasy world where everything he does is wonderful. Such a government is obviously doomed. So it has been decided wisely that this should not happen. But it means that as long as every truth can still be said, there is no actual danger with censorship. A ban on the word "nigger" is not dangerous, as it does not change your ability to say any truth. I think that a ban that forbids the use of the word "nigger" as a quote of someone else's words is completely stupid, but it is not dangerous as long as there is some other way to speak, as ridiculous as it might be (like "n-word").
Then, there is the usual argument: if we ban "nigger", they will want us to reduce freedom of speech even further : this is the slippery slope fallacy. What about "if they can say nigger, they will soon try to kill black people"? History proves that limiting freedom of speech can lead to general censorship, but it also prove that racial insults can lead to mass murder. Is limited freedom of speech a worse result than a mass murder? Even if you think that a limited freedom of speech would eventually lead to mass murder, you have to agree that it works both ways: mass murder are a very good way to destroy freedom of speech.
distic
2yr ago
Well there are several monarchies in Europe and none of them has someone as popular as Elisabeth as a king or queen (spain, belgium, sweden, netherlands, luxemburg,...). Yet those monarchies survive because it is not useful to anyone to change the regime. Perhaps the british monarchy will have to be less fastuous
They are not tolerating the user/mention distinction because they are lazy. It is a lot easier to write a program that removes every occurence of some words than to actually read the comments. Or perhaps they are just that stupid, I don't know.
Please don't grow the community into something bigger. Bigger community, bigger problems. Rational debate has never existed on a very large scale.
distic
2yr ago
Did you steelman the case for some censorship, though? What your teachers said seems to be a slippery slope fallacy. For exemple, "authauritarians will put people in prisons, and they will start with criminals, so we should have no prison at all".
distic
2yr ago
Abdication is very unlikely. The basic principle of monarchy is that no one chooses the king, not even the king chooses to be king. If the king is chosen by a popularity contest inside the royal family, then just extend the contest to everyone and elect a president. Moreover, it would create a competition among members of the family which is not a very good idea.
But it seems to me that in countries that implement a strong censorship, like eg Russia, the justice system, including prison, is a lot more instrumental than reddit censorship which has yet to prove dangerous. The justice system has to establish what is true or false (for example did you and did you not murder X?), and this power on truth is the very basis of polical censorship (remember 1984 Ministry of Truth).
Because the law is well written and only allows you to ban harmless things? That's like death penalty. If you kill criminal, why wouldn't you kill political opponents? The answer is that you can't because it isn't allowed. Why is it possible to draw a line for the harmless use of the justice system and not for the harmless use of small censorship?
Just like the justice system has been used for repression a lot. Or the army. Russia used poisoned tea to kill political opponent, so is drinking tea a first step toward political assassination? The only thing that could convince me completely is a proof that the censorship as it exists is already dangerous. There are other restrictions on freedom of speech (eg you cannot publish classified material). Is forbidding the word "nigger" really more dangerous than allowing the government to keep secrets that no one is allowed to tell?
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