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I have done a cursory search on both reddit and here but I cannot find the juicy gossip. I really absolutely have to know the specifics of this incident. Yes it is salacious gossip. Yes it is an utterly irrational guilty pleasure. But please please please can someone spill the beans on exactly what went down.?
And please, just this once, can we ignore the usual motte precepts and fully and shamelessly engage in friend/enemy distinctions? Can we embrace sarcasm and mockery just this once? Can we be a little uncharitable to our censorious enemies? Can we pretend that they will never read this because they probably won't?
Please I would love someone to leak all the intimate details of the parenthetical comment being deleted while I engage in apelike disdain of my outgroup.
Thank you in advance, and please forgive me this one time for bucking the very pillars upon which the Motte rests.
Zorba explained it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/778?context=8#context
Thank you. My entire lifetime, teachers warned me that we must always be on the look out for anyone infringing on free speech or authoritarians censoring us and that they ALWAYS try to start small and then move on to bigger issues.
Then one day I woke up and half of my fellow countrymen were pro-censorship. I am still confused by this.
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".
It needs to be clear that the existence of the "Slippery Slope" fallacy does not mean all Slippery Slope arguments are fallacies. Slippery Slopes do happen and it's a very common tactic, in fact. The fallacy is along the lines of your example but suggesting that censorship, once successful will expand is not a fallacy it's the most likely outcome. It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions. Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?
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?
You are right, I claimed more than I intended. I would say that basic word-based reddit censorship, like censoring the word "nigger" or even the so-called (((echo))) has not really harmed the debate, even if it gives place to ridiculous cases like on /r/themotte.
There are other cases where reddit censorship is worse than that, like website-level rules against "transphobia". Those rules are very bad in my opinion, however they are nothing close to the Russian system of censorship. It is still possible to express opinion against transgender identity in most western countries, mainly because people can speak somewhere else.
You do know why we have to post on a separate website, and not the subreddit? Precisely because the slippery slope is real and comments merely explaining meaning atract attention of the AEO.
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