> the censorship apologists in HN's usual go-to argument
Please don't make spurious generalizations like this one, which is obviously false. Instead, please familiarize yourself (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) with the cognitive biases that lead to these false feelings of generality [1]. Yes, a lot of people make the argument you're mentioning—and a lot of people also make the opposite argument. I don't know if it's evenly split (no one knows that), but it's close enough not to matter.
It's important that this community get educated about this so we don't tear ourselves apart—which is what the fantasy of being an embattled minority, surrounded by enemies and demons [2, 3], will lead to. In reality, there's a range of views here, more or less homomorphic to the range in society at large. That's what any sufficiently large population sample converges to.
I apologize, dang. I understand how my phrasing can be taken as a generalization of everyone in HN, but that was not my intention.
I wasn't trying to say that everyone in HN was advocating for censorship (if anything, I always feel a little better when I read people defending free speech, they're what keep me coming back, at least to this type of posts); I was talking about what those in specific who speak in favor of censorship say.
I agree. In fact, I'm not aware of any context or venue where leftists have supported freedom of speech (for non-leftists). They're failing every test. Campuses, disinviting speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or even Condi Rice – don't know if the latter was successful). Twitter. Facebook. Any action to remove apps from stores because they lack the vigorous and extremely expensive censorship infrastructure of the big leftist corps line FB and Twitter. Even removing apps and services from web servers, like Amazon did, which was breathtaking. Any infrastructure-level censorship/sabotage like Cloudflare has done at various bizarre points (I think one was an alleged Neo-Nazi website, and the other was merely one of the chans, apparently for the sin of being used by a killer; I have no idea if Prince has tried to censor more, but I found it too depressing to dig into further).
I thought we had a deal, but clearly we don't. I assumed that everyone understood and could predict their own future motives and emotions toward a desire to censor speech they disagree with or find "offensive" (if you're the kind of person who chronically experiences that state of being "offended" – I'm not).
I assumed we all knew that we couldn't possibly trust ourselves to censor dissent from our own views. I assumed that we all knew that our initial impulses toward that would have to be dismissed out of hand, given everything we know about human fallibility, cognitive biases, how incredibly easy it is to be wrong, and the obvious arbitrariness of this time and place – that is, the time and place we happen to be alive. Leftists seem to not be accounting for any of these factors. They think they're right. Well, they know they're right. And they apparently think there's no way their ideology could be mistaken or unwise or harmful in any serious way, or that any of a dozen or so discrete beliefs/narratives/dogmas could be wrong. They for some reason believe that early 21st-century American leftist ideology is airtight, mostly complete, the first complete and totally true belief system in human history, and it's not a huge coincidence that it happens to be the one that's sitting there when they happen to be alive.
And that their whole framework and dogma around their preemptive marginalization of outsiders with the idiosyncratic usage of the word "hate", and an associated set of evidence-free abstractions like "privilege", and a bunch of -phobias that don't actually exist, at all, to the knowledge of serious scientists... well that whole package is of course completely true, just like everything else. No only is it true, but they'll recursively use that sort of immune system package to justify censoring non-leftists, much like how Scientologists tag people as Suppressive Persons (SPs).
This is bad news. Their epistemology is terrible. It was always the elites who were the vanguard defending freedom of speech. It was never expected that regular Joes could be counted on to grok the epistemic and psychological facts that motivated a principled commitment to freedom of speech. It was the intellectuals who understood how easy it is to be wrong, how ideologies can blind us, how our own subjective sense of the certain truth of our beliefs was completely irrelevant to their objective standing, how so many humans in history have had that subjective experience of certainty, with mixed results. Now we face an awkward situation where intellectuals have let themselves stumble into a cult, a cult that has conveniently constructed arguments and rationalizations that purport to justify censorship. So now they can just skirt on past the many robust reasons to defend freedom of speech, if they ever knew them. Because, "hate" obviously. That's all they needed to abandon something so crucial to human progress and growth. Just use an arbitrary human negative emotion word in contradiction to its actual, dictionary meaning, applying it to a huge swath of outsider/non-cult speech, even encompassing someone noting that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Boom..."hate". Something huge is falling to something very small.
