The idea of an arbiter of what is and isn't free speech is deeply repulsive to me. So is cough medicine. So is chemotherapy. I can't see every cell of the cancer but collectively, there's enough of it visible to shake me. Do you kill the poison with a lesser poison? Depends on your level of concern, I suppose.
Philosophically, I'm in a weird place right now to be honest. If you told me that our country was going to round up all propagandists, science deniers, and white supremacists and throw them in jail based on hard evidence of purposeful misinformation or credible threat -- regardless of how those things are defined and by whom -- I think I would respond, "k"
I acknowledge that I would be resolute in lazily ruining people's lives based on a perceived threat to the greater good out of some longing to be bored again. That's scary to me.
I'm a nerd, wholly driven by logic (to this point), and I can feel the boundaries of its apogee being prodded. It's not just the country that's sick -- my ideologies are also under the weather.
The tl;dr answer would be that personally, I'd be fine with banning Holocaust denial or the promotion of terrorism because at the end of the day, I'm just a everyday liberal software engineer. Neither of those bans would ever apply to me.
That is, unless someone decided to attack me with false or shaky accusations. Therein lies the problem, eh? But what's the alternative? There's no winning.
>>The tl;dr answer would be that personally, I'd be fine with banning Holocaust denial or the promotion of terrorism because at the end of the day, I'm just a everyday liberal software engineer. Neither of those bans would ever apply to me.
"Neither of those bans would ever apply to me" is a pretty revealing statement. In fact, it's almost so perfectly comical that I would give way better than even odds that your post was a parody if someone just read it to me out loud randomly.
This term itself is bunk. Part of science--science being imperfect and reliant on experimentation--is arriving at contradictory results. It is a natural part of the scientific process and is codified in the scientific method.
What is the lesser evil here? Are some scientist so beyond reproach that any incongruent findings are illegal? What if they're right? What if they're wrong but there was no intent to mislead. What if the authority that anoints untouchable scientists is compromised or otherwise acting in bad faith?
Nothing good is going to come from giving credence to a ridiculous notion like "science denier."
Philosophically, I'm in a weird place right now to be honest. If you told me that our country was going to round up all propagandists, science deniers, and white supremacists and throw them in jail based on hard evidence of purposeful misinformation or credible threat -- regardless of how those things are defined and by whom -- I think I would respond, "k"
I acknowledge that I would be resolute in lazily ruining people's lives based on a perceived threat to the greater good out of some longing to be bored again. That's scary to me.
I'm a nerd, wholly driven by logic (to this point), and I can feel the boundaries of its apogee being prodded. It's not just the country that's sick -- my ideologies are also under the weather.
The tl;dr answer would be that personally, I'd be fine with banning Holocaust denial or the promotion of terrorism because at the end of the day, I'm just a everyday liberal software engineer. Neither of those bans would ever apply to me.
That is, unless someone decided to attack me with false or shaky accusations. Therein lies the problem, eh? But what's the alternative? There's no winning.