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Re: Popper debunked

Someone I don’t get along with very well wrote:

Once you establish the precedent that ‘offensive’ speech is illegal, then anything that challenges the political or cultural powers that be can then be deemed offensive and thereby banned.

Yep. Anything that destroys the open and just society we’re trying to build can be banned. Just like an app that destroys the computer it’s on can be deleted.

That’s not even counting the fact that censoring ‘offensive’ speech is self-defeating. Let‘s take this stance at face value: offensive speech should be illegal. Ok, fine. I, as a free speech absolutist, find the mere suggestion of censorship, of any speech whatsoever to be deeply, indescribably, offensive. It is an affront to every fiber of my being. That is, whether you merely say it should be done, or you actively perform the censorship, then I am offended and appalled. So then, by your own words, since I am offended, you should apologize, retract your statement and never mention it again, thereby putting an end to the call for censorship. By merely taking your words at face value, I have defeated your stance.

That’s why it’s a “paradox”. It’s even in the name. The Paradox of Tolerance.

You put in a hook to delete offendedness, but the hook itself was predicated on your offendedness, so luckily it deleted itself by its own logic. Your own debunking was shredded up by your own debunking.

There are many widely recognized exceptions to free speech.

Here are some American ones.

(Counterfeit money, for example.)

Supporters of Popper’s position, like me, want “incitement to intolerance and persecution” to become and remain one of those exceptions.

And yes. We do want censorship (beyond this limited set of exceptions) to be another of those exceptions because the whole goal is to build an open and just society.

As I wrote in my “Blank is great”, it’s possible to call a lot of things “speech“ and say it’s axiomatically good because of that. I can call censorship and bookburning “speech” to protect it. I can call the death fatwa on a controversial author “speech“ to protect that fatwa. And, that’s the kind of speech I’m opposing here. I’m opposing speech that destroys other speech.

Yusuf Islam (“Moon Shadow” guy) got widely, career-endingly deplatformed for expressing (in speech) support for, and agreement with, the (also speech) calls to kill Salman Rushdie.

And that’s common sense to everyone. You don’t go around killing people. You don’t say “but my killing them is ‘speech’ and therefore protected”.

Same goes for harassment. It’s fine to ban it and block it.