The reason I am as staunch about freedom of speech as I am is twofold. One is that it's a matter of principle. If I want to be able to say I'm in favor of freedom of speech I have to be in favor of all of it. Once I make a concession and say that some of it is OK to ban then I will never have any leg to stand on when I oppose any other kind of speech getting banned without being a hypocrite. Second reason is that I believe it's better to have the trash speak out in public so that we can ridicule their ideas rather than fuel their persecution complex by driving them underground and thus confirming their 'truths'. You never know what they cook up once their idea of a holy and absolutely necessary mission gets lodged in their heads. It's better to let them roam free, like an old timer at your local pub who keeps rambling about made up adventures.
So like I said, absolute free speech would legalize death threats, violent incitements, and CSAM (what 4chan calls CP). You yourself said you aren't okay with that, at least when it effects you personally.
Principles are BS when they allow for harm to others. Read Alan Moore's
Watchmen some time; Rorschach asks Manhattan to kill him because he realizes that his principles don't mean shit in the face of how they'd just kill numerous innocent people if he stuck to them. (At best, you'd learn a lesson from reading it, at worst, you'd get a good read out of it.)
The slippery slope fallacy holds no weight. Nobody is required to ban everything just because they ban CSAM. That's not hypocrisy; that's being reasonable about the existence of exceptions. Likewise, claiming there should be no exceptions whatsoever in any situation isn't being principled; it's being a zealot.
Letting the trash speak out allows them to be legitimatized. That's the actual studied practical results. Ridicule fails frequently, and often only succeeds in the aftermath of the destruction caused. And no, driving them underground doesn't confirm anything. In the 90s, nobody in the mainstream was saying Stormfront was confirmed legit despite them being driven out of all other forums. At no point in the past did any insane extremist driven underground become "confirmed" just by not being handed a megaphone. And yes, we know what they cook up, because it's the same over and over. And we'll be ready for it if we stop handing them the mic and normalizing their views just like we were back in the day.
I've said this before in another thread, but it bares repeating: there's a rule bartenders learn in order to keep their jobs. If a person walks into your bar and has clearly visible signs of being a neo-Nazi (tattoos, decals, etc), you kick them out immediately. It doesn't matter if they are behaving "peacefully", you kick them out anyways. If you don't, they'll return the next day with another neo-Nazi. And the next day, another, and so on. You know who won't return? Everyone else, because you now have a Nazi bar and you'll be forced to close down because your business won't survive that.
This isn't unfair; this isn't being unprincipled. This is existing in reality and not in the dark corners of the internet. Real life doesn't match up with ideals; if it did, we'd be in utopia already. That's a simple fact about ethics and epistemology that can not be ignored just for the sake of holding oneself above real consequences.
Might I add, you have said nothing but repeat the same arguments that every single person making your argument has made before, with nothing new, just as all those before you have. I knew all these arguments before you said them, and was already ready to counter them, which is why I've had a comeback for each of them. I'm ready for all the others you'll "make" because you have a less than 10% chance (being generous here) of making any new ones based on past experience with multiple people with the same views and arguments as you. The "free speech absolutists" never once consider that all they argue has been argued before in universities, intellectual circles, and the legal system over and over again, and their opposition knows all their ideas better than they do.
They're doing it on their site and keeping it there. The only way to be offended at 4chan is to choose to go there and be offended.
Like I said, their shit has been smeared all over the internet. It's on reddit, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, and even online games. And it's offline too now, which is the biggest problem.
And saying "you choose to be offended" is horribly insulting and blaming the victim.
Cool, hope they both crash and burn.
Also, why tf are people arguing about 4chan lmao y’all aren’t gonna make the other see your side just give up and move on.
It's not even just about getting the other side to agree. It's also about everyone else reading. Certain views shouldn't be left to be normalized just because the person arguing them won't budge on their POV.
On other occasions, I've called out actual Nazis on this forum. I don't expect any of them to change their lead brains, but I do expect that others will realize what the problem with them was. ("Was", as in they get banned afterwards.) It's helpful in case they try to make a return, or if others like them arrive, since others will get what to look out for. And more importantly, their views will not be treated as normal here because the problems with them have been explained.
If the mods were based and Antilocalpilled they’d give me a solution smh
With
that terminology, let's hope they don't.
