some valid points at the start, but as soon as the "woke mind virus" is mentioned we know we are dealing with a moron who can't see the forest for the trees - a classic example of Godwin's Second Law
Ah yes, therefore we should treat everyone like children who need our protection. Wait, we're going to need some extra power so we can properly protect them. Yeah, we'll probably need a big budget too.
And we know what's right and wrong so we need to take swift and bold action against these cretins - I mean citizens - who are espousing the wrong views.
What a lovely free and liberal society we have. And it just so happens our kids are learning less and less in school [0]... darn, I guess we'll have to crackdown even harder and triple the budget....
The biggest problem with a total lack of moderation is stochastic terrorism. As a response to gp mentions, people attacking fiber optic cables for “causing covid” is a problem that can’t simply be refuted logically.
The term has been well known in public-policy discussions for at least a decade. The basic idea goes back a loooooong time, at least to 1170 when Henry II of England asked, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" (meaning Thomas Becket). Thus he ensured that someone would and did, even though he didn't know who, where, or how. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie could serve as a contemporary example that also predates what wiki-editors seem aware of. Offering a clear path to gain favor is almost as good as an order.
Nowadays, when a prominent US politician says "these people are {killing babies|sexualizing children|stealing an election} and something should be done about it" then it becomes increasingly likely that violent acts will follow, even though no specific or direct order was given. It's a way to rule by fear while supposedly retaining deniability, but anybody who has been paying attention can see right through it and it's beginning to look as though the legal system might catch up.
I cite an example from 1170 and you pretend I'm claiming it's new? Maybe you should direct your comments to my interlocutor, who claimed not to know the term in 2023. Using "this isn't new" as your standard opening - three times in this discussion alone and all of them a bit spurious - isn't very good for curious conversation.
Exactly what it says: the legal system has not caught up. Even in a post-Brandenburg world, the standard is still that the threat must be both explicit and imminent. They're still struggling with the "stochastic" part of stochastic terrorism, even though the phenomenon itself has existed for centuries.
> I’m talking about the current legal system here like you, so I’m wondering what’s fundamentally so new that censorship is the only answer here?
Never said, never implied, not even relevant in this particular sub-thread.
> Exactly what it says: the legal system has not caught up. Even in a post-Brandenburg world, the standard is still that the threat must be both explicit and imminent. They're still struggling with the "stochastic" part of stochastic terrorism, even though the phenomenon itself has existed for centuries.
That’s not an answer. I already showed you where we have existing laws and precedent; so I ask again what’s different?
Or are you saying that the bar for inciting violence was considered too stringent?
Because the only legal lack I’m aware of is what to do when a President is the one that incites a rebellion.
> Never said, never implied, not even relevant in this particular sub-thread.
Fair. The sub-thread spawned from moderated speech but I agree moderation isn’t the same as censorship.
Maybe public policy discussions between foolish people, but not elsewhere. You really don't want to go down the route of loosening the standards around blaming people for unrelated people's acts. Not only would that simply be an excuse to engage in actual terrorism, committed against anyone who has an opinion or enters politics, but it's a sword that cuts both ways.
After all, the most violent political acts in the last few years in the USA were the Floyd riots. But do you really want to prosecute anyone who argues that there's a racism problem in America for "stochastic terrorism", because some people heard that and went looting? Seems obviously inflammatory and unwise.
It's unlikely. It's not just how educated an motivated you are, you don't have enough time to be an expert in everything.
There are billion dollar industries designed to change your mind and get you to act against your best interest without you even recognising it, but people think they are "free thinkers".
Assuming you are a human, you don't have time to read everything even on just the important issues. The people who are deliberately producing information (as opposed to those whose misinformation is due to error) can often outnumber the producers of accurate information by orders of magnitude.
That's both because it takes much more work to produce something accurate than to produce something inaccurate, and because those deliberately producing misinformation often more resources to put toward such production.
with the chemists selling useless cold medicine but the streets EVEN MORE full of meth-heads than before, obviously this particular "war on (some) drugs" measure is a pathetic failure.
That's also not how logic works, if you want to claim that this measure was successful you need to offer convincing evidence in favor of that. The benefit of the doubt doesn't go to failed war on drugs policies.
I'd imagine you'd still need a cost benefit analysis if this inquiry were done in good faith. Which in politics, especially when it comes to controlling drugs, it never is. The exception possibly being prohibition itself—but prohibition actually worked, in the sense that the rate of binge drinking dropped drastically. No such efficacy is obvious here and it seems like a really useful medicine.
The problem there is that alcohol is relatively high-volume, I mean a barrel of pure ethanol is still a barrel of pure ethanol. By contrast fentanyl for example can be effectively shipped, in commercial quantities, in the back of a sedan or human-portable luggage.
Stopping binge drinking meant reducing the amount of available alcohol, a substance requiring large scale shipping and production, storage and so on. Modern drugs really don't have that problem, and for the ones that do, synthetic alternatives would just take over.
Improving folks economic reality tends to lower drug use. We could try not further ruining lives by putting them into the "justice" system and instead close the gaps they fell through while helping them up.
