The best way to get to sanity in public discourse is sanity in how we understand what the limits should be.
Right now the limits of public discourse are set by a chaotic process that no one likes because the alternative is no limits at all.
This should be the key takeaway from discussions of censorship: the power isn't going anywhere. The demand and moral high ground for some censorship isn't going anywhere. What censorship is good and why?
Grab the issue firmly and actually try to answer the question.
Let's start with some basics: who is regulating discourse? Broadly speaking, the elite. There are many factors, but the essence of power is being able to influence those factions with intention.
The elite, through various mechanisms, regulate discourse in their society.
The next question is whether that regime is legitimate. If they are legitimate, we should recognize their authority to regulate discourse.
Legitimacy means they are keeping society from crisis, and delivering progress. What more can we ask? Even that is a high bar.
Given legitimacy and power to regulate discourse, the first task is to maintain political order. The worst kind of crisis is a political crisis; they often turn bloody, and make other issues worse. We have the responsibility to regulate speech that threatens political order.
Twitter's censorship of NYPost was clearly an example of discourse regulation grounded in desire to maintain political order. A legitimate thing in itself, but in context of an already very messy political order situation, and not done with proper legitimate authority.
As a factional conflict between elites that has turned political, it would be a mistake to try to apply a normal standard of justice to the NYPost censorship; all you do is pollute your standard with overriding friend/enemy concerns. The only question here is who you support.
This is the key thing our discourse around censorship is missing: this isn't about what's right, it's about who you support. It doesn't make sense to talk about ideal justice until the political fight is resolved one way or the other.
But not all decisions or censorship are fully political in that sense. Many actually are just the legitimate regime maintaining political order. Even when there are fights within the elite, the regime overall still has the authority to regulate discourse.
Besides political order, we also censor things that are likely to feed into what we judge to be bad ideas or bad paths as a society. Even true social ideas can be harmful in the current state of society. We often censor on these grounds.
There is much more than censorship in discourse regulation: also promotion of certain ideas or conversations that we deem important to the development of society. But this tends to be less confusing and contentious, because it doesn't seek and destroy discourses.
So what about free speech? Is there any limit to what we should censor? Yes actually, restraint in the use of destructive powers is very important to the health of society. We often need conversations we don't want. Therefore censorship needs to be very conservative.
But note this grounds for free speech doesn't have a loophole for nominally private companies. If you are regulating public discourse, which twitter, the media, facebook, et al definitively are, the logic of free speech applies. Legal shell games don't get around this.
These are hard truths. Few people have an interest in admitting that discourse regulation for political order and social progress, AND free speech are both important. They are sometimes in tension, but navigating such tensions is what makes the difference in good government.
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There will be no grandchildren. millennials and zoomers aren't having kids, and aren't going to. How does this affect the world?
This has something to do with economic modernization. Since the late 1700s, modernized societies increasingly prioritize work and leisure over reproduction. Maybe it's just the obvious: institutions that eat the seed corn win.
All modernized populations that don't specifically and deliberately maintain institutional power against it, and even most of those, undergo the demographic transition.
Modernity melted away our certainties. Many of the ideological responses have tried to reclaim them, or create new ones.
What if those choices are no longer open to us? Can we existential uncertainty in a way that lets us navigate the world we've made?
Through @whoiscsmith, we encounter @nntaleb's focus on fragility and heuristics, Alasdair MacIntyre's communitarian thought, and John Gray's critique of humanism.
Likewise, Deleuze's de-centering of the human perspective, and successors like @Outsideness and Manuel de Landa.
You, a "Scientist": I have carefully worked within established frameworks to advance our knowledge slightly. More research is needed.
Sir Isaac Newton, noted weirdo: here, I used math to describe gravity to prove my own weird metaphysical heresy. Brb studying secret bible codes.
All intellectual progress is driven by weirdos with obscure grievances against normal society who are wrong 90% of the time, but uniquely right 10% of the time.
This is very difficult for relatively normal and respectable people to understand. If we admitted that those weirdos we exclude are actually the instruments of progress, our class position is threatened! So we creatively identify ourselves with past heretics, but not current ones
Broke: censorship is fine because Twitter isnt part of the government.
Woke: censorship is fine because Twitter IS part of the government
With more nuance: all societies thought history have engaged in censorship to shape public discourse, shape culture, and yes, cover things up. It's a key power of state.
In America, we would do better by admitting that we manage public discourse with quasi-state power.
We need a national conversation on what the rules should be for censorship, to bring this incredibly dangerous power back under the purview of formal government.
The current informality just turns over a key power to political gangsters with no restraints.
You can't separate civilian and military nuclear power. This drives fear of nuclear. We need to come to terms with this, and build a positive vision of a green nuclear-powered civilization.
When Japan talks about their peaceful nuclear program, they are sure to mention how much plutonium they have, and how successful their rocket program has been. They want you to know how close they are.
Progress in civilization is largely denser forms of energy and power generation. Renewables are too low-density, and thus high-impact. An individual's lifetime energy use can fit in a few kilograms of uranium. Very low actual waste.