It’s been more than a week since MPP Sarah Jama was booted from the Ontario NDP caucus and censured by the Ontario government for daring to name Israel as an Apartheid state. It’s been more than a week since CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn agreed to
This is exactly why we need to have open and censorship resistant platforms.
We should never celebrate deplatforming people for unpopular or evil opinions, not because we agree with those opinions, but because those tools can and will be used against good causes / us eventually.
The cancelling culture, and rage framework that has existed in the west media is now being turned against “worthy” causes.
I’ve gotten into many deplatforming is evil, and shouldn’t be encouraged/allowed arguments on lemmy - this is exactly why I engage. Do I care about kiwifarms, communists, racists, no… I do not, but when its time for my voice to be heard above the whargarble of public opinion i need those very same platforms to exist.
The next step would be to legistate that protected free speech should also protect people from employment discrimination and reprisals, but that is probably a discussion for another day.
Today I think the big fight is over saying : Killing civilians is bad, ethnic cleansing is bad, genocide is bad…
We should never celebrate deplatforming people for unpopular or evil opinionsBullshit, people with evil opinions keep others from expressing themselves, tolerating them means deplatforming others and means they have more space to recruit.
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Agreed. The central example is a NDP member being censured by the party for her views. THAT IS WHAT A POLITICAL PARTY IS. She would have also been removed if she started arguing for tax cuts to the wealthy and restrictions on union activity. Even perfectly legitimate political opinions can make you totally unfit to be a representative of a political party. Words have consequences and political parties are social structures with social rules. Cry me a river, this isn’t a free-speech issue.
Then you get this situation the article speaks of, people being de-platformed for speaking against evil in the world.
Sure, it doesn’t make your message right.
Clearly we have a philosophical divide. We value different things in this world. We are both “right” to our own philosophies.
If one group can make another voiceless i think that is a larger risk to the human condition, but I see where your coming from.
It’s just another variant of the paradox of tolerance.
I’m very consistent in my views, I do not tolerate anyone being de-platformed. I am intolerant of de-platforming. I do not tolerate anyone trying to remove the voice of anyone else.
I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. - Poppel The Open Society and It’s Enemies
De-platforming is a form of rhetorical suppression, as OPs article points out.
Which means that you tolerate intolerance.
The saying goes that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
De-platforming is a means to show that the platform doesn’t want to be associated with specific content. Being against de-platforming means you are on the side of forced speech.
I’ve never heard the term forced speech before, the only references I can find are legal referring to compelled testimony in court. Can you give me a reference so I can better understand you?
The saying goes that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
I’m afraid I missed that part of Open Society, my understanding is the intolerance of tolerance was making it criminal to have calls to violence, at least as I understood the book.
Finna deplatform you right now with the block button, babes 💞
Sorry to have offended you. I didn’t mean to cause you distress.
The article points out that those that have been bitching about free speech being suppressed when it’s about some bigot spewing fash crap, are uniquely silent when it comes to racialized people speaking out about genocide and apartheid. The “free speech debate”, “anti-wokism”, “anti-cancelling” etc has never been about lifting the voices of those who are structurally silenced at every turn in this country. It has always been about people that already have privilege being able to punch down with impunity. So fuck that.
I’m here making noise about the silencing of genocide and apartheid.
As an aside, the number of times, this week!, I’ve had a argument about the dictionary being wrong, and that the definitions are inaccurate, sensational, antisemitic… is laughably high.
Arguing that the dictionary is correct and should be cited as the arbiture of language ignores that language is a fluid, evolving structure. Dictionaries are guides to help seek understanding and seeking to be understood. They’re not law by which we must abide.