I am concerned that non agreeable forums could not still link somehow.

Why? If one forum is an absolute cesspool of toxicity and abuse, then why should my forum link to it? Why should I be forced to implicitly participate?

If you force me to host content I’m highly against, I’m just going to shut down the whole service. I don’t owe you or anyone else an uncensored space and I definitely shouldn’t be forced to provide it.

Well no I would not force you to link to it or participate, you seem to have missed the point I made which is if things get banned etc the conversation could continue. For that end I would guess that lemmy have some open api that you can continually pull content from.

I am not asking to force you to do anything, you can restrict speech however you want just don’t expect to be popular at all or to be beneficial to society or to achieve those utopian socialist goals you probably aspire to, no one has yet and infact free capitalist society is the closest yet L-)

it is clear that the current round of censorship that is hitting most is from the left.

Lol, have you even read up on American politics lately? Who is trying to suppress voters, the ultimate form of censorship in a democracy? Who is spewing misinformation to down out all the facts? Which president keeps saying that journalists who report on him negatively should be fired and threatens to cut funding to universities if they don’t agree with him?

Yes I follow politics very closely. If you think voting is the problem you a few levels not deep enough. Your vote doesn’t matter at all, you are not even given an option. The fact you think you have an option is how effective they are at this. You are watching theater all designed to convince you it’s real.

As a capitalist I think government should not fund education at all, in fact I think many of the societal problems with for example woke culture and identity politics and disconnect from reality socialist ideologies are a direct product of socialized government funded education.

The thing is speech in of itself does not cause harm.

You’re objectively wrong. Anyone who has been verbally or emotionally abused can attest to this. Anyone who has been stalked or doxxed, or had their intimate pictures leaked can attest to this. Anyone who has their life ruined because they were accused of something they didn’t do can attest to this.

Stalking is not speech, doxxing is used to produce a physical threat so it is problematic, verbal abuse is not great but you can learn to resist it, for example police put up with it daily and the effect wears thin. False accusations are a problem. I had always thought doxing was only a tool used by the left or well the examples I have seen are that, can you show me opposite examples?

Now just because some people can not control themselves in reacting to certain speech does not necessarily mean you should stop certain speech

If you say something knowing that someone else could see it and cause them to do something violent, why shouldn’t you be liable? If I told someone else to beat you up, knowing they probably will after hearing me, am I innocent because I didn’t personally do it?

The person doing the physical harm should always be responsible. Obviously there is laws where say if a person asks harm to be done and it is they are responsible. It gets complicated for certain like that, because you can have for example criminal arrangements where speech is like pulling the trigger on a gun. One person orders others to commit crimes etc. Still the speech is not the direct cause of harm it can be viewed as a link, but the speech in of itself does not do harm.

You seem to be arguing in borderline bad faith but you can not show me possibly one instance of speech causing harm.

You seem to think harm means physical harm when mental/emotional harm can just as easily break a person. People have been permanently traumatized or even committed suicide over verbal abuse or false allegations. People have literally killed themselves over racism, sexism, homophobia and all manner of other non-physical bullying, try telling any of them or their friends and family how harmless those words were.

Again these are peoples response to the speech, its the response that is causing the harm. I mean you literally give the example of suicide which is self harm. You will I think find that society has become much softer verbally and also much more sensitive, they go hand in hand. You can toughen and handle these with mental exercises. I am most sensitive to their problem but the thing is why does anyone have the right to control others speech when they can’t control their own emotions? This is a problem of responsibility and passing your own problems onto others only makes you less or even not in control of them.

Interesting problem you bring up like with homophobia, this is a persons response to the expression aka speech of someone overtly homosexual, by your reasoning it’s the homosexuals problem because it’s his speech that is caused the problem for the homophobe. You see where this is going? you can draw similar reasoning for most anything even sexism or racism. Another thing is I am not so sure gays fair to well in socialist utopias…

All speech is meant to be legal in the US but exceptions have been carved out for a variety of reasons.

In order of increasing severity: Slander, threats, aiding and abetting less serious crime, obscene material, aiding and abetting serious crime, and child pornography are all banned and all for very good reason. Those are all non-physical things yet they’re all harmful, so what’s that about speech not being harmful.

I disagree and agree. Again the speech itself is not causing the harm, but it’s the response to the speech, in those cases, like particularly slander stopping the speech seems the most effective means to prevent the problem. The thing is in many cases no one is sure if someone is slanderous until it is too late. Like with child porn too there is a gray area where it can be hard to guess an exact age. People get really sick having to filter it so like on saidit a general porn ban is just much easier.

on the right they have far more impulse control and so are less likely to react so the left will always be at a disadvantage to freer speech as they have less impulse control and as with their favorite word “triggered” so easily.

If you literally can’t debate in a polite and civilized manner, which includes not dropping offensive words left and right or attacking your opponents, then your opinion probably sucks.

Not a fan of comedy I take it? Well it can be really good and uses a lot of language. Given that you just used offensive language to me what am I to think? What if I just start being offended by more and more words you use? I could easily throw this back at you and say if you can’t get past words that could be considered offensive in a debate your mind probably sucks, and I apologize I really do not mean to insult your mind it’s just an example.

And I’m not even going to comment on what kind of person you are if your “favorite” word is a slur that objectively has a definition meant to insult a certain group.

Words truly only have the power you give them, by being offend and labeling things slurs etc you are literally creating the problem around the word. Again it’s not the speech but the response that is the problem.

If I started abusing you in a foreign language which I can, and you didn’t understand it at all, didn’t use a translator etc, how would you feel? Remember you don’t know it’s abuse, you don’t even know what it is except some weird words. Like if I typed some numbers 234234 and they were an encryption for a slur etc? I still used a slur I still abused you but you had no response, these things rely on the response and trust me you can control that. By insulating your world you are actually making that control harder.

With no discussion there will be no real progress and to that how can you call yourselves progressives?

Discussion, not abuse. Spewing slurs is not discussion. Attacking people is not discussion.

Fair points. I get abuse, I get slurs, but attacking? You have to attack the ideas of someone else to have a good discussion and that can mean their beliefs and identity sometimes.

It is sad the segmentation of communities online, it makes it harder for people to talk to each other and fosters bubbles, which will push further separation and in some cases radicalization. I look at the riots as a product of this. The super sad thing is this play is straight out of divide and rule or conquer. The rich minority that controls everything are the ones that benefit from this. The internet should be the most powerful tool to bring us together and organize but instead it seems to be ripping us apart.

I would love to fix our democracy, and that means people knowing they are represented and by who and that those people share their values and ideas instead of just their geography… I get you probably believe in socialism, but I hope we at least share in a belief in democracy. I would be very willing to concede that a lack of democracy was the major flaw in communism. I hope for a startrek future where physical products are so easy to make wealth and capital become irrelevant. but we are very far from that future and to get their is going to take a lot of smarts and work still. You may despise capitalism but someone like Elon Musk having all the money and power he has now is our best hope we make things better. Because ultimately it doesn’t matter about most terrestrial problems something eventually a huge asteroid something else will destroy us here so we better move off at some point.