• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 11 days ago
cake
Cake day: February 4th, 2026

help-circle
  • If the approach is just “look for evil people and then destroy them”, or “if politicians piss the people off, and they’ll come for their head”, it’s likely to produce more evil through the fear that it creates. A good political system is predictable – politicians should know that if they do evil (clearly defined in law), it will become public, and it will have consequences (again, clearly defined in law). This should also apply to all powerful people, not just politicians.

    At the end of the day, the goal is to control and counteract certain ambitions, not to create fear.











  • It is possible to harass and shame people by misgendering them, e.g. by conspicuously and repeatedly referring to them in the third person. I think some people do try to chase trans people off the public square using tactics like that. Beyond that, my gut feeling is that if it’s a belief that’s presented honestly and curiously, those philosophers would want it expressed.

    The whole trans debate is a bit of a mess in this regard, I think. For trans people, it is very personal, and it’s been jazzed up so much by the whole culture war bs. Everyone who has an opinion on it, seem to finish presenting it with “END OF DISCUSSION”, not really in line with those enlightenment ideals.





  • If you read the classical texts defending freedom of speech (Mill, Spinoza, Kant, et.c.), you’ll see that the point was supposed to be to get as many ideas as possible up on the table, so they can be rationally discussed and considered.

    They were quite clear that harassment, shaming and other ways of shutting people up, goes against this purpose - and while they might not want the government to get involved, I don’t think they’d have a big problem with platforms doing content moderation to prevent those sorts of things.