I wonder if there's anything we can't look up on the Internet now. We probably don't need to do philosophy any longer. We can just look up anything we're wondering about. — Terrapin Station

It would solve a lot of problems, yes. Philosophy forums seem to attract people who lack common sense.

Sure. Everything is relevant to some things to some people, and irrelevant to some things to some people. — Terrapin Station

Yes, like I said, it's irrelevant. Like if I said that I'm in favour of maintaining the ban on hate speech because ham sandwiches don't play chess.

Oh, that was easy. That solves the issue. I should have thought of that. — Terrapin Station

Yes, you should have. The legal definition and examples are available to you through the internet.

It's not a straw man because I'm not presenting it as someone else's argument. — Terrapin Station

Okay, then it's just irrelevant.

Yeah, that's a can of worms we didn't get into--just what counts as hate speech? — Terrapin Station

You have access to the internet. Look it up.

There's no "cost" to consider. — Terrapin Station

Yes there is. Your opinion doesn't matter in the bigger picture.

It's not that speech can't have an effect on others. It's that it can't be shown to force them to perform particular actions. — Terrapin Station

No, you've already been told that that's a straw man.

What makes you a moron here is that you think that particular ethical stances have anything to do with intelligence. — Terrapin Station

Baden said to give it a rest with the insults, so pack it in, you moron.

You can not possibly be that much of a moron. Seriously. — Terrapin Station

This coming from the guy who said the following:

Should the state prosecute people who order killings or have a stance or an ideology which promotes violence?
— Wittgenstein

No, not in my view. A number of times I've brought up the extreme case that people like to bring up (and I now see you did in the following post): to my knowledge, Hitler never killed anyone. I don't know what, if any crimes (that I'd consider a crime) he committed, but certainly no speech, nothing he ever ordered, etc. should be considered a crime. — Terrapin Station

...among other gems.

Every time you say this:

I'm a free speech absolutist. — Terrapin Station

...you're basically saying, "I'm a massive moron".

I may have missed it, but the guy who is most protective of free speech has mainly or entirely avoided insulting or ad homming those on the other side of the fence. — Coben

Entirely. :up:

We have a fantastic promotion on at the moment, although it's ending soon, so you'll have to get on there quick if you want a bargain!

Oh here we go. You’ve admitted you are employed to manipulate people through words as a living. It’s not working so well here, is it? — NOS4A2

Yes, I'm self-aware that my job involves manipulation. Whereas you're in denial about your own rhetoric.

By the way, have you considered renovating your bathroom?

Sorcery then.

That's a lie.

I do. I am confidently inoculated against it. — NOS4A2

"Confidently inoculated". You're a walking contradiction. You just admitted in a separate discussion to hyperbole and sarcasm. You yourself are full of fallacy and rhetorical trickery, but you're in denial, whereas others are at least more self-aware.

Like Gorgias, sophists overestimate the power words, and believe they can produce magical effects on other bodies. Hence their rampant use of fallacy and rhetorical trickery. — NOS4A2

You'd know all about that.

One irony is that people who are for the censorship of hate speech spend time telling each other negative things about him. IOW just his arguments, but him as a person. I may have missed it, but the guy who is most protective of free speech has mainly or entirely avoided insulting or ad homming those on the other side of the fence. — Coben

You definitely just missed it! :lol:

And that's not an irony, because nothing that we've said counts as hate speech. Not even close. My goodness! There's a world of difference between mere negative comments and hate speech.

Only if you suspiciously leave out the possessive pronouns. — NOS4A2

"My leg detached from my body in the accident".

My biology, my body, same thing. — NOS4A2

Clearly not the same thing. In English, "I found a body in the canal" cannot be accurately translated as "I found a biology in the canal".

And the lies from Trump that you have just acknowledged in this post? — praxis

:lol:

If by “having a personality” you mean I behave and act in certain ways, yes, but if you mean I am something more than my biology, no. — NOS4A2

Funny how "body" became "biology", by the way. You do like to move the goalposts, don't you?

Exactly. We can forgive each other’s hyperbole and sarcasm. — NOS4A2

What's there to forgive? I thought words were powerless?

You believe in sorcery?

Nixon 2.0.

A lie. It’s amazing that the very people who wag their finger at the president for his falsities have no qualms about spewing their own. — NOS4A2

Maybe you should look up the difference between a lie and something said with tongue in cheek. Your idol has a proclivity for both.

You may know all his so-called “lies” and repeat them verbatim, but I wonder if you can express anything he said that was true? Or is that evidence the contrary strictly forbidden? — NOS4A2

That thing he said about covfefe. The rest of it was lies.

Oh right, you believe in sorcery. — NOS4A2

Yes. Hitler was a warlock, and Churchill was a wizard. Churchill was famed for his black Homburg hat, but little is it known that in private, when he was casting spells and such, he wore a purple conical-shaped hat with a broad brim.

They don’t — NOS4A2

And yet we just agreed that slick talkers have made significant achievements, which apparently had nothing to do with their "powerless words". I thought that Hitler rose to fame and power through his speeches in the beer halls, and that Churchill's speeches boosted British morale during the war, but I must have just dreamt that.

Well, I was talking about the last few presidents, but sure, point taken. — NOS4A2

And yet, "words have no power", right?

Maybe you should focus on polices instead of words, as you've pressed others to do.

So we agree that slick talkers have made significant achievements.

But what has a slick talker or ivy-league lawyer ever really done? What have they created? — NOS4A2

Helped the Allies win the Second World War? (Winston Churchill).

I don't know. @Hanover, what do you think? :smirk:

Off with his head, I say.

Britain Trump has said that suggestions the suspension was motivated by a desire to force through a no deal were "completely untrue".

So if a lot of people agree to how it's being made up, then it's good to go?
— Terrapin Station

Yes, have you a better plan with subjective harms and benefits? Ignore them all to serve some religious ideology? Come and ask you? Why on earth shouldn't a community get together and decide that the risk of allowing people to say "Gas the Jews" isn't worth the benefit? — Isaac

He doesn't really have any answers, and what he has revealed about his vision of how society should be is ludicrously impractical, chaotic, and dystopian. He is just an opinionated and outspoken ideologue.

So he gave an example of antisemitic language and the detrimental effects that it can have. There's no shortage of examples of that. Look up Nazi Germany. Once you've removed your head from your arse, that is.

You have no logical reason to be asking about that specific phrase, rather than antisemitic phrases generally. But if you want to be illogical in a futile attempt to gain the upper hand in this debate for a second notable time, like when you deliberately selected a sample group that was far too small, then be my guest.

I'm not making it up, and whether or not you believe that is irrelevant. I weighed up the costs and benefits before reaching my conclusion. You can do likewise, but my analysis is sensible and unbiased, whereas yours has been unreasonably skewed from the start because you are a hopelessly biased free speech fanatic.

I said "that sort of thing". I was charitably assuming that your example wasn't specific to the point of absurdity.

I've never denied any such correlation, and you never asked me about one. You did ask me a question which was poorly framed, like if I were to ask you whether chocolate causes obesity, so I decided not to answer directly, but instead to indicate the problem with the question.

We've already explained why hate speech should be banned, but video games like GTA and horror films shouldn't be. It's not our fault if you ignore the explanation that we've given. Hate speech fails the cost-benefit analysis, whereas video games like GTA and horror films don't. Although of course some that go too far do fail the cost-benefit analysis, and we have laws and regulations in place for that very reason. There's a reason why you can't walk into your local video game store and purchase a copy of Jew Killer, because such a game doesn't exist for obvious reasons.

The philosophy of software engineering? Oh boy, that sounds exciting. Where do I sign up?

Well, on the scale of stupidity, from Kanye to Einstein, I would give it a stupidity rating of... oh, wait, that was a rhetorical question. I see what you did there.

He's not properly engaging your list of lies because he either can't be bothered or because he senses that you have a point, or a combination of the two. It requires less effort to hand wave and it functions as an evasive maneuver. But I'm confident that he could produce propaganda explaining away each lie on that list. He moulds himself in the fashion of his idol.

Like many others, I spotted the logical consequences from the very start, which is why in my very first comment in this discussion I said that hate speech should of course be banned, and remarked that the Second World War is still in living memory.

There hasn't been any real argument against this line of reasoning, just around forty pages of persistent and unreasonable doubt. Their stance on cause and effect in relation to speech generally, and hate speech in particular, lacks any explanatory power, and should be rejected on that basis. And the stance that hate speech shouldn't be banned should be rejected based on a reasonable assessment of history and a sensible cost-benefit analysis. Turning up with a die-hard commitment to free speech fanaticism in spite of all reason is not a credible stance, so Terrapin, along with his vampiric compadre, is just wasting his time and effort here.