Believe it or not, the Weimar Republic had very advanced hate speech laws, and the Nazis were routinely suppressed and banned, many of them jailed.

In free speech literature, the notion that if only there were hate speech laws to counter the Nazis, the holocaust might not have happened, is a fallacy.It’s known as the Weimar Fallacy.

https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would-censorship-have-stopped-rise-nazis-part-16-answers

Chomsky makes a similar argument. He says that the reason there is no real threat of fascism in America is that there is free speech. While in Europe fascism and holocaust denial is taken seriously, and routinely banned, in America holocaust deniers are allowed to distribute their literature with little to no censorship, and as a result their ideas just aren’t taken seriously.

Fair point and good objection. I think Popper was largely talking about reactionary violence, where they “answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols”. Suppressing their intolerant philosophies would be “most unwise”, but one ought to fight back if violence occurs.

I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that “cancel culture” fell into that camp. I say this because speakers are often shouted down, or there are bomb threats, swatting, vandalism, even violence etc. though I may be mixing up my terms. I’m not even sure “cancel culture” is an actual phenomenon, to be honest.

Well said. Yes, there’s value to knowing what people really think even when it’s wrong, ugly, ill-mannered or offensive. I would even argue it would be better to encourage such speech and the tolerance of it, at least to know what people believe and to keep them public, rather than send them into hiding as you say.

I am against taxes for the same reason I’m against theft, exploitation, and slavery. Taxes is on par with slavery because the tax man is taking the fruits of another’s labor. In other words, not only is a worker toiling for the tax man for free, but at a loss. It’s theft or extortion because one is punished if one doesn’t pay. It’s exploitation because the tax man benefits himself and his beneficiaries from the work of others. So the values of your State appear to be slavery, theft, and exploitation.

Advertising works. I don’t think advertising is a waste of money. How else can someone know what you’re trying to sell, or that you exist if you don’t tell them that you do?

It’s not magic, though. When people keep treating words and symbols as magic spells, as if they can animate someone to do this or that, I object to that, and I don’t know why it is so controversial.

It has nothing to do with my unbreakable will. It’s simple physics and biology. You cannot control another’s motor cortex with words. You cannot cause someone to buy a thing any more than you cause them to forget the advertisement of the thing altogether. I cannot cause you to agree with me and vice versa.

You’re placing nothing in my head. My desires, fears, beliefs, thoughts, concepts—they all find their genesis in me and me alone. All of your examples about pets and Subway all fall prey to post hoc ergo proctor hoc, after this therefor because of this. None of them show any causal factors between one or the other.

I own a house on land in Massachusetts. It was originally included in a grant from the King of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony then portioned out smaller grants to people who wanted to start communities. The leaders of those communities then granted properties to people who wanted to move into that town. Over the years, those granted properties were subdivided, sold, and developed until the real estate system we have today resulted. I don't see any "natural right" in this process. Governments took the property by fiat and created the property rights out of the air. Ownership was legitimized and documented by the government, which also enforces the laws that protect property rights.

That’s not quite the case. Many puritans purchased land off the natives, in spite of the government fiat. Even Joh Winthrop said the natives had natural rights. Natural rights influenced much of the founding of the country, at least nominally.

Like it or not, God didn't give us our properties, the government did. It's a service it provides. I think protection of property rights is very important - the quality of my life depends on it - but it's a legal and not a moral responsibility.

Another New England example would be Rhode Island, purchased from the natives by Roger Williams. All the services of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like religious persecution, compelled Williams to flee from that colony to found one of his own. The natives were not a part of any government, had no law and especially no government rights, but the just transfer of property between one holder and another occurred anyways.

All you’d have to do is compare the amount of advertisements you see to the amount of those products you buy. I don’t know about your case, but in mine the result is near nil, and I see advertisements almost on a daily basis.

It is likely that my case is similar to many; but perhaps there are people who buy the products of every advertisement they see. In any case, the sheer amount of advertisements one sees in comparison to the amount of those products one buys ought to provide a sufficient data-set of whether it is the case, or is logically falsified.

What about inciting people to murder then? Or even inciting them to persecute others? To anticipate a likely objection: you might argue that people make up their own minds what to do, in which case you would be hopelessly naive.

If you wouldn’t mind demonstrating your ability to incite someone to do something else, it would be appreciated. I will be your willing subject if you wish.

I was hoping this would not be necessary: It is hard for me to see how you're not trolling.

The question is obviously and clearly about speech. So, can you have another go and see what kind of speech I might be talking about?

I’ve already argued that speech cannot cause harm. So maybe you can tell me what harms you’re speaking about.

I don’t represent anyone. No illusions here.

How am I incorrect? It’s quite easy to prove me wrong: make me feel fear with your words. Incite me to violence. You won’t because you know you cannot do any such thing, despite claiming the opposite.

So, you're simply unable to imagine any sort of reality or situation where all of a sudden you're not in the position you have become accustomed to? Not even a little bit? No empathy or ability to sympathize with other people who aren't like yourself? Mate... that's not just illogical. It's inhuman.

Where do you get that from what I wrote? Odd.



You don’t want to test your magical theory?

I don’t believe government makes property rights—or any rights—because I believe in something like natural rights. State rights are merely the concessions of our collective servitude, in my view.

But I’m still not a complete anarchist yet. If the government protected our natural rights and made justice costly and accessible, then went no further, I would voluntarily pay for such a service. It would be a government as illustrated in the Declaration of Independence, and I’d be one of its biggest cheerleaders.

I find it hilarious that you think that the best way to combat slander and defamation is to call someone a liar and let them carry on the rest of their lives... living with themselves. What if you wronged me and I didn't care? I could make up so much terrible stuff about you and completely ruin your life and wouldn't miss a second of sleep about it, if I disliked you that much it may even help me sleep at night knowing that I ruined your life... You simply cannot allow someone to do that with no repercussions.

I’m sure you could come up with some terrible stuff and wouldn’t miss a wink of sleep. But it’s your word against mine, and I don’t think you’d be that convincing.

Can I ask what you think about NDA's? Surely you don't think a piece of paper can stop you from speaking as well. What about Classified information? should there be repercussions for breaching these?

I don’t think so, no.

I find that Free speech absolutists ignore the damage you can do with words.

Technically speaking you are correct, words cannot cause harm and the harm comes through reactionary actions.

This is a similar justification with gun violence, "Guns don't kill people, people do". I feel like both are absolving the blame on one factor and piling it all on another factor simply because it fits their narrative. Speech can be used as a tool to: Incite violence, Abuse people, Cause fear, Slander, defamation and much more... Can I ask why you think that you are within your right to do these things and why your rights supersede the victims rights to not have these things happen to them?

If I was passing by a school on the street and I started screaming really threatening stuff to the children on the other side of the gate, should I be arrested?

I understand I am peppering you with questions, I am just seeing how far your absolutism goes.

It’s magical thinking. You can’t cause me harm or make me do things with your words. To believe that is to believe in sorcery.

We can run a simple test. You can try it on me. I will be your willing participant. Make me commit violence with your words, or make me fearful. Abuse me, or whatever. According to you your words should be able to cause me to do things, maybe feel pain. Let’s try it and see if that is true.

“Go forth, my disciples, and murder those who would oppose”. Is murder not the “out-going harm” you were speaking of, then? Then what, exactly, is the out-going harm?

I never said anything about allowing murder.

Not if you're successful - you will harm and that'll be that. Still happens these days.
That's the point. Causing actual damage is something which needs to be addressed. You cannot rely on social life for justice. It is almost never going to happen. I'm very sympathetic to an actual 'absolute' freedom of speech, but the harms visited by speech on concert with intent to harm is something I am not comfortable with.

Kinetically speaking, causing damage with words is impossible. There isn’t enough energy in a word to inflict a wound on even the slightest of biologies. Perhaps yelling a word may harm an eardrum, but you could do the same with any sound.

The harms begin only in the reaction to words, and how people use them to justify their actions towards others.

So should I be able to publicly slander and defame you for being a pedophile and lie, resulting in you losing your job and every social factor that would come along with that and be able to continue to carry on with my day with no repercussions?

I don’t think you’d get the responses you’re looking for. The repercussion is you’ll be known as a liar, slanderer, and a defamer. You’d also have to live with yourself.

A small quibble. Slander and defamation are usually civil wrongs, not criminal, but I don’t think they should be treated as such. In any case, the fact that something is a civil wrong or a crime doesn’t mean it ought to be. People still claim yelling fire in a crowded theater is illegal, for instance, but they are merely repeating the fatuous ruling of Oliver Wendell Holmes, which has long since been overruled by later precedent.

Do you believe that there should be consequence to certain speech? Realistically we can all say whatever we want at any point, but do you believe people should be able to say WHATEVER they want at any point with no consequence ever?

No, I do not believe there should be consequences for speech, and yes, I do believe people should be able to say whatever they want at any point with no consequence ever.

Yep, the FBI’s collapse is immanent. Any day now.

Let speech be free absolutely.

There is no point in censorship and it is a double violation of rights. It denies the speaker his fundamental right to open his mouth and speak, and it denies the rest of us our right to listen to it. I can’t think of one person, alive or dead, who ought to have the power to tell us what we can or cannot say.

Thanks for the discussion.

Years back I did a very unscientific analysis, gathered as much as I could regarding the convictions of politicians for crimes in the United States, and separated their crimes by political party. To my surprise the Democrats had more corruption convictions, while republicans excelled in sex-related crimes. Their respective leads were negligible, at best, so the analysis was fruitless, but the moral development seemed to be lacking in both just about the same.

I object to the left/right paradigm in general because left and right are so nearly identical in their underlying philosophies. They both hold to the republican belief in the sovereign power of political machinery, that so long as their people are allowed to tinker with it long enough and send it off running in the direction of their choosing, everyone will get The Good Life. Once their power is threatened they act as a praetorian guard. Sprinkle on top of this activity some surface-level rhetorical content and one might be able to convince others there is a distinguishing mark between these two factions, but on the whole it is all similar. Perhaps, the only differences are the incidence of the beneficiaries. At any rate, this specious divide is what we get for modelling a political spectrum after the seating plan of the National Assembly.

I also object to the social categorization at use here and for the same reasons I would do so for all sorts of identity politics. There are as many political beliefs as there are people, and the term “Left” and “Right” are by now slurs meant to impugn another, or otherwise to signal one’s political purity, and not much else. A whole host of fallacy results.

Let's stop the obfuscation - what is your answer to my question? Do you as a libertarian/liberal have a responsibility not to benefit from the exploitation of others.

Absolutely.

Suppose there are two methods by which man’s economic needs and desires can be satisfied, through production and exchange, or through the appropriation of the production and exchanges of others. One is diligence, the other exploitation. Government employs the second method.

Do you believe you have the same responsibility?

When given the opportunity, powerful people will enslave others. Will use violence to prevent organizing. Will pay less than livable wages to people with limited choices. Will allow their employees to work in life-threatening conditions. Same as it ever was. To the extent that it isn't, it's because of government and labor unions.

I hope it is merely irony to advocate for the regulation of everyone’s lives just in case powerful people were to enslave us. Maybe if the government appropriates enough from the fruits of my own labor it will help stop the powerful from taking my things.

I’m curious, though, that if given the opportunity, would you enslave others? If not, why do you assume others will?

Your moral purity is maintained based on the lives and misery of millions of people.

One thing is for certain, my morality is maintained based on my actions towards others, not on my political beliefs and voting patterns. It’s clear to me, at least, that one is unable to judge another’s moral character from what he says about government regulation or what box he marks on a ballot.

Clearly there are many good people out there advocating and voting for higher wages for workers, for more protections and better conditions, and so on, but how many of those good people are out there providing them? Providing those things to workers can be moral, no doubt, but voting to force people to provide those things cannot be moral.

In my experience, libertarians don't really have much interest in "our obligations to our fellow man and to our communities." Take environmental protection - a typical libertarian recommendation of what to do when Dupont dumps tetraethyldeath in the river where I get my drinking water is to take them to court. If you don't see how laughable that is, there's not much more I can say.

Most libertarians are not interested in the welfare of their fellow citizens. Many of them see themselves as rugged individualists who deserve all the credit for what they have accomplished. They don't recognize what has been given to them just by living in our society.

Libertarianism is just another name for anarchy. I'm not using that as an insult. I mean it as a description. This from the web - Anarchy - the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government. And it won't work, can't work, for any large modern society. It's pie in the sky.

There is plenty anarchist and libertarian literature showing that the opposite is the case. I’ll accept your experience in good faith but I’m going to defer to my own experience.

They just have a little more faith in human nature and their fellow man, that if the government disappears tomorrow not everyone will go to war with one another. They believe people will largely cooperate, as they do already.

But most of all they are taking a moral stance. They refuse to rely on an instrument of exploitation and coercion to achieve cooperation with others. To do so, to me, is a sign of moral poverty. At any rate, it’s a sign that one doesn’t have much else to offer but his fealty to some class of politicians.

Speaking of pie in the sky, the vain hope that we can elect a bunch of angels to run the government is an absurd one. But, I guess we’ll keep trying anyways.

I agree with everything you've written, but what's the alternative? I would be more sympathetic to the libertarian view if there were any acknowledgement of a societal obligation to create a society where people can live decent, secure lives. Fact is, I don't think it ever crossed most of their minds. They don't really care. Do you?

The alternative is to do it ourselves. Even the most limited, night-watchman state, does not preclude our obligations to our fellow man and to our communities.

I would argue that delegating those duties and responsibilities to a bureaucracy or voting for a political party is the very least one could do in that regard, so much so that’s it’s tantamount to doing nothing, save that it allows us to signal our bonafides and allegiances. I don’t think that any of this crosses the statist mind.

Your discourse is unobjective. You do show American theory. The problem has to do with the maintenance of an objective and official State, an apparatus of welfare, coercion, and compulsion that is perpetually accountable to the citizens.

If by “accountable to the citizens”, you mean citizens get to vote out a few people in power every few years, then exactly what part of the state are we holding accountable?

The welfare, coercion, and compulsion remains, the only things changing are the beneficiaries. Posturing for the power to wield an instrument of economic exploitation such as an official State doesn’t seem to me to be an objective worth taking part in.

I care. The investigation is the punishment in American jurisprudence. It can bankrupt people.

You’re right, save for the conflation of conservatives and libertarians. I understand the close relation of the two in the United States, but they ought to be distinguished.

Conservatives are not unlike progressives in their application of government intervention into the lives of others. Arguably the first welfare state was a conservative invention, for instance, but also militarism, subsidizing, and taxation comes to mind.

One of the arguments in libertarian literature is that conservatives cannot offer an alternative direction to the one that we are heading, that is, to the enlargement of the state and the ever-growing positive encroachments into the lives of others.

See Hayek’s “Why I am not a Consevative” as an example.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf

I don't follow the bolded part. Property dualism would allow for a seperate soul that all infants have (and arguably fetuses too) that would protect them against any abuse, regardless of age, awareness, or intellectual capacity.

It’s much the same. In my understanding Property dualism is like dualism except it uses non-physical mental phenomena instead of souls and spirits.

In an act of sweet revenge, it looks like Letitia James is getting treated the way she treated Donald Trump. Now she’s being investigated for mortgage fraud. I’m under the mind that she’s getting what she deserves.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/nyregion/trump-letitia-james-mortgage-fraud.html

The notion that infants are not self-aware, therefore it is acceptable to end their being, illustrates the utter disregard for the material human body in favor of one’s own abstractions. That one can look at an infant and make such a calculation in order to justify eviscerating that human being is a calculation that ought to be condemned as evil, but is the logical ethics of property dualism. The infant lacks an undefinable property, does not act as my ideal person would, therefore he is inhuman, a zombie, or otherwise not a person. It is perhaps the logic of all atrocity and genocides.

The question boggles me, too. Thoughts and verbal or written expressions are perhaps the least consequential and harmless actions a person can make in his life time. So it is a conundrum why people get so worked up about beliefs and words and often respond with some very consequential and harmful actions, like censorship, ostracization, or even violence.

Can such an inconsequential act, like the imperceptible movements of the brain and making articulated sounds from the mouth, be evil? I don’t think so. I believe the reactions to acts of speech, though, undoubtedly are, and represent some sort of superstition of language, though I no argument for it yet.

“No one is above the law”.

Racist anti-Trump prosecutor Letitia James appears to be in hot water for possible mortgage fraud and for living in Virginia while serving as AG for New York, which would mean her AG office is vacant according to New York law. The Trump administration hit her with a federal criminal referral yesterday.

https://www.newsweek.com/letitia-james-attorney-general-new-york-residence-2060152

It’s great seeing people get what they deserve.

Good read, Tim.

I’m against the idea that liberalism is the problem because I do not believe liberalism has really taken off in the first place. I believe that when the proponents of an ideology completely violate the root word of that ideology, they are merely nominal liberals, or otherwise not liberal. So with that I get to side-step the common criticisms of liberalism. Rather, the problem of liberalism is that it is not liberal, and it never was. It is, and always has been, illiberal. We saw this most recently and clearly during the previous pandemic, how quickly a self-proclaimed free country can turn into a totalitarian hellscape. But we’ve seen it in times of war or other moments where its reign is threatened by disorder and conflict or even contrary opinion.

The life of every individual who occupies space in a self-proclaimed liberal country is highly regulated from birth until death, from cradle until grave. I would argue that liberalism’s discontents are unhappy with what the individual has become with his decreasing margin of existence.

iIlliberalism has always been the dominant ideology. Any rare inroad to freedom was the mere concession of a far mightier and dominant love of manorial order that has reigned since the time of Rome and beyond. Even the communist and fascist revolutionaries built republics, and on the ruins of what was there before. Mixed constitutions, the rule of positive law, federal judiciaries, taxation, the political oligarchy we like to call representative democracy, clamoring for state rights rather than natural ones—this is not the project of liberalism and never has been.

I have declared zero successes, to be sure, nor have I made any predictions of future events. That’s a fool’s game, yet it is absolutely pertinent to the lucrative anti-Trump racket.

The racket goes like this: predict a future Trump calamity, like a depression or nuclear war or fascist takeover. When it never arrives, promote oneself and one’s own failed prophesies as part of the efforts that helped stop it. Rinse, repeat.

I don’t know you, and haven’t followed most of your previous comments on politics, so I dont know what your political perspective is in general. There has been much written about the New Right, which is a big tent including Peter Thiel, J.D.Vance, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. Some of them, like Musk, Thiel and Mark Andreesen, are enamored of the ‘technocracy’ movement which believes in government by a technocratic elite. Others (Yarvin) are in favor of something more like a monarchical leadership. A. inner of them have high respect for Victor Orban? What do you think of him, and where you do stand with respect to these figures and this movement? Is there one among them who is a kind of guiding light for you? You certainly don’t sound like someone who considers the Reagan or Bush neo-liberal free market vision to be an inspiration for you.

I can’t say I have any guiding lights and don’t silo myself into any particular brand of this or that political philosophy. I like to know what others think so my readings have spanned the entire spectrum and I am comfortable gleaning insights from all of them. My political perspective is always changing but I tend towards anarchy and individualism; and if I had to put a label on it, the only one I would wear comfortably is “individualist”.

What is your perspective in general?

All that being said, I haven’t read anything of the figures you’ve mentioned save for some of Elon’s X posts. I don’t know Orban, have never seen him speak, nor have I read anything he’s written. All I know is that, according to some, I’m supposed to fear him because his name is often evoked with some frightening words.

It doesn’t look like your prediction panned out, much like the one you made about the collapse of the FBI. It appears that the opposite is the case: a deal, a partnership, with the United States acknowledging Panamanian sovereignty. That could all still collapse and fall apart into war and annexation, but so far nothing like it.

Next up, cartels and Iran. Both of these will need to occur to get you back in the green. I read you often and enjoy your efforts, but I’m still trying to assess whether I’m being given insight or fear-mongering.