I don’t get the question.

There are other countries in the world, and conservative, liberal and socialist politicians employed the same authoritarianism. The only place I can think of that didn’t was Sweden, and they aren’t exactly the most right-leaning government on Earth. I’m not really sure what you’re getting at, in any case.

Well, we have a special situation where politicians tried to use a public health crisis as a political football. So, now we have a group whose political identity is tied to the denial of a pandemic. So, the suppression, if it can be called that, of inaccurate medical information is intertwined with political positions. The ethics of public health out weigh the ethics of politically driven misinformation. They could probably be quite a bit stricter and still pass based on the exceptions for Police Power to the ends of public health.

And I disagree. If the censorship is "not effective" then one isn't being censored; are they?

When politicians and their health officials can shut down entire industries, control the free flow of information, and rule by decree, it necessarily becomes a political issue. Authoritarianism isn’t the only way to educate and prepare the public for threats to public health, but our so-called liberal democracies have proven that they are willing to resort to such tactics.

Corpses are much different than living bodies, biologically speaking, so no one needs to insert a mind into the equation in order to discern a difference between one and the other. Though the debate about when the moment of death occurs is ongoing and challenging, the “organismal integration” of a living human organism displays activity and functions not present in its corpse state. So materially speaking it’s not because there is no mind that we cremate corpses, but because there is no organismal function and we require a way to dispose of the decaying organic material. Corpses aren’t obviously bad, but the infectious hazards and smells are more than enough reason to dispose of them in such a manner.

I do not think there is any reason to posit an immaterial substance or object when we already have a complex and dynamic organism to consider. Until we learn to value and sanctify that organism itself, evil will persist.

This is new territory, and it’s just as outrageous as the last.

Indeed. Hence fetish: an object believed to have special power to protect.

Free speech is not an object and no one believes it has magical powers, or at least you haven’t shown otherwise. At any rate, any argument against free speech is an argument for censorship, so maybe we can skip the word association and get right to arguing why speech ought to be censored.

Again, it was government that led to censorship on social media in the first place, so it makes little sense to me that only an act of legislation and some legal precedent can fix it.

We've always held that dangerous speech should be censored.

For a long time we thought some people should be slaves. The prevalence of the denial of some right is certainly not an argument against the right itself.

Do you think the government should have the power to inspect restaurants and shut them down if it finds them operating contrary to the public interest?

No, I don’t think so and for the same reason I stated. I don’t know of any solution, but there has to be a better alternative than aggrandizing the state.

It was government posturing and regulations that led to censorship on social media in the first place.

I, for one, don’t want to live in such a society. I believe giving the state such power has the corresponding effect of diminishing social power.

Do you disagree with calling privately owned lunch counters public accommodations in order to force them to serve black customers? They're private companies too, and before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was perfectly legal for them to discriminate on the basis of race.

I do disagree.

I don’t think that. I just think that governments shouldn’t police someone’s speech and beliefs. Do you think they should?

Sure, perhaps he made it up.

The dictum “they are private companies” holds true. When the government forces a company such as Facebook to operate in an approved manner, it violates their free speech.

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/12/biden-covid-vaccination-campaign-499278

Anyone can prove what they are by pointing to themselves. What do you point at when you point to yourself? What do you use to point? What points? In each case it’s the body.

Right, you said “the psych”, another phantom you could never reveal or prove even if you wanted to.

Are you not your body? So be it. You can always pretend and say you are not your body, but you will forever be unable to reveal your true self, in any case.

The problem is when you speak of a mind you tacitly speak of the body, or at least you are unable to produce or point to anything else called “mind”. One is left to wonder what it is exactly you are ascribing value to.

I am my body. So what else besides me commits these actions/reactions?

If you identify with the biology, though, you would be under your own jurisdiction. Self-tyranny is a paradox.

It does not matter if it is effective or not. What matters is the ethics and politics of the situation, whether the state should determine what can and cannot be said, and so on.

So @Tom Storm indicated that “ends justifies means” reasoning. You are assuming that the collateral damage of stress and work is okay to impose for someone else to justify providing possible experiences of joy. Why is this kind of collateral damage justified, even if joy is the intention? It’s not like the person already exists to ameliorate a lesser harm for a greater harm. This would be creating the state of affairs of stress and work just because the parent wants this outcome to come about. That doesn’t seem like a good justification. An intention for good outcomes with known (and permanent/intractable) collateral damage, and for no other reason, “just because”, seems wrong. Not sure how it’s defended other than it’s currently held to be ethical by most people currently.

I was only making the point that one must first exist in order to negate stress. The argument that one will not feel stress if he doesn’t exist is a weird one. He will not feel, do, or be anything, so you could replace “not feel stress” with any aspect of existence, like joy, happiness, gravity, breathing, eating McDonalds.

I don’t believe that giving birth is tantamount to imposing stress and work. That opposite is the case, except in the case of negligence. More often than not a person is coddled, raised, and cared for during the early stages of life, so pretending parents impose work and stress is largely untrue.

Biden’s bagmen and propagandists such as the DNC are currently pressuring SMS carriers to “dispel misinformation”. We now have the ruling party inserting itself into our private messages. So long free speech.

A world with no people is still a state of affairs where no one feels stress.. So it isn't a world of fantasy. The world in fact existed billions of years before humans and presumably billions of years after.

A world with no people is one thing, a world where no one feels stress is something else entirely. But ok. You can call your state of affairs a world where no one feels stress, and I’ll call your state of affairs a world where no one feels joy or happiness.

“There is no state of affairs where no one feels stress”. Such a state of affairs exists only in fantasy, like a world made of candy.

The pronouns under discussion are mostly used in the third person, or in other words, in conversations between others. I can understand the desire for others to refer to me in a manner of my choosing, but I cannot get past the notion of demanding others conform to my linguistic preferences.

But, surely, a regular ID card will only be about identifying the basics, such as name, and date of birth and, and has little to do with identity and the philosophical aspects of identity.

Surely it all has much more to do with the philosophical aspects of identity than we care to admit. The basic facts such as name, eye-color, height etc. may not intrigue a being who is unable to see beyond his own limited periphery, but to others who must contend with this being as an object moving about in their lives, this information means a great deal. It is why we search for identification among the deceased and injured, or why such identification is stolen for nefarious purposes.

It’s pure speculation, but for my own view I think society is evolving in an encouraging direction rather than collapsing. There appears a growing schism between positions of power and their thralls on the one hand, and those who oppose it on the other. The so-called social democracies over-played their hand with their pandemic response, using an emergency as an excuse to seize power, favoring authoritarianism and statism over the free choice and association of their citizens, and I believe this will return to bite them. By now people are feeling the slow choke of authority. Such sentiment, if it is there, may prove disastrous for state power, but it can only invigorate and replenish social power.

It’s as easy as looking in the mirror, so it’s strange that such an idea is fraught with mystery. A regular old ID card will say more about the self than any philosopher.

People like things for a lot of reasons and quality or truth is rarely one of them. The popularity of an opinion isn’t a good measure of its veracity or validity anyways.

It seems to me “Reputation system” is an odious term, something like certain governments would do.

So if there could be a state of affairs where no one feels stress, and one where there was, would you pick the one where the was on someone else's behalf? Is that kind of imposition right to do for someone else?

There is no state of affairs where no one feels stress, but I suppose one could avoid it with drugs and the like. I wouldn’t impose any of that, but I would advise against it.

It’s good to gain that sort of life and work experience so that you can better operate in the future. Experience, study, and practice betters the range of skills one can have.

Stress can be a valuable function insofar as it helps one stay alert, motivated, and adaptive. If you can manage stress it can be quite beneficial.

Instead of removing billionaires, which would necessarily involve tyranny and exploitation, one might serve the cause better by becoming a billionaire. This way he can abolish himself, redistribute his own wealth and property, negate the very problems and inequalities billionaires are routinely blamed for, and all without getting blood on his hands. Until his abolition he can provide employment, livable wages, health care, and all the goodies without having to beg for it from politicians. Win-win.

You could be a shining example of humanity without becoming a tyrant, murderer and thief.

They stand for the aggrandizement of their party and the federal government, like the Democrats.

I think it does. It’s a stage of life all of us must go through.

Who says emotions and body are one and the same?
Do you have any scientific proof or sources to back your claims?

Animals were never born with emotions to begin with.
We go through surgeries to remove appendix and wisdom teeth as they are vestigial.
Why can't we do the same with emotions, then?

Also, we are talking about a hypothetical here.
Which means we don't have to think how it is done before we know if it will even be a good choice or not.

How can you say its not worth it?
A bit of pain for infinite peace.
Or would you like to see war and murders happening as long as you get to live without pain?

Charles Darwin and William James said it, but I thought it was a matter of common sense. Emotions are an act of the body. It’s why our heart races when we fear something or our eyes tear up when we are sad. When we study emotion we study bodies. I can’t see what suffices as a better answer, to be honest.

I say “it’s not worth it” because the procedures to do so would cause more injury than it would eradicate. Psychological life is so intertwined that to remove one would hinder the other, as in lobotomy patients. They might not have felt emotion, or at least expressed it, but they were incontinent and unintelligent.

If you think about it, if I did not feel pain I might not be able to recognize an injury. If I did not feel anger I might not be able to recognize an injustice. If I did not feel fear I wouldn’t know which situations to avoid, or when to pay attention. Sure, our emotions can guide us astray, but they also let us know. Doing away with emotions would render us stupid, in my opinion. Maybe I just get weirded out when people seek to mess with things that took millions of years to evolve.

Doing away with emotions would be tantamount to doing away with the body since they are one and the same. All you could do is dull them with narcotics, invasive and unethical surgeries, or abuse. In short, it’s not worth it.

Law is little more than a collection of prescriptions serviceable to rulers. They function as justifications for the exploitation and enslavement of populations.

It’s far worse. Agnosticism rests itself on the possibility that god exists, which seems to me a crummy assumption.

Let it be known, friend. If it’s just, based on solid evidence, and can be expressed in a way that is a joy to read, add it to the noise. It might stand above other opinions.