It literally does. 654 exerts a power on the system which unlocks the door, 456 loses all the mechanical power in waste heat. It's basic physics. If 654 physically switches a switch but 456 doesn't then 654 has more power (within that system) than 456 (whose power is lost to that system as waste heat). You can't make things happen without power - basic laws of thermodynamics.

The keys exert power, no matter what’s written on them. The numbers on the keys exert none. This beginning to get ridiculous.

The only moral choice is to lead by example, hope for the best and prepare for the worst, unfortunately. Any “solution” as applied by some centralized authority will ultimately end in tyranny and failure.

That’s right. I will respect someone’s property rights while simultaneously holding the belief their censorship is unwarranted. No matter how many times you speak my position back to me, sooner or later you might have to come up with an argument against it or drop it altogether.

I once picked up an Arabic newspaper and my eyes went immediate to the top-left of the page and I followed the script left-to-right. Had I known Arabic went right-to-left I might have started on the other side. That wasn’t determined by the symbols, which are completely blameless. It was the consequence of me not being able to read Arabic.

As for your keypad, the code opens the door because it is programmed to do so, and is able to do so through mechanical forces and means. It certainly doesn’t open the door because 654 is more powerful than 456.

All you're saying is that the sum of the energy within the arbitrary boundary you've chosen (the paper and ink) is the same, so the sum of the energy in that which it causes will be the same. Yes. You're absolutely right about that. So?

Right. So how can one be more powerful than the other? You’ve already said “because the ink is in a different arrangement”. That to me is sorcery. Witches inscribe runes on objects and recite incantations premised on the same belief.

I enjoy your formulation and largely agree, though we could probably quibble with the terms. It reminds me of Thomas Paine’s distinction between society and of government in Common Sense: “Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices”.

Yes, all censorship is unwarranted in my view. It is for this reason that I refuse to deny or punish someone’s choice to publish what they wish, and censor what they wish, on their own platforms. I can hold that their censorship is unwarranted while refusing to censor them at the same time without any contradiction.

Edit - just to be absolutely clear - this is the grounds on which I don't believe your false virtue signalling about 'free speech'. If you really believed words were powerless, then banning all of them would be a trivial matter, like banning hats. Stupid, pointless, but ultimately harmless. We'd all just get used to wet heads and have done with it. No. The reason why you don't want certain words banned is because (despite your phoney nonsense to the contrary) you know perfectly well that words have the power to influence people and you don't want influence in your chosen direction to be taken away from you.

That’s a silly analogy and conclusion. Your claim to understand what I know and want is fabricated from thin air, projected, just like the power you ascribe to words.

Here’s a thought experiment. Take two pieces of paper and two inkwells with a small but exact amount of ink in them. On one piece of paper, scribble gibberish and random symbols until all the ink is applied to the page. On the other, write something, maybe a letter to a loved one, a song or whatever, until all the ink is applied to the page. There should now be the same amount of paper, same amount of ink, same mass, same velocity, same potential energy, same forces acting on each. So how is the power of one different than the power of the other?

I wouldn't characterize your having written that as "ironic". I'd say it was, is, and will forever remain self-contradictory, untenable, inconsistent, irrational, illogical, unacceptable rhetorical bullshit.

If all censorship is unwarranted, then none is warranted. <-------that points out the self-contradiction and/or untenability of what you've offered here.

It's really pretty simple and easy to understand...

If all censorship is unwarranted then even in situations when an individual owns the means of discourse - say television, radio, or other social media outlet - that ownership does not provide warrant for them to censor.

I never said censorship was warranted. I said that they can censor if they wanted to. This is because it is their property. To deny or punish them for publishing what they want on their own property is to infringe on both their property and free speech rights, which I fully grant them and defend. That doesn’t mean they did the right thing.

Then why post? If it's irrelevant what people take away from your doing so?

I seek expression for its own sake. I also find it healthy and beneficial to hold my ideas to the grindstone of criticism and disputation. It get’s me thinking.

1. Neurons firing are the proximate cause of all action and speech.

2. Sound and light patterns cause different neurons to fire depending on very fine details of the exact sound and the exact light pattern.

3. Nothing we know of causes neurons to fire apart from sensory or interocepted signals, or other neurons. Our current best physics determines that it is impossible for a chain of neurons to fire without having been physically stimulated to do so.

So. Words trigger specific neurons to fire, which form part of a chain of reactions, the end of which is some speech or action in response. Of course other factors also contribute to that chain, but to deny that the specific sounds are one of those factors is to deny everything we know about neurology and physical causation.

If you want to deny that, be my guest. People deny the earth is round, stupidity exists. Just don't expect to be taken seriously if you do.

I see no disagreement in the biology, so I won’t deny it. And I would not say certain sounds are not a factor in hearing certain sounds. It’s true that light can fall upon photoreceptors and vibrations can move eardrums. There is undoubtedly a direct interaction between the body and the environment. But that’s where your chain ends for me.

After that the events are generated by, sustained by, governed by, performed by, and therefor caused by the human being. It is true that light falls upon photoreceptors, but photons enter the eye only to the extent that the body allows it. It seems to me that the body, the “other factors”, is the reason why the eyes are open, why light is focused in such a way, absorbed rather than reflected, activating the necessary nerve cells, and so on. It is doing the work.

The same with words. We seek them out, focussing on them, reading them, listening to them, speaking them, understanding them, ascribing meaning to them, becoming aroused or anxious or offended by them, venerating some and banning others. Again, in my admittedly common sense understanding, these are the activities of a human being. At each step we control what we do with these sights, sounds, or whatever form words may take in our environment. And I believe these actions are not just the immanent reactions to word themselves, but of the entire organism as it exists a long process of language development and acquisition.

Basically, I believe people overestimate the power of words while underestimating their own power over words. Words are beautiful, useful, important, valuable—but they are not powerful.

Nice examples of unwarranted censorship. Do you find all censorship unwarranted?

I do. When I think about the sum total of linguistic expression, it pains me to think of all the history, knowledge, and art that has been stolen, suppressed, and destroyed because someone could not bear to look at it. I don’t envy the censors; they will forever be tied to what they stole from posterity.

I do think, however, that if someone owns their own means of discourse they can censor at their whim and fancy, ironically, on free speech grounds.

s it okay - on your view - to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, for example? Is it ok to spread falsehood after falsehood as a means to effect/affect deliberately taken action, say to... oh, I don't know... how about... stop the certification process of an American presidential election by virtue of taking over the building in which the elected officials certify the aforementioned results on the day of certification? Is that protected under free speech? Seems like that speech was an instrumental element, without which, the insurrection attempt would not have even been attempted.

Yes, it is all protected under the principle of free speech, in my view. I am not so fearful of falsity nor doubtful of truth as to require someone such as yourself to pick and choose what I am allowed to read and say. What I am fearful and doubtful of are your abilities and moral superiority to make these decisions. In fact, I cannot think of any man or group of people in history with the ability and moral superiority to decide what others cannot say and read. Can you?

Do you find that Trump's words over the previous year regarding the election are protected under free speech?

I do.

You're not fooling anyone. You know that, right? This is a good example of when words don't have an effect. When I disbelieve the person speaking them.

I don't care if you believe me or not. I think what you believe is stupid, so you asserting what is opposite of the case is no surprise. You evoked my name to spread a malicious falsehood in what I suppose was an attempt to "suppress" me with your magical words. It didn't work because it cannot. So here I am, in good faith, correcting you and stating what I actually believe.

We've been through this argument and you bailed, not me. Don't start it up again like nothing was said last time. If you have a non-magical means by which physical neurons are caused to fire without prior signals then lay it out. Otherwise shut up. I've no objection to you believing in magic/religion/yet-to-be-discovered science. But it's pitiful to try and paint that belief as knowledge and the current science as the fantasy. Again, if you have a non-magical means by which physical neurons are caused to fire without prior signals then just lay it out. Otherwise it's your notion of uncaused reactions which is nonsense here.

I mistakenly tried using your deterministic language in an effort to explain it in a way that might be helpful. I regret doing so, and I apologize.

I have never believed nor stated that sound and light doesn’t have an effect on the body, so there is no need to pretend I did. I am merely opposing the idea that words, whether spoken or written, have a different, more powerful effect on the body than gibberish or arbitrary marks on paper. I am opposing the idea that some words, certain combinations of letters or articulated guttural sounds, are more dangerous than others. I oppose the idea that certain combinations of letters or articulated guttural sounds should be banned, thrown to the fires, while others are venerated. I am saying the words as they exist in the world are wholly innocent of everything we usually blame them for.

I am willing to defend this belief if you care to argue the point.

Absolutely. Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but I sense, in the arguments of free-speech absolutists like nos, that they're not merely 'confounded' but deliberately use the confusion as a smokescreen for promoting the use of language to suppress minorities. That's really the only reason I got involved here, to point out that assuming a hard disconnect between the speech of one and the response of another is a political, not a logical decision.

Your sense is way off in my own case. Throughout history censorship has been used against minorities of all types: religious, racial, political, the individual. Censorship suppresses minorities; free speech liberates them. Frederick Douglass, who was once a slave, reasoned as much.

No greater excuse has been used to justify censorship than this action-at-a-distance, the magical thinking that words cause adverse effects on groups of people or society as a whole, as if it was poison, pollution, or a natural disaster. Examples of this are myriad. Whether expression is “corrupting the youth” in the case of Socrates, “adversely affect public health, safety, and morals” in the censorship of Bertrand Russel, or it leads to “disorder and mischief which were thence proceeding and increasing to the detriment of the Holy Faith” in the case of Galileo. In each case some fearful authority attempts to raise expression to a species of dangerous sorcery somehow capable of manipulating matter.

So I tend to oppose that type of thinking and don’t want to see our children taught to believe it, not only because I believe it is metaphysical nonsense, but because it disarms them against hatred, cruelty and bullying.

"Why do human interactions on the internet tend to skew negative, as opposed to positive? What does this say about human behaviour?"

Most likely because we are interacting with screens instead of human beings. So much of human interaction is missing from the equation to begin with.

Strange. You seem to have more to say about American politics, when you don't even live here, than about the politics in your own country.

It’s a sort of cultural imperialism, spreading through various Internet echo-chambers as quickly as the Washington press will allow it. I also don’t live in the US, but our press no less resorts to the same churnalism as other countries, and everything comes out reading like a CNN article. I fear there isn’t an original thought among them.

No, they are not sufficient causes, they are necessary causes. Another necessary cause is a human tea-maker, or a machine. It doesn't make them not causes, otherwise nothing could ever be caused.

I suppose flour is the necessary cause of bread, and hops the necessary cause of beer. I’m not going to use such language. No matter what word you use to modify “cause”, and no matter how easily we can drift into the passive voice when we describe tea-making, none of these ingredients can gather and mix themselves with other “necessary causes” to create the end product.

Exactly. So, in terms of speech legislation, if I wanted to stop you responding, then removing one of the necessary causes (my post) would do that. Of course, in the real world we must usually talk about minimising chances rather than outright prevention because the number of sufficient causes is very large.

If you wanted to stop me responding you would have to stop yourself from responding. In both cases, the words did not cause any of these actions. These are the decisions of an agent, the only being with the capacity to act in such a manner.

You've just ignored what I previously said rather than counter it. That is not the public meaning of the term 'cause'. You'll not find such a meaning in any dictionary. It is not necessary for a cause to be sufficient in order for it to be a cause. My post was not sufficient to result in your reply, but - this is the important bit - nothing is. So if we reserve the word 'cause' for only those factors which are sufficient we have to accept the absurd conclusion that nothing has any causes.

Leaves are a cause of us raking them. They're just not a sufficient cause, they are a necessary one.

Again I don’t care about the jargon or arguments by gibberish. We can quibble about definitions of “cause” and variations of “cause” forever. But I still feel that you’re raising the ingredients of tea into the cause of tea by sheer act of rhetoric, nothing more.

We do not have to accept that nothing has any cause unless we extirpate the causal agent from your examples, as you have done above. The one thing that gathers the ingredients, boils the water, and combines the ingredients to form tea hardly makes an appearance in your analogy, or is relegated to the same species of cause as boiling water.

Leaves are not the cause of us raking them just as they are not the cause of us refusing to rake them. The very beginning of the raking process, starts in only one place and in one object.

Again, the importance for free speech legislation - remove the leaves and you remove the raking, because they are a necessary cause.

But how can you remove the leaves if not by raking? Cut down the trees? I suggest we teach people to not fear leaves so that we need not resort to such measures.

I appreciate the analogy. But who or what is making the tea? The milk? The tea-leaves? The kettle? Not a single one of these, or any combination of these ingredients, can cause tea.

It’s true; I would not respond to something that is not there, but I would also not respond had I not looked at my screen, taken the time to read, and chosen to respond. I could do the exact opposite: not respond. This is because your post isn’t the cause of me responding anymore than it is the cause of no one else responding. The causal chain of your language ended wherever you have left your words, and there they will sit until some agent comes across and chooses what to do with them.

Leaves don’t cause us to rake them. Rocks don’t cause us to pick them up. Your post doesn’t cause me to respond to it, and so on.

No, I could care less about jargon. The only thing you or your words have caused is the movement of some air and some sound waves.

If I give you the wrong directions to the pub, and you go that way, my words have caused you to do so. It's not that hard.

Your just skip a variety of preceding causes to the event you described—hearing, understanding, trusting etc.

Appealing to ridicule to disguise a shit argument. Not that hard.

Would he be that pesky?

No. The fears that “any candidates other than white men for jobs mostly held by white men might run into turmoil once their nominations got to the White House” is false in its face.

This Is the Woman President Trump Wants to Be the First Female African-American Marine General

That's a concern to me as well, as I noted previously, at least as a matter of definition. What will constitute promotion of free speech under the law? It happens defining "promotion" will involve defining "free speech" as well.

Great point. As their sanctions suggest, I think we can trust that their version of free speech extends only to views they agree with.

I don’t know much about the UK education system, so I’m not quite sure what their measures would exactly entail, or how much the government gets to decide curriculum. But I don’t like the idea that universities should be legally required to actively promote free speech for the same reason I don’t think they should be legally required to actively promote Marxism. When the state compels people to promote a certain stance under the threat of sanction we have entered the realm of censorship.

I personally view liberty as of the highest importance and believe society should maximize it. Liberty isn’t so redundant when you realize there is still slavery and subjugation in the world.

But I do believe it is under threat from a vast variety of forces, from governments to corporations to paranoid busy-bodies on the internet. An unfortunate effect of living in a free society: it’s easy to give up defending human rights and freedom when we’re too busy enjoying them.

Then what events are words the cause of exactly? I know when you’re struggling when you begin to pad your arguments with ridicule.

You’re right. Cancel culture is a huge problem, and it is forging a generation who fear ideas. I just think there are better ways to defend free speech than let the state violate it.

Well then he ought rationally deliberate the opposite, it would be far less problematic. Unless, of course he couldn't, in which case the words would have inevitably caused him to think that way...but since words can't do that apparently, he's free to deliberate whatever he chooses to in response to those words.

If you threatened me with fines for not promoting free speech, using the exact same words as the government, I’d laugh in your face. Same words, different result. How do you square that circle?

Personally I think the government, especially one as censorial as the UK, should not compel universities to promote free speech with the threat of sanction. I believe universities should be able to do what they want. If people need a little safe-space university, where scary ideas are verboten, let them have it.

There are plenty examples there, spanning decades. The point, though, is that I am unable to find many fools among them. And it’s not a question about whether a university ought to give a platform to fools, but weather a university should bend to the pressure of protesters and deny both the rights of a speaker and those who wish to see him.

In the US the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has a database of “disinvitations”. I’m not aware of any such database in the UK, but I’m sure some examples (such as Flemming Rose and Sir Tim Hunt) are available.

Oh dear, not another one. I'm not going reply to any comment arguing that insisting on free speech implies universities having to entertain flat earthers. It's a disingenuous, and pretty damn stupid argument. In my previous post I suggested you look at the case of Lindsay Shepard. Did you?

You’re right: it is stupid. One would be hard-pressed to find flat-earthers and fools among the growing list of disinvited speakers.

Why would they have any fear? The new rules have only so far been communicated with speech and apparently speech has no effect whatsoever on other people...so if these people fear fines as a result of some speech, that's their problem.

One can listen to a speech and fear what he comes to understand are the intentions of the speaker. This is a rational deliberation, not something forced into the mind by words.

I don’t trust that a “free speech champion” should compel people to advocate for free speech under fear of fine and sanction. That seems to me the opposite of free speech.

You keep making clear you do not understand the US Constitution. Which is perfectly ok if you're not American - even a lot of Americans do not. But you keep posting as if you do.

Unfortunately your capabilities only allow you to make the accusation, but you can never back them up. I can refer to Supreme Court precedent to show why Trump’s words aren’t incitement; you cannot. So if you can ever find some bite behind that bark, let me know.

It would make my life easier if you put a question mark after each of your sentences. Like this?

Anyone else notice that Mitch McConnell's speech, directly after the acquittal, saying that it was undeniable that Trump was responsible for incitement, directly contradicted Trump's own defense?

It also contradicts American law and 1st amendment jurisprudence. But people such as yourself are not concerned with actual law, just political show-trials.

This guy misses Trump so much he's crying about a possible misreport by the NYT that has in fact been updated as new information appeared. Like god damn what a boring loser.

Since you cry at the mere sight of truth, believe things uncritically, and use "like" in the worst fashion, I'm forced to imagine your voice with a high rising terminal.

The House managers used the lie in the memo, and the New York Times spread the misinformation to their readers, but I’m the liar? You’re a useful idiot, Tim.

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.

He wasn’t murdered.

“He texted me last night and said, ‘I got pepper-sprayed twice,’ and he was in good shape,” said Ken Sicknick, his brother, as the family drove toward Washington. “Apparently he collapsed in the Capitol and they resuscitated him using CPR.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/officer-brian-sicknick-capitol

That’s quite the claim for someone who was just murdered by a fire-extinguisher.

That he was murdered by someone wielding a fire-extinguisher.

It looks like the lie about Officer Brian Sicknick’s murder is quietly being updated, long after credulous dupes used it as a political football.

UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.

...

Law enforcement officials initially said Mr. Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, but weeks later, police sources and investigators were at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official.

“He returned to his division office and collapsed,” the Capitol Police said in the statement. “He was taken to a local hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.”

https://archive.vn/HPUoo

Shoan’s evisceration of the House manager’s lies was amazing to watch, but it’s also useful because this is the sort of manipulation the American media has been getting away with for years.

I watched reporting on the House presentation on both the CBC (Canada’s state run news) and the BBC, but there was zero critical analysis of the House narrative, almost as if they have become the foreign echo-chambers of the liberal media complex. Very disappointing.

Well, I never said that. Trump’s speech, however, is protected.

No, I was speaking of criminally charging someone for incitement to insurrection when his speech is fully protected by the 1st.