Assange is in jail for skipping bail. But that’s ok. You’re allowed to spread falsities. We make mistakes; we get the wrong information; we believe stupid shit. And the fact that we are fallible is enough reason to oppose anyone having the power to determine what is or isn’t true in the first place.

The same institution after Assange is the same one now pressuring social media companies to enforce state truth. I don’t care if people start believing the moon is made out of cheese, no one should have the power to govern what is or isn’t true, especially a government like the United States.

Why is it stupid?

Unconscious doesn’t have to mean automatic and split off from consciousness. Enactive, embodied approaches to cognition reveal the body as integrated with mind in a complex and inseparable fashion. Each subsystem of the body is reciprocally interconnected with all the others , so that the person operates as a functional unity. What this means for the idea of the unconscious ia that what is outside of awareness is not necessarily cut off from it. Rather, the unconscious is a kind of implicit consciousness. One can think of this in terms of levels of awareness rather than functionally independent chambers as Freud’s psychodynamic theory had it.

The reason that subliminal
advertising was such a dismal failure is that what is not important enough for me to be consciously aware of it cannot influence me at an unconscious level

I like the idea that the unconscious is a kind of implicit consciousness. We are probably more conscious than we care to admit. In the driving example, something pays attention to driving even when one believes he is not, and that something is the very same person who believes he is not paying attention to driving. How could we create antibodies if we weren’t in a sense conscious of the disease? And so on.

I would say that the person is abusing his dog instead of using his property, and I would stop him from doing so. To relegate a dog to the status of property alone and to excuse its abuse so that a man may gratifying himself seems to me to be a utilitarian position rather than a libertarian one. We don’t steal the dog because it is his property, but we prohibit it’s abuse because it is a sentient being.

But the point is that you would have to ground the moral difference - that is, the vast difference in moral value between a corpse and a person - in those biological differences. But that's already been shown to be implausible, for all those differences are sensible differences. I mean, corpses smell in a way that living persons do not, but it would be implausible to ground the moral difference in that olfactory difference. I am morally valuable irrespective of my smell. And so on for any sensible- and thus any biological - feature.

I think the moral difference between a fully functioning human being and a corpse is quite profound. The physical differences and biology might not be apparent upon immediate inspection, sure, but the absence of physical and biological activity is. Minding is but one of these activities, but it is no less a function of the material constitution and its array of activities as a living whole. In any case, I cannot see or find any other thing or substance upon which to place value.

Yeah, fair enough. I wasn’t trying to convince you of anything anyways. You asked, I thought I’d help. Cheers.

I didn't claim otherwise. Treating free speech as an object of adoration is fetishising it. Now go re-read the OP, and replies, and note the way free speech is treated.

Assange.

I’ve read the OP and replies and do not see how one can make the association. I’ve also read you in many threads on censorship and free speech pooh-poohing the topic, so maybe it’s more of a pet-peeve than a fetish. Assange.

I just though you might wish to peruse some information on the topic. It’s all a rhetorical ploy and a language game about a fetish, anyways. Nothing to see here.

Why rise against something you yourself built?

A sheltered life must be nice. But even the biggest recluse can stay up on current events.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/03/04/future-choices/charting-equitable-exit-covid-19-pandemic

https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/democracy-under-lockdown

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-exploiting-covid-19-crisis-grab-power

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/16/future-government-powers-coronavirus-pandemic/

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un_policy_brief_on_human_rights_and_covid_23_april_2020.pdf

Racism is a form of laziness insofar as a racist deduces from flimsy and superficial generalizations and does so without verification. Unfortunately, this species of thinking manifests in racists and so-called anti-racists alike.

Governments around the entire world have seized unprecedented control over the daily lives of their citizens. The restriction of movement, border closures, economic intervention, lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, police checkpoints, curfews—all of this has been occurring for quite some time now. I thought it was common knowledge at this point.

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.