< Nick Cave on finding good ideas

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~zampano

The thing is, I think he's right, both on this and #66:

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/why-do-you-write/

It's easy for us to forget that, say, 1960s protest music, which seems surprisingly quaint now, was every bit as transgressive then as something like a singer having said something transphobic is now. Or what Martin Luther did in the 1600s. You can argue that the underlying morality is different (and I wouldn't disagree), but this brings us to a difficult place. It's difficult to allow only some kinds of unpopular ideas and not others.

That being said, I do think society has a right as a general thing to allow for certain bright-line rules. But I also question whether deplatforming, cancelling, whatever you want to call it, does more than drive those ideas underground. At the very least, it's going to make someone be less exposed to contrary opinion, and thus less likely to change. Pushing back directly just leads to the person digging in their heels.

Or as Nick Cave wrote in #66:

> Antifa and the Far Right, for example, with their routine street fights, role-playing and dress-ups are participants in a weirdly erotic, violent and mutually self-sustaining marriage, propped up entirely by the blind, inflexible convictions of each other’s belief systems. It is good for nothing, except inflaming their own self-righteousness. The New Atheists and their devout opponents are engaged in the same dynamic. Wokeness, for all its virtues, is an ideology immune to the slightest suggestion that in a generation’s time their implacable beliefs will appear as outmoded and fallacious as those of their own former generation. This may well be the engine of progress, but history has a habit of embarrassing our treasured beliefs. Some of us, for example, are of the generation that believed that free speech was a clear-cut and uncontested virtue, yet within a generation this concept is seen by many as a dog-whistle to the Far Right, and is rapidly being consigned to the Left’s ever-expanding ideological junk pile.

Really the only thing I disagree with here is the suggestion that Antifa is somehow as organized as the Far Right movements we're seeing, but that's a quibble in this context.

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~pink2ds wrote (thread):

This pub also has some "guidelines" on speech.

So I believe there are some limits to platforms—for example, I don't want anyone to be able to phone me up in the middle of the night to rant & ramble, nor do I appreciate people scrawling hate slogans with glue on my front door. Nor do I want someone to jam every radio frequency with their own channel over the other radio channels.

So for me, unlimited platforming as a philosophical concept is out.

That leaves content. There are things that, for me personally, I don't wanna die a Voltaire-like death in favor of. I'm just not up to defending them. Such as vengeance porn, doxxing, falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater (or the equivalent on Pennsylvania Avenue).

So unlimited free distribution of content is also out for me philosophically, personally.

I can't categorically say that I want to provide unlimited platforming to unlimited content.

Luckily, neither does the US Bill of Rights:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A good law. If the press is forced to publish false statements—if Twitter and AWS are forced to host false statements—the press is not free.

It's not just that the differing underlying morality, as you rightly point out, affects our sympathy for the speaker.

It's that hate speech and harassment is itself silencing by way of its chilling effect.

It is in and of itself speech-suppressing and tyrannical.

In linguistics, speech can also be acts—speech acts. And saying "STFU f*g" is an illocutionary act with an intended and often realized perlocutionary component. As in, the speaker is trying to silence the other person, and that often succeeds.

Free speech is an obstacle for free speech.

Martin Luther's speech certainly had dire consequences.

Horrific consequences on the speech of, and even lives of, the Jewish population in Europe.

Nick Cave is a good and interesting writer even when I disagree with him, as I do with him regarding metoo, Antifa, and wokeness.

A huge component of how "hi we have free speech here" became a dog-whistle, a moth-flame, to Nazi, is to be shouldered on the right wing itself. The left wants to protect the speech and expressions of groups that the Nazi would want to extinguish or enslave.

Now, it's unknown what the consequences of deplatforming is. Many seem to believe, and this does make sense to me, that the growth of the groups would've been slower but the depths of their hatred would've been deeper. So the ultimate consequence would've been a function of the unknown extent of those two factors.

Arguably if DJT would not have had such a huge platform, for his "birtherism" lie ten years ago, we would've seen a different world today.

I think these issues are not clear cut. They are difficult philosophical questions that humanity are still working out.