None of the competing thoughtcrime tribes seem to care about things like free thought, discourse, etc. This is the frightening part to me--people in the "other tribe" aren't worthy of things like due process, and authoritarian approaches are fine as long as they are aimed at the "other".
I know history repeats itself but wow, c'mon.. the 20th century wasn't that long ago.
I have heard a scant few stories of people having their due process taken away.
There is some controversy though about whether the concept of due process as per law should be extended to a general principle that guides the operation of privately-owned websites. That isn't how the internet used to work so the jury's still out.
"aren't worthy of" is distinct from realized actions of the state. If you recall the impulse of the mob during me too was to burn without trial any accused--this sentiment is what I'm talking about.
You can't put a jew and a nazi into a room and say "have a free thought discourse". Or a (american) white supermarics and (american) person of color. Or a homophobe and a gay person.
There can be no discourse when one side wants just to be left alone and the other wants to exterminate them.
You might want to rethink that 20th century lesson.
> His efforts to fight racism, in which, as an African American, he has engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), have convinced a number of Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
In fact, bringing people of different minds together is the only way to have free discourse, and the only way to change minds.
Nobody’s trying to put you in jail for having differing views. But there’s never going to be a world in which there aren’t social consequences for having them. If you think, for example, that the world is going to greet people who think it’s ok to molest children (whether they do it or not) with open arms, you’re just deluded.
I agree this is true. But we can do better than we are now. There was a time when an Episcopalian wouldn’t consider being friends with a Baptist. We are a better society for the fact that this is mostly not true anymore.
I’m not saying it should be unlimited or anyone should be legally or morally obligated to refrain from social consequences for any and all speech, but I do think a society where tolerance is extended to a majority of the other people by a majority of people is healthier than one where that isn’t the case.
“ The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.
So long as the rules are seen as moving from a bad global equilibrium to a global equilibrium seen as better, and so long as the rules are mostly-equally enforced on everyone, people are sometimes able to take a step backward and see that larger picture. Or, in a less abstract way, trade off the reified interest of The Law against their own desires and wishes.
This mental motion goes by names like "justice", "fairness", and "impartiality". It has ancient exemplars like a story I couldn't seem to Google, about a Chinese general who prohibited his troops from looting, and then his son appropriated a straw hat from a peasant; so the general sentenced his own son to death with tears running down his eyes.
Here's a fragment of thought as it was before the Great Stagnation, as depicted in passing in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, one of the earliest books I read as a child. It's from 1962, when the memetic collapse had started but not spread very far into science fiction. It stuck in my mind long ago and became one more tiny little piece of who I am now.
> “Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s throat?”
> “He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered. It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”
There is no suggestion in 1962 that the speakers are gullible, or that Pendarvis is a naif, or that Pendarvis is weird for thinking like this. Pendarvis isn't the defiant hero or even much of a side character. It's just a kind of judge you sometimes run into, part of a normal environment as projected from the author's mind that wrote the story.
If you don't have some people like Pendarvis, and you don't appreciate what they're trying to do even when they rule against you, sooner or later your tribe ends.
I mean, I doubt the United States will literally fall into anarchy this way before the AGI timeline runs out. But the concept applies on a smaller scale than countries. It applies on a smaller scale than communities, to bargains between three people or two.
The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed to so many social-media-viral depictions of the Other Side defecting, and viewpoints exclusively from Our Side without any leavening of any other viewpoint that might ask for a game-theoretic compromise, that they're losing the ability to appreciate the kind of anecdotes they used to tell in ancient China.”
I know history repeats itself but wow, c'mon.. the 20th century wasn't that long ago.