Free Speech and Meta-Thinking

Thinking is mostly not something you actively do. Thoughts mostly occur to you. They well up from below. “You” are the culmination of prior events over which you have little or no control. To the extent that people deny and abhor this fact, they are especially vulnerable to censorship.

[Added July 29]

I am largely in agreement with Sam Harris on the topic of free will.

Continue ReadingFree Speech and Meta-Thinking

The Corruption of Wikipedia

In 2021, the co-founder of Wikipedia warned that the website has become hopelessly corrupted. The article appeared in the New York Post: "Wikipedia co-founder says site is now ‘propaganda’ for left-leaning ‘establishment.’" Here is an excerpt:

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has warned that the website can no longer be trusted — insisting it is now just “propaganda” for the left-leaning “establishment.”

Sanger told UnHerd’s Lockdown TV Wednesday that he started the “encyclopedia of opinion” in 2001 purely on the basis it would offer true neutrality and offer “multiple points of view” on “hot button issues.”

Now, he insisted, conservative voices are “sternly warned if not kicked out” if they try to add a different take on establishment views — which Sanger deemed “propaganda.”

Continue ReadingThe Corruption of Wikipedia

The Hubris that Resides in the Heart of the Censor

Glenn Greenwald, discussing journalism and censorship with Ben Shapiro:

At the heart of the censor resides hubris, more than anything else. If you look at the intellectual history of humanity, it's nothing but trial and error. What people believe in one generation is Absolute Truth. It gets to be regarded by the next generation as a grievous error. That's the way that we advance. That's what makes life exciting: The fact that we err, we're fallible, we're constantly in search of the truth, we're using our reasoning skills and our cognitive abilities to try and figure out what is true and what is false.

There are a lot of things I believe, very, very, very passionately, I honestly have never ever gotten to the point where I felt like what I believe in is so clearly and indisputably and permanently true that I believe it ought to be illegal for anyone to express an opinion different than the one that I had. I couldn't imagine ever finding the hubris necessary to believe that about myself that I now reside above the human history of trial and error. But that's really what these people believe. And I think that is the reason censorship is so appealing: once you convince yourself that you were on the side of objective good, whoever disagrees with you or sees the world differently than you is the enemy of all--evil--and you can only see the world in that kind of binary way. It almost becomes not just tolerable, but necessary to say those people shouldn't be able to speak because they're fonts of falsity, lies and deceit, whereas I am the owner of the truth. I feel extremely uncomfortable believing that about myself, even though there are a lot of things I really strongly believe in and believe are true. I just never have gotten to that point. And can't imagine getting to that point.

Once you adopt a view, your political opponents are no longer people who are misguided and wrong, or even ill-intentioned . . . they're essentially on the level of Hitler and Nazism. That's the single worst evil we could possibly think of. If you really believe that the United States faces a choice between remaining a liberal democracy on the one hand, or succumbing to a Hitlerian, white nationalist dictatorship, if that's something that you actually believe, on some level it becomes rational to say: "I think the evil we're facing is so overarching that anything and everything we do, censoring, lying, sabotaging, cheating and deceiving becomes, again, not just morally justifiable, but morally necessary.

Continue ReadingThe Hubris that Resides in the Heart of the Censor

Martin Gurri: The Path from Liberal Democracy to Liberal Authoritarianism

Martin Gurri details the path to present times where many of those on the Left who abhorred government-imposed censorship ten year ago now embrace it. His article is long, detailed an excellent. Title is: "The New Censorship: How the establishment Left embraced government control of digital speech." Here is an excerpt:

The Democratic Party is the natural home of the establishment Left. To this arrangement, the Left brings apparent advantages like the reflexive applause of the New York Times, but also, less evidently, a heavy load of ideological baggage. Its doctrines tend to be unpopular even among Democrats. Most blacks oppose defunding the police, for example. Most Hispanics disapprove of open borders. Most Democrats don’t believe that grievance should trump merit. If put to a vote, these propositions would lose. The Left must therefore transform them into moral commandments, beyond the reach of politics. In the digital age, this can be accomplished only by policing and controlling the Web—and censorship of that magnitude is possible only if Biden or some other Democrat holds the presidency after 2024.

Continue ReadingMartin Gurri: The Path from Liberal Democracy to Liberal Authoritarianism