TheOtherDave comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong

157 Post author: Yvain 27 August 2012 03:36AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1742)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 September 2012 01:24:32PM 5 points [-]

Sure. Heck, once I admit that it's OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it's OK to regulate the forms of speech.

Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.

For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like "the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I." Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide... though it still doesn't allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)

Comment author: drnickbone 01 September 2012 01:36:03PM -1 points [-]

Quite true: If I genuinely care about the "differential suppression of ideas" then I will want to avoid suppression of the ideas of the poor by crowding them out of public discourse e.g. by flooding the airwaves with the ideas of the rich. There are more types of suppression to worry about than legal suppression.

However, this is now getting overly political, and off-topic...