Thank you for taking the time to write all that, it helps me see where you are coming from. You clearly have a large framework which you are basing your views on, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that I do, too. I have several partially-written posts about this which I hope to post on Less Wrong one day, but I’m very worried they’ll be misconstrued because it’s such a difficult subject. The last thing I want to do is defend the practices of oppressive regimes, believe me. I’m worried that people just read my posts thinking “oh he is defending censorship, censorship is evil, downvote” without thinking about what I’m actually saying. “Censorship” is just a word. All of my arguments work just as well for “having a community norm against” something as opposed to “censoring” it.

The problem is a framing issue, I think. People keep seeing something like censorship as a bad thing period, because it is something that’s used by oppressive regimes. However, killing people is also used by oppressive regimes, and yet I still wouldn’t promote total pacifism. Your post reads to me like Ghandi saying that the Nazi’s should be opposed non-violently: I do believe that there is wisdom in what you say, but that’s going much too far. The thing you have to realize is that if all the nice and reasonable people in the world go around worrying that if they fight monsters they will themselves become monsters, the monsters always win because they’re the only ones willing to fight.

My view on killing is this: The crucial issue is who is being killed and why, and what principle you are using to determine who to kill. My view on censorship is this: The crucial issue is what view is being censored and why, and what principle you are using to determine what to censor. Censoring a view just because you disagree with it is just as wrong as killing someone just because they disagree with you. Getting everybody who disagrees with me to shut up wouldn’t actually make for the kind of world I want to live in. So what views do I think should be censored? Only those ones which seem to serve no purpose other than to destroy everything that’s good and right in this world.

Imagine you are the leader of Utopialand. Everything is going swimmingly: People are working hard, people are happy, and everyone is largely free to do and say as they please. Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful: You have to believe everything it says or you will be burned to death, you have to verbally abuse your children daily to raise them properly, you must reject anyone from society who holds ideas the religion disagree with, science and critical thinking are wicked, and so on and so forth. This religion goes against everything you value and what’s worse, it seems to be catching on. What is your reaction?

1) “Well if he wants to spread ideas that destroy everything I love and cherish that’s his right as a citizen. Who am I to tell him he can’t destroy the world? I mean it’s a free country. “
2) “AAAAAAGHHH IT’S A VICTIM OF A MEMETIC PLAGUE! QUICK, ISOLATE HIM BEFORE HE INFECTS THE OTHERS.”

The way I see it, there is a war of ideas spanning across all of human history, with good and helpful ideas on the one side and horrible memetic plagues which destroy everything they touch on the other. The civilisations that have prospered so far are the ones which fought for the good ideas and won. I submit that if your reaction to the above is option 1) and not 2), you are essentially choosing to lose the war of ideas on purpose. There will be nothing left of your empire but fire and ash.

Well. All three of them are falsifiable, barring quibbles over definition.

"Socialist regimes killed the most people!" may or may not be useful for making predictions - it's not useful for making predictions about, say, the USSR - because it doesn't exist now. But on the other hand, it created chains of cause and effect still in existence, and we would like to predict those.

"Neo reactionaries are evil racists" seems the most subjective, in that we are more confused about "evil" than "killing" or "intelligence". But as long as we taboo "evil", I don't see how it could possibly be a useless-for-prediction, impossible-to-falsify statement.

"black people are less intelligent than whites" pretty clearly has the most confounders and controversy, but it's certainly falsifiable in principle, and both sides would argue that it has already been tested, I think.

On the gripping hand, all three seem like prime candidates for political mind-killing.

Ask yourself if the other person would try to censor you if they thought they could get away with it even if you were nice to them, and if the answer is yes it is acceptable (but not necessarily desirable!) to censor them.

That isn't what a DefectBot is. A DefectBot is an agent that would defect in every position, including this one.

For example, the Nazis might do everything in their power to hurt you now (such as attacking you on the way home), and when they are in power (such as, well, I think we all know the canonical example of that.)

On the other hand, they might act nice now but, you suspect, defect when they find themselves in power. Or they might attack as hard as they can now, but be generous in victory. Neither of those are DefectBot.

The problem is how does one distinguish someone defecting because he's dealing with a DefectBot with someone defecting because he is a DefectBot.

Ask yourself if the other person would try to censor you if they thought they could get away with it even if you were nice to them,

I think you are going to run into problems here. I suspect that most adherents of many ideologies would censor opposing views if they could get away with it.

That's funny because I view progressives as the exact group that would instantly throw me under the bus the moment I didn't want to help them against someone else. Neoreactionaries at least propose to leave me alone.