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By sharing black lists of employees with 'wrong' political opinions. This I consider a sacrifice of reason.

To broaden the discussion a bit, I think that generally there is a trend of the 'progressive-left' censoring things they don't agree on.



That was what I was going to point out. I understand peoples problems with colleges and what is painted as a rise of postmodernist thought in those arenas (which is really a fairly meaningless farce, many in college are still establishing their identity due to being prevented from doing so in adolescence by modern schooling and parenting styles, so they're doing the typical thing of seeing how far they can push ideas). Postmodernist thought has its place but is fundamentally flawed as a tool for addressing reality generally (to such a degree that if someone adopted it as a lifestyle honestly they would find themselves incapable of being certain whether they actually need to breathe or eat and they would swiftly die out).

But, reason supports freedom of speech and of ideas. It does not support censorship. It supports even the free expression of even the most odious ideas, so that they may be addressed rationally. The only exceptions to this are very few and involve our human weakness of certain speech in close physical quarters or when packed into physically close groups being able to rise above speech to reach the level of overriding the rational faculties of the listener. That's where things like not shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater lie. It results in a biological disabling of the forebrain when immediate physical mortal danger is at play. That can never, ever, ever happen when a statement is read. Not from a poster, paper, book, pamphlet, and certainly not from a screen.

There is an interesting argument to be made, though it is not really being made by any significant number that I've encountered, that the psychological manipulations of social media - the intentional things they do to optimize driving people to more extreme opinions and inundating people with false information in order to maximize engagement at the expense of absolutely anything else - might need to be treated differently, but even there the issue is not the speech. It's the manipulative analysis and other practices.

I don't even think the real primary motivation of most censorship of repugnant ideas online is motivated by a belief like "these ideas are wrong and we must not expose people to them, else they may adopt them". I think the mindset is more along the lines of "these ideas are wrong... I feel. But I cannot actually justify. And I fear if someone challenges me to dispute them, I will fail."

Reason also supports an absolute hard line distinction between the real and the fictional, a line which is increasingly ignored, though I chalk that up to factors that mostly go across political divisions. Both sides attribute the negative traits and consequences of real examples of things to images of those things without a second thought, conflating imagery and reality to a degree that it really makes me wonder if they could even explain what the difference is... or if they believe there is any difference.




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