We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume

I’d be curious to meet someone who wasn’t.

300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:

How do you have a conversation about whether or not god exists and we are all subjects to his teaching? How do you debate with someone who shows up wearing the sin of misguided faith?

And the answer, largely, was “you don’t, you burn them as a heretic”.

Again, this takes us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. We don’t want a large movement of deeply religious reactionaries burning people at the stake. So we nip the impulse in the bud by censoring individuals and organizations that propagate hysterical beliefs about The End Times and Eternal Damnation of the Human Soul, as a means of goading them into enforcing a theocratic dictatorship.

In the same vein, we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) don’t like ICE banging down people’s doors and dragging them off to concentration camps. And I’d posit we wouldn’t be living in this moment if the anti-immigration firebrands had been isolated, muzzled, and neutered before they could propagate a bunch of reactionary misinformation to the general public.

The flip side of this is the Israeli censorship of Palestine, which we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) generally don’t like. Not because we have some contrarian attitude towards censorship generally speaking, but because we believe propagating information about the genocide is a primary means of changing the policies around our country’s support of it.

And then there’s the flip-flip side, where we (generic Lemmy Libs) are perfectly happy with censoring Chinese/Russian media, if we believe this media is somehow being weaponized to weaken the US or turn the population against itself.

300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now.

We fucking better be. The notion that modern public education, mass media, and online social discourse hasn’t granted us any new useful information is pretty bleak. Sort of raises the question of why human language exists at all, if it’s just white noise and nobody is gaining any kind of material benefit.

(Although, check out Peter Watts’s Blightsight if you want to chase that rabbit down the hole).

But part of the appeal of censorship is that you’re gating your social circle from regression. You’re not going back to re-litigate settled issues with any kind of seriousness. You certainly aren’t going to tolerate reactionary quarters of your population that try and reinstate them.

My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes.

I would argue that it is cruel to indoctrinate someone else with misinformation and a kindness to spare them from delusion. Similarly, bigotry can turn verbal harm into physical harm very quickly. Even benign communication can be weaponized if it is used to drown people out or deafen them.

So I’ve got three general categorizes of communication that it would be compassionate to spare them from.