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[wierd]

The plank unit is the smallest measurable distance. Below that scale, everything is quantum noise.

The notion that all particles are indistinguishable from waves, and that you can have large scale superposition comes from Heisenberg, iirc.

[martinuzz]

Wouldn't a planck urist be shorter than a planck unit?

[EnigmaticHat]

That is a semantic argument about the legally defined right of free speech, vs the philosophical notion of free speech.

The philosophical notion has the second part attached; the legal definition does not.

I did not say it was illegal to shut people down. I said it was intellectually and philosophically destitute.
I do not argue that your view on the legal definition is incorrect. I point out that I am not arguing points of legality.

Since you have a firm grasp of the legal view, while presenting a deficit on the philosophical notion, here is a nice (and old) pdf from a political philosopher of some note.

http://eet.pixel-online.org/files/etranslation/original/Mill,%20On%20Liberty.pdf

No its really not.  You're trying to shut down someone else shutting you down.  Any defense you could have of yourself also applies to them.

You can't just link an old philosopher as a source without connecting it to your point.  Philosophers are an authority on exactly one thing, which is their own beliefs.  Any other significance they have comes from the influence they've had, but you haven't said specifically what that influence is here.  And don't say "he influenced the founding fathers," because those guys created the legal definition you keep ignoring.

The philosphical underpinnings of free speech are not complicated.  There is no "good" expression and "bad" expression.  That's what you're missing that I keep correcting.  You think your speech is free but the other guy's speech is anti-free.  Not how it works. Even the phrase "I think we should not have the right to free speech" would be practicing free speech 100% as intended.  In letter there is unprotected speech but philosophically free speech is content blind.  That's why there are no words a private citizen can say on their own time that destroy free speech.

[wierd]

I linked to an *entire book*, DEDICATED to that topic, created by John Stuart Mill.

John Stuart Mill is accredited with being one of the most influential political philosophers of the 19th century, and his views are very much seen in much of the culture of modern western society.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill/

Specifically, the book I linked to, goes into great detail about where one persons freendoms end, and another's begin, and has an entire section relating to freedom of speech as a philosophical notion.

I can lead a horse to water, but I cannot make it drink. If you do not read the book, I cannot help you further.

[Reelya]

No its really not.  You're trying to shut down someone else shutting you down.  Any defense you could have of yourself also applies to them

Sorry, but this argument is using the exact same logic as "anti racists are the real haters because they hate racism".

[wierd]

EH:

The view espoused-- that there is more involved in public discourse than the two people speaking (Specifically, that other people have a right to hear the public discourse)-- has no bearing on any perceived notion of "rightness" or "wrongness" in the speech. 

You are confusing a "Right to hear" with a "Requirement to listen."  They are not the same thing.

When a person decides to shut down speech of another, because they do not wish to hear it, they are denying other people the opportunity to hear (or read) that speech. This is one of the multitudinous arguments laid out by Mill, and he does a very good job of it too. (Being a classical empiricist.) Instead of shutting somebody down, therefore, the most societally forward thinking way to approach the problem is to recuse ONESELF, not to shut the OTHER down. This removes yourself from the conversation, and thus allows you to not hear any further dialog-- without removing the ability of other people to listen to the guy on the soapbox, if they so choose.

In instances where the other person is harassing you, and will not relent when you attempt such recusal, the various anti-harassment laws on the books are a good place to start from. This can physically prevent the person from being in your proximity, for instance. It does not prevent them from speaking to other people though, which is why it is preferential to using socially dynamic ways of shutting people down. (like the mansplaining phenomenon)

I WOULD go so far as to say "It is in your best interests to listen, even when you disagree with what is being said", rather than do the recusal and duck out-- At least if you are actually interested in obtaining empirical truths about the topics of the discourse. Mill mentions this as well, giving several noteworthy examples. He refers to it as "the combination of opposites."  He supposes that each side will have some portion of the empirical truth, but with a lot of subjective bias, favoring the individual speaker's internal world views. To reach a neutral opinion of truth, one must wade through the quagmire of all opposing views, and distill the verifiable essences from all parties.  This means that if your goal is truth or knowledge, you cannot just summarily dismiss another person's rhetoric. It *IS* mentally taxing, but if your goal is truth, it is the only way forward.

Combined with the prior, any person seeking such truth has a requirement to listen and hear the views being expressed, even if you yourself do not. Shutting down that speech, because you find it offensive, prevents the truth seeker from getting that speech, and denies them valuable sources of information. (There are all kinds of information to be gleaned from even purely propagandist speech, that is completely non-factual on the face of what is being discussed! The language of the propagandist, the sources they cite, and a number of other things are all of value to a person seeking universal and neutral truth of the topic!!)

[EnigmaticHat]

A private citizen telling you to shut up doesn't stop you from being heard.  Not even a little.  I mean if they shout it repeatedly for hours they could physically stop you from being heard.  But if I hypothetically were to say "shut up Weird", even if its on live TV with 10 million people watching, I have done nothing to prevent you from being heard.  If you walk down the street and say the sane thing to a stranger, they'll hear you all the same.  All I've done is possibly made them less receptive to your message.

More to the point, if some thinks you're mansplaining they have the same right to say it as you do.  You can say "that's unfair" or "that's mean" and that's fine.  But if you say "you telling me that is destroying free speech" then you're mistaking destroying for practicing.

No its really not.  You're trying to shut down someone else shutting you down.  Any defense you could have of yourself also applies to them

Sorry, but this argument is using the exact same logic as "anti racists are the real haters because they hate racism".

No its not.  The racism argument is equating two unequal tupes of speech: unjustified hatred and informed dislike.  Tolerance comes with disclaimers.  You have to tolerate someone until they give you a genuinely good reason not to.

When it comes to free speech all speech is equal.  Free speech (in the philosophical sense because legal arguments are apparently not important) is content blind.  Free speech has no (non-legal) disclaimers.  So if someone tells you to shut up and you call them an ass, that's internally consistent.  If you say they're destroying free speech you don't understand what free speech is.

Additionally Weird accused feminists of destroying free speech.  My argument isn't that Weird is destroying free speech (because his words can't, see my other posts), its that he's spreading already common misinformation about free speech.  Indeed, mansplaining makes no point about free speech.  If a feminist said "mansplaining is destroying free speech" that feminist would also be wrong for the same reason Weird is.

[PTTG??]

Sooner or later the conversation has to move from free speech to the actual speech being discussed. We've had a century of very clear, convincing arguments against (for instance) nationalism and fascism. Eventually the people who espouse that nonsense are clearly not participating in a good-faith intellectual discussion any more than flat-earthers or anti-vaccers are.

It all reminds me of Achilles and the Tortoise. If one side won't cooperate in rational discussion, extending the courtesy of rational debate is at best unproductive and more likely counter-productive.

[Playergamer]

here's my opinion on mansplaining: it's really dumb

i mean can we all just stop trying to quantify what is and is not worth saying/hate speech/whatever. how about instead of "omg that's hate speech" we listen to what the person says and say "you're fucking dumb."

people think that the evul alt-right is literally hitler but they aren't, at least not at this stage. the vast majority of these people are pol types. if, when they show up in the real world, you laugh at them like the troglodytes they are, that'll be more damaging than any number of sticks and stones.

source: i'm basically one of these people except i have more layers of irony than an onion.

oh and while we're at it, commie ninjas fuck off. you're not working class if you don't work.

Spoiler: To Anyone Concerned With the Above Comment (click to show/hide)

By "commie ninjas," I am referring to pajama wearing anarchist, communist, and anarcho-communist types that have garnered so much attention recently, with their various street-fighting, fire-starting antics. Specifically, I am referring to the phenomenon of these "communist ninjas" wearing all black turning out to be upper-middle class university students. I have no quarrel with Average Joe Stalin at this time; there are more important helicopter targets.

[Strife26]

Sooner or later the conversation has to move from free speech to the actual speech being discussed. We've had a century of very clear, convincing arguments against (for instance) nationalism and fascism. Eventually the people who espouse that nonsense are clearly not participating in a good-faith intellectual discussion any more than flat-earthers or anti-vaccers are.

It all reminds me of Achilles and the Tortoise. If one side won't cooperate in rational discussion, extending the courtesy of rational debate is at best unproductive and more likely counter-productive.

How many years of "agreement" does it take before contradictory views are no longer acceptable?

[wierd]

Ok, I am now throughly confused as to what you think I am saying EH.

As pointed out by others, "Mansplaining" has transformed from "You know that thing boorish men do, when they talk down to women?" to "I am right, you are wrong, nothing you have to say is of value to me. Shut up."

The former has no justification. A woman is perfectly capable of understanding the subject matter in any circumstance that a man can likewise understand it. There is a caveat there though-- The mere presence of a vagina does not mean the woman has superior understanding either. As such, if the woman is indeed, demonstrably incorrect in her understanding, the fact that she is a woman, and the person attempting correction is male, does not make the correction "mansplaining", regardless of her opinion on the matter.  That would imply that the man has a gender bias, which is not necessarily so. He could very well be just trying to correct her erroneous opinions, and has no consideration for her gender at all. (this has happened to me quite often. It does not matter to me what genitals a person has, and it should not matter what kind I personally possess either. Attempting to correct an erroneous viewpoint with reasoned argument is not misogyny.)

The latter, likewise, has no justification. As I just elaborated, it is socially deficient to use social dynamics (calling somebody a misogynist by inference, through the use of language as a weapon to silence discourse) to "shut somebody down."  Polite recusal is the more appropriate methodology, for the reasons I mentioned.

Also, why so angry that I mentioned that legality is not the topic of discussion? Legality is ancillary to what is prevalently considered socially appropriate. (Law is ancillary to philosophy.)



PTTG:

That people *STILL* engage in such faulted forms of discourse is of interest if you are studying sociology. While the body of human knowledge has expanded tremendously in the past 2 centuries, the innate human condition underneath has not. The humans alive today have the same primal motivations and drives as those from 6000 years ago. As such, the same things "Feel right" (even if they are demonstrably NOT right), the "Feeling of rightness" still has predominance in the human mindset (bias, vs knowledge), and so the same tired ideas keep getting proffered by generation after generation.  Each new generation will look at those old ideas with different worldviews, however, so their discussing them publicly still has intellectual value, just not for actually proving their worldview as demonstrably correct. There is tremendous value in exploring that dialog, to determine how and why those old ideas still have resonance with the new generations.

The correct reaction to this phenomenon is not "Oh gawd, this shit again..."  but instead "I wonder why they feel that way, especially since it has been disproven so completely?"

The latter question leads to further and better understanding.  The former leads only to stagnation and decay.

[Frumple]

Philosophers are an authority on exactly one thing, which is their own beliefs.  Any other significance they have comes from the influence they've had, but you haven't said specifically what that influence is here.

Oi. Rhetoric and logic both easily go beyond a philosopher's own beliefs, and are exactly two of the things members of the field can be authorities in. Some other stuff too that I'm too tired and forgetful to dredge up, but whatever.

... I mostly don't care about all the rest of the stuff that followed, at this point, and as near as I can recall Mill wasn't particularly notably skilled in either of those two,* but that one needed clarifying. Contrary to some folks beliefs, philosophy involves more than one practical skill and body of actual expertise.

*Yes, I know the name of the book and about the related junk, no, it doesn't really count -- he knew the stuff well enough but, outside a fairly narrow aspect of a singular field that was probably more contributive (at best) than authoritative, that was about it, and most of his shtick was only tentatively related to the stuff.

[EnigmaticHat]

Weird, what I'm saying is this:

Free speech exists for you, for me, for all of us.  It our property, our tool.  It is not a contract with terms and conditions.  And its not a frail little cobweb to be brushed aside by a careless movement.

To be more direct: free speech only enables speech, it never restricts.  There are plenty of reasons to control your speech, but free speech will NEVER be one of those reasons.  We don't need to tread lightly or be responsible.  To do so would be not wearing your raincoat because you don't want it to get wet.  There's no need to worry; its waterproof.

When you say the mansplaining argument destroys free speech, what you are doing is asking another person to choose not to exercise the right of free speech for the sake of the right of free speech.  But free speech isn't going to be brought down that easily.  Its the same reason that free speech arguments from the anti-PC crowd or the "all speech must be politically balanced" crowd are wrong.  Because instead of arguing with the content of their opponent's words they try to convince them that forming the words is wrong.  But there is no wrong way because free speech is OURS.  We can do whatever we want with it and anyone who tells us otherwise is intentionally or unintentionally conning us.

Look at it like this.  Someone wants to tell you you're mansplainig but can't decide if they should or not.  So they make a little pros/cons list in their head.  You're saying "would hurt the free speech of Weird" or "would hurt free speech" more broadly, should be in the cons list.  But its not.  If they ultimately decide to say nothing or say somethibg, either way both of your free speech rights will be completely intact.  However, if the person decides not to say what they want because it could hurt free speech, they just got duped.  Because they chose not to use their inalienable right when they could have.  And yeah sure there were good reasons for them to stay silent but protecting free speech wasn't one of them..  This is why its so important for people to know where their rights begin and end.  Its much the same as how people voluntarily incriminate themselves because cop shows have lied to them by telling them that the right not to bear witness against themself doesn't apply in situations where it actually does.

[wierd]

I see where you are coming from, but I also see that it completely overlooks the realities of chilling effects.

Shutting people down, and slathering them with an abusive label in the process, is a prominent source of said chilling effects. That is exactly what modern "mansplaining" based shutdowns accomplish, and is their primary motivation for being used. (It is not so much that they just shut that one person up, they shut up a whole group of people.)

It is the corollary of things like maligning gay people, (so they are afraid to assemble), and other actions like them-- just typically perpetrated by the left, rather than the traditional right.  (and I hate those terms, just so you know.)

I really cannot conceive of a proper or justifiable reason to engage in such an action.

[Neonivek]

Dang it... Now I actually want to look up anti-gay sentiment in feminism >_< (And not just Anti-trans which everyone here probably already knows about)