Part of my joy comes from blocking angry dudes that feel entitled to engagement.

mekka okereke :verified:

Part of my joy comes from blocking angry dudes that feel entitled to engagement. Highly recommend it!

I don't have to talk with everybody. There are so many people that are genuinely curious and open minded, that I just don't have to deal with these dudes.

There's an effectively infinite supply of "dudes on the internet." There is absolutely no shortage. The marginal cost of blocking one, is close to zero.

"Well, what about the marketplace of ideas huh? Not very inclusive of you!"

OK!

mekka okereke :verified:

Paradox of tolerance and all that.

I don't see it as a paradox at all. You cannot include all ideas, because one of the loudest ideas, is "We should silence the ideas of Black people!"

You cannot include this idea without excluding other ideas. So absolute inclusion shouldn't even be anyone's goal. It's certainly not mine.

And dealing with annoying people online can be exhausting. Even if they're not malicious! Me doing "racism 101" individually for millions of people, just doesn't work.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@mekkaokereke There's a song to go along with that: Block party https://vid.wildeboer.net/w/6Svd4a5aQGQvyJRbd1HEBa

Alaric Snell-Pym

@mekkaokereke the thing about the "marketplace of ideas" argument is that it's only a marketplace if people play by the rules. That's how a marketplace works. People can only claim to participate in the "marketplace of ideas" if they actually debate in good faith, and other participants are welcome to protect the marketplace by shunning them, just like fraudsters and theives being kicked out of a commercial marketplace.

Misuse Case

@kitten_tech @AngelaPreston @mekkaokereke This is funny because I made a joke to someone this morning about how we need regulation for the marketplace of ideas

Silver Huskey

@mekkaokereke Once I stopped feeling bad about blocking people my enjoyment of social media increased.

No, I don't have to listen to bad faith arguments. It's freedom of speech, not obligation to listen. :blobcatcoffee:

Dan Neuman

@mekkaokereke That's my perspective as well. You get more free speech if you exclude hate speech. If you include hate speech, then you lose *all* the speech from the victims. It's a loss for society because minorities have the unique perspectives you don't have in the dominant culture. Edit: I mean, from a market of ideas perspective. It is just wrong from a societal perspective.

Thad

@mekkaokereke One of the things I've noticed about dudes (and it's almost exclusively dudes) who preach the importance of markets — whether that's literal free markets or the marketplace of ideas — is that they really seem to have a lot of trouble understanding that the point of a free market is that nobody has to buy shit they don't want.

Max Gross

@mekkaokereke I usually have a few go's at attempting a rational discussion but it always ends the same puerile, abusive way... and that's when I block.

Diane

@MaxG @mekkaokereke

I think it's pretty easy to spot the difference between a person making an effort to have a conversation and someone convinced of their own rightness and who has no interest in listening to anyone else.

ktp_programming

@dan613 @mekkaokereke
Maybe it is because USA was born with that principle of free speech that they have a hard time what it meant not having it. Free speech is about not being persecuted by officials for stating an opinion, about the state, about the church, about science. It has never been about gaining access to a platform or a right to a public.

Free speech applied to hate speech gives them the right to not be jailed for stating their opinion in a KKK rag.

Free speech also means that everyone is free to set up rule in their media, social or otherwise, to select opinions it wants published.

Jürgen Hubert

@mekkaokereke When I was still on Twitter, I used some mass-blocking tools to block anyone who liked certain particularly horrible opinions of particularly loathsome people. I must have blocked tens of thousands of accounts, and this was the only thing made Twitter in its late stages remotely bearable. Of course, when they changed the API and disabled those tools, that was my final cue to get out of there.

Everyone is entitled to say their piece of mind, but no one is entitled to a captive audience. And any social media which violates _this_ part of the social contract won't get any of my time.

Moose Jolly Holcomb

@mekkaokereke yeah I've always thought paradox was a bit of a stretch as a label, even though I think it's generally a useful framing. It's only a paradox if you take a rigid almost clinical definition of the word tolerance. Basically you presuppose the word means absolutely tolerance. But that's not really how language works, words like tolerance are always a bit fuzzy, for exactly this reason.

mekka okereke :verified:

@ktp_programming @dan613

The US has never really had free speech. Ever.‍️

There's never been a point in US history when Black folk could speak freely without severe consequences from their government. By severe consequences, I mean government programs designed to falsely imprison or execute them.

Slavery was obvious.

To Jim Crow: cops & politicians targeting "uppity" negroes.

To COINTELPRO.

To "Black Identity extremists."

US free speech usually just means "Let the nazis talk"

1/N

mekka okereke :verified:

@ktp_programming @dan613

And the most obvious: voting is arguably the most important form of free speech. But it's 2024, and there has never been a single presidential election in US history where it was as easy for Black people to vote as it is for white people to vote.

I don't think most folk in the US realize how shameful that is. We just... kinda accept it. We don't realize that we're the only major country that restricts the free speech of *an entire race* this way.

2/N

Kevin Bonham 🚽🦠👨🏼‍🔬

@ReverendMoose @mekkaokereke I like the idea that tolerance is an agreement, not a principal. It is not paradoxical to be intolerant of intolerance, any more than you need to believe someone that's dishonest.

I commend people that do - I think it's noble to try to work across difference - but I don't think it's required of us.

Joanna Holman

@mekkaokereke marketplace of ideas is such a silly metaphor that bears no resemblance to any market I’ve ever been to. I have never been to a market where I have wanted or had the ability to buy everything. Any market with more than a couple of stalls that required every visitor to examine the contents of every stall would be essentially unusable. Market stall holders yelling at people to look at what they have drive a lot of customers away

David Megginson

@joannaholman wrote

marketplace of ideas is such a silly metaphor

Exactly. If there's a "marketplace of ideas", they need to face the fact that we're not interested in what they're selling.

And then when they pivot to whining about their freedom of expression, we can remind them that we also have freedom of association. They can talk all they want, but no one's obliged to listen.

@mekkaokereke