Okay Trump is recent, but his whole change of focus since buying Twitter is where public opinion on him shifted. That started a shift in public statement more toward the libertarian or perhaps conservative and that made him unpopular with a lot of the liberals who previously liked him for pushing environmental causes.

Now that he pushes conservative and libertarian ideals, supports a Republican candidate, he becomes persona non grata. That may well be valid, but it should not take away recognition of his other accomplishments. If he’s now an asshole, he can be a visionary asshole. Becoming an asshole doesn’t mean he isn’t or wasn’t a visionary.

I’m not saying he’s not an asshole. But he is a visionary.

And right now, if he wasn’t up Trump’s ass, you’d probably be saying he’s a visionary without sarcasm.

Obviously the right of people to live is very important. But if somebody encourages them to end their own life, their right is not being taken away, they are just being given bad advice. If they choose to suicide, their right to live is being surrendered by them, by their own bad choice. Taking away somebody’s right to live is murder. Encouraging somebody to do something stupid is harmful, but it is not murder. No more is it theft if I encourage you to set your money on fire and you do it. You choose to follow my obviously bad recommendation, you choose to set your own money on fire. That is your choice and your responsibility.

Making any sort of speech illegal is a slippery slope. Most civilized people would agree they don’t want to read racist rhetoric, encouragements of suicide, etc. but when ‘I don’t want to read that’ becomes ‘I don’t want you to be allowed to say that’ you start forcing the morality of the majority on everybody. And that rarely ends up in good places, historically speaking.

Read your damn history.

SpaceX is basically 100% Elon’s creation. He was founder, Tom Mueller (who designed the Merlin rocket engine) was the first employee period

Tesla was Elon and a few other people who had seen a good electric roadster, but it had been a one-off that that company was not going to produce. They decided they wanted to produce an electric roadster, so they did. Initially, Martin Eberhard was in charge of the company and Elon was just an investor. Search archive.org for the original Tesla blog. It’s all laid out. I know this because I was following them while it was happening.

Eberhard was in charge, and they were going for a setup with a two-speed gearbox. There was to be no clutch, just a synchromesh to allow shifting. Problem is, shifting at 10,000+ RPM under heavy load is mechanically stressful, and they were having a lot of trouble getting the gearbox to work reliably. After a good year of screwing with this, they were burning through cash and not getting close to actually shipping a car. That’s when Elon stepped in, pushed Eberhard out, and took over Tesla. Elon quickly switched to a setup with a single speed non-shifting gearbox (much easier to build, much less expensive, and will basically last forever as long as you lubricate it) and a larger and better cooled electric motor to deliver the required torque that they wouldn’t get from a lower speed gear. That setup is still in use today in all Teslas.

The problem is that ideas that are under people like musk, are doomed to always fail

Like electric cars, like reusable rockets…

I mean full respect when I say this- but if you advocate for a law or policy, don’t shy away from the hard questions about it. Think them through BEFORE you advocate for the policy, as part of your thought process of whether that’s a good policy or not.

In this case, those hard questions are exactly why I’m NOT in favor of such a policy.

If you make it illegal to recommend suicide, you create a situation where anyone who says anything even vaguely pro-suicidal is open to both criminal prosecution and civil liability. So that guy who (without any desire to see the poster suicide) said take a long walk off a short pier now is facing criminal charges, will have a criminal record, may go to jail, and then he’ll be sued by the family of the deceased and probably lose his life savings (or whatever he’s not already spent on lawyers).
Or, what if it’s not the disturbed guy from the scenario who suicides, but some other random person a month later and they see that the ‘long walk off a short pier’ post was in that person’s browser history? Do we blame that person for every single person who suicides who might have read that thread?
That in turn has a chilling effect on any online discourse and you’ll get a lot more people using proxies and VPNs and anonymizer systems just for basic online discussion lest something they say be taken badly and the same happen to them.

And then in the wake of some publicized suicide, some politician will say it’s time to clean up the Internet to keep our kids safe, and they’ll task an investigative agency with proactively seeking out such things. Suddenly online message boards are crawling with cops, and if you say anything even vaguely pro-suicidal your info gets subpoena’d from the platform and you get cops knocking on your door with a court summons.

Is this ‘better’? I don’t think it is.

To be clear-- I have great value for the sanctity of human life. I don’t want to see anyone dead, including from suicide. I think encouraging anyone to suicide is abhorrent and inhuman and I would personally remove such posts and/or ban such users from any platform I moderate.
But that’s my personal standards, and I don’t think it right or practical to throw people in jail or ruin their lives because they don’t agree.

I also think one part of free speech is if someone else wants to create a toxic cesspool community, I don’t have the right to order them not to. I’m okay with requiring a warning label on such a space though.

I think I might be okay with encouragement of homicide or murder or terrorism being at least somewhat illegal.

Question for you though, let’s say you have a person with numerous documented mental health problems, who has been suicidal for quite some time, they post some awful shit on a forum one day when upset. One of the responses is to go take a long walk off a short pier. Only they go and do that, with a bunch of rocks in a backpack, and they drown.

What punishment would you prescribe for the person who told them to take a long walk off a short pier?

Making things illegal is easy, but all the law does at the end of the day is a list of if you do X your punishment will be Y.
So for the dude that told him to take a long walk off a short pier, what is the punishment?

there are always some restrictions on speech.

There may be a few, but they should be as minimal as is humanly possible. Restrictions on any civil right should be seen as an absolute last resort, to be tried only when all other options have failed and there is an overwhelming need to fix some desperate problem.

but on the other hand, if you have people committing suicide because they were encouraged to do so, then maybe it makes sense to make pro-suicide speech illegal

No it doesn’t.

You are focusing on the symptom rather than the disease. The problem isn’t that there is pro suicide content, the problem is that people are listening to it. If your society is so gullible and fragile that they will kill themselves because some asshole online says to, you have a much much bigger problem than online speech. You have an education problem and that is what you should fix. You are not teaching your kids critical thinking skills and you need to start. Getting rid of the pro suicide content is just starting a game of whack-a-mole because the next guy will post something else equally damaging that gullible people will fall for.
Birds aren’t real, climate change is a hoax, the Earth is flat, vaccines react with 5G cell phone towers to cause autism, and forward this message to 50 people or you’ll die tomorrow. Even if you get rid of the more harmful ones, your society is still collectively prey to any intellectual abuse and/or memetic virus.

The solution to disinformation isn’t to block disinformation, it’s to harden your society against it. Do that and the problem will solve itself, because people simply won’t listen to the crap so there will be a lot less reason to post it and even fewer people spreading it.

Train your people to employ critical thinking skills, and when they don’t, blame them and not whatever moron they were listening to.

Disclaimer- in this reply I may use some offensive statements as examples, none of which I agree with. To summarize my actual views- I consider myself liberal-libertarian-- I believe the married gay couple should have guns to protect their pot farm and legally adopted children from harm, knowing that single payer healthcare will prevent them from going bankrupt if one gets hurt. I don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. And I think government should be out of the marriage game, there should be a one size fits all civil union for any couple/throuple/quadruple who want to legally entangle themselves (and it should not say ‘marriage’ anywhere on it). If you want to get married go to a church, if you want to be legally entangled with your partner go to the government.

In that case, what is the line between “simply” hate speech and actual radicalization to terroristic acts and/or conspiracy to terroristic acts and/or incitement to terroristic acts?

There’s two lines. The line I’m more concerned with (and you should be too), is where’s the line between ‘simply’ a controversial opinion, and ‘actual’ hate speech. If platforms are required by law to ban ‘hate speech’ then where does that line get drawn and by whom? And how do you differentiate between a controversial but honest opinion, and a prejudiced and hateful statement, when the two share the same position?

For example, is ‘gay people freak me out’ an opinion or hate speech? What about ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it could harm the children’? What about ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry because marriage is supposed to be a man and a woman’? Are those opinions or hate speech? Is there a difference between ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it might harm the children’ and ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because fuck the gays’?

Depending on how you define ‘hate speech’, it might require platforms to themselves remove anything even vaguely anti-gay.

I have no problem with any private platform choosing to adopt whatever rules they want. I have a BIG problem with government-mandated censorship of controversial opinions (and I think you should also).

As for the two lines, let’s do a spectrum— again, this is presented as an example, I do not agree with any of the following statements.

1. I don’t like gay people.
2. I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it would harm the children.
3. I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry because it’s bad for society.
4. I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry or adopt because I hate gay people.
5. I don’t think gay people should have the same rights as straight people.
6. I don’t think gay people should have traditional civil rights.
7. I don’t think we should tolerate gay people in our society.
8. I think we should send a message to gay people that they’re not welcome.
9. I think we should round up the gay people and kick them out of town.
10. I think gay people are a cancer on society that should be excised.
11. I can understand why someone would want to get rid of gay people.
12. I think it’s reasonable to want to get rid of gay people.
13. I want to hurt gay people and you should too.
14. I want to help get rid of gay people by any means necessary.
15. It’s time to take up arms against the gay people infiltrating our society.
16. I’m going to get my gun and go shoot some gay people.
17. You all should get your guns and go shoot some gay people.
18. We’re meeting at 8pm at (place) to pass out guns, then we’re going to (gay nightclub) to shoot gay people. Come join us!

Where do YOU draw the line in there?
For me I’d say the line between opinion and hatred is between 3 and 4, and the line between hate speech and criminal incitement is between 12 and 13.

The problem though is if ‘ban hate speech’ is codified into law, if platforms are REQUIRED to police it, then ALL of this becomes essentially illegal to say, essentially starting with #1. And while it’s sad that anyone would say any of this, that basically makes it illegal to express ANY dislike of gay people because of the murkiness of the line between unfortunate opinion and hate speech.

Perhaps it’s not easy to decide where the line of legality should go though, which is why this topic is controversial.

It’s not easy. Especially when you need to determine what’s a controversial opinion and what’s hate speech.

For example (and this is NOT anything I agree with)-- if one said ‘I don’t believe gay people should be allowed to adopt children, because science shows both male and female influences are more helpful when applied together for a child’s development’ what is that? Is that hate speech because it advocates taking rights away from gay people? Is it an opinion stated with the goal of protecting children?

Does it become illegal to express almost any position that isn’t pro-gay?

It’s a VERY slippery slope.

Certain speech is criminal like inciting violence. If someone said ‘I’m going to buy a gun and kill gay people, and you all should kill gay people too’ that is a specific statement of criminal intent and also inciting violence. That will get you cops knocking on your door (and rightly so).
You can apply a ‘test’ to that- does it show specific intent to commit a crime? Does it encourage others to commit crimes? Yes on both.

But how do you ‘test’ someone saying they don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt? How do you tell from a few words if they have a hate-filled heart, or if they legitimately think gay people can’t provide a loving home? You can’t.

For the record- I’m using LGBT as an example. I personally liberal-libertarian— I believe married gay couples should have guns to defend their adopted children and pot farms from criminals, with single payer healthcare to keep them alive if they get hurt. I’m against almost any effort to take away anyone’s rights.

So I’ll fight for the asshat’s right to say ‘fuck the gays’ just as hard as I’ll fight for the LGBT person’s right to marry, adopt, and use whatever bathroom they want (provided they wash their hands).

A better question is where is the line between ‘simply’ a controversial opinion and actual hate speech?
Because if a platform is required by law to ban hate speech, that’s going to sweep up a lot of controversial opinions along with it.

Is it ‘hate speech’ to express any negative opinion about an oppressed group? And if not, where do you draw THAT line?

(if you want an answer to your original question I wrote one out but it’s somewhat long…)

That’s the sort of shit I hope they get away from.
Lower taxes and more efficient less intrusive government are good ideas. They’re just too far in the pocket of big business so ‘lower taxes and more efficient government’ often comes off as ‘let’s give the 0.01% more tax breaks and defund the bloated inefficient EPA’.

If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.

Antitrust laws prevent companies from acting in a way to squeeze off competition. Small companies are also prevented from squeezing off competition. Anticompetitive practices are illegal regardless of your size.

For the record, I personally think everything you said is truly repugnant. Although I’d point out the first one I’ve seen applied to Trump voters, frequently, in mainstream discussions on ‘civilized’ platforms, with little or no moderator response. So apparently it’s okay to be prejudiced and discriminatory as long as it’s against someone others don’t like.

That said, my problem is not the banning of these statements. Most platforms quite reasonably would ban such things, and I have no problem with that.

What I have a problem with is the government REQUIRING a platform ban certain speech. I don’t care if it’s the most vile horrible hate filled shit. It should be up to the platform, not the government, to decide what speech is acceptable or not.

Because if government gets to decide what private citizens are allowed to discuss on privately-owned forums, that’s a very slippery slope.

And I still say it’s counterproductive.

That’s absolutely the one! Truly great American. We could all learn a thing or two from him.

On the censorship thing, maybe it is okay if an online messaging website bans certain content, like pro-suicide content, or pro-terrorism content, etc. You could call that censorship but you could also call it safety.

I think that should go either way and I have no problem if a platform decides to ban that kind of stuff. I certainly have no desire to consume such material.

I have a BIG problem when the government decides that platforms are required to ban things. Even if they’re things I don’t myself want to read.

It’s a slippery slope.

This is actually a real problem more so in this case than most. There’s an awful lot of satellites in low Earth orbit, altitude of a few hundred to several hundred kilometers. Atmospheric drag still exists here a little bit, and thus space junk will reenter and burn up in years or decades.

This satellite was in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of about 36,000 km. Debris up there can take hundreds of years to come down. Geostationary is a special altitude where the satellite orbits at exactly the same rate as the Earth spins. That means that a fixed dish on Earth will always point at the satellite without needing to move or track. So there’s just one narrow orbital ring around the equator for that. That ring is not a place we want space junk to be, because if it gets too hazardous for satellites in GEO that basically removes our capability as a species to use fixed satellite dishes for anything. And that problem won’t go away for centuries.

In concept I agree with him on that. I support your right to say awful shit, but I am not going to spread that message to others. Where Elon lost the plot was thinking of Twitter as a public square. It’s a nice thought, but it requires the whole platform to be 100% neutral and unbiased. So it’s all good to call Twitter the public square, but that’s a lot harder to take seriously when the guy in charge of policing the square is heavily biased.

how can we protect people without this censorship?

We don’t, nor should we try to.
Protecting people’s feelings from offense is not a valid activity in a free society. The second you start down the road of ‘we must regulate this guy’s words and actions to protect that guy’s feelings’ we become a nanny state full of people with paper thin skins. We accept that one consequence of free speech is that sometimes people will say things that are hurtful. We do that because the alternative is getting rid of free speech.

Hate must be addressed at its root.

I could not agree more. Fighting hatred with hatred only breeds more hatred. But that seems to be the standard strategy today, it’s okay to not just refuse to tolerate intolerance, but to be actively intolerant of those who themselves seem intolerant. It is just fighting bad with bad and the result is more bad.

The way we fight the roots of hatred is with open discourse. The people who have hate in their hearts, we do not isolate them, we do not wall them off from society, we do not practice and encourage intolerance against them. We show them a better way. We make ourselves examples of doing better, not just against the people they don’t like, but against the people we don’t like.

We try to build bridges and encourage communication. For all the people who say immigrants are lazy lawbreakers, we show them immigrants who are the hardest working motherfuckers there are and pay their taxes. For the people who think black people are a problem, we introduce them to black people who break their stereotypes.

For the overwhelming majority of people who have hate in their hearts and intolerance and prejudice, those feelings are based on stereotypes.
People don’t join the KKK because they start in a mixed culture and then conclude black people are a problem. They join the KKK because they have stereotypes they see reinforced in media and TV.

There was a famous Black dude whose name I don’t remember, but he of his own volition managed to deprogram a whole bunch of KKK members. All he did was sit down and fucking talk to them. That’s it. Like sit down at the bar next to them and start a conversation. Many of the KKK members had never encountered a respectable well-spoken black person before (let alone one willing to talk to them) and were completely blown away because it broke the stereotype of a black person that they joined the KKK to fight against.
A good number of them ended up leaving the KKK and giving this man their robes on the way out. So there’s this friendly black dude who has a big box of KKK robes that were given to him by ex-members he deprogrammed.

That is how we fight hate. We fight hate with love, we fight intolerance with tolerance and open arms, we fight stereotypes with exposition, we fight ignorance with knowledge.

Otherwise it’s like we are saying there’s too much stupidity in society so we’re going to prevent people with lower IQs from attempting school. It doesn’t work.