Quote Originally Posted by Think View Post
Gwahir, on the other hand, is taking the position of a sort of cultural determinism: acts of will are heavily influenced, if not determined, by the conceptual apparatus of a belief system and/or a culture (in fact, he may go so far as to question such a distinction between belief and act at all); therefore, there ought to be a system to call into account demagogues and memetic structures themselves (in some ways this is a predictable anglophone distinction between the USA and the later British territories: the USA was forged in the heat of British Empiricist thinking and is strongly puritan and nonconformist in culture; the remaining British territories are more influenced by cultural, religious and political pragmatism, the wishy-washyness of anglicanism is a perfect exemplar of this thinking; its strength is that opinion and reason are more strongly linked in the public forum, its weakness is in making principle bow to expediency (i.e. freedom of speech is a fine thing unless there's a problem with it; we oughtn't to censor the internet but...etc.etc.etc.))
Well, I certainly can't sound intelligent after that, but, umm, kinda.

You're dead on about the weakness. Honestly I'm hopeless when it comes to the part of the discussion where we go "how do we police that?", "how do we legislate that?", and "how do we systematise that?"

Free speech is already limited. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it illegal to make violent threats against the President? Why is THAT law okay, but a law saying that no holder of public office may make or publicly endorse a threat against any other public official would not be okay? I'm almost inclined to suggest a law making it illegal for any holder of public office to make statements directly supporting violence against any citizen, but I can see that raising weird red-herring questions about things like abortion and the death penalty.

Quote Originally Posted by Think View Post
Gwahir: To what extent ought there to be public/state intervention against memes? If you would say that memes influence the way people behave, and this is interrelated with the will in causing crimes and abuses, and are further willing to give the state a role in policing memes then, on these philosophical grounds alone and without reference to your personal values (except regarding freedom of speech of course), delineate the ethical problems with the Jacobins' attacks on the Girondins, the Bolsheviks' attack of the Mensheviks, or the actions of the Catholic church against those it regarded as heretics between 700-1500ad (I don't really expect you to have any trouble attacking those historical incidents, it's more an exercise to try to find internal inconsistency)
While I'm considering accusing you of purposefully setting me up to look like a moron by not knowing enough about ANY of these things to respond, instead I'll look them all up and get back to this later.

As for the first question: simply put, I don't know. I'm very willing to talk it through, but I'm just not good at that part, so I try not be too opinionated about it. I'm very willing to say "X must take responsibility for Y", but I'm not willing to say what form that responsibility should take, or who must be the one to hand it out.