[shadowprofile77]

There should never exist a rubric known as "things you do not discuss" in any society that takes open debate and free expression seriously. Discussion is not violence and it should always be defended as a freedom regardless of how boorish or controversial its subjects. The very idea of such a category is grotesque and cowardly, to start.

[lukifer]

When I finally took the time to learn how the proof of The Halting Problem worked, I was fascinated by just how "edge-case" it actually is: it's less a general principle, than a proof that a black-hat exploit can always exist that will break any given halting-prediction algorithm.

With the caveat that I'm a Chomskyan free-speech absolutist, and I generally agree with you: it's not hard to apply the same Halting Problem concept to free expression. Such an exploit can manifest many ways: QAnon, Red Guards, literal Nazis, Woke "Neo-Marxists", etc; but regardless, scale the intersection of extremist ideology and human social behavior until they approach infinity, and it's easy to see how they can (and historically have) resulted in a systemic collapse of free expression and free thought. (This was what Popper was trying to capture in his now-oft-quoted Paradox of Tolerance, which is now ironically over-applied as a lever of pre-emptive intolerance of challenges to orthodoxy!)

I do agree that it's both a categorical and strategic mistake to succumb to an epidemiological model of memetic extremism. Even to the extent that model applies, extremist ideas only spread under social preconditions of susceptibility (as described by Hoffer [0]), and I don't think pre-emptive idea suppression is either right, or wise, or helpful. Extremist ideological infection is more a symptom than a root cause.

And yet: we can still recognize that certain taboos might exist for a reason, such as the one against openly voicing "maybe we should just kill the people who disagree with us". James Lindsay (perhaps the second-most infamous opponent of postmodernist thought) has described postmodernism as a "universal solvent", capable of taking apart any idea. It's not that you never use such a cognitive tool; rather, one uses it cautiously and judiciously, when one has the wisdom to wield it properly. Similarly, we need safe spaces for dangerous thoughts, even of the Popperian or Halting Problem variety; yet it may be appropriate to hold social taboos against those ideas being used casually in polite society and the public discourse, lest they dissolve polite society and public discourse themselves.

[0] https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n...

[morlockabove]

That's all well and good, but I'd still rather not see a bunch of autistics fired and unpersoned for unwittingly questioning modern dogma. We live in an increasingly religious time; better to go into questioning the orthodoxy with your eyes open.