zorse's comments

Very cool. Sciencescape built a ton of these field visualizations that cover a bunch of topics (genes, cells, diseases, etc). The pay wall issue is a non-starter in my mind: public funds -> publicly accessible data.. or at least thats how i think it should be...

10 points to gryffindor!

Economist Thomas Sowell talks about this at length in his book economic facts as fallacies. He points out its foolish to make policy decisions based on what % of the national income each economic quintile made, because the people within those quintiles are constantly moving from one to another. A person who made 500k/year for 40 years drops down into the lowest quintile when retired, though that person is by no means poor.

Those are great examples of 'hate' groups that have marginalized themselves just by saying what's on their mind. In the United States where speech is heavily protected by the constitution, those who hate have much less power.

Moreover, lets say that there is a person with a particularly sophisticated hatred of Jews, Muslims, gays or whoever. In fact, so sophisticated that its hard for you or I to counter his argument. This would be a fantastic situation! Why? Because we would either concede that his unfortunate views are correct, or seek a better understanding of the issue, perhaps by seeking someone who is an expert in philosophy, law or whatever and having a discussion/debate

In that circumstance we all win. You and I win because we have a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the issue, and everyone else wins because they can weigh the arguments themselves and make up their own minds.

It might be the most foolish law on the books. Does anyone think that someone who hates a racial, ethnic or religious group will all of a change their mind because its against the law?

Laws against anti-semitism lend credibility to proponents of conspiracy theories. "If what I am saying isn't true, they why is the government out to stop me from speaking about it?"

If you look at France in particular the attempt to shut down the comedic routine of dieudonne m'bala m'bala who has a routine that makes fun of the holocaust has likely done orders of magnitude more to stir up anti-semitic sentiment in France than his routine

regarding the anti-islam stuff, its a similar situation, with some important distinctions that I won't get into at the moment. Regardless, silencing anti-islamic sentiment, just as with silencing anti-Semitic sentiment, will only make the situation worse

P.s. its not just in Europe. In Canada we have 'human rights commissions' that can force you to apologize and pay enormous fines and legal fees for 'hate speech'.

Censorship is the worst way to fight an idea

- It lays credence to that point of view ("why would the government censor it if didn't have some truth to it?") - It undermines the importance of having discussions about challenging issues - It makes those who hold the aforementioned views even more sure that they are correct, and that someone is unjustly out to get them

let people freely discuss these issues and we will all come out on top