donstewart wrote:The much admired Obama was in favor of dismissing unconventional sources of information.
Unconventional meaning alt-facts.
There is a difference between censorship and editors. Editors by their nature cut out information. That's what editing is. You used to buy a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas or subscribe to the New York Times and you knew that there were experts who made sure the information in those pages was accurate, or at least as accurate as possible. It was not necessary for people to question the validity of what they read because of this trust relationship with domain experts.
Now thanks to the internet there is NO trust. No matter what it it is, someone is telling you it's not true, a false-flag, whatever. I started noticing this ages ago when articles started allowing in-line comments at the bottom.
Then you have the rise of alt-news like Brietbart (or Zerohedge) who make it clear that their mission statement is to be anti-everything. It's no wonder they're sensationalistic since fear sells. The outlet acts like a cult by saying they and only they should be trusted. That's what I see in Onlooker camping out at Zerohedge, for instance.
So freedom of speech is great but because now everyone is plugged in with everyone else you realize how dumb everyone really is when left to their own devices.
Electing Trump is the end result of this wave of anti-intellectualism passing for freedom of speech.
Civilization's immune system against quackery is broken and something somewhere needs to come around to take its place otherwise we're going to fall into Sagan's Demon Haunted world where nobody gets vaccinated and they think the world is flat. It's bad enough that AGW denialists have essentially won and Trump has gutted the EPA. Ignorance has dire consequences in a world in massive ecological overshoot.
donstewart wrote:Do they suppress the disagreeable thoughts
Perma-doomers can always fall back on the "your brain can't handle inconvenient truths" canard. That in and of itself can be a rhetorical crutch. The only thing that matters is the data.