Just because a person shouldn’t be believed, it doesn’t mean that person shouldn’t be listened to.
It is dehumanizing for a person to be judged as not worth listening to, and it is inhumanizing to make oneself the judge of whose voice is heard and whose is silenced.
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People are astonished when I say nobody should always automatically be believed about anything, but that all people should always automatically be heard.
What? The right to a trial is a fundamental principle of liberalism!
And people want to give even more emphasis to STEM disciplines. As if the main problems of humankind are technical problems. As if even more technology will save us from our social problems.
When the goal of educating citizens is lost, and education becomes training employees for industry, or worse, credentialing employees for employment, this is what happens.
I think you’re right if everyone is arguing in good faith. But I learned a lot from this r/askhistorians post on holocaust deniers: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57w1hh/monday_methods_holocaust_denial_and_how_to_combat/
Giving everybody a chance to be heard on principle tends not to work in online communities if the parties aren’t playing fairly.
To clarify, I’m not saying we all have to listen and participate, and I’m not saying that people should be allowed to speak freely in every forum. There are (many) places where such debates are unwelcome, but mainly because they interfere with other discussions, as you pointed out. The practice of deplatorming to make it impossible to express certain idea because of a conviction that those ideas need to be silenced everywhere is different from that, though.
The actual situation I was thinking about when I wrote this was the common belief that “we must always believe the woman” in cases of sexual assault.
“While much of what he wrote consisted of the tired, old, and familiar rhetoric of deniers, the new twist he added to his strategy, a strategy that works out so well for Holocaust Deniers in the American context until this day, was his insistence on “free debate” unmarred by “political correctness”. Already prevalent in the early 1990s, conservative political groups had accused the “liberal establishment” of labeling certain topics politically incorrect and therefore ineligible for inclusion in the curriculum – an outcome of the Stanford debate on the core curriculum and the Western Civ requirement of the late 1980s.”
—https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8rbfdw/how_did_holocaust_denial_become_a_thing/