Exactly

It’s not but the tone of the discussion is slightly piss taking on your part

All i was asking is what do people think of Robinson being banned from twitter. My view is that give these people a voice and hopefully the sane and decent people in the world will be able to take them down with facts. I realise it’s a difficult task but I believe there are more decent people than people who believe his views. I now understand some people are tired of this discussion and I didn’t realise it had been discussed before. And yes it is a fairly hostile audience which i was also unaware of

No no, I’m pleased you and others have.

Yep let’s leave it there, because although I’ve clashed with you in the past as well as in this thread, I’m a fan of you work.

I think my issue would be that I’m all for discussions about Islam, anti-semitism and so on, but I really think starting from the likes of Tommy Robinson’s views is a bad way of opening that up. People of that ilk really don’t appear to be interested in a discussion, rather they’re interested in getting across a polemic having made up their minds years ago.

edit - to be clear, not trying to tell you how to think; your experiences are almost certainly more valid than mine in this arena. Merely explaining why I personallybelieve that giving people with those views completely free reign is not beneficial.

The trouble is that if everyone in the country had voted I don’t think Brexit would be happening. Voter turn out was very poor. On a simple level there’s more good people in the world than bad people. There’s just too much apathy about such things

Thing is we’re in the era of post-truth, people are being convinced it’s fine to put gut feeling above ‘so called facts’ and views are more and more entrenched. The ability to turn people away from hateful ideas with facts and rational arguments has demonstrably become harder and harder to do, hence unfortunate results to public votes. An afternoon on twitter is all you need to see how impossible it’s become to change the mind of someone with facts and evidence when they’ve already decided what they think.

Facts are no longer taken as facts, a source that disagrees with someone’s opinion is biased and fake. It’s not so clear cut. Trying to stop the bullshit from reaching people before this point is the only viable option now.

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Yes I see your point. However Robinson could easily open a new twitter account or get someone to do it for him. At least if he’s on twitter or similar the authorities know to a degree what he is thinking and planning and can try to put a stop to anything nasty he has planned. I know it comes across as idealist and good will triumph over evil but I do think it’s not impossible if extremely difficult.

It was over 72%, I’m not sure how much you’re expecting.

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Higher than any general election I can remember though

Do you not think if everyone had voted though we’d have a different result? I think too many thought there’s no way it can happen so just didn’t bother

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No, not really. We’ve got results of a poll of 33,500,000 people there, which is the best possible indication of how a vote of 45,000,000 would go.

With Trevor Eve.

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It was a close result though. 52-48

Yeah, and you’d need a significant reversal of that in the people who didn’t vote (my rough maths is saying 55/45, but Friday night maths aren’t my strong point) to even out the result across the country. There’s no reason to think that would have happened.

The Paradox of Tolerance has already been mentioned here but another concept that might be useful for the OP is Schmitt’s critique of the kind of liberalism you’re espousing upthread. This isn’t to say that what you’re saying is inherently wrong, more there’s a number of presuppositions which underline liberal democracies that people like Robinson subvert by creating a specific axis of antagonism which can be seen whenever he’s given a platform to speak.

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If anything i’d suggest the turnover for the Brexit vote was too high. Had it been anywhere around the 64% average of General Elections over the last twenty years we’d have probably stopped talking about the result by now.

He must have gone pretty far to be banned from a site that suspends people for telling the American Nazi Party they smell like butts. I can only assume Tommy Robinson finally said something bad about Huel or neoliberalism… :thinking:

always hated time team

*Time Time