> challenge sacred cows
What do you mean when you say sacred cows?
There are a lot of reasons an idea might make you mad, some of them very warranted. If you don't have an emotional reaction about at least a few topics, you probably aren't thinking seriously about the practical consequences of getting those topics wrong.
To be clear, society-wide censorship is rarely if ever a good idea. But I am similarly unsympathetic to the idea that being able to make someone mad means that your arguments have more merit. Being able to troll people and rile them up is a different skill than arguing. It doesn't mean Moore has hidden insight, it means he knows what buttons to push.
I wager that I could make some pretty stupid programming claims on HN that would get downvoted to oblivion, and the fact that I knew which buttons to push to get a reaction out of commenters here wouldn't have anything to do with whether or not they were true. I mean, I know exactly what buttons I would press to make someone like tptacek mad at me about encryption, but those buttons don't really have any correlation to the areas where I agree or disagree with tptacek's general approach to security.
In other words, there are a lot of reasons someone can be angry about a public claim -- they can be angry that it's common and they need to respond to it over and over again, they can be angry that the arguments are being accepted by a large portion of the population, they can be angry because the arguments are based on a faulty or fundamentally wrong understanding of how science/research works, they can be angry because they think the arguments are being made in bad faith.
> but even absurd ones rarely get called out as dangerous enough to warrant being banned
It's not the content, it's the source. It's that Moore has a large public following and people know about him. Lots of people deny climate change, but climate scientists get more worked up about Trump doing it than fringe researchers, even though on average the fringe researchers are probably making more nuanced, more insightful, better arguments against climate science than Trump is.
People do need to be careful about falling into ideology traps, but if you want to claim that someone has a mental area where they can't even consider adversarial evidence or question their own beliefs, I feel like I need to see more evidence of that than, "this highly public person made people mad when they said something stupid to millions of viewers."
Because that's just not a hard thing to do. If the head of the FDA walked out on a stage tomorrow and announced that actually we got it wrong, and drinking bleach is a really good cure for COVID-19, lots of scientists would be mad about that, and I don't think that would inherently mean that bleach is one of their "sacred cows".
