The thing about Europe: it's the actual land of the free now

> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation.

There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.

As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.

Exactly, regulation benefits the consumers by allowing for a competitive playing field on innovation, cost and labour.

Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).

The right wing propagandist who photoshopped "I hate free speech" over Nancy Faeser standing at a Holocaust memorial and holding a sign with the Text: "We remember"? I guess it is kinda important to not ignore the context of the edited image, especially since Germany for good reasons is not including the rights of holocaust deniers and Nazis in their free speech.

Quite a singular case and it sparked a huge controversy on free speech in Germany, with most scholars and officials siding with the sentiment that what David Bendels did was disguisting, but probably covered by free speech to some degree.

Compared to the free speech violations (and the seemingly inconsequencial nature of the discussions after they happened) this is still just a singular case.

Also, purely from a conceptual standpoint I do not think that a free society has to tolerate every opinion of people who objctively seek to abolish it. If you have a significant fascist movement in your country your speech will have become less free, so limiting their speech before they do is an act of defending democracy and everybody who believes in it.

Just replace Nazis/fascists with radical islamists and check how free your speech really is.

Popper's paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Similarly, we should not tolerate the "free speech" of those that seek to silence others (e.g. fascists).

Popper said we should tolerate the intolerant as long as they aren't violent, so its the exact opposite of what you say.

In general intolerance just breeds more intolerance, people are much less tolerant today than 10 years ago due to the massive amount of intolerance towards intolerance that proliferated the past 10 years.

Violence is such a nebulous concept, though. There are forms of violence that aren't physical, even though the law typically only recognise those. Is publicly mocking people for having a different culture violence? Is calling for harm upon them? Is, through policy, causing harm to them violence? Is it violence if it's through willful inaction?

I think all the above are, although the trade-off line is somewhere above mockery.