Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other.
This is all so disheartening.
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This is all so disheartening.
Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).
No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.
That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.
You need moderation both ways.
Yes to the First.
But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.
Bonus points if the cops arrest him before he goes to school tomorrow.
Couching threats of violence in political language shouldn’t change anything in that regard.
(Well, it does these days. But it shouldn’t. That’s how you get kids gunned down at prayer.)
Anyway, bottom line is, adherence to the First doesn’t mean we abandon law enforcement, or military sense.
I think that everyone (yes, literally everyone) would agree that direct incitements and threats of violence such as this would be fine to censor and deal with appropriately. As a free speech advocate, I know a lot of folks with free speech absolutist views yet I don’t know a single person who’d be against any of that.
The reality though is that, in practice, these extreme examples tend to be used to justify censorship only to end up making the rules vague and subjective enough that, sooner or later, folks start being censored for wrongthink.
Also, “moderation” is just a soft term for censorship.