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Comment by _mhyx | Hacker News Reader

But absolute freedom of speech IS A LEFT WING OPINION! Is no one here old enough to remember the fight over pornography or offensive language in art/music/movies? That was the right trying to shut down speech they disagreed with via corporate power! These people are _not_ liberals, they're something else that's new and terrifying

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"The left" became "the progressive left" which became "progressives". The actual liberal left still believes in freedom of speech, the public perception of it has just been co-opted by militants with a different social agenda (conformity to progressive values, rather than liberal values).

I think you've convinced yourself of something horrific for reasons that I'm not seeing from what you're writing. "Absolute freedom of speech" is a satisfying way to describe a righteous movement like the one you mentioned, but it's not a real thing. Nobody is for "absolute" anything, though they may shout as much from a podium. I think it would not at all be a contradiction if many of the same people who fought against censorship of "offensive" material in the arts would opt not to fight for the right to incite direct violence. On the other hand, would they be against whatever it is these employees are upset about? Possibly - the details are fuzzy - but if it's general political workplace hostility, then that seems to happen just as much in conservative workplaces, where I've personally seen people express a shocking degree of public hatred for other people based on the perceived liberal nature of their opinions, to the point of destroying working relationships.

The things that scare ME are:

A. Some people seem to be practically unable to engage with dissenting opinions without claiming to have been "shouted down".

B. There seems to be less disagreement about the how to achieve what's right (i.e. we both agree on what's right, but disagree on how to get there), which can realistically be argued about in good faith, and more disagreement about what's right in the first place (e.g. person X thinks gay marriage, abortion, etc should be legally prohibited, and person Y does not), about which good-faith arguments are vanishingly rare for perhaps unavoidable reasons.

"But absolute freedom of speech IS A LEFT WING OPINION"

That only holds if you're willing to perform enough mental gymnastics to somehow transmogrify the gulags, mass graves, firing squads and famines that the USSR, Mao Zedong, Cuba, Pol Pot, etc. employed to deal with dissenters into features of right wing governance.

Or just pretend these things don't count...

One could argue they were "punching a nazi" of their time. The establishment of a dictatorship of the working class was a mission for which no human sacrifice was too great.

Obviously we're nowhere near that in modern US, BUT the hints of "violence in exchange for a dissenting opinion" and "what I don't agree with is Nazism" are unpleasant to say the least.

>the hints of "violence in exchange for a dissenting opinion"

I couldn't agree more. I've seen both actual violence and extreme glorification of violence against people of the opposite political affiliation more and more over the past couple years. Many people seem to dismiss the calls to violence as "trolls", which is actually probably true, but I have to wonder if there is much of a difference between a troll who calls for violence and loves to see people get attacked at rallies, and a person who would actually be happy about these things if they became worse than they are now. I feel like there used to be a solid distinction, but I'm not sure any longer that there's really a hard line between all "trolls" and people who would actually enact these things, given the power (and given no significant threat to themselves, of course).

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> One could argue they were "punching a nazi" of their time.

One could. One would have to forego any claim to "absolute freedom of speech," however.

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