Surely it's also true that when you start preventing actions, you give a very small group of people the ability to prevent the actions of whoever they please. It's hard to see the point being made here.
This is a type of speech, and there's no reason all speech should be regulated uniformly, just as speech and actions should presumably not be regulated uniformly. We could just prevent actions without bothering with speech at all, but (for instance) it seems similarly doable to ban certain forms of speech that cause unreasonable harm while leaving other forms alone.
An argument could be made that this would be yet another slippery slope, but I think at some point every law falls into that category and a society must decide whether the benefits are worth the tradeoff of starting down this path.
Except that the article is dedicated to explaining why it's not doable and is a bad idea in general
The article does not address whether it's a bad idea, rather its entire premise is built upon the fact that whether it's a good or bad idea is preceeded by a question of whether it works. Several commenters in this thread have pointed out that it does work, and is used to this day, from China's authoritarian implementation to the implementation at other points in history.
I think it's reasonable to make the statement: assuming that it does work (and maybe the article is correct - perhaps it doesn't work), would it still be a good idea? What number of people would it need to work on to be a good idea?
An idea that won't work is a bad idea (to me, at least). From the author's point of view, it won't.
> Several commenters in this thread have pointed out that it does work, and is used to this day, from China's authoritarian implementation to the implementation at other points in history. > I think it's reasonable to make the statement: assuming that it does work (and maybe the article is correct - perhaps it doesn't work), would it still be a good idea? What number of people would it need to work on to be a good idea?
Depends on your definition of works, I suppose. Unfortunately, even if the main objective could be achieved, there are drawbacks. I would not call CCP's implementation a success. Sure, in some ways they have squashed extremist speech, but at what cost? They have also severely curtailed speech which criticizes them. They have created a culture of fear where people self-censor. Eventually, I believe something will have to give. It is simply too early to call it a success or failure at this moment.