Governments and companies continue to get more and more empowered to do this stuff because people always show that it has never really been about freedom but rather pushing their own views.
> people always show that it has never really been about freedom (emphasis mine)
Which people? They always act this way? It was never about freedom, for anyone? Who could possibly say this authoritatively?
I think the last ~5 years has put a bright light onto freedom of speech. It is a complicated topic with some surprisingly nuanced positions. Does it include the ability to say what you want wherever you want? Or without consequence? There are multiple vectors to it.
I consider myself a free speech advocate. But i have no military fetishism that you claim is one of the root causes for free speech support (a weird combo). I support free speech because... i think people speaking their mind freely is a net positive. That appears to be increasingly controversial these days. That's fine, more room for discussion.
One of the safer to discuss at work examples is how loud can speech be while still being speech. Is a concert playing loud music free speech? Is it still free speech when the music is at such a level it causes hearing damage for those attending? Even if some attendees are children? What if it is only temporary hearing damage? What level of loudness creates enough harm to another person for it to stop being considered speech? Where is the distinction between me causing you bodily harm with airwaves or with punches?
Another example is bright lights. Having a sign up is free speech. But what if the sign is well lit up at night? How many photons can I send toward you before it stops being speech and starts being violence? Clearly aiming a powerful enough laser to cause eye damage would violate it. But what if it was a weaker red laser that I was shining through your window. If it is the aspect of targeting you that matters, then when if I set up a bill board and put a bunch of red lasers pointers that moved around randomly to draw attention, so it is no longer targeting just at you.
Then there is all sorts of problems one can get into with photos and the numbers that represent them.
thanks for asking the tough questions
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-scottish-governmen...
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sending-a-mean-tweet-abo...
The problem with your view is 1) It is unsubstantiated - where do you see "crickets from the usual crowd"? 2) It is exaggerated and playing into partisan tribalism of people. 3) Creates more division than helps, does not address anything really except teach toxicity.
You're flaming the fumes.
This is always going to be a controversial topic with too sides. That isn't apparent in the US because there are such strong protections on freedom. But that doesn't change the fact that there are some people who believe they should be removed: those people exist in every society, they are a majority in the place where this occurred, and they are a majority in many other countries.
Saying that someone is fanning the flames when they say they support freedom misunderstands the topic totally. There are people who believe free speech is weak and decadent, the First Minister of Scotland is a lawyer...these people are not crazies, they are people in govt today. And there aren't two sides to freedom, you are either for or against, there is no middle ground (I live in Scotland, the primary argument of people who want to supress freedom was your argument, word for word...my freedom is gone now).
Personally, I'm of two minds about it: this isn't a "cancel culture" situation, because evidently he did break a law. He's not being shunned by society, he's just getting arrested for a crime — however ridiculous the crime may be.
The main argument against this sentence is that other people do the same thing all the time and don't get punished for it. That's not a strong defense. The other argument is that the law itself is inappropriately applied, which it probably is. But this guy wasn't engaged in civil disobedience, he was a drunken idiot who thought he could shoot his mouth off with impunity, and to his surprise he got caught in the system. He should appeal, and the law should be clarified, changed, or struck down, because it's being selectively applied and that's a bit scary. But, this isn't shocking, and the guy isn't a sympathetic hero.
Unironically canceling the cancelers to pushback against cancel culture? Maybe the horseshoe theory has some merit after all.
Do you also have a problem with robbers being punished by the justice system and having their ill-begotten spoils returned to their rightful owners? It’s really no different.
A better example might be punishing a murderer with the death penalty. But most people who oppose retributive “justice”, myself included, do indeed have a problem with that system so it’s still not a particularly persuasive point.
If a person believes $action is wrong but are able to rationalize why it’s only wrong when others do it but it’s justified and permissible when they do it then it seems to me that the hullabaloo over $action is just a pretext and real issue they’re mad about is who is doing it rather than the $action itself.
The problem is that one side currently doesn't think it is wrong to do these attacks in the first place.
But maybe they will start to understand the harm, if they are subject to the same thing.
Yes, it is better for these cancel attacks to happen to nobody. But it simply isn't going to stop until people on all sides understand the harm that it causes, and likely the only way to do that is for them to suffer at least a bit of those same attacks.