Firstly because life's too short for that, and secondly because who knows, one day they might turn out to have been right or mostly right.
Are you right about everything?
If you don’t like what people are saying, you can use your free speech to explain why your ideas are better.
Who could that possibly hurt.
You think you’re smart enough to determine which ideas should be allowed? How do you know you won’t be the Church burning Galileo at the stake? Hint: you don’t know that. That’s why you have some humility. Ultimately ideas that don’t work will fail.
Sure, Phrenology just died out on it's own. You got it.
https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refere...
In fact in places where it wasn't banned it flourished.
Literally the very next sentence. Banning things doesn’t work.
Phrenology died out because it was openly discussed, debated, and debunked. If you are confident you can prove you’re right about an issue, you don’t need to ban anything, you just go ahead and prove that you’re right. When you start banning things people only take that as evidence that it’s some secret forbidden knowledge that threatens the existing power structure and they’re even more motivated to pursue it.
That is a tragedy not because the targets are indeed often wrong, but because it has a negative impact on when student activism is required and can have positive influences as it so often had in the past. I can be dismissed with references to incidence like those where people just were shouted down.
Well, where is that? I live my life surrounded by "discredited" ideas with much popularity and power. I don't know shit about intellectual discourse, can it get the police to stop killing my friends? Can it get a doctor for my impoverished mother in law?
If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them.
True. But trying to prevent further expression of those ideas, or retaliating against those who express them ("cancel culture" IIUC), isn't necessarily the best type of opposition. For example, disability rights isn't an academic issue for me and some of my friends. But when someone expresses opposition to the idea that websites should be required to be accessible, I don't try to silence them; I try to engage with them for the purpose of changing either their mind or mine.
To strong-man "Cancel culture" - trying to remove people from decision-making roles after they have signaled they intend to make harmful decisions is not - on the face of it - a ridiculous idea.
> expresses opposition to the idea that websites should be required to be accessible
If someone openly holding this view applies for a job in charge of your website, are you going to seriously consider their application?
The point of cancel culture isn't to convince the person being cancelled, or to coerce those who agree with them by threat of losing their job. The point is to remove perceived political opponents from positions of influence.
I (for the most part) agree; like I said, I am not generally a fan of contemporary cancel culture.
Are you Muslim btw, or is your username a coincidence?