I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it

99% of the time that someone decries the "death of free speech", it boils down to them not wanting to hear criticism for expressing ignorant or hateful ideas.

Just because you can say something doesn't mean you should. And if you do say something that is stupid or is harmful to others, you should expect push back. If you have no defense for that push back, it's a clear sign that you should either re-evaluate your opinion or express yourself in a more thoughtful manner.

This is a lesson that most people learn in grade school. But one of the big issues today is that a lot of people believe that others not accepting their opinion is a form of persecution. They are so self-centered that criticism of what they say is taken as an insult to them personally. Criticism of these people lead to no moments of self-reflection and no moments of personal growth.

The big question for me is how do we move past this moment without a large number of people realizing that they are acting like spoiled children. Speech is as free as it's ever been. What's different is an entitlement behind expressing opinions that destroys any meaningful discussion.

It's an interesting double standard.

After all, what is the point in discussing something if ideas are not challenged or expected to have a sound argument behind them? To feel that you should be able to say anything you want and people cannot make a counter-point is absurd and quite selfish.

Hard to find a reform the next generation wants that hasn't been written or conceived by our ancestors, yet so many people are naïve to the point they think they're part of something novel.

The verbiage in this bit is exactly what I was talking about. Your objection was not simply that there are forbidden topics, you are specifically complaining about what topics are forbidden.

And to be clear, the "cancelling" of people existed before either social media or the internet. Yes, the internet and social media can act as a multiplier on this behavior, like they do for all sorts of other human behavior, but they didn't create it.

When did the internet become garbage? I'd say Facebook and Gamergate, but news groups were really cool until they got trashed by trolls, or was it when you needed to set up a special eggdrop to protect your irc, and that was a long time ago.

Is Ham radio cool again?

What happened to bands/athletes who spoke out against American wars in the past? What happened to atheists for the last few decades/centuries? Or women who were accused of being witches? What happened to people who thought that women could participate in professional life? How about people who thought that it was ok to be gay or love someone outside of your race? How about people who thought that native peoples we not savages or subhuman?

To think this is a anything new or has anything to do with "wokeness" (whatever the hell that means) is to take an extremely short-sighted view of the world.

> At least in my experience, conversations online were more open 10 years ago than they are today.

I'd argue the exact opposite. 10 years ago there were a lot less people online. And those who were online engaged in more niche and closed off platforms/forums. It's only been in the last 10 years that general discussions with huge numbers of people from all around the world on any and every topic have been combined into a singular feeds on a small number of platforms.

As for social justice being a recent phenomenon, it isn’t. It being on the web is, but the web is still relatively young and it finally became intertwined with our offline selves that your online behavior is just your behavior. And social consequences for that behavior can be executed online.

We've done worse, and with more rigor than today's cancel culture, but for however much I might find it distasteful, the stigma borne of cancel culture at least doesn't have the full weight of the law behind it.

[1] Here's an article from 2016 chronicling the rise of the phrase over 25 years before that. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-co... . If you search for that phrase you will find a treasure trove of exactly the same sorts of outrage we see today, only now the phrase "political correctness" is replaced with "cancel culture" or "wokeness".

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...

2016 - Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem and never played another game after the end of the season.

It's easy for CIS-het white men to feel threatened by their loss of supremacy in American society. And to take it out on everyone outside their group.

I don't think it's recent, it's just done a complete 180. You could absolutely be cancelled for holding the wrong opinion in the 80's when I was a teenager, but the "wrong opinions" were anti-conservative opinions back then.

I think the problem with statements like this is that there are some things they could refer to that are very, very obviously (at least from where I sit) actually ethically bad, but were considered by many to be acceptable things to say few generations ago. Things like sexist and racist jokes, comments about where women and "colored" people belong, blatant homophobia and transphobia—y'know, all the widely-normalized bigotry that was a part of the rich white male landscape in the postwar years, à la Mad Men, remained so to some extent at least through the late '90s, and continues to be aggressively defended by some to this day.

It is true (I might even call it a truism) that some people go too far and overreact, but I think it's important to step back and think for a minute about just how short a time it's been since these things were considered widely acceptable. Then think about how that affected the people still around today who had to sit through that. Then remember that, as I said, there are still many people today who are actively advocating for a return to that blatant bigotry.

This is why you get people who overreact even to genuinely-benign questioning of such policies: because it's very hard, in many cases, to tell the difference between someone who's just asking questions, and someone who's "just asking questions"[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Because this is almost always true. For example, there was somebody here, who said the same thing, that they got in trouble because they asked whether transwomen can have periods. They knew the answer. They just tried to argue about something stupid, and they used this problematic wording for a specific reason: they wanted to have a pointless debate. They even knew that if they would asked the same thing with “period symptoms”, there wouldn’t be any debate. They didn’t want to have a conclusion.

Btw, one of my close friends said the same thing about corporations. He has zero ground to say such thing, he can’t even argue for his statement. It’s just his feeling.

Explain. You "got in trouble", what kind of trouble exactly?

Did someone disagree with you? Because that's natural. And did someone call you "racist"? Well if you posted your opinion publicly and 10,000 people saw it, it's almost certain at least one will comment that. Doesn't mean it's the majority opinion at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

The country I live in (New Zealand) has no constitutional free speech guarantees, and ranks 11th. The US ranks 42nd, behind East Timor, Jamaica, Slovakia, South Africa, and many other places I imagine your average American would not associate with free speech. Now, I have quibbles with the way the Press Freedom Index is assembled, and it only captures one narrow (but important) aspect of what we care about when we speak about free speech. That notwithstanding, my question to you is this: scanning down that list of countries, does it perhaps occur to you that the US may have something to learn from us, rather than the other way round?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...

Yeah, but not really.

God is dead and such.

Might makes right. Liberty, free speech, facts, etc. are apparently just nice theories from a more enlightened time.

Slavery (or it's near equivalent: peasantry) was not considered unnatural for the vast majority of human history, really up until modern era. As horrible as it was, it was also the basis of many feudal economies the world over, and it probably powered societies through the dawn of agriculture, so at least 10k years. Prior to that, hunter gatherer groups also raised other groups and took slaves.

Industrialization had more to do with slavery's eventual decline than any idea that it was unnatural.

This is reflected in the areas where it ended earlier due to earlier industrialization (England, the Northern States of the US) vs where it ended later due to a persistent preindustrial agrarian society (Russia and the American South).

What is inherent in humans is the capacity for empathy and the ability to mentalize about another human's experience. That can lead to a belief that slavery is wrong, but that belief is in battle with the desire to exploit other humans for your own gain.

It very obviously wasn't [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

The template works like this, create a set of ideas, but cast them as having been part of the fabric of reality itself. This can happen intentionally or organically. Organic development is as simple as raising kiddos with the same belief. The way that socialization and mental development happens us that it makes these truths appear as normal and obvious as apples are red.

Are rights obvious and self evident? Congrats you've been born and socialized in the west. Is the mandate of heaven obvious and self evident? Congrats, you were born in China a millennia ago.

It's just sad that those self-proclaimed anti-oppression activists don't see they're using the very same methods for their supposed goals.

Speech is cheap. The scenario I am imagining is someone calling you and telling you they are going to kill you and your family.

Thanks for the "verbal warning".

The problem with free speech absolutism is its childish view of causality. It only views the end cause of a sequence of causes as bearing any responsibility. Reality doesn't work that way.

The decision to absolve person A of criminal (and often moral) culpability leads to obviously pathological outcomes in certain situations. For example, what if person A is a master manipulator, and person B has an IQ of 60. Who really has the culpability in this scenario? The free speech absolutist would still lay the blame at the feet of person B, but most reasonable people that aren't possessed by ideology would clearly identify person A as bearing a significant chunk if not most of the responsibility for the murder, even though all they did was use their speech.

You're basically thinking like a "crunchy mom" anti-vaxxer who thinks that measles are harmless because she doesn't know anyone who's died from it.

Imagine for a moment that you're a black person living in 1920s Mississippi. You personally know people who were hanged by lynch mobs. You've read about Mary Turner who was burned alive while 8 months pregnant for daring to speak out against the lynching of her husband. And now white people tell you they'll kill you if you register to vote.

You seriously argue that banning those threats would be a worse infraction on people's freedom than allowing them?

If you don't see a way of defining hate speech in a way that won't be misused any worse that free speech is, it just means you haven't thought very hard about it, and suffer from status quo bias.

Even the US has histories of this happening, plenty of hated minorities were silenced, threatened and punished if they spoke up.

Doesn't that mean that type of speech is forbidden?

By definition, half of people are worse (however you define worse) than average. The world is truly held up by the inertia of the achievements of our betters spanning generations. I praise myself lucky every day to live in a stable western country with a heritage of centuries of liberality and thousands of models of civic courage and leadership.

If the edifice we're standing on is stable, and let's hope so, it's despite the frothing masses of idiots and vengeful iconoclasts. Yes, always a good chance I myself am one of these idiots, but nonetheless, it doesn't make the overall assessment any less true.

The inability or unwillingness to point out right from wrong is either due to a lack of courage or an absence of hubris. Both sides of the same coin. That judgement, who to entrust with the levers of society, needs to happen.

Because of such crystallization, in America, critical thinking has become fairly close to heresy, and any tid bit of questioning of your own group's inflexible logic must be couched in "please don't hate me, I'm on your side" first. Those of us that enjoy being contrarian to our friends are getting less and less boost in social media, and most political messaging now contains a bite of "the other side, your fellow Americans, are corrupt/evil/incompetent." I just don't know how we can shake this situation but I think free speech isn't the problem at all, it's the incentives around our speech.

Something like 25% of the population has an IQ <90. Education cannot take such people very far. I support almost absolute free speech nonetheless.

What if everyone actually was a moron? In that hypothetical, would we just pretend it's not the case to not get the nanny state?

But if you publicly said "my name is Joe and XYZ racist thing", people have the right to cancel you.

Historically this public/private distinction has been violated lots of times in the U.S., e.g., WWI, McCarthy. I don't think it's totalitarian; it's usually relatively limited. Most of the time, for most topics, the government leaves you alone and you can say what you damn well please.

Yes, real life is hard and complicated and there's no easy way to decide it. We collectively do the best we can and keep trying to improve. That's just reality. That's why free speech absolutism is naïve- it appeals to our desire for one, simple, always enforceable rule but it's not the way the world works that one simple rule is always the best outcome.

Parliaments and courts.

See the battle-tested European hate speech laws I mentioned, e.g. section 130 of the criminal code of Germany:

"Whoever, in a manner suited to causing a disturbance of the public peace,

1. incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origin, against sections of the population or individuals on account of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or sections of the population, or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them or

2. violates the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning or defaming one of the aforementioned groups, sections of the population or individuals on account of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or sections of the population"

Note especially how the first sentence is a pretty tight restriction. Private speech cannot be affected. Academic texts are pretty safe. Anything arguing for moderation and careful consideration of facts is easily defensible.

See how dumb that sounds ?

No, it is really not at all a slippery slope.

Even if you just look at the term, it's pretty damn obvious that it has nothing yo do with "Speech that you don’t like? That offends you?"

No, we didn't. That is a particularly silly and ignorant example of a slippery slope argument.

There is in fact a fuckton of evidence: https://news.yahoo.com/all-25-us-extremism-related-murders-l...

It is not true, we don’t live in a free speech absolutist world. I’m pointing out that free speech absolutism doesn’t obviously point in the direction of maximum free speech for the individual. In a free speech absolutist world, there’s no liability to worry about in the first place.

> Personally, I don't think that platforms are people and thus don't have the same rights to speech which is why we allow them to escape some of the responsibility.

Platforms aren’t people, but they are owned and operated by people, who have the same free speech rights as everybody else. It seems like this ought to include the owner’s right to selectively publish content they’ve been sent.

I’m not a free speech absolutist, and so I resolve this issue by saying, yeah, free speech absolutism is dumb, it is fine if we protect some types of speech, and selectively acknowledge the right of platform-owners to not broadcast some types of speech. There are competing interests and navigating them requires getting into the weeds. Unfortunately, this doesn’t have quite the moral certainty of “free speech absolutism.”

>> It isn’t obvious to me that there is an absolute direction. It seems like an interplay of the speech interests of various entities which may push against each other.

> Well, you're not entirely wrong, but I feel perhaps like you're missing some nuance.

I don’t think I was missing some nuance, I was describing a point where free speech absolutism misses some nuance.

> Anyway, apart from all that, free speech as a value is much broader than the legal requirements of the First Amendment. I'm reminded of Alan Berg, hosting and debating bigots on his radio show, because limiting expression always ends up hurting minorities, and because suppression of such thoughts just drives it underground; sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I do think there’s a value to open and thoughtful debate.

Free speech as a general value is good, but sort of abstract. I think open, thoughtful, good-faith debate is a closely related but slightly better value. Sometimes it is fine to not host a discussion if one of the parties is just there to spew propaganda for example.

Edit: removed a bit about Alan Berg, wasn’t familiar with his story. I don’t have anything to say other than, that’s just tragic.

At some point, people decided that we should fear the KKK and white supremacists, and that gave the racists an enormous amount of power even though their numbers are dwindling. I think the world was better when we mocked them and belittled them.

But now the strategy is to call anyone a racist, which is self-defeating and something I vehemently disagree with.

Or did we just have a black president and a political party that leaned into white supremacy dog whistles?

Governments that want to abuse laws can use nearly any law. Don’t like what a media outlet is saying about you? Investigate them for tax evasion.

If you’re worried about government abuses you can argue against having any laws at all.

You mean like criminalizing it like the way it is in Germany? That magic?

And assuming that people of color should be the victims of violence because you, personally, aren't concerned with violence is selfish and narcissistic.

I think it removes the ambiguity. If you find laws that prohibit someone from being a literal Nazi disagreeable and would choose not to live in a state because of it because of 'free speech', that's fine. Just as I'd be fine for not living in Florida or Mississippi for the inverse of that reason.

If it's change you're after, sometimes your best course of action is to remain silent and to leave politics to those with personalities better suited for it.

I've known enough politicians to understand that they are often better people than I am. Not everyone but many, perhaps even the majority. They can disagree in public, work together despite their differences, and go grab a beer together after work.

"But they couldnt have known back then, the facts only came out later".... This sounds good in theory, unfortunately people lie, and one mans objectively false information is another mans truth. If there was a magic 8ball that could say "true/false" to any such information, i'd agree, but there isnt.

UFOs, MKUltra, involvement in various coups, PRISM, etc. used to be "objectively false information"... until it wasn't.

> This isn’t a new problem, it’s been illegal to pretend to be a doctor for decades. The difference is simply the reach we are giving charlatans.

Thalidomide is the famous counterexample. Just to be clear, I don't like people who give bad medical advice. But I am much more tempered when it comes to the rights of ordinary citizens to hold and discuss their personal views about industrialized medicine.

This is the key thing people miss in the free speech debates. The reach is because it is profitable to give people that reach and host them, even if they are spreading misinformation and lies. Ban them from social media/youtube/whereever and they still have freedom of speech.

In the past, their audience would always be limited to a local network, only people they could interact with in person. It didn't make money to spread their nonsense, but now it does, and tech companies have no incentive to ban or remove profitable users.

Look at Google. Now try to never ever touch code they touch, information they curated a bit, or anything they do. Good luck with that!

Try your best, you will be tainted. Somehow. Someway.

A key example? Try to email people, without Google/Gmail/Workplace bring the result often.

Google is the de facto monopoly of many things, and you are forced to touch them, even if you try not to.

So in such a case, well... I don't know. But there is no choice.

ADDED: In other situations the degree of saying whatever you want is very context-dependent and also dependent on what consequences you're willing to suffer.

Question like these are pointless since they’re already solved. The American Law system already said no at the highest point possible.

There are even proeminent leftist streamers who have gotten into spats with JK Rowling that are still playing it publicly (Vaush, Hassan).

Also, sure - other cultures had different perspectives on sexuality. I don't think there is any argument to be made that biblical era jewish society was more respectful of Freedom of Speech than modern America or Europe, so I don't think this is very relevant in context.

Talk to any free speech advocate but those who preserve the purity of speech and you will rapidly find that they add epicycles for all sorts of things.

Free speech is not an ideal that we should strive for in itself but shorthand for a principle that helps promote stronger societies that help its members live longer. Any speech that goes against that basic goal is stupid to fight for. Eating is something that is not something we should strive for in itself but shorthand for fulfilling the nutritional needs of the body. Any eating that goes against that basic goal is stupid to promote.

But there are things that at least today still fairly strongly tied to gender Expression. Wearing skirts. Painting nails. There used to be more such things! Wearing pants. Having a labour-based job. Feminism enabled women to pick and choose aspects of things gendered masculine and incorporate them as needed. The reverse hasn't caught up - mostly because of misogyny, honestly. It's reasonable that "Women want to be more like men". It's demeaning when men want to be more like women.

But this is all still gender expression, not identity.

Where does expression end and identity begins? The answer is actually very difficult to establish. This line is constantly shifting, but it takes decades.

Is it possible that if we completely removed all social stigma on any kind of "gendered" expression, and allowed everyone to behave exactly how they want, would there be any gender binary remaining except biological? Would the majority of people end up some sort of "non-binary" and there would be no more reason to "transition"?

It's possible.

But that will take decades, and meanwhile there are people today, in today's society, who are suffering.

And this is just me taking a very shallow look at the problem that is sympathetic to people who say things like "This transition thing doesn't make ay sense, just act how you act, you don't need hormones or surgery for that".

There is another layer which is dysphoria, and then we get into a question of innate gender identity. I suspect a part of it remains.

The only way we find out the reality of what humans are like, and how they belong in our society, is by being accepting, and welcoming, and believing those that are trying to tell us what they want and need.

Unfortunately, to a lot of people, someone being "accepting" of an idea they disagree with, sounds like "encouragement" of the idea. So now you have all these stories of teachers grooming children to believe they're trans. And it's just b.s.

I understand that we have to realistically look at the effects these changes have on individuals. But I don't think that we have reached any kind of "optimal social rules". Deciding to stop right here and now seems arbitrary, and I'm reasonably certain that there have always been people making this exact argument for any kind of change.

I understand your concern, and I think your perspective is actually non-discriminatory.

But I'm still curious how you think the line should be drawn. If I said I think race mixing is a bad idea (to be very clear, I absolutely don't hold this opinion), do you think it would be fair for people to avoid discussing with me?

Your perspective strikes me as a modern version of the old “concern” that talking to teenagers about homosexuality turns straight kids gay. By now we hopefully all understand how that’s just bigotry, and your argument is basically the same. You make some vague allusions to confused teenage girls being vulnerable to gay^H^H^H trans propaganda based on purely hypothetical worries. Gut feeling all the way down.

Note also that your concern is that a straight teenage girl gets mindwarped by the evil trans lobby and not the symmetrical scenario of a hypothetical teenager daughter that is trans but feels unable to come out of the closet because she doesn’t trust the adults in her life to respond reasonably.

Maybe ask yourself if you would be disappointed if one of your kids turns out trans and then ask yourself why.

> I think most people, understanding the reality of this in stark terms, would be dead against children transitioning.

The only reason why this hasn't been outright banned for minors yet is because older voters don't know what's happening.

It's funny, I see a NYT article that literally just repeats these things out loud so that everyone can see what's happening, and then they get attacked for just describing what's happening

What's being done right now is so damning, no criticism is necessary. Only visibility. The people who want to hide facts from the public can only do this for so long

Which is why the permission of their parents acts as a limit on what they're able to agree to, in this case as in all others.

> The treatments have permanent side effects

Yes, that's the point.

> lead to sterilization. One of the drugs used to aid in "transitioning" is lupron, which is also used to sterilize sex offenders

This is pure bad faith fear mongering. It doesn't matter what else the drugs could do. Titanium is used in missiles, chemotherapy drugs can be used for euthenasia. None of those are what we're talking about, so talk about what we're talking about not some other unrelated thing.

> The only reason why any of this is allowed to happen is because the general population doesn't see what's happening.

There's no "general population" this is being slyly pushed on. People are making decisions within their families. Each individual is making choices with medical consideration and the guidance and, if a minor, ultimately the permission of their families and doctors.

"Allowed" is a telling choice of words though! You're advocating for a state-enforced limit on what people are allowed to choose for themselves.

---

And additionally, and very seriously, wake the fuck up and pay attention. The anti-trans moral panic is the tip of the spear of fascism in north america. You had a clean chance to see that and change course last year when Putin explicitly used anti-LGBT reasoning as part of his justification for the invasion of ukraine! Look at what Orban is up to, what comes along with this rhetoric. Look at what you are being used to accomplish.