In recent years has become the rather less inspirational:
"I disapprove of what you say and I will do what I can with a mob to ruin your reputation and career as an example to make sure nobody else says it"
"I disapprove of what you say and I will do what I can with a mob to ruin your reputation and career as an example to make sure nobody else says it"
1. If everyone has free speech, then people are free to criticize the speech of others.
2. If everyone has free speech, others are free to publicize the things you said.
3. If everyone has free association, others have a right not to associate with you based on your speech.
To look at your example in a US-centric light, being homosexual was literally lethal for some and cost thousands others their jobs. LGBTQ+ people are still losing their jobs for being homosexual. People are still saying things about the LGBTQ+ community that are statistically and provably untrue.
I personally don't understand why we would hold those perpetuating such things above criticism or force association.
But what problem has been reasonably solved by violence that you're thinking of?
The anti-freedom of speech path would be to ban any pro nazi speech entirely.
Plus, let’s be honest — most of the “consequences” of speech, like cancelling people, are not really targeted at the person being cancelled. They are really happening because people want to suppress speech they don’t like by scaring other people into silence.
Government is not the only source of oppression. We should be very careful about excusing social consequences for people speaking their mind, or we will lose free speech because of a cancel-culture mob mentality rather than because of government oppression. The end result is pretty much the same and we shouldn’t let it happen.
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.
We should strive for free speech even if it hurts people’s feelings, and even if it gives a microphone to crazy people, even Nazis.
The alternative is a world where the government, or a mob, or both, get to dictate what we can say and think. It would also be a world where we cannot point out errors without being shouted down, resulting in things like Soviet science and basic errors of governance being uncorrected until they ruin everything (e.g. the recent history of Sri Lanka). It would be a world where both scientists and critics of science have no ability to deal with pandemics or other disasters outside the bounds set by politicians who have no idea what they are doing.
There was a time when cancel culture was turned against people arguing for gay rights, desegregation, and feminism. That time may come again, quite soon, and people on the left who have recently turned against free speech and created mechanisms to weaken it will reap what they have sown.
Utter nonsense. Would you rather have free speech or live? Only one of these is a primary goal. The other is merely a means to attain the other. Hence, the restrictions on free speech provided by every country's laws.
> There was a time when cancel culture was turned against people arguing for gay rights, desegregation, and feminism. That time may come again, quite soon, and people on the left who have recently turned against free speech and created mechanisms to weaken it will reap what they have sown.
Cancel culture itself is free speech. The right used it to morally bankrupt ends that resulted in people losing their lives.
Any argument you have given so far can also be used by your opponents.
No, I'm not. If some speech serves to cause people to die, that speech is bad and is not worth protecting. Preventing people from dying is the opposite of weaponizing. If my opponents want to prevent me from dying, I won't oppose them in doing so. My opponents and I don't disagree on everything.
If I say I should eat bread but not shit, your argument is that my opponents can now say that I should eat shit but not bread. You're ignoring that only one of these is wrong.
You seem to be missing that cancel culture is itself free speech, so your position contradicts itself.
I’m not sure why you keep going with the weird shit-based analogy.
My argument is simply that if you can control the speech of others, then they can control yours.
Whether some speech is “right” or “wrong” is always going to be up for debate. The result will simply be that anyone in power will ban speech they don’t like.
Getting someone fired, cancelling their appearances at universities and other public events, blacklisting them from academia -- those things are not speech.
It's the employer who terminates employment, not the people asking the employer to do so. The opponents of the people asking the employer to terminate employment can exercise their free speech to argue for continued employment. That is the only action congruent with free speech absolutism. In this case, it also happens to match what the law protects.
None of these are restricting someone's freedom of speech. It's the same badly constructed talking point over and over again.
You might as well also say that jailing people for their speech doesn't infringe on freedom of speech, because that is a consequence of speech they already made. But that's a very narrow (and ahistorical) view of what freedom of speech really means.
We can lean on the Wikipedia definition here: "Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction."
People who speak out want to influence people or policy, which to them would be positive consequences, and yet immediately label negative consequences as being "cancelled".
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.
To continue your analogy, free speech absolutism would be the geocentric model of the universe, the epicycles would be attempts to explain the obviously desirable exceptions to the rule (harassment, incitement to violence, etc).
That suggests that there is a missing heliocentric model for free speech, one that is not based on absolutism and thereby avoids needing to add exceptions while simultaneously avoiding the trap of strict epicycle-free absolutism (which, to continue your analogy, doesn't accurately describe our observations).
Apart from overt racism (which you can still easily find online, even among pretty popular figures in New media), virtually no position that used to be expressed in public discourse has disappeared, and many many ideas that used to be unthinkable and definitely unspeakable are now common place.
So where exactly is this terrible mob?
Quite to the contrary. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft [1] was a research institute dedicated to human sexuality. Histories have long been "cleansed" of records of gay and transgender people; look no further than the bible for evidence that homosexuality was quite normal in society a very long time ago. After all, there's no need to invent a rule against something that people don't want to do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
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.
Around 2014 you get the first mention that she once said she once said she had mixed together with Christ and was neither male nor female. After 2014 you gradually get more and more edits from the point of view that Jemima was nonbinary or trans (all of the sources for this are post-2010).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Public_Universal_...
That's not true, she uses both names on her last will and testament (and uses "her" there as well). And I'd caution against pretending to speak on behalf of someone who's no longer around. Many who do so have little interest in the deceased beyond them being a tool for their own ends.
There are even proeminent leftist streamers who have gotten into spats with JK Rowling that are still playing it publicly (Vaush, Hassan).