tetranomiga

Sorry, just saw this. Will do.

It was popular to say, but I challenge the idea that people have somehow become less tolerant of speech they disagree with than, say, Christians in the 1980s or the US government during the Red Scare.

"Is this person defending free speech in favor of liberty? Or because his anti-liberty extremism won't be tolerated otherwise?".

It works both ways so this isn't a practical way of looking at implementation of free speech. You can't keep a system that doesn't protect itself free forever - propaganda travels faster and further than truth, and I doubt the founding fathers wrote the first amendment with mass media in mind.

You can start the argument of who gets to decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't, and in the current political climate (at least in the USA) the answer to that is obviously nobody. Ideally those decisions would be made during a time of cultural unity, where a whole nation can say "These are our values that we want to write in stone", like Germany did with the new constitution in the 20th century where it put well-defined limits on what kind of speech should be forbidden.

It's doubtful if that kind of unity is even possible in the USA anymore, so I'm worried that, on a long enough time-scale, unfettered free speech will inevitably lead to tyranny of a kind because there is no system in place to protect it.

That's an "if" so big I don't know what your point is.

Because the west and especially the US has, very specifically, a fascism problem.

There's no historical reason to think that not supporting extreme speech will lead to fascism. There are historical reasons to think that curbing extremist speech protects democracy (see the Weimar Republic).

I dunno if I'd agree that it's a small vocal minority, zero-tolerance to anybody questioning the current dogma is seen everywhere where trans acceptance is a focus. Ten years ago I was told, by trans people, that there are physical differences between trans and cis brains. Say that today, and you get kicked out of LGBT spaces for being a transmedicalist or truscum.

I have no idea whether it's true or not because you can't even find research on the subject because of how absurdly politicized the topic is.

Gender politics is a cancer on the left, even though I agree with it, it takes up so much time and energy away from things that would benefit everybody including trans people, like universal healthcare, better employee protection laws and better, more available education. Such a small percentage of the population has been the center point of so much discussion and debate, and for what benefit? All I see it doing is give the right-wing more ammunition to harden their bases.

> You are intentionally misunderstanding

I can't misunderstand what doesn't make any sense.

> We have a destination in mind. We know it's down this dark and rainy road. I can't foresee every twist and turn on this road and I am able to be at peace with that.

When people say "they're at peace" with things like this in the context of religion, it usually means they've replaced the importance of the here and now with valuing the beyond and the ephemeral. Things in the here and now just aren't that important because God or Jesus will take care of things. I would argue that being at peace when you're in danger, driving down a dark and rainy road, would make you a much worse hypothetical driver. To be a bit snarky, I for one wouldn't want my driver thinking in the back of his mind that if we all die in a crash, it's no big deal because it was God's plan anyways.

You're gonna say that that's not what you do, but that peace has to come from somewhere, and from what you've been saying it sure sounds an awful lot like the peace comes from absolving yourself of responsibility for things that you can't control, even if they are still your responsibility to handle.

> Political change happens step by tiny step.

No it doesn't, political change is simply impossible without massive financial backing, which is why policies that benefit the classes that don't have a lot of money have to jump through all those hoops you mentioned to eventually get the money behind it.

Diversity of skin color is not meaningful change in the slightest if all the policies stay the same. They're just hiring different faces to say the same things.

I can't believe you're unironically using the crack epidemic (that ravaged poor minority communities and was caused by the US government) to justify the War on Drugs (that ravaged poor minority communities and was caused by the US government). The REAL SOLUTION is boosting the lower classes and making life better for everybody, but that's too expensive to try, so wasting trillions and ruining minority and poor lives is better. /s