wilsocr88

We should be extremely slow to "universally condemn" things, though. Free speech requires that universal condemnation is very difficult to reach.

The reality of a free society is that we will be confronted with ideas that differ from our own. It will often be uncomfortable. To be free is a demanding thing for a sovereign citizen.

The exact thing to not do is to claim that every situation is potentially worthy of universal condemnation and that we must figure out how every situation could potentially be worthy of universal condemnation. That's the opposite of living in a free society.

What we mean is when groups of loud activists pile onto a wrongthinker en masse and demand that the person's life and livelihood be destroyed, or else engage in targeted harassment campaigns, all for the crime of having a different viewpoint, which of course makes them the worst possible thing.

I think it all stems from this idea that we can't be made uncomfortable ever, or we are a victim. The whole point of colleges and universities was to be confronted with some very uncomfortable ideas and to argue your position on them. This is how free societies work.

But as you said, currently all of our mundane day-to-day dopamine incentives in the West are aimed at the precise inversion of that. Not a good thing.

Yep. There is no freedom of speech unless the most batshit insane ideas can see the light, be understood truthfully, and criticized freely.

And, I'd add: we need to respect the rights of the crazies to speak their mind. Yes, respect. Otherwise, you have people stuck in their crazy bubble, following only social media accounts that agree with them, and not listening to any criticisms of their points of view because everyone treats them like a horrible pariah and has never bothered to explain why their ideas are wrong, and they've never had a chance to truly argue their position (which is how you suss out what you actually believe).

And what do we get when we don't let people with bad ideas speak their minds freely, argue their position, and listen to arguments from others?

We get January 6th.

That is truly unfortunate to read.

Those people are not serious about free speech; they are deeply hostile to it. If they were serious about free speech, they would welcome the criticism.

In my experience, it's not the criticism that free speech advocates complain about (plenty of weak phonies do, to be fair, because they are not secure in their principles or viewpoints). In my experience, free speech advocates complain mostly about the moves of private organizations against individuals' right to free speech. The bans from the social media "public square," (suddenly more important during Covid...) or when someone gets cut off of PayPal for dubious political reasons, these things do matter. They may not be strictly "unconstitutional," or even really illegal, but they are dangerous, and they are against the ideals of a free society.

In my experience, the "anti-free speech" things they complain about are generally the actions taken by powerful private institutions (PayPal cutting people off, complete bans from the Social Media town square) that prevent individuals from having the right to exercise freedom of speech in practice.

Free speech exists to prevent "nasty behavior". The whole point is that you speak your mind instead of getting violent. The whole idea is to invite criticism for "nasty behavior," and to allow everyone to see why that behavior is nasty, what's wrong with it, and why.

The point of the bit about Western Europe was to point out that hate crime laws in practice achieve the exact opposite of their intended goal: They make societies more bigoted. The US, which doesn't legislate against hate speech, has less hate crime than countries that do.

The point is to figure out what works, not "keep trying what we expected to work, but it didn't, but we've already sunken the cost of believing it, so we might as well keep trying."

No, it's precisely the other way around. The XKCD comic attempts to reframe one of the most important philosophical foundations of democracy as somehow legally unsound, or otherwise completely dismissable when it comes to ideas that are in the minority. When one is in the majority, implies Randall, it is their right to take part in the suppression of minority ideas. That sort of questioning of democratic fundamentals runs directly contrary to the ideals of a free society.

The whole point of free speech is to allow for fringe, crazy, bad ideas, so that we can put them in the light and suss them out. Without that, there is darkness, and we all know what happens to democracy in darkness.

Emacs was released in 1985. That's 36 years ago. Half of that is 18. What am I missing?