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I'm essentially supportive of your point, but I think your characterization of free speech advocacy is ... idealistic. Any time you reserve the right to upset

I'm essentially supportive of your point, but I think your characterization of free speech advocacy is ... idealistic. Any time you reserve the right to upset people, there's a question of whether you're doing so because you're altruistic or because you're just cruel, or at least so insensitive that you prefer casual cruelty over bothering to be sensitive. Being protective of the right to upset people is an implicit judgment that sensitive people ought not participate in public discourse. And maybe you're okay with that, because the hedge-against-consensus angle is so valuable, but I think the standard counter-argument is that the actual result of a free-speech approach is a yet-unhedged consensus determined by the insensitive jerks with the stomach for a public discourse privileging insensitive jerks. This is orthogonal to the "this meme is so dangerous it must be suppressed" argument. One thing you can do if you want more acceptance to a pro-free-speech viewpoint is actively address the exclusion-of-sensitive-people angle, and try to decouple "having controversial ideas" from "being a jerk about it."

DanielBMarkham 6y ago
Excellent point. We have a tech problem that is orthogonal to the free speech issue. It's making things worse, yet the principles of free speech don't go anywhere simply because other problems have arisen. Up until a decade or two ago, everybody spoke and everybody spent most of their time not listening to one another. Instead we did other things. Today, however, we carry these wondrous little devices in our pockets which connect us to every angry person and demagogue all over the world. We can find and associate with people who believe some really eccentric things we also believe. We can spend our free time encouraging one another to become more and more radical. I didn't comment in order to go down this path, but your point is valid. Unfortunately, speech is not the only thing under attack. Pervasive tech has changed much of the definition of what it means to be human. That's a much more involved subject (!) that seems a bit OT for now. But I agree.
BurningFrog 6y ago
You can't fight the power without upsetting people.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  So, again, there's a standard counter-argument that you also can't fight the power without aggressive suppression of speech supporting the status quo. Also, in your statement is a buried assumption that the people happiest with the status quo are the ones most likely to be upset by speech from people challenging it. There is again a standard counter-argument to this, asserting that being very, very upset is part and parcel of "fighting the power," and the right to upset people is used mostly by cruel-minded supporters of the status quo as a means to amuse themselves by upsetting the agitators more or to goad them into violence that can be used as a pretext for state suppression.
  - viklove 6y ago
    Woah woah woah, you're not allowed to say that. Off to the gulag with you!

DanielBMarkham 6y ago

Excellent point. We have a tech problem that is orthogonal to the free speech issue. It's making things worse, yet the principles of free speech don't go anywhere simply because other problems have arisen. Up until a decade or two ago, everybody spoke and everybody spent most of their time not listening to one another. Instead we did other things. Today, however, we carry these wondrous little devices in our pockets which connect us to every angry person and demagogue all over the world. We can find and associate with people who believe some really eccentric things we also believe. We can spend our free time encouraging one another to become more and more radical. I didn't comment in order to go down this path, but your point is valid. Unfortunately, speech is not the only thing under attack. Pervasive tech has changed much of the definition of what it means to be human. That's a much more involved subject (!) that seems a bit OT for now. But I agree.

BurningFrog 6y ago

You can't fight the power without upsetting people.

neutronicus 6y ago
So, again, there's a standard counter-argument that you also can't fight the power without aggressive suppression of speech supporting the status quo. Also, in your statement is a buried assumption that the people happiest with the status quo are the ones most likely to be upset by speech from people challenging it. There is again a standard counter-argument to this, asserting that being very, very upset is part and parcel of "fighting the power," and the right to upset people is used mostly by cruel-minded supporters of the status quo as a means to amuse themselves by upsetting the agitators more or to goad them into violence that can be used as a pretext for state suppression.
- viklove 6y ago
  Woah woah woah, you're not allowed to say that. Off to the gulag with you!