> Society has always, always had social norms which entailed consequences if countered. And often times in the past, the norms were strict and dissent was puni

> Society has always, always had social norms which entailed consequences if countered. And often times in the past, the norms were strict and dissent was punished by jail, torture, or death. > Today, we've much improved. If you express an opinion that is contrary to the norms, you get made fun or or ostracized by the community, you don't get killed. "Things are better now than they were at some point in the past" does not mean that we should stop trying to improve, since things have already improved by a nonzero amount. If I said "Deaths due to infectious disease now are much lower than they were 100 years ago and therefore we shouldn't worry about infectious disease now", my faulty logic would immediately be spotted and called out. The general environment for free speech is much better today than it was in years past. There are, however, specific worrying trends now that did not exist in the past, and I think people are right to point them out. I'm not a huge fan of the term "cancel culture", because it implies a lot more intentional group behavior than I think happens, but the term does point to a real phenomenon where certain controversial speech gets amplified to absurd degrees, and a very small fraction of the people who see it and disagree with it try to cause disproportionate harm to the speaker (e.g. lying to their employer to try to get them fired, calling in false reports to try to get a highly armed SWAT team sent to their place of residence, sending death threats, etc.). Complaints about "cancel culture" are not so much about people complaining about not being heard as people complaining about having something they said taken out of context and amplified to millions of people, and the consequences of the consequent rage of millions and actions of the most extreme dozens of people out of those millions. Losing your job and getting death threats is an improvement over being jailed, tortured, or killed, but it's still not ideal, and we're still allowed to want better.