Fair enough. I’m not sure the far right would employ multiculturalism or socialism as state doctrine, for example.

We’re all over the place here. I thought we were talking about the left today, and not the right yesterday. Both are statist, both are authoritarian, both like identity politics, both are collectivist, yes. I appreciate the examples but I just don’t know what purpose they serve.

It’s true. The left used to be about freedom and individualism. Now it’s statist, reactionary, and collectivist. That’s why the old divisions hardly work anymore.

I’m not sure that’s true. To identify the left wing all you have to do is ask them.

This thread is about the left wing, though.

Whatever it is, it always reads to me as big government, nanny-statism with an emphasis on identity politics, activism, and anti-capitalism. It’s no so much extreme as it is routine. It’s fashionable.

I was just talking about Math.

Math wasn’t racist until people such as the Ethnic Studies Math teacher entered the scene. They are creating systemic racism.

Biden’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” commissar.

I mostly agree with your definitions. I would add, though, that an agnostic believes in the possibility that a god exists. The possibility of god is an equally untenable belief, in my mind.

I’m aware of Mill’s ideas. I don’t think the harm principle should apply to speech.

However you don't have the inalienable right to use Twitter or be employed by me, therefore it isn't wrong for me to fire you or for Twitter to suspend your account for expressing your opinion.

It’s true. Your business is yours and no one has a right to be employed by you, and you have every right to fire anyone. But the fact of having the right to fire someone for their opinions doesn’t mean that it is right to fire someone for their opinions. Though it’s up to you and no one else how you should operate your business, you should not fire someone because you don’t like his opinions.



It’s not a gift or a bargain or a contract. I was merely using the idiom “uphold my end of the bargain” to say that I will fulfill my obligation. Perhaps that idiom is too American. My apologies.

I will not seek sanction or punishment for your speech. I will also defend you from those who would seek your sanction or punishment. No casuistry will convince me to do otherwise.

I have bestowed it; I’ve conferred it; I’ve granted it; and I bestow it on everyone. I give you the right to be a fraud, a bigot, a liar. Reject it all you wish, but I will uphold my end of the bargain nonetheless.

Mill’s arguments for free speech are far better than his arguments for voting and other statist schemes—a Benthamite through and through. We are talking about one and not the other, after all.

JS Mill, John Milton, Meiklejohn, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Voltaire, Emma Goldman, Orwell, Huxley, Karl Jaspers, Arendt, Paine, Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Chomsky…there are plenty of arguments for free speech from a vast array of important thinkers. One ought to at least consider them, place them next to the opposition, and see which prevails.

Of course there are limits on speech. If there wasn’t there wouldn’t be censorship, and therefor no need to argue in favor of free speech. But I’m making prescriptive statements, not descriptive ones. The fact of slavery, for instance, is no argument against its abolition, just as the fact of limits on speech is no argument against the absence of such limits. So I repudiate the article and Fish’s book.

And so true is this fact that it is illegal to say otherwise.

France has laws making it illegal to lie about the Armenian Genocide happening.. This is because Turkey spreads lies and propaganda and denies they committed genocide.

Nothing could go wrong when the State has the right to determine historical truth and to punish dissent from it.

The moral and practical basis for free speech is well-established, well-argued, even ancient, especially where the legal basis has yet to catch up. The moral and practical basis for censorship, on the other hand, is utterly threadbare.

You do have the right because I and others bestow you that right. This right has little currency in a censorial and querulous culture, no doubt, and it’s not backed by any vested interest like a state or corporation, but it exists.

Similarly, there is no right to censor such views, nor any obligation to consent to censorship. This is why it is so odd to see so many try to undermine the principle of free speech but say nothing of censorship, premised as it is on its own kind of bigotry, hatred, and immorality.

State censorship, mob censorship, church censorship—a distinction without a difference. We should be concerned about their censorship and for the same reasons. One act of censorship is a thousand-fold more destructive than any sentence ever uttered.

Many despots have suppressed views they don’t like, and no flaunting of power and priggery warrants its defense.

Trump using violence is hardly a trivial matter. His speech incites the violence and it is deliberate. By the way, new here. Are most people in England?

The “incitement” doctrine is an exercise in magical thinking, in my mind. If one can incite violence, one should be able to incite me to accept a contrary view, or perform any other activity for that matter. Can someone’s words make you commit violence?

The website is in English, is all I know.

“Imagine”…this is all the censor can do, imagine a future in which speech inflicts harm, corrupts the youth, but in all likelihood merely conflicts with his own views.

There’s plenty of reasons why Socrates ought not have been censored, and his views tolerated.

Not only is it wrong to censor a man, kill him, for specious fears that he might corrupt the youth, but it is wrong to deny others the opportunity to hear him, the choice of which is no business of the censor’s.

Such actions also deny history and posterity the same opportunity—we will never know what other wisdom he might have shared if his views were tolerated. It is, as Mill said, to rob humanity.

Censorship weakens truth, as Milton said, by prohibiting and licensing her strength.

So it may be legal to engage in censorship, but there is plenty of reasons to tolerate views, at least more so than reasons to censor them, which is invariably premised on personal fears and other subjective feelings.

Another question? Is this an interview?

I agree with all of this.

You either believe in freedom of speech or you don’t. Censors should crawl out from under the rocks and be proud of who they are.

It’s an utterly useless and contradictory phrase, not so different than “freedom of speech but not freedom from censorship”. Maybe come up with something better.

The actual consequence of speech are physical in nature: the expelling of breath, the subtle vibration of the air, the marking of pencil on a paper, and so on. All benign stuff and not worthy of suppression.

Any and all reactions to those benign activities are born in those that react to them, and thus a consequence of themselves.

Considering this, the phrase “freedom of speech but not freedom from consequences” is a goofy one at best, but a justification for censorship at worse. The idea that the world and posterity might lose a great work of literature because someone cannot control their rage is a tragedy.

I approach it from two prongs. The language around “laws of nature” imply a kind of governance, leading to the assumption that something else controls or forces our actions. I would refute that language because the “something else” cannot be found, and further that it cannot be shown to control or force our actions.

Second, simple observation and experience shows me that wherever an action begins in an organism, it is thus willed by that organism. It couldn’t be otherwise.

I said speech is free from consequences. The consequence of that sentence, apparently, was for you to quote it out of context, to which you responded with a flurry of questions and an assertion of the opposite. My speech then caused you to resort to sarcasm.

Too simplistic, there's more to the story, but it's not that free speech/expression ought to be ditched of course. (Once upon a time I'd have said that the only way to respond to speech is more speech.)

Not really. It’s an important point because censors ban speech, as if it was the speech that cause this or that problem. But speech has no such causal factors. The speech ought to be left alone.

My words are so consequential that you can only write in questions and sarcasm.

You didn’t even make an argument, and resort to sarcasm when challenged. Not even clever.

So a woman comes to a dinner party at my house and starts saying derogatory things about gay people, I can't ask her to leave? So I run a business and one of my employees spouts Nazi slogans in the lunch room, I can't fire him? So a member of the YMCA curses, swears, and uses inappropriate language, they can't revoke his membership? Of course speech has consequences.

It’s up to you. That’s the point. You determine your actions, and therefor any penalties you dish out are the consequence of your principles and decisions, not of the words. Sorry, but speech does not have the consequences you claim it does.

No, that’s not what I’m saying. A figurative statement is not to be taken literally.

What do you think I’m saying?

But you said it is something the Chinese say, when one can go out and ask Chinese people if this is true and find various opinions. At any rate, Methodological collectivism is no more than the application of hasty generalizations.

That’s the necessary result in that kind of thinking, and yours. One can say with more confidence that that is not what the Chinese say, but what communists say.

Well, we’re all of a certain species, is basically what I’m saying.

According to me.

James Baldwin’s “Giovanni's Room” was replete with white people, his protagonist a blonde-haired, white man. “Who cares,” in my opinion—we ought to be able to relate to and empathize with people who do not look like us—but as I recall it caused a bit of controversy among identity politicians, which is by now to be expected, and in my encouraged. The culture lines should be erased, not drawn.

free speech doesn't itself mean free of consequences

I’ve always despised this statement. It’s untrue and is often used to justify censorship.

Free speech does mean speech is free from consequences, and it ought to be treated that way. Censorship, for instance, is the consequence of people who do not like some kinds of speech. It is not the consequence of the speech itself, nor could it be. Being “called out” or “de-platformed” is the consequence of the censor, not the speaker. The censorship of Socrates was not the consequence of his speech, but of the fear of lesser men.

Parler was denied access to the app stores, to Amazon web servers, and the concerted effort to suppress its rise worked quite well.

The irony is that to identify with group identities is to misidentify, to find affinity with some ideal or stereotypical identity in order to disguise one’s real identity, which can be described in greater detail with any state I.D. card.

There is an interesting inversion there. Mishima saw suicide and death in battle as an act of solidarity with the group, a sort of morbid collectivism. I’m not sure how much his views on suicide extend to the culture at large, but retaining or regaining one’s honor through suicide, like Seppuku, similarly implies a primacy towards group dynamics. On the other hand, Western conceptions like those found in Plato or Aquinas regard suicide as unfavorable to the group, bad for the State, and so on.