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.

Mishima’s Sun and Steel hints that suicide, or death in battle, was an aesthetic and romantic act. His philosophy on the topic is nebulous but quite profound, in my mind, at least as much as its English translation affords me.

The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence began to trouble me.

I reasoned that if one wants to identify seeing and existing, the nature of the self-awareness should be made as centripetal as possible. If only one can direct the eye of self-awareness so intently towards the interior and the self that self-awareness forgets the outer forms of existence, then one can “exist” as surely as the “I” in Amiel’s Diary. But this existence is of an odd kind, like a transparent apple whose core is fully visible from the outside; and the only endorsement of such existence lies in words. It is the classical type of existence experienced by the solitary, humanistic man of letters. . . .

But one also comes across a type of self-awareness that concerns itself exclusively with the form of things. For this type of self-awareness, the antinomy between seeing and existing is decisive, since it involves the question of how the core of the apple can be seen through the ordinary, red, opaque skin, and also how the eye that looks at that glossy red apple from the outside can penetrate into the apple and itself become the core. The apple in this case, moreover, must have a perfectly ordinary existence, its color a healthy red.

To continue the metaphor, let us picture a single, healthy apple. This apple was not called into existence by words, nor is it possible that the core should be completely visible from the outside like Amiel’s peculiar fruit. The inside of the apple is naturally quite invisible. Thus at the heart of that apple, shut up within the flesh of the fruit, the core lurks in its wan darkness, tremblingly anxious to find some way to reassure itself that it is a perfect apple. The apple certainly exists, but to the core this existence as yet seems inadequate; if words cannot endorse it, then the only way to endorse it is with the eyes. Indeed, for the core the only sure mode of existence is to exist and to see at the same time. There is only one method of solving this contradiction. It is for a knife to be plunged deep into the apple so that it is split open and the core is exposed to the light—to the same light, that is, as the surface skin. Yet then the existence of the cut apple falls into fragments; the core of the apple sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing.

When I realized that the perfect sense of existence that disintegrated the very next moment could only be endorsed by muscle, and not by words, I was already personally enduring the fate that befell the apple. Admittedly, I could see my own muscles in the mirror. Yet seeing alone was not enough to bring me into contact with the basic roots of my sense of existence, and an immeasurable distance remained between me and the euphoric sense of pure being. Unless I rapidly closed that distance, there was little hope of bringing that sense of existence to life again. In other words, the self-awareness that I staked on muscles could not be satisfied with the darkness of the pallid flesh pressing about it as an endorsement of its existence, but, like the blind core of the apple, was driven to crave certain proof of its existence so fiercely that it was bound, sooner or later, to destroy that existence. Oh, the fierce longing simply to see, without words!

The eye of self-awareness, used as it is to keeping a watch on the invisible self in an essentially centripetal fashion and via the good offices of words, does not place sufficient trust in visible things such as muscles. Inevitably, it addresses the muscles as follows:

“I admit you do not seem to be a illusion. But if so, I would like you to show how you function in order to live and move; show me your proper functions and how you fulfill your proper aims.”

Thus the muscles start working in accordance with the demands of self-awareness; but in order to make the action exist unequivocally, a hypothetical enemy outside the muscles is necessary, and for the hypothetical enemy to make certain of its existence it must deal a blow to the realm of the senses fierce enough to silence the querulous complaints of self-awareness. That, precisely, is when the knife of the foe must come cutting into the flesh of the apple—or rather, the body. Blood flows, existence is destroyed, and the shattered senses give existence as a whole its first endorsement, closing the logical gap between seeing and existing... And this is death.

In this way I learned that the momentary, happy sense of existence that I had experienced that summer sunset during my life with the army could be finally endorsed only by death.

Western conceptions of suicide, I fear, are so much influenced by religion, that the aesthetic, romantic, and interesting qualities have all been stripped away. The Stoics had a better conception of suicide than the ancient Greeks and the Christians, in my mind.

I would argue that “injustice” suffers the same problem as its antonym. It has no referent, but we know it when we see it. Better to reason about states of affairs in practical terms, with focus on individual cases, on human behavior, rather than building institutions with some ideal in mind.

I don’t expect you to get on board. I could care less what others believe. I’m just saying compassion isn’t a feminine trait, but a characteristic of both men and women.

Compassion is a characteristic of men and women, and therefor not a feminine trait. End of story.

I’m talking about biological characteristics and traits. An Adam’s apple or chest hair is not feminine. Those are masculine traits, in other words, characteristic of a man. I don’t think a man with those or any other masculine traits ought to be called a woman. Anyways, that’s all I’ve been trying to say.

Dictionaries record usage, “trends” in definition, and “feminine” means “having the qualities or appearance considered to be typical of women; connected with women” (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/feminine_1). It is synonymous with “womanly”.

Sure, the word can be applied to man, to stereotypes, to objects, and so on, but it will always be figurative. It will never be accurate.

Grammatical gender is different than natural gender. Grammatical gender is a feature of language, a way to classify words, going back thousands of years (Protagoras?).

Colours, tables, houses … the list goes on.

But the point was that it is an old term (like ‘race’) that has morphed into some other meaning depending on context.

I always understood that something is feminine if it is characteristic of, or appropriate or unique to women.

What is it that really defines a man or woman, the question seems to be. Sex alone doesn’t seem to cut it, particularly in less liberal perspectives. For instance, if a man were to act too feminine in a very macho culture they may not be considered a man and it wouldn’t be at all unusual for them to be told directly that they’re “not a man.”

If not a man, then what? Some other sex?

Feminine does not mean female any more than masculine means male.

What is feminine supposed to describe, if not females? What other objects in the world ought to be described as “feminine”?

Is your sex contrived?

I walk around and see the sexes, the biology, often despite the performative and contrived.

I imagine a feminist would know what a woman is.

I'm talking about characteristics like being aggressive or submissive, competitive or cooperative, etc

I’m just saying that’s not what I was talking about. By “acting like a woman”, I thought you meant he was effeminate in his mannerisms and dress, not adhering to your stereotypes.