Speech and ideas of all colors need to flourish. That's how bad ideas get discussed and stamped out: think of natural selection. Right now we have a situation where groups are too afraid to discuss so these bad ideas fester in their own filter bubbles.

On Liberty: Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Bad ideas get stamped out by people pointing out they are bad ideas. If a CEO supports a spectacularly bad idea, it is not a problem if someone gives him the boot.

Even if the idea is completely unrelated to the company? And even then, we weren't talking about CEOs. We were talking about people like the low-level employees at GrubHub told that they should keep real quiet about their unapproved opinions if they wanted to keep their jobs.

"You can and should be judged on the basis of the ideas and opinions that you promote."

That reminds me of the quotation:

"A new idea is a beautiful and fragile thing. Attack people, not ideas."

I don't know who said that first, but I love that quotation. It mocks itself (and other witticisms), and at the same time reminds you to focus your energy attacking ideas rather than people.

In extreme cases, someone can have a lot of bad ideas and you need to challenge them personally. But that's only in extreme cases, and doesn't apply transitively to supporters of the person.

It would be nice if we could actually judge people accurately based on the ideas and opinions they promote, but that's rarely what happens.

Usually people are judged based on the ideas that those who oppose them hold.

The ballot is secret so you cannot pay people to vote a certain way. It has nothing to do with judging people for their vote.

It's secret for retaliation plus that. It should be obvious security requirement given all the times in history people got rounded up by the next, opposite person in power. Or politically punished as countries got less vicious. A good, voting system should always protect the voters from retaliation where possible.

It serves both to protect both the integrity of the vote, as well as the freedom of the voter from reprisal. Imagine a less than democratic democracy (if such a thing could be imagined). Dissenting votes, if public, wouldn't be very safe to make.

>You can and should be judged on the basis of the ideas and opinions that you promote.

Not in the context of your employment, you shouldn't. Really, where does this attitude come from that one's employer should get a veto over everything one does when off the clock? It's usually from people who are always complaining about evil corporations stepping on people's rights, too. I don't get it.