How can defenders of "free speech" say that it's ok for them to say whatever they want, but it's unfair for other people to respond to them? This is a tactic especially favored by the alt-right. They claim they're being censored and appeal to "free speech" the instant someone calls out poor behavior, and then turn around and organize massive harassment campaigns against people who say things they don't like.
The position is logically inconsistent, but they've found that just saying "free speech" makes people want to defend both of their actions. It's a wonderful exploit targeting people who have been ingrained to enthusiastically defend people saying "free speech", regardless of whether or not what they're actually doing resembles respecting the rights of as many people as possible to speak.
I'd like to point out one more thing. This isn't censorship. This is what the real free market of ideas looks like. You say things that people find vile, and the market judges your ideas to be harmful and best avoided. That's how it's supposed to work.
It took about five years for the cultural zeitgeist of Germany to swing from extremely liberal to extremely fascist starting in the late 1920s. Sure, false flag and other political shenanigans hastened the process along - but it was the culture, or in your words, "the market", that managed to move rapidly to the right quite alright on its own.
Imagine if the nascent nationalist tendencies in the US and Europe really start ratcheting upward in a serious way over the next decade. Imagine that, at some point, "the market" judges pro-healthcare or pro-LGBT ideas to be harmful and best avoided. What then?
My point is that what you've done with your argument is handed Nazis all the moral authority they need to repress your ideas if their ideas become popular.
The argument for free speech is that we pay the small price of hearing vile ideas as insurance premiums against good ideas being censored if the pendulum ever swings the other way.
You're implying that the group of people - the subset of the German population - who were (allegedly) extremely liberal transformed into the group of people that were extremely fascist.
I don't have the time to research this, but it seems much more likely that these were largely - if not entirely - different population subsets, and that the latter arose in reaction to the former. It's not like the two groups had the same shared values with the new addition of "kill everybody that disagrees with me."
It isn’t limiting free speech by not wanting to listen to or follow people whose speech you disagree with and the argument that doing so is equivalent to how Nazis came to power is entirely historically inaccurate.
Against what baseline? The results are only discriminatory against a baseline in which affirmative action is baked in. But this can't be the proper baseline, because if it is then any amount of affirmative action can be called into question.
Does your company practice some affirmative action? That has a disparate impact that hurts minorities, because you could be doing more affirmative action!
Edit: simplified my original reply
Since the onus is on the employer to prove that they had a legitimate reason for this disparate impact, often these cases end in settlement.
I'm sure many of these cases end in settlement — 90% of all cases do. And yeah, it's not a great idea to go around saying stuff that will inflame people. But saying something that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said ("The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race") would not be great ammunition for a plaintiff.
His comments are the wrong comments to defend, I think, for reasons adequately explained in the article. Minimizing the harm powerful people have caused to their victims is not "dissent" we should avoid stifling.
What exact comments? His comments on Minsky controversy are totally just.
But it's true that it's going to be a lot easier to remain anonymous when your opponents don't have the resources of a government.
You can also find a like-minded group of individuals on the internet who you can discuss your beliefs with.
Maybe it doesn't matter too much if nobody knows who you are, but it's why some authors write under pen names. (Back when the U.S. was founded, writing for newspapers using your real name was apparently pretty rare.)
> Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you.
I think the prudent strategy is to understand what's being cancelled today and make sure you're on the right side of it. It's really pretty easy to do just by reading HN.
Just know that you're always speaking to the mob and you won't get canceled. If you have views that disgust the mob, you're going to end up like RMS.
A lot of people are upset about cancel culture, but if you embrace it, it's pretty easy to exploit. You don't have to do the canceling yourself, but if you understand it, it's like a cheat sheet for being socially "right" on every hot button issue. I can fit in any liberal circle with ease because it's so predictable, and I know how to be edgy if I want. And because there's only two tribes that are pretty much opposite, I can do the same with conservatives.
You can still have all the radical opinions you want, you just can't do public stuff with them under your real identity, if you want to avoid being canceled. Maybe we'll see a resurgence of anonymous early-internet type culture, where people have aliases and keep their views disconnected from their public life. I think that works pretty well, because most activism can be done anonymously. It's not that hard to conform irl and do meaningful things under an alias online.
Reading through those posts, is there any group in America that wouldn’t be angered by at least one of those posts?
The thing I feel bad about with RMS is that he's clearly not able to read the room, which used to be considered quirky at best and unpleasant at worst, but now he finds himself unable to function at all in a society that he doesn't understand.
Most of the stuff he's saying would have been fringe in the 90s, but now it's unacceptable and worthy of exile.
Imagine you're in court, say you've been charged with something extremely serious and you're completely innocent. Your lawyer decides to argue your case by referring bitterly to a different, utterly hopeless case that he's losing. You wouldn't cheer him on for exercising his right to free speech -- you'd fire him and get an attorney that knew how to focus attention on a persuasive argument.
My point is eloquently summarized by someone else here:
"I guess free speech still exists in non-controversial matters, and for people who don't have to worry about employment."
I can understand his position, but this is part of the picture of a core problem in society today.
Its NOT that leaders aren't allowed to speak about controversial issues - its that they aren't allowed to advocate ONE side of an issue, while the other side is perfectly OK. You probably shouldn't say "diversity is important but not our only goal" as a CEO, but you CAN say "diversity is the best". That kind of large scale censorship only stifles dissent without changing the dissenters mind. Which is a state of affairs the far left happily accepts - "toxic people dont deserve a voice". Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you. Better yet, just don't even think those unthinkable thoughts. Submit to the collective. All your opinions can be inferred from your tribe anyways. You don't really exist, only your tribe does.