How about drawing the line at the government? My understanding is though, that this is a bit of a straw-mans argument. There is no credible proposal to only allow the government approved version of truth.

I thought the marketplace of ideas was a popular concept in the US.

you are misinformed:

"But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member

How does that at all rebut what the person you're responding to has said? I've read your quote multiple times trying to see how it at all presents a "credible proposal to only allow the government approved version of truth."

its a government official speaking about the dangers of unfettered free speech. I'm genuinely at a loss as to what you want me to offer.

perhaps if you explained it to me as though I was a small child.

Your quote literally says "as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech" emphasis mine

Yes I did not share the context. He's relaying how he came to question those values he was advocating.

> perhaps if you explained it to me as though I was a small child.

Unless you are a small child or truly have the mentality of what, I will not speak down to you like that.

I will repeat your quote though:

> "But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member

That quote is clearly an observation, not a call to action in itself. It is an observation that the US's notion of free speech is not at all universal, and can be confounding even to people with some quality ("sophistication", perhaps "worldliness" or other terms would be more helpful descriptors) that the author wouldn't expect it to confound.

You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways).

Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it. How hard is that to do? Learn how to construct and present arguments in ways that actually have a chance to persuade instead of making statements that verge on non sequiturs.

Here, I'll help you: Link to the actual opinion piece [0]. It's clear from that that he's arguing in favor of hate speech laws (which is a slippery slope, I'm pretty sure a few "Christians" I know would like hate speech laws so they could stop me from calling them anti-Christians), and thinks there's already precedent for such laws.

> The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted.

You didn't present that part though, I only stumbled on it because someone else linked to it in this thread.

TL;DR: You are terrible at argumentation.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri...

thanks for the reply. I now see where the inferential gap is.

> You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways). Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it.

I was attributing the context to the quote. I hadn't really considered that people were unaware of the context, because I had read the quote in context. Context being an editorial titled "Why America needs a hate speech law"

> TL;DR: You are terrible at argumentation.

Thanks for the reply.