Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end

For example, I'm in favor of banning speech exhorting folks to violence against people of any specific race/religion/ethnicity/orientation/belief. That seems like a simple enough restriction.

But then, in the event of a law like that being passed, the advocates of violence switch their tactic to explaining why said target group is subhuman, or resort to apophasis, or develop coded language.

The solution often proposed is to consider purely verbal instigators of violence to be innocent of any crime, and consider the individuals who physically enact the violence as bearing all responsibility. Unfortunately, having personally witnessed mobs getting worked up and seeing firsthand the collapse of individual thought, I fear this approach is based on an over-generous analysis of the rationality (and individuation) of the human brain.

I don't have any solution to propose.

Thomas Jefferson had already addressed the notion of a tolerant society in his first inaugural speech, concerning those who might destabilize the United States and its unity, saying, "let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.

The fundamental truth is that you are intolerant, because speech leads to action. People like to think of themselves as tolerant and not sensitive, and maybe some people are tolerant to speech which doesn’t lead to action and can take insults for days. But when a majority may hold an opinion you don’t like (e.g. cancel your favorite TV show, or food, or just flat-out kill you and harvest your organs), you want to censor this opinion. You may also want to censor speech when it affects those who aren’t so thick-skinned, like your mom or 5-year-old daughter or the other 75% of the population whose mental health is affected by words.

If your laws tolerate enough speech, the bad guys may team together, take over your government and change them - hence, the Paradox of Tolerance. But they may not, and they may also manage to take over your government without tolerance or speech or even teaming up. In an ideal world we’d allow all speech but have no “bad” speech, but in practice we have tape and plywood to prevent speech when the alternative would very clearly, very significantly hurt more people than censoring.

I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months. However, covid mandates once we realized covid would become endemic, those are debatable, because a) the emergency is no longer universally agreed, and b) some of those mandates could be argued indefinite.

But the other fundamental truth is there’s no right answer. There’s no “do policy X and everything will work out”, hindsight 20/20 but we have no idea the “bad” speech (speech which causes real suffering) of the future will be. There’s no “objectively moral” answer. Ultimately it comes down to, well, your opinion or the opinion of those in power.

I think only the RT video broadcast is blocked, not the website.

Express yourself all you want. No one is owed an agreeable audience. That’s the exact opposite of allowing freedom of expression.

Personally I think it’s the contrary; expression has become so unique and personal and not coupled to an abstract social tentpole; it’s really confusing people whose success is coupled to attention and adherence to past political correctness.

A whole lot of people used to a lot of deference are no longer being deferred to and are complaining. That’s all this feels like to me. Memory of when the sky was the limit for them because there was less freedom of expression under past “big top” social frameworks.

To back this up; in the US we recently crossed a threshold of <50% of adults believing in “higher powers”, down from ~80% around 2000. It’s hard to see such release of a modal not impacting belief in the “higher power” of a nation state, prior success of celebrities and thinkers; biological state has changed. Everyone is just “one of seven billion” with no special claim to a figurative identity that uniquely empowers them over any one else. That’s freedom of expression and people who rely on deferential attention will hate it.