Heresy (2022]

Why was this flagged in 2026 and not in 2022?

> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.

Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?

It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.

Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.

When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”

I suspect this happens a lot, and am unsure about what the first and second order consequences are.

Most evidently, positions that are not paraded around face less backlash, so people are just not as equipped to deal with them. But then again, it's also evident that those positions don't spread as easily, often being left to niche spaces, which do have a tendency to become echo chambers, cue polarization.

Do you really not see to what degree you are proving his point here?

I'm not sure that's quite right, the pendulum has swung to a degree, for sure, but I find it evident to argue that the place the pendulum was at was in the benefit of liberal elites, and rather than reversing, I can see how the opposition to those liberal elites do have more freedom now, but the circles adjacent to the liberal elites have enormous leeway right now, I'm not sure there's even anything verboten.

You can have as much prejudice as you like against white people, argue for ending the concept of family, the idea that the west must cede hegemony on a moral basis, reparations, ending capitalism altogether, implementing any brutally authoritarian form of government you may picture (as long as it doesn't seem right wing), ending borders, dissolving countries, call for the death of the bourgeoisie, and I won't even mention anything related to gender or data centers as I don't want to find out if these comments have a limit on text.

Is there a line? I honestly don't know if there's a line. A renowned Harvard academic could argue tomorrow that all of humanity should commit coordinated suicide and I'd barely be surprised. I wouldn't even bet money that it hasn't happened already.

I'm a liberal myself, really, but it feels the general political current of liberalism has gone through some real excesses and it's bloated and dysfunctional right now.