Rowan Atkinson on free speech (2012) [video]

> Yes, I guess so! I'm not sure what changed, but I doubt that would ever have happened a few decades ago.

I'd say what changed is that a lot of people started realizing the power of speech is asymmetric. It's far easier to spout bullshit than to disprove it, so debunking only works if there's very few people spouting bullshit.

And the internet made this a lot worse, because one person can invest a trivial amount of time in spreading misinformation and never caring about anything afterwards, while anybody trying to counteract it must invest enormous amounts of time to do so effectively.

> You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it.

Well, I think that's one of the big ones. Almost everyone already recognizes that speech must have limits to it (eg, defamation, inciting panic). Therefore saying it's an "unalloyed good" is nothing more than a nice sounding fiction.

This is not like say, being against killing people because we can actually have a society where legitimately nobody has to die for any reason. We can just put them in prison forever instead.

Free speech I suspect is a value most people hold as a means to an end. Meaning you hold it not because free speech itself is desirable, but because we believe that it has desirable outcomes. This makes it easy to reject if we ever end up living in a world at odds with what we like.

Do a mental experiment, imagine living in a place where every time somebody opens their mouth it raises your blood pressure. Whether because of politics, or threats to your life/your loved ones, any reason you like. How long would it remain being an "unalloyed good" in your eyes?

If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, it's actually quite easy to determine who should prevail. Back in 1644, John Milton argued in favor of allowing bad ideas to be published for the following reason[1]:

> Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.

Thomas Paine said something similar in his introduction to The Age of Reason[2]:

> You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

As did John Stuart Mill in On Liberty[3]:

> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

In short, freedom of speech isn't some deontological argument about the rights of the speaker or writer. It's a consequentialist argument about the rights of people to read or listen. Every time you silence someone, you are denying others the right to read what they want to read or hear what they want to hear. If some protesters are disrupting a talk, they are the ones who are in the wrong, as they are denying others the chance to get the information they want. Many in the audience might not agree with the views expressed, but they want to understand the ideas so they can strengthen arguments for their own views.

If you don't think people are rational or intelligent enough to consume certain ideas safely, well then you might as well get rid of the entire idea of democracy, as you shouldn't trust them to vote either.

1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Areopagitica_(1644)

2. https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm

3. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

I can tell you're struggling, so I'll try to make it even simpler.

Normal beliefs (kids don't belong in sexually charged drag shows) are being tagged as "Nazi".

Certain factions have deemed it acceptable to commit unprovoked violence against anyone labeled thusly, accurate or no.

Do you deny this, or not understand? If so, you will continue to struggle in confusion, because it's an incredibly clear concept and phenomena and harder to make much simpler than that.

That's a very disingenuous way of describing that issue. Much of the banned material is entirely suitable for children, just not something the governor and his supporters approve of. Books containing various minorities, characters with parents of the same gender, and various other real-life situations that children are likely to encounter, but that the government would prefer hidden from public view.

And I also seem to remember news from a couple of years ago that scientists from state-funded institutions (I think this was also in Florida) weren't allowed to talk about climate change.

I think both of these are pretty serious restrictions of free speech.

In a comment elsewhere you seemed to argue that censorship in schools is acceptable to ensure books are appropriate for children. Is that not the case with Roald Dahl books? Should they just have been banned from schools instead?