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There are two more ways to deal with content we don't like. We've largely abandoned these to our great harm:

1) Get to know people in your community who hold differing opinions. We all need to be doing this more - fostering friendship over the things we have in common. This isn't easy, but the Western world used to be far better at it.

2) Engage in healthy debate, which means advocating a specific opinion in a public way -- either speech, column in your local newspaper, etc. -- with carefully researched references/sources, no ad-hominem attacks, assuming good faith and intent on the part of those who disagree, and respect for the differing opinions of others.

Imagine if every local community did (1) and (2) -- people would be a lot happier and would be less likely to hold unsupportable opinions, since even cursory research (i.e. prior to publicly arguing in favor of them) would show those opinions have no basis in reality.




There seems to be an immense body of research that shows that good ideas do not win out over bad ideas.


What's worse than a bad idea? A forced idea (or ideology) and the lack of freedom to express a contrary opinion.

The real problem isn't those who disagree with you or hold "bad ideas", it's those who would take away everyone's freedom to disagree in peace.


The idea anyone's freedom of speech is silenced because they can't say what they want through their preferred megaphone is ridiculous.


The idea that these megaphone institutions can and must act as arbiters of what's "ok" speech and what's not is socially untenable.

The best marker of sweeping political radicalism is when no one is allowed to be neutral anymore--not even news outlets or public forums. When everything is political and everyone is forced out of political neutrality, we're in big trouble as a society.

"If you're not for us, you're against us" is an ominous statement in any context, and when that becomes a mainstream political cry, it signals that freedom itself is coming to an end (not to mention freedom of speech).


It's 100% social tenable.

You could never walk into a private bar and demand the right to hand out Nazi propaganda, solely on the merits that "well, that's where all the people are!!"

As for neutrality, there are plenty of actively neutral companies, in action, today. They're just not very popular. Because they're filled with horrible people who demand the right to say horrible things. And no one wants to hang out with those people.

Now that the market has decided horrible beings aren't entitled to anyone else's space, the horrible human beings are insisting that the big mean bullies be forced, through threat of violence, to tolerate them.

It's nonsense all the way down.


That doesn't seem to square with the progress civilization has made over the last several centuries. We no longer torture animals, treat humans as property, believe in the 'evil eye', etc.


While it might be fun to debate the specifics of those claims, let's pretend I inserted the word "always" in my statement.




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