Now, me, Richard and Nier have gone into a tangent where I have shown some very poor grasp of both social and rational skills, and allowed myself to snap at my comrades in an entirely unseemly manner, under externally-induced stress and time pressures, that I should have known better than to let get the better of me. The posts I have fathered have shamed me, but I shall keep them up as an example of what not to do.

I'll try here to adress their points more intelligently, pertinently, and courteously.

So for you and your friends, freedom of expression doesn't extend to letting people say things you don't like, and it isn't censorship if you stop them doing it.

This statement got me very very angry. The conclusion you jumped to, Richard, is an understandable extrapolation, but I would have liked it if you had been more cautious about embracing it, because I have said nothing of the sort. My guess is that you are committing the "Politics is the Mind-Killer" mistake of trying to fit me into preexisting categories, groups, and roles, in your narrative. You should know, by now, that trying to do that with a Less Wronger is like trying to catch water, except water doesn't get pissed off. Abstain from doing that in the future.

Now, I don't know about my "friends" (I'll ask them... both of them... when I get the chance, though I think they'll agree with what I'm going to argue), but I for one think that people should be allowed to say what they want, regardless of whether I like or I don't like it. If there is any merit to their ideas, sharing them with the public will represent an improvement to the pool of collective knowledge. If there isn't, having them submitted to be de-constructed and exposed as worthless is also an improvement.

At least, that's my kind, idealistic, forgiving, past self. After having spent some time with /b/tards and goons, I have found that there is such a thing as a harmful, dangerous, or cruel abuse of freedom of speech.:

• There is the promotion of the discriminating of minorities.
• There is the promotion of violence.
• There is the promotion of sexual and psychological abuse, and of the oppression of one gender by another, of one age group by another.
• There is the promotion of one group using lethal force on another to, well, force them to undertake certain actions, or cede certain advantages, for the sake of the group that is most effective in its use of violence.
• There is the promotion of totalitarian regimes.
• There is the systematic aggression by certain self-appointed standard enforcers, against any opinions that go enough outside the mainstream that they attract any attention at all. (Hypocrisy? Wait up!)
• There is the promotion of not giving a fair trial to people (lynching, purging, and so on), mostly by presenting their guilt as being beyond doubt (regardless of evidence), and that what they did was so heinous they must be punished as soon as possible, as harshly as possible, without getting a chance to defend themselves.
• With some correlation to the last one, there is the promotion of the idea that said extremely heinous criminals should not even have the right to live on.
• There is the promotion of the idea that strikes are an illegitimate form of protest, heck, that any form of protest at all in the workplace is illegitimate, save for job-quitting, if that.
• Analogically, that protests against the actions of the government are illegitimate, no matter how non-violent.

I'll leave the question of how these (ab?)uses of freedom of expression should be dealt with, and whether there should be consequences for those who make use of their freedom in such a way, and what those consequences should be, as an exercise to the reader.

When I said

If anyone disagrees with any of these points, they had better not say it out loud, regardless of what they actually end up doing.

I had this sort of guy in mind. A fascist in a liberal democracy, he keeps his mouth shut (well, at least he tries, but his burning, endless love for the kind Fuhrer cannot be contained), and bides his time. Because he fears... what? In what I conceive of liberal democracy, he'd have the right to hold on to his ideas, even to speak them out. As long as he doesn't actively advocate finishing the Holocaust or oppressing black people or that kind of thing, the Law would leave him alone. He would be allowed to discuss his anti-democratic, fascist opinions in public places and media... and have them be ridiculed and soundly refuted. His immediate environment may or may not care: they may very well file him off as an inoffensive cuckoo (he's anything but: he almost gunned the protagonists down, and then blew up a theatre at their behest... long story). He's poor, unambitious. incompetent, and keeps to himself. No-one will bother to obstruct him or get in his way.

Now suppose that someone who was in favour of wars of conquest, in favour of strict government censorship, in favour of ideological totalitarianism and one-party rule, in favour of lynchings, trial by ordeal, "adminsitrative detainment", summary execution, extermination camps, prohibition of any form of protest in the workplace or against the government... suppose that this someone was smart, rich, capable, pragmatic, competent, and ambitious. Suppose that, and I know this is hard, given the previous attributes, suppose that they publicly announced holding this set of beliefs.

Would you not expect them to meet with a spontaneously generated slew of obstacles and hindrances of every kind?. And I haven't said anything about their opinions on race or gender or social inequality. Just the institutions of liberal democracy.

Would it not be right, and good, and proper that they are subjected to this kind of obstruction, if not outright legal action?

But, see, that's why that hypothesis was hard to swallow. Someone like that, smart and capable and pragmatic, would keep their mouth shut. They would bide their time. And then, when you expect it the least, they might pull this kind of shit. Or this other kind of shit.

Are you still going to pretend that this is just a matter of what "me and my friends" "like" or don't "like", Richard?

Now, see, I regret that, out of self preservation, and/or for the sake of bringing their plans to fruition, that kind of people will keep quiet, and only share and discuss these opinions with like-minded people. I regret that they do not feel that they can share their opinions in public, and expect them to win out by their own merit. I regret that they might, in fact, not want to submit their opinions to public scrutiny, because somewhere, deep inside, they know them to be evil or false. There is an idealistic part of me that wants to believe that, were these people given a chance to express themselves, to communicate freely and civilly with others, they would either change their beliefs as a result of the bayesian update, change everyone else's beliefs, and/or, if it's a matter of "personal" or "irrational" sensibility, make peace with the fact that they live in a world where the majority does not share their point of view, and that they cannot force their opinions, least of all their policies, unto them.

There is another, more cynical and ruthless side of me, that believes that the sort of people who are dangerously violent because of their ideology are not the sort of people who would benefit in any way from publicly debating their ideas, nor would anyone benefit from arguing with them. This aspect of me posits that sometimes, defending the freedoms of the most means stopping others from promoting the idea that said freedoms should be partly or fully, but permanently, waived, as well as infringing on the freedoms of these others should they show that they are willing and able to destroy these freedoms, and that this is perfectly okay.

To give you an example, you can't accuse of hypocrisy someone who claims to want to preserve life, because they kill a few select individuals, that have proven that killing them was the only way of incapacitating them (or that you can't try to incapacitate them without at least risking, and sometimes accidentally achieving, killing them).

You can't accuse liberal democracy of "not being very liberal" if its institutions, official and unofficial, actively work to hinder, by any means necessary (and ideally by the least harsh means necessary), any and all efforts to make it less liberal. This democracy is, in fact, in a constant equilibrium of being as liberal as it can sustainably be.