Comment by porknubbins
4 years ago
Just by saying “absolutism is bad” your post doesn’t explain why you are against free speech. The problem with anything but a simple rule for free speech (with obvious exceptions for threats, malicious lies, danger etc) is that it becomes a litigation, which is often a power struggle about who can manipulate the rules best, or a political struggle where one group captures the means of adjudicating speech.
But it is a power struggle and always has been.
The very earliest advocates for free speech, most notably Milton, excluded established powers from its protections, notably the Catholic Church:
I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled.
-- John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644.