Comment by terminalshort
3 hours ago
What if 25 years ago I spoke out against opiods as highly addictive and dangerous. Remember, this was in contradiction to the scientific consensus at the time that modern opioids were not that addictive. A reasonable person could have said at the time that my claims were false and posed a danger to people who were in pain and needed this medication. In hindsight it's obvious that the scientific consensus was catastrophically wrong, but it people like you were in charge, people could be jailed for their dissent.
If you did you'd have been in very good company because the world over the scientific consensus was that opioids were addictive.
That scientific consensus you are alluding to is not what you claim it was.
Finally, we're talking about celebrities without any qualification whatsoever spreading utter nonsense causing real harm, you can look at that in isolation and compare it to you making that statement out of an abundance of caution regarding something where there is no downside. The two simply are not equivalent. Free speech absolutists always pull the same trick, aiming to refuse an obvious wrong in order to defend their bastion while forgetting that there isn't a black-or-white at all, you can have some reasonable limits on what people can and can not do and in the age of 'influencers' with global reach the danger is much more prevalent than it used to be.
Free speech is a great good, but it is not the greatest good.