Comment by JKCalhoun
5 hours ago
As I got older I began to recognize that some things are just bad for society at large.
My refraining from a thing doesn't fix the societal ill the thing causes.
5 hours ago
As I got older I began to recognize that some things are just bad for society at large.
My refraining from a thing doesn't fix the societal ill the thing causes.
I suspect this view is actually the majority. Chat Control, the Great Firewall, Indian VoIP control, the Spanish Cloudflare ban and so on point to many societies finding that many things are just bad for society at large. We’re all just fighting over what things are just bad for society at large.
In the US, the first amendment exists but in Germany simply displaying the flag of the Nazi party is illegal. The latter have determined that it’s just bad for society at large. In El Salvador, tattoos on a man are just bad for society at large.
It’s true that refraining does not actually solve the problem. Others must be constrained. Sometimes for their own good and other times for the sake of society.
Personally, I like the way the US is setup but what is truly adaptive isn’t clear to me. Perhaps indeed it is good that one is bone sawed because the things one is saying are just bad for society at large and I should support that whether or not I have said those things.
Only time will tell. I just hope I have some place to live that has something like the First Amendment and that has some of the freewheeling life of the US. Maybe I will only have that if I defend it and if I fail to then by its defeat it will have proven its maladaptive nature.
To use a tired cliche, 'freedom isn't free.' I used to roll my eyes at that, but I have recently become convinced that the only thing holding us back from a total backwards slide on civil rights is a small number of citizens fighting and speaking up.
Even in this thread, you can see any number of people gleefully encouraging censorship and the stripping of our first amendment rights. I don't mind if they end up living in a totalitarian hellhole, but I certainly won't be going quietly with them.