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I mean didn't he literally just get purged for expressing a political opinion?
He doesn't have to read about authoritarian states, he's already living in one!
EDIT: Well that comment didn't last long. Here's the original:
If my employee is on TV and says rude things about a major client of mine, should the government ban me from firing them? From my perspective as a business owner in this hypothetical, it seems more the authoritarian government is the one that forces me to keep shitty and unliked employees around even if they're costing my business reputation.
Is free speech more or less important than freedom of association?
Not a great question considering free association rights are essentially a form of free speech rights. At least that's how we've traditionally viewed it in the US
That's how Anglo-Americans traditionally (read pre-CRA) viewed it. That's not how continental Europeeans ever viewed it.
I think the question has merit. Otherwise Mill wouldn't have had to invent the Harm Principle to solve it.
Consider a church that a large majority of your society attends (let's call it the catholic church, for "universal"). Let's say this catholic church has formal processes that would impose specific penalties on its members if they associate with people deemed unsavory by the institution. This is not a government institution, and yet it possesses large powers of censorship through this simple application of freedom of association.
How is this possible if there is no tension between keeping political expression unsuppressed and the ability for people to freely exclude anyone they desire from their lives?
Libertarians discard the primacy of political expression and focus on property rights. Liberals discard the primacy of freedom of association and focus on political expression. Hence vastly different reactions to some dudes deciding to setup ethnic enclaves innawoods.
But neither of these approaches realizes the original Liberal promise that both political and social freedoms can be fully realized with no contradiction. Because it was a lie.
Ok well in the case of us (me, and the jubilee guy) being American, the American view is pretty relevant here.
And considering how poorly Europe has been on free speech lately, I'm even less enthused about their philosophy.
If you get large enough it basically becomes a psuedo-government at that point and I would entertain the argument. Throughout much of history, this has been the case so yeah I'd agree we should be cautious.
But America is widely diversified. There is not a single corporate/religious/etc other private entity with that power. In many ways this can beneficial for them because there's a shit ton of powerful rich groups willing to support you. Shiloh Hendricks as an example made almost a million dollars just for being a viral cancel culture focus.
It certainly doesn't seem like there is an all encompassing major institution where dissent = failed life if even the closest thing to that has its victims made millionaires. Maybe it tries, but it's been proven over and over again to be lacking in power outside of a limited subset of society.
America is a highly centralized modern managerial nation.
Try living your life after having been deemed a politically liability whom no bank will touch and come back to me.
But you don't even need society wide nets to ruin a person, just industry wide. Remember when James Damore got fired and people tried to prevent him even getting any job back? Because I remember.
People always do this dance of pointing to some Emmanuel Goldstein that survived cancellation because they can't actually name the ones that were successfully ruined, since they disappeared from the internet since.
I personally know half a dozen such people. The modern world and its secular Cathedral does have excommunication. I know so.
That doesn't and hasn't really happened in the US ... except for well, the one big thing we're seeing right now. Over porn/adult content. The payment processors ability to censor the largest stores on the internet and some of the state governments suppressing adult content sites is a pretty easy to see what real power looks like.
It looks like you literally not being able to see or buy the "bad things" to begin with. And even this still needs the backing of government and the deepest institutions of credit and capital to enforce their censorship with decently accessible workarounds still available. This is the worst America has to offer currently, multiple times more censoring than almost any other cultural clash and it's still struggling.
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