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felipec  unbelief  1mo ago (felipec.substack.com)   1824 thread views

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

felipec.substack.com

I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.

Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.

Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.

Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.

So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.

How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?

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They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite

You made me curious where this came from, so I tried playing with google search date ranges and the first instance I could find that isn't a spurious result is this https://askleo.com/how_do_i_block_people_from_finding_information_about_me_on_the_internet/ which google says was written in 2008. No attribution however it seems to cite it as a well known quote already.

Interesting. I tried the same, but the earliest I could find were comments from 2010, and it's the same thing: people were already using as if it was part of the Zeitgeist, but no source.

This reminds me of cargo cults. People suddenly start repeating some dogma with zero understanding why it's there in the first place.

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