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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I agree that not all equivalences are created equal. Things can be similar in some ways and different in other ways, and whether their similarities or differences should be focused on is dependent on the situation.
That being said, while you've made it clear that you strongly disagree, you have given little explanation as to why, and you appear to have ignored the arguments I put forward.
You ask:
And the answer seems obvious to me: Flags defend ideas by their very existence, because the purpose of a flag is to serve as a physically-tangible token of loyalty to an abstract idea. Again I ask you, if a flag does not exist to support the ideas associated with its symbolic content, for what other purpose do humans make, carry and wave flags?
If I put up a flag, that is obviously a message. I'm putting the flag up because I want to send a message! I'm broadcasting that message because I want other people to receive it! If this were not so, what other purpose does putting the flag up serve?
You do not speak for "all reasonable people". I think I am a reasonable person, and I will happily argue in an open debate what messages specific flags intend to say, because I perceive many flags to obviously hold such messages.
This flag means "Our willingness to live in peace with you is dependent on your respect for our personal liberties. If you cannot leave us in peace, we will defend ourselves from your encroachment."
This flag means "We support sexual minorities in their struggle for recognition and acceptance in society, and we oppose those who object."
Now, you could take the same rainbow flag, and say that to you it represents Christian Theocracy and the need to minimize and punish sin through the powers of the state, since the rainbow was God's symbol of peace with mankind after the flood. But the problem is that you would be the only person using the rainbow flag that way, and everyone else would still be using it to symbolize LGBT pride, and so the message people would actually receive is the pride one. In the same way, you could invent a novel definition for some common word, diametrically opposed to the common definition, and then insist that your definition takes precedence, but that would be stupid and counterproductive and most people would just assume you were trolling.
And yet, people make such inferences commonly, you will not be able to stop them from doing so, and communication requires accepting this reality and working around it.
What do you actually want here? I'm not even sure I want to argue that you're wrong, but what is your point? You seem to be objecting to the fact that humans in groups naturally coordinate together to create and maintain Overton windows, punishing those who fall outside them. Humans obviously do this, and there are obvious downsides to them doing this. It seems to me that humans generally perceive the upsides of such behavior to outweigh the downsides, and I do not think any meaningful number of them will ever agree to coordinate the opposite behavior in any consistent fashion. You can dislike this fact, but I'm exceedingly skeptical that you can change it, or that I'd even want you to succeed in doing so.
You have not made any argument.
You are making claims that are completely unsubstantiated presuming they are true, just because you said so: ipse dixit fallacy.
That is an assertion without a proof.
Why do flags serve as a token of loyalty? Because you said so. That's not an argument.
Stating what people do has no bearing on what people ought to do. Effective communication requires interpreting what the author of a message actually meant, not whatever people commonly infer.
This is the main problem with modern communication: people do not care what other people actually meant. I can provide you with a completely different meaning of the rainbow flag that millions of people agree with, but you are going to claim their interpretation is wrong. Why? Because you say so.
I disagree. Here is my argument:
I'm arguing that this is what flags mean to people. Implicit in the above statement is my evidence for it:
None of the above is Ipse Dixit, at least not beyond the tautological sense in which anything I might say is something I have said. I will grant that none of the above evidence is perfect, at least not to the standards of rigorous, committed solipsism. Given that I cannot read minds, I cannot actually be sure that the boringly-consistent data across a lifetime of observing social and political norms is not some elaborate prank being played on me by the rest of the world.
Further, despite the fact that contrary arguments seem facially absurd, I have invited you to offer contrary evidence, or even speculation, on what possible other purpose a flag might serve anyway, because you seem very certain and I'd like to know why.
What people do is at least legible. The problem with claims of what they ought to do is that such claims are not necessarily bounded by reality.
Will I? Why would I do that? Whatever meaning is ascribed, I'm going to argue that it needs to actually account for the common behaviors of those waving the flag. I think my definition above does a pretty good job of that, but I wrote it straight off the dome and would not be terribly surprised if a better encapsulation could be offered. By all means show me how it's done.
More generally, it's not clear to me that most people, or even any people, "know what they mean" themselves. Language is necessarily imprecise at the best of times, and often people speak carelessly, even about things they care deeply about. This is not a retreat to infinite subjectivity, just an acceptance that human minds are complicated, and introspection is difficult.
That's not an argument, that's an assertion.
Evidence is not proof.
What you are doing is literally the black swan fallacy. You assert that all swans are white, then you provide a post hoc rationalization for your assertion: here are some white swans. This is not proof that your assertion is necessarily true.
There's a well known method to solve the black swan fallacy, called falsifiability. Instead of looking for white swans, we should be looking for black swans. In this particular case we should be looking for evidence where people consider a particular flag to be the opposite of what you claim.
If you cared about truth, that's the evidence you should be looking for. But you are doing the opposite of what you should be doing: you are ignoring all the evidence that contradicts your assertion.
Yes, but you have already spelled out exactly how you are going to dismiss it, and on what grounds.
Then why are you arguing that people ought to do these common inferences?
Yes, because you are doing a post hoc rationalization: you are starting from a pre-established conclusion, and selectively choosing the evidence that fits, and rejecting the evidence that doesn't.
So any evidence that contradicts your assertion must be rejected on the basis that it's not "common behavior". So by definition all swans are white, because all the black swans we find are "not common".
So when evidence supports your claim, you treat language as precise; when it doesn't, you appeal to its imprecision. That asymmetry reveals a confirmation bias.
Your assertion is simply unfalsifiable.
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