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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29117 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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You don't get to decide what speech is or is not appropriate! That's the whole point! If you don't like it, put up your own poster: but what is or is not allowed to be said in the public square is not based on your opinions. That's the whole point of the 1st Amendment.

Tearing down posters is a much a sort of speech as putting them up in the first place. Consider the natural limit if we could only put up posters and never take them down: the whole world would be tiled with posters. Since you don't own the public square in the first place, you don't have a right to have your displays persist there indefinitely. And the only productive way to communicate "this discussion isn't important in the first place" is to shut down the conversation. Allowing it to evolve into a debate implicitly accepts that it is a debate worth having.

Silencing others is not speech, it's censorship.

If speech can be used as a weapon to silence others by overwhelming them with speech, then the antidote - censorship - must also be a form of speech.

That doesn't logically follow at all: that's like saying that if poison can be used as a weapon, then the antidote to poison is also a form of poison.

If someone uses their speech to overwhelm someone else's speech (for instance, if someone is giving a lecture and someone else starts screaming on a megaphone so that you can't hear them) then they're engaged is censorship. Their speech itself is not censorship, but the form they are presenting it in is censoring others.

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