To be clear, I don't think anyone should be allowed to punch people or pepper spray them.

This depends very much on what "not allowing someone to speak" means.

If it means physically barring someone from entering a venue or trespassing at a venue--those things are already illegal and can be dealt with by authorities as they see fit.

f it means shouting someone down in public or pressuring a school to disinvite a speaker, then those are proper uses of free expression.

For example, Roxane Gay pulled her book from Simon and Schuster in protest of their decision to publish Milo's book. That's a perfectly legitimate method of protest. If S&S decided to drop Milo because of it, then it would also be an effective protest.

Maybe sometimes. But protests also aim to dissuade the dissemination of ideas that are deemed dangerous. If a university were inviting a Holocaust denier, it would be proper to protest that decision because one would not want to give such arguments the authority of a debate. In that case exposing people to different viewpoints gets us farther from the truth. If you expose people to nonsense, they sometimes believe it regardless of how untruthful it is.

It would be great if no one ever published holocaust denial material. If webhosts and YouTube and etc came out with a policy to never publish Holocaust denial, then I would be all for it. If they don't, then I understand. But the world would be a lot better if they did.

What if "as they see fit" is the police shut down the event in order to prevent the threat of violence from hostile protesters who won't move from an LGBT rights meeting?

What if anti-abortion activists showed up at feminist events and shouted them down?

You think that's a proper use of free expression? I don't. They aren't countering arguments with arguments, they are attempting to prevent the arguments being made in the first place.

Sort of seems redundant for me to say that 0.6% of people isn't a lot, but okay.

0.6% of people pissing in the other toilet isn't a lot.

Well, you can't trust Milo fans not to shoot people, so that seems fit to me.

Protests are the sorts of things the media pounces on and the first question anyone would have is what were the ideas that led to them. The more fervent the protest, the more people will be exposed to the original idea being protested. Even if I were to buy that there are some ideas that need to be shut down, I don't see protests as an effective strategy for doing this.

Please don't bring 2+2 into this discussion or make it about posters. Final warning in this thread.

Bigotry is weak and inferior. It's actually a challenge to counter-belittle your post as it is already so small it may just collapse like it were erased, but a shallow shell remains. Maybe knowing people better can help?

Are they trespassing or physically barring people from entry? If so, then I would say no. This stuff happens to both sides, like when gamergaters called in death threats to universities. But that's not what most troubles me about gamergate.

Nothing says that you have to use freedom of expression to counter arguments with arguments. You can use it to attempt to prevent arguments from being made and people do so all the time.

Yes, that's the way I feel about Milo. Ignoring him or mocking him seems more appropriate. Protesting it seems to only give him more power.

But that's a question of tactics. I'm sure sometimes a protest would be the best tactic.

Strategically we can note that people who protest have the free expression to do just that.

And plus watch a nazi-alts' house of cards about free speech fall like a people's breeze blew it down. Schemers, gotta love them.

sjws think this is wrong and racist, but dont realise that them calling stuff racist, and their lacking sense of liberty, is the problem. if only they could support the police like conservatives do


https://twitter.com/TimCushing/statu...83030351413249

Wat? Texas sheriffs are shaking down blacks and latinos and somehow not only isn't it racist it should also reinforce a sense of liberty? How exactly?

Daca is being sarcastic. He isn't a mouth breather like lord.

I was possibly a bit harsh with the final warning last time so I'll hold back from a timeout. Do it any more and the timeouts will start.

Citations needed!

We should start a score card thread to keep track of who is who, hard to tell the difference between sarcasm and idiots.

Threats are wrong and illegal. Aholes on all sides do it, and it's deplorable.

And I think it's wrong and illiberal to use speech, or any other means to try to silence people. Just because people try to shout down people a lot these day, doesn't make it right. You win battles of ideas by promoting better ideas, not by stopping people from expressing their bad ideas. That itself is a terrible idea, and it never works in a free society, rather, it only makes those bad ideas more enticing, sexy, "Dangerous".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...=.8f14c47243a5

Also, it's apparently not even legal:


http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep...leven-20110924

One may try to re-write civil disobedience in some partial fashion, but they'll have to erase a lot of people to erase civil disobedience.

I'd be interested to see some evidence that the civil disobedience of the past civil rights era used tactics aimed at shutting down political speech.

look at these sjws forcing people, that share the beliefs of half the country, out of their jobs https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...-trump/516132/

I'm using speech to confront speech this instant.

If I had personally attacked you as part of that speech confrontation and were modded by the authority, it would still be that instant.

I could be wrong, but I don't think all those demonstrations of civil disobedience that successfully propelled civil rights campaigns of the sixties utilized shouting down techniques and tried to bar people from entering events.

I'm pretty sure it was the other way around, and strong laws protecting free speech and civil liberties organizations defended them from such illiberal tactics. Now those same laws and organizations are being demonized by people in the name of civil rights, and trolls like Milo, as terrible as some of his speech may be, are right to jump all over that illiberal hypocrisy. https://milo.yiannopoulos.net/2017/0...r-free-speech/

There are civil rights groups and movements that are organized with a purpose to specifically go protest other people's free speech. Nazis and KKK have been attracting protesters of their free speech since they lost again last time.

Just because the new types wear suit-ties or dress like mimics of real ska-style bangers doesn't mean they get a pass to make a call of free speech without a free response.

In a symbolic fashion, the good old fashion counter sit-ins was a protest of the very free speech of a "white's only" sign. An implicit symbol of racist fear and ignorance.

What's that quote? "target the oppression, not the oppressor" The oppression is the oppressor's speech in such a situation.

What is mistaken is alt-thinking having free speech is like a privilege which grants authority to tell everyone else to shut up and mean it.

Free speech rights are indivisible. You should protest bad ideas to your heart's content, but protesting free speech is a bad idea that you should also protest.

https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-e...position-paper