For every man who would exploit his neighbor is another who would not. This is why I have faith in the absence of state fetters. What prohibits a man ...
My own view is that the state is formed through conquest and confiscation. I don’t believe in any social contract theory. As such, suffrage is merely ...
I’ll try to clarify. If there are no positions of power for the plutocrats to occupy, it doesn’t follow that the absence of these positions of power l...
I look around and see competing interests competing for state power. All of them intervene in the economy through the very means you defend, yet we’re...
But the state is a monopoly of the kind you describe, destroying the playing field for everyone else, and willing to maintain it with compulsion and v...
We’re all over the place here. I thought we were talking about the left today, and not the right yesterday. Both are statist, both are authoritarian, ...
It’s true. The left used to be about freedom and individualism. Now it’s statist, reactionary, and collectivist. That’s why the old divisions hardly w...
Whatever it is, it always reads to me as big government, nanny-statism with an emphasis on identity politics, activism, and anti-capitalism. It’s no s...
I mostly agree with your definitions. I would add, though, that an agnostic believes in the possibility that a god exists. The possibility of god is a...
I’m aware of Mill’s ideas. I don’t think the harm principle should apply to speech. It’s true. Your business is yours and no one has a right to be emp...
I have bestowed it; I’ve conferred it; I’ve granted it; and I bestow it on everyone. I give you the right to be a fraud, a bigot, a liar. Reject it al...
JS Mill, John Milton, Meiklejohn, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Voltaire, Emma Goldman, Orwell, Huxley, Karl Jaspers, Arendt, Paine, Spinoza, Thomas Jef...
The moral and practical basis for free speech is well-established, well-argued, even ancient, especially where the legal basis has yet to catch up. Th...
State censorship, mob censorship, church censorship—a distinction without a difference. We should be concerned about their censorship and for the same...
The “incitement” doctrine is an exercise in magical thinking, in my mind. If one can incite violence, one should be able to incite me to accept a cont...
“Imagine”…this is all the censor can do, imagine a future in which speech inflicts harm, corrupts the youth, but in all likelihood merely conflicts wi...
There’s plenty of reasons why Socrates ought not have been censored, and his views tolerated. Not only is it wrong to censor a man, kill him, for spec...
It’s an utterly useless and contradictory phrase, not so different than “freedom of speech but not freedom from censorship”. Maybe come up with someth...
The actual consequence of speech are physical in nature: the expelling of breath, the subtle vibration of the air, the marking of pencil on a paper, a...
I approach it from two prongs. The language around “laws of nature” imply a kind of governance, leading to the assumption that something else controls...
I said speech is free from consequences. The consequence of that sentence, apparently, was for you to quote it out of context, to which you responded ...
Not really. It’s an important point because censors ban speech, as if it was the speech that cause this or that problem. But speech has no such causal...
It’s up to you. That’s the point. You determine your actions, and therefor any penalties you dish out are the consequence of your principles and decis...
But you said it is something the Chinese say, when one can go out and ask Chinese people if this is true and find various opinions. At any rate, Metho...
That’s the necessary result in that kind of thinking, and yours. One can say with more confidence that that is not what the Chinese say, but what comm...
James Baldwin’s “Giovanni's Room” was replete with white people, his protagonist a blonde-haired, white man. “Who cares,” in my opinion—we ought to be...
I’ve always despised this statement. It’s untrue and is often used to justify censorship. Free speech does mean speech is free from consequences, and ...
The irony is that to identify with group identities is to misidentify, to find affinity with some ideal or stereotypical identity in order to disguise...
There is an interesting inversion there. Mishima saw suicide and death in battle as an act of solidarity with the group, a sort of morbid collectivism...
Mishima’s Sun and Steel hints that suicide, or death in battle, was an aesthetic and romantic act. His philosophy on the topic is nebulous but quite p...
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