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freedom of speech

comment on k5:

The gist is that censorship in democratic society is contradictory: it assumes that people are too stupid to judge information for themselves, but intelligent enough to select those in power who can. Well, this is also roughly the basis of a republic, but then I'm not so hot on republics either; in any case, it's highly instable, on a much shorter scale than a republic (where people are capable of informing themselves).

Okay, so democratic society is bad, too, then. But every society is democratic in some sense; we have yet to get to the point where someone can spontaneously impose a stable government on people totally against their will, and if we do the rhetoric of government won't be very meaningful.

A point made well by Eloquence is that you cannot censor a viewpoint without effectively censoring its opposite. That is, you have something bad like Nazism censored; it now becomes impossible, or unlikely, to talk about why it's bad, and educate people well enough to avoid it themselves. Since the kinds of things you'd need to censor are often intuitively emotionally appealing, the result is that rational discourse is absent while those with an affinity for the censored view will always find a way to it anyways.