Outlawing shitty speech won’t make shitty speech or the mindset it envelops go away, only make it less visible. It will linger in shadowy places where the public can barely see it, where it does not receive the scrutiny and scorn it might deserve and where awareness of it has faded to the point where civil and safe countermeasures against its spread will be too little and too late to halt its spread once it does once again advance.
Likewise, the outlawing of free speech tends to erode what speech is reasonable and necessary, though usually unpopular.
Where the former threatens to annihilate a free civil society in a backwards way by inducing a reactionary series of clamoring of hostilities and brazenly spurious calls for “law and order”, the latter will slowly eviscerate the freedoms and open institutions of a liberal democracy as well as civic associations by way of a dysmoral induction of citizens into the policing each other as that of a razor blade that progressively shaves a notch too closely, eventually leaving the skin not seemly, but bloodied.
The first tends to cause harm on the body of the public in a tangible manner, ie. authoritarian and brutal; the second leading to a rise of a diffuse totalitarianism by way of control of the mind of the public consciousness.
Freedom is preserved by members of the general public who posess the courage to walk the tightrope over a chasm of two species faux decency; that tightrope spun from the yarn of a freedom of discourse and expression of a standard high yet not unreasonably so, in a braid together with a firmness of conviction that the means of freedom are the ones that must be used to exhaustion to guard and preserve them as a whole, even when the means of force by ways of government or vigilante thuggery seem alluring to ‘solve’ these problems of individuals voicing their hatred and abomintion, real or imagined.
Surely, the nasty people with the nasty ideas will go away when swiped away by a mightier force; a hand directed by those of us decent. And we will probably never need to use that forceful hand again, will we? Or do we even care?
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May a free New Year be brought to you and your fellow citizens ask in return that you throw in your efforts to bring a free and thus hopefully good and safe New Year to them as well.