Free speech again (getting very ranty)

Okay, one more post that’s vaguely on the topic of “free speech”, and then I promise I’m done for a while.

I think my beliefs can be summed up as something like the following.

Communities have a right to decide what behavior is antisocial, and what to do about people behaving antisocially. I am confident that every community that has existed has considered some forms of speech to be antisocial, and has used some form of coercion to limit antisocial speech.

Personally, I’m only interested in participating in a community where a form of consensus decision-making is used to determine what behaviors are antisocial, and how to handle them. Naturally, this includes speech.

I’m also only interested in participating in a community that will resort to violence in response to antisocial behavior rarely, only in the most extreme cases, and as a last resort. (It’s worth mentioning here that the only purpose of police is to inflict violence.)

The ability of other communities to influence the behavior of my own should be limited to the degree to which our behavior meaningfully affects them. For example, the folks who live downstream do have a say in what we put in the river, but they don’t get a say in how we perform marriage ceremonies.

I’m happy to talk about speech with anybody who agrees to something like the general shape of the above. But the internet is full of people who are committed to the logic of the state and place property rights over human rights — I share so little common ground with these folks that a discussion of anything so vague and abstract as “free speech rights” is a waste of everybody’s time.

Obviously, I live in the liberal capitalist hegemon, so the communities in which I find myself violate my principles in countless ways. I hope I live to see this cruel, violent system torn down so that I can participate in building a truly free world, or barring that, a truly free corner of it.

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