No it isn't. Speech can be refuted by other speech. If you offend me, I can decide how to internalize it. If you do real physical violence to me, I don't have a choice.
Yes, there are dangerous ideas, but I don't want to trust anyone to tell me (or worse, the public at large) what I can and cannot say or think. I want good ideas to win out by persuading me and others, not by being handed down from on high as dogma.
>If you offend me, I can decide how to internalize it.
No you can't. Millions of emotional abusers have caused harm strictly through speech. You can't "control" how a hunk of fat doing a bunch of chemistry reacts to sound waves because that hunk of fat explicitly evolved to react to sound waves in physiological ways!
Trauma is a real thing. People can be harmed in medically discernible ways through nothing more than words.
Those words represent a thought in the head of whoever spoke them, and your brain knows that. Your brain knows words are more than "just words" and reacts accordingly.
It's at times like these that I wish we could somehow evolve past our fragile psychology soon. There's only so much theory that can overcome human limitations. I do think everyone should have a platform online, but there would be robust filtering capabilities so people can hear just from who they like. In person, restraining orders and the like seems reasonable. Implementation is a different matter, but I think that's a reasonable balance between free speech and abuse prevention.
No it isn't. Speech can be refuted by other speech. If you offend me, I can decide how to internalize it. If you do real physical violence to me, I don't have a choice.
Yes, there are dangerous ideas, but I don't want to trust anyone to tell me (or worse, the public at large) what I can and cannot say or think. I want good ideas to win out by persuading me and others, not by being handed down from on high as dogma.