@faithisleaping@anarres.family I actually disagree to an extend: Freedom of Speech (or rather the in my opinion better alternative of freedom of opinion) is a very important fundamental right and not something that should be lightly discarded. Now most fundamental rights are to some extend in conflict with each other and will therefore have to have exceptions, limitations and the like and freedom of speech/expression/opinion is very much no exception to that. The most obvious example where I have yet to find anyone arguing that it should be legal is literal fraud: Absolute freedom of speech would mean that I can’t be held liable for not upholding my end of a contract, since I after all just engaged in speech. And once you have that established it actually opens up a pretty healthy way of looking at conflicting fundamental rights: They are things that need to be balanced against each other to improve the overall outcome. Importantly balancing doesn’t mean that you meet 50% between them, it just means that you can’t fully ignore them. (This is by the way not a controversial opinion, it’s literally the approach of the federal constitutional court in Germany. And yes, as far as courts go, there are very few deserving of more respect than that one! It is most importantly not some politicized monkey-den like the US supreme court, they actually have a very high rate of good decisions.) If you were to deny that need for a balance, you’d quickly end up in a situation that would be actively harmful to the minorities, because if you don’t create a reasonable room for ambiguity and open conversation, in practice you are still going to stifle honest conversations and questions because people are going to be too afraid to state their minds. You need some openness to shitty takes to have a space where people can grow. And that doesn’t mean that there is room for incitement or malicious spreading of misinformation, those things can absolutely be punished by prison if need be, but that is also the point: Balance doesn’t mean that you ignore or undervalue the minority-needs, it just means that you ban only that which does more harm by not being banned than the ban would. (Maybe this is another case of me speaking literally, whereas some people that you are talking about saying “balance”, but some malicious NTs meaning “ignore one side”, I’ve run into that before. But I still hold that we shouldn’t take their inability to use language, but point out, that they are the ones who don’t want to balance things.)