I would much rather change (b) than (a). Censorship, even of speech with the worst content is not good. Let that speech be spoken, and then counter it with better ideas. I agree that a monopoly on the megaphone is a serious problem, but I'm not certain what hte best solution to it is. We need to find a way in which more people can more easily be heard. Shutting people down, especially those with minority dangerous ideas, isn't that.
It's not the quantity of voices that needs to be changed, it's their relationship to authoritarian power and its oppressive functions. Censorship to protect the entrenched and ill-gotten wealth of the minority is one thing, and I oppose it, but speech that harms those who are already victims of this exploitation and oppression doesn't get to hijack the communications infrastructure made possible by the very people they are harming. We can simply say no to them, without giving them time to argue their case because they don't have one; we know this, we know what they want, and it's already settled that it's bad and not worth listening to.
I don't. I don't support repeatedly punching anyone in the face. And I noticed you wrote white nationalists and not white supremacists or violent white nationalists or nazis. That alarms me.
Those are synonyms, I hate to be the one to break it to you.
And I am curious why you stop at punch in the face? Why not kill? Why is one ok for you but not the other? Or are both ok? If somebody shot Richard Spencer dead tomorrow, should they be charged or praised?
There's no need to needlessly escalate to lethal force if violent resistance will do the trick. The point is not to wipe them out through genocide, it's to create the expectation that their ideas are not welcome in society. We need a unified, organized, ruthless contrary force to positively demolish the foundations of everything Richard Spencer stands for, and if there is a way to do that effectively without much violence I'm all for it, but the longer we wait the harder that becomes. My problem with liberals is they do not even see this need. They imagine that, like in a free market, people will just naturally disagree with people like Spencer and thus he will lose his platform and incite less violence as the invisible hand sweeps him into the dustbin of public discourse. Speech doesn't work like that when money = volume. The degree to which the voices of those in the upper crust has been unduly amplified, far beyond what someone working 60 hours a week could ever hope for, means unconditional free speech is actually a mechanism for increasing inequality and preserving power imbalances that serve the rich.
In the 60s, 70s, and 80s kids were protesting FOR free speech, not against it. Somehow it got turned around.
Everything to do with power and who has it. As long as there is a segment of people who do nothing and own everything, it will be in their interest to silence the majority they depend on for their wealth. This should be fought at all costs. However, when the same cabal turns around and starts using their massive overblown media empire to attempt to brainwash us into thinking they've got our best interests at heart, when what they're actually saying is to wipe out people because of their race, sexual orientation, or religion, it would be
unreasonable to allow them to speak as if we were all evaluating their suggestions for the first time on a pure, blank backdrop.
It comes down to the difference between the liberal idea of freedom (everybody does whatever they want individually by default, and society's job is to manage the intersections between conflicting wants) and the idea of social freedom (nobody has any freedom without everybody else, and it is only through cooperation and mutual support that any individual gains freedom). The liberal conception is not very old, believe it or not, but it is often assumed to be the natural, obvious one. As if the tens of millennia of basically egalitarian social organization in the families and tribes of our ancestors was the exception, and the system invented by the winners of feudalism's collapse a few centuries ago is how humans are programmed to operate from birth.
