CENSORSHIP IS WRONG – Louis Brandeis

It’s really quite simple, actually: Free Speech is about FREE SPEECH – not moderated (i.e. censored) speech.

Contrary to the perverted concept held by many users on this website, no one has a right to never be offended. There is a very good reason for this: because it is utterly impossible to avoid offending every individual on every subject – no doubt someone reading this very answer will be offended, and what needs to be said for that is simply “tough shit, get over it.”

If a user is offended by what another user writes, then mute the person, block him or her, and then go about life without further bother. But it is no one’s job or duty to police the thoughts or ideas of others in defense of the rest of the world; each individual has the capacity to make his or her own decision as to what they wish to actually read or listen or watch.

Political correctness is poison, a cancer that gets in the way of discussing matters honestly and openly. Political correctness invites abuse by anyone who “feels threatened” or “feels offended.” Political correctness robs human beings of interacting free of reprisal or unfair material counterattacks.

The “line” between Political Correctness and Free Speech is very easy to identify. Free Speech is a TOTALLY FREE exchange of ideas; political correctness is ANYTHING that limits, qualifies, quells, changes, modifies or moderates speech …NO MATTER HOW SUBTLE.

It genuinely scares me that so many are so CONSUMED with stifling the free and open exchange of ideas.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

Brandeis also said, “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion.”

Brandeis went on to say the following, a most clear expression of the essence of the importance of Free Speech: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Adherents to the concept of Political Correctness seek NOT to have an open and free exchange of ideas but to silence those whose ideas are divergent from the collective’s. There is a word for that: CENSORSHIP.