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Free speech has become a meaningless slogan since it's now used as if there was a wide consensus against all property rights. But nobody is against property rights, just property rights of other people, maybe.

I support your right to perform necessary bodily functions, just not on my living room carpet. I wouldn't say that's "tribalistic", more like "territorial".




I think we've had a wide consensus against commercial property "rights" since the Civil Rights Act, and probably long before that, but I'm not a historian. AT&T doesn't get to listen to my calls to decide whether carrying them on their network is good for their brand. The big tech companies shouldn't get to claim they're a platform and then arbitrarily censor whoever they want without any due process.

It's 2019 and everyone talks online, it's time to stop pretending that the public sidewalk is the only place people have a right to protest. Telling someone they have to go use gab.ai (which is blocked on both on both app stores and has had its payment systems pulled) is like telling a sidewalk protestor they have the right to protest as long as it's somewhere in the wilderness where they will not be discovered, alongside the other miscreants who have a beef.

Nobody has ever been against the right of people to protest in invisible places, even China lets you do that. It's like the old saw, that Stalinist Russia had free speech as long as you were praising the party or nobody could hear you.




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