The You Can't Make This Shit Up Department

[Dystopia]

Because suppressing those ideologies drives them underground, while addressing them in the marketplace of ideas lets everyone see exactly how wrong they are.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant", and so on.

Besides, by outlawing this stuff, you make it impossible to see the dumbfucks quickly. 'Tis better to have them announcing themselves, it seems to me.

What if I told you that there are people from the old regime that still like fascism, and letting these ideas be promoted freely could drive the majority of the population in support of fascism? Better not take chances. They can be underground and discuss their ideas all they want, but they won't have a chance doing it publicly. Sure you have a point when you say we could expose the dumbfucks, but what if our (ignorant) population liked these dumbfucks? What would we do now?

The idea that what you say harms me in the absence of action on your part is highly debateable.

I pprefer freedom of thought and trust myself to winnow out the assholes, rather than trusting the government to not abuse such sweeping authority.

It's your opinion... By the way, freedom of thought is absolute, my professor said well that we could all be fascists on the inside, we can even declare we are fascists in public, we simply can't promote by showing a positive side of it, I'd rather have things like this. And about the absence of action, promoting something is an action, the action of promoting. Absence of action being punishable would be if someone was sentenced to jail for being merely a fascist, only with an action can you get punished, that's the most basic requirement of the system, and propaganda is an action, whether it is trough speech, headlines or papers. This is not the only promotion crime, there is also crimes of promotion of suicide, promotion of murder (telling people to murder others), promotion of hatred against races (saying people blacks are inferior and incentive of violence)

You can think individual liberties should prevail all day long, but if you talked with someone who was arrested and tortured for being a protester against the fascist regime, they'd tell you clearly this prohibition is a requirement. Let alone the German case of nazism they took it very far indeed, maybe too far.