If Only The Romans

[Anomalocaris]

To the objection of potential for abuse, yes, there is. But it is greater, certain, and continuous abuse to allow the unqualified an equal voice as the qualified.

The idea that some people are "qualified" to determine what is and isn't acceptable speech is far, far too authoritarian for my taste. Where such a design has been adopted, the abuses far outweigh anything seen in a country where free speech allows the polity to warn of and gather against such abuses.

Thanks, but no thanks. History shows that despots remove free speech first for what I hope are obvious reasons.

That despots always do this doesn't mean it can not therefore be necessary to do it for reasons other than securing despotism.

I think Cultures with long and well remembered historic experiences is in better position to judge what sort of speech likely leads to harm to their own people all out of proportion to the touted benefits of free speech than the individual tastes of outsiders based on one's embrace of political-philosophical views born much more recently, that is founded upon no reasonably similar experience, and that really lacks credible fundamental predictive power for its own consequences and relies to a large degree on emotional evocativeness that are perhaps more specific to particular cultures than to human experience in general.

I personally would like to live in a society where interference in personal conscience is minimal. But I do not take the view that it is for the greater good to impose norms designed to support this preference as a universal value. I would like cultures making different choices than I would like my culture to make, because they had different experiences and different mechanics of social interaction, to have the opportunities to demonstrate the efficacy of their choices and thereby make their experiences more instructive also to those who didn't have them. This enables all cultures to actually learn something more fundamental than what might be learned through the act of conjuring up straw men in order to seemingly better secure one's personal preferences.