Vivat Libertas

A while back I wrote about the chilling effect that sanctimonious vitriol can have on discourse. It punishes people, particularly the most vulnerable people, in the name of some righteous cause or other, and because it's an exercise in influence, a lot of people don't want to get in the way of seemingly justified anger. A perpetual worry is that the fear of giving offence causes people to self-censor. Given that the internet is full of people who think that holding a shitty opinion is literally the worst thing you could do and that it's acceptable to threaten people until they shut up, this is perfectly understandable. Even then, there are issues and nuances; on a trivial level, people self-censor all the time. It's why politeness exists. Some level of self-censorship is normal in most societies to stop us from fighting all the time, because there are times that are bad to pick fights and times that are worse to pick fights. The internet is now a perfect place for pe...

There seems to be this great taboo against criticising the thoughts and beliefs of others lest others get offended. Someone can believe the moon is made of mouldy cake  or that mathematics was invented by sentient jetpacks last Tuesday. Are you allowed to titter at their stupid beliefs behind their backs? Of course! How else do you think society works? Are you allowed to openly disagree with them? No, we can't have that - no matter if they're just plain fucking wrong or, worse, passing that wrongness on where people can't disagree with it, you can't rebut them because to do so would be offensive. And there's nothing worse in the world than offence, is there? Not paedophilia; not indoctrination; not even plain old stupidity. Offence is the worst of them all. If you can't tell that that last sentence was sarcastic, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog. As you can probably tell, I have some quibbles with this whole idea that not giving offence come...