> No, of course not. Everyone is obliged to continuously engage in the conversation, to push the course of all society away from suffering and toward justice.

Well how the fuck are you supposed to be able to do this if all wrongthink is banned? Because things like "women are equal to men", "race doesn't matter", "slavery is wrong", etc were most certainly wrongthink to begin with.

I’m going to turn it around on you: how can we have a just society if women legitimately fear for their safety when they go to certain places? We’re not obliged to suffer white nationalists carrying tiki torches down the national mall chanting “Blood and thunder” and making the world unambiguously worse because we need to know their position exists. Sunlight is not always the best disinfectant.

> how can we have a just society if women legitimately fear for their safety when they go to certain places?

This is a really hard question, partly because those women are generally wrong - men are much more likely to be mugged/assaulted/killed than women in every US location I've seen statistics for.

> We’re not obliged to suffer white nationalists carrying tiki torches down the national mall chanting “Blood and thunder” and making the world unambiguously worse because we need to know their position exists.

Should we also not be obliged to suffer black supremacists doing the same? Or, more recently, gay rights advocates? How is that not exactly analogous to pride parades?

Yes, we now agree with (and approve of) some values and not others. But locking those values in place 20 years ago would have been clearly wrong (no gay marriage, etc), so why do we assume that doing the same today would have been better? How can we differentiate between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' while still allowing the next gay rights movement to take place?

> Should we also not be obliged to suffer ... gay rights advocates?

If you want to make a case that gay rights advocates make the world unambiguously worse, be my guest. At a societal scale, you will fail, because there is a clear and categorical difference between that example and mine.

It's fine that not everyone feels that way. The people who think gay rights advocates make the world worse are wrong, and society has the right to judge them that way.

Just because you can swap the nouns in a formulation of a policy and turn it from good to bad (or bad to good) doesn't mean that policy is wrong, or bad, or shouldn't be used. Social policy don't need to be content-agnostic to be useful. We can apply a policy against nouns that, in outcome, make the world better; and refuse to apply the same policy against nouns that, in outcome, make the world worse. We're gonna get those determinations wrong sometimes, and that's inevitable and fine, we can just course-correct and carry on in good faith.

> If you want to make a case that gay rights advocates make the world unambiguously worse, be my guest. At a societal scale, you will fail, because there is a clear and categorical difference between that example and mine.

My point was that 20 years ago, there are a hell of a lot of people that would have made that argument. There's probably still a double-digit percentage of Americans who believe that today.

It's like evaluating a stock trading strategy on historical data - success there does not guarantee success in the real world, but failure highly implies it. Your proposed policy - which as far as I can tell simplifies to "ban advocating for things that a supermajority of the population finds distasteful" - would have prevented (or at least harmed) quite a few movements over the past century or three, and so I say that if implemented today it would do the same in the future.

> My point was that 20 years ago, there are a hell of a lot of people that would have made that argument.

I understand that's your point. And policy reflected that majority opinion back then. But, it was wrong, and we fixed it. That's fine. That's how things should work.

> Your proposed policy - which as far as I can tell simplifies to "ban advocating for things that a supermajority of the population finds distasteful"

I'm making no policy proposals. I'm saying society is justified in making moral decisions via policy, and in many cases is ethically obligated to do so.

I'm saying that a blanket position of moral agnosticism by government (which is, as far as I can tell, what you're suggesting) is naïve in the best case, and actually actively unethical in the worst case, when that position prevents a society from protecting itself from disease.

We still have courts even though there is the possibility of convicting the innocent, a society without a justice system is unworkable. In the same way, we still have the right and responsibility to make policy on moral and ethical grounds even though we might choose incorrectly, a society without that ability is unworkable.

> Because things like "women are equal to men", "race doesn't matter", "slavery is wrong", etc were most certainly wrongthink to begin with.

Pretty big difference between your examples and literal nazis posting hate on 8chan.

Oh, of course - but the point is that you can't always tell ahead of time, and giving the people in power the ability to determine such just ensures that the people in power will never change.