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Saline9515today at 1:29 AM1 replyview on HN

Noam Chomsky: 'If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.'

Also, your solution doesn't solve your problem: your colleague won't stop to hold ideas that you don't like, nor his blog will disappear. If it's just a blog, he didn't harmed anybody, whereas you got him fired.


Replies

array_key_firsttoday at 2:00 AM

There's multiple levels of freedom of expression. You could argue, and people do, that the company has it's own right to freedom of expression, and wants to portray itself in the way it wants, and that necessarily involves deciding who they work with.

For example, if I told you that you are forced to associate yourself publicly with someone you don't like and don't want to associate with, then you might say I'm hindering your freedom of expression.

And this is missing the elephant in the room: white supremacy is fundamentally anti-free-expression. That's one of it's core tenants. So we have a little bit of tolerance paradox here.

If we allow those who oppose free expression to freely express that, then they express it by limiting free expression, then by allowing free expression we've actually suppressed free expression. So, it's tricky.