Liberty Talk #48
Channel: Liberty Talk
Date: 2016-01-15

Liberty Talk #48. Last week marked the one year anniversary of the murders at Charlie Hebdo, and we explore freedom of speech as a concept:

- Freedom of speech was never needed to agree with the current regime or consensus, but precisely to say reviled and offensive things.  It is the right for idiots to be completely wrong, and that's a good thing.

- Many of our liberties today would not have existed if people hadn't challenged the status quo and suggested such liberties in times when they were considered offensive - for example, equal rights for a lot of minorities with the majority.

- An absence of freedom of speech only protects those in power, never the powerless.

- Many seem to have mistaken the Hebdo magazine for racist or similar along the lines of Poe's Law: when you're making a parody of an extremist or downright medieval view, some people will mistake the parody for a sincere expression of the parodied views. Rather, it's a mathematical proof by contradiction in showing absurd consequences of the intolerant discourse, thereby promoting liberty.

- Ultimately, people who don't believe in freedom of speech think that being offended makes them a victim by somebody else's speech and therefore gives them certain rights to restore an imaginary honor -- which, taken to its extreme, can lead to acts of violence like the one at Charlie Hebdo.

Commentator: Carl Johan Rehbinder.

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