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Comment by emadabdulrahim | Hacker News Reader

I lived a similar experience back in Cairo during the Arab Spring. People had no internet access for over 10 days. It was their way of shutting down communication between people protesting on the streets and their family and friends.

Needless to say, when that happened, I simply lived down in Tahrir square since my brother was already there and I had no other way of checking on him.

Now that I'm in San Francisco, I can't tell you the libration I feel every single day by being able to do and say whatever I want. By being able to think, really think.

Sadly though, a lot of Americans and especially people on the far left are not appreciative of the freedom of speech this country has, and continue to squander it.

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> Sadly though, a lot of Americans and especially people on the far left are not appreciative of the freedom of speech this country has, and continue to squander it.

I think this is unnecessarily presumptive, and doesn't reflect the US's actual (and tarnished) record of free expression.

No part of the left-right political spectrum can be said to be the good guys or the bad guys in respect of free expression, especially in the United States. Roughly 20 years ago it was the conservative side doing most of the thought policing and the liberal side defending freedom of speech. The very same right-leaning media that now mocks "Woke" culture was cheerleading for the "Christian right" in the 1990s and labeling anyone opposed to the "War on Terror" as enemies and traitors in the early to mid 2000s.

The sheer hypocrisy of it all is incredible.

> No part of the left-right political spectrum can be said to be the good guys or the bad guys in respect of free expression, especially in the United States.

Maybe across all time, yes. But parties change. Right now there's a clear enemy of free expression, and it's not the right.

The correct play, of course, is to pressure the party that's currently on the anti-free-expression side to back down - even (especially) if that's your "own" party (not like the two major US political parties are very representative of their ostensible constituents) - and that's what the GP is doing.

(you can do this without condemning the ideals of the party as uniformly bad - which is something that a lot of people don't get - attacking a party is not the same as attacking its ideals!)

> Maybe across all time, yes. But parties change. Right now there's a clear enemy of free expression, and it's not the right.

Are you sure about that[1][2][3]? People on the left side of the aisle seem to be invested chiefly in social shame; the right side is actively using the power of the state to control public expression and educational content. Equivocation between the two feels like false balance.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/florida-race-and-ethnicity-govern...

[2]: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/bert-v-o-connor-complain...

[3]: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

In my view the prominent politicians and media personalities of both sides shamelessly practice this demagoguery and resort to any means of power to have their way, be it state authority or social pressure. I doubt most of them have any serious conviction in the positions they espouse. Pandering to the desires and prejudices of audiences is an effective tactic for gaining power or just earning a good living. The outcome for the cause du jour is of little importance. What counts is winning the election or growing & maintaining an audience.

I don't have any particularly nice things to say about American politicians from either party. But I don't think we ought to conflate social pressures with top-down policing of speech. The former is a cultural challenge; the latter is a material erosion of civil liberties.

> People on the left side of the aisle seem to be invested chiefly in social shame; the right side is actively using the power of the state to control public expression and educational content.

Conversely, even without me digging up any references of the progressive politicians also using the power of government to suppress free speech, it seems like you're making a false distinction.

Progressives are using their power to try to get people fired and unemployable (which is somewhat disingenuous to call "social shame"). When you can make someone unemployable in most of an industry, there's little difference between that and using the government directly. Furthermore, progressives use large tech companies (with power comparable to the state in some respects) to censor speech on their de-facto-town-square social media platforms.

If you want to regulate large technology companies, just say that. You'll find that plenty of people agree with you. Trying to contort private expression into state expression isn't going to get you very far, either in terms of convincing others or legal action.

(FWIW: conflating "progressive" and "left" belies a fundamental misunderstanding of left-of-center politics. It's a misunderstanding that you're going to want to correct if you want people to entertain your positions.)

People on the extremist fringes, whether it's far left or far right, tend to prefer authoritarianism and thus want to curtail freedom of speech because it is harmful to their political ideology. The more brazen ones seek to curtail freedom of speech while claiming to protect or even increase it.

> Sadly though, a lot of Americans and especially people on the far left are not appreciative of the freedom of speech this country has, and continue to squander it.

Can you expand on this? I’d like to understand your view better. How does the far left not appreciate it?

Not OP. But from my perspective, there has been a huge amount of silencing of speech for non-Left or non-mainstream opinions. Not always in the form of raw censorship, but a weird kind of endorsement, repetition and tacit-acceptance by institutions of only Left-leaning views, and also fear and bully-like tactics that has the ultimate effect of people self-censoring if they happen to be outside of that seemingly-narrow and "Left"-leaning set of opinions.

There are so many opinions that are downright foot-guns or taboos in any sort of public arena for example. And we don't even notice how we self-censor those opinions, nor do we notice it until we have those opinions/ideas and try to voice them. I'm relatively civil and polite on HN, but I don't dare repeat most of what I express here under my real identity.

The attack on comedians, the insistence on de-platforming folks that say anything outside the mainstream consensus. Cancel culture and the elevation of sensitivity.

It's one thing for one to share their opinion "I don't like this, this is inappropriate", it's different when one is seeking power to shutdown the person they're disagreeing with.

All of this makes people who have a different perspective, who might want to share their own personal experience that doesn't quite fit the narrative, to withhold and play it safe. Which ties back to freedom of speech. I've experienced this myself in my career in large SV tech companies. And my friends in Academia share similar stories and concerns.

Beyond freedom of speech, there are many extreme progressives (not "liberals") who will attack you if they think that your beliefs are "wrong".

You can maybe kind-of almost justify strong restrictions on what someone is allowed to say in public - but no, these people will try to get you fired if they think that you have the wrong thoughts. This is, quite plainly, inexcusable pure malice.

>Now that I'm in San Francisco, I can't tell you the libration I feel every single day by being able to do and say whatever I want.

Something doesn't add up in this sentence.

>are not appreciative of the freedom of speech this country has, and continue to squander it.

On one hand. You should be and somewhat happy for them. Because obviously they have never been through life without it. And it is a horror. A seed of fear forever planted inside you brain.

On the other hand.... you sighed. There is no way for them to understand without going through it. Human are damned to continue to repeat the same mistake over and over again. There are just something you cant learn from textbook.

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