> You wanna discuss Phaedrus or The Republic, or the Sacred Band, or something else?

Sure. How much Plato have you read in Greek? What do you think, for example, he means by ὑπηρετεῖν when applied to χαρισάμενα παιδικά?

> Waters is indeed...steeped in and derived from...

This makes me suspect what the answer to "How much Plato have you read in Greek?" was, and exactly how much that postgrad degree was worth.

> And you're right, youtube and 8chan don't want to be hosting that stuff.

It actually looks like 8chan is perfectly fine hosting this stuff, which is the problem. I doubt Cloudflare would have as much of an issue if 8chan were proactive in taking down a lot of its more terroristic content.

> It troubles me that the very same people arguing about a women's right to choose are slamming facebook and youtube and twitter for allowing people to express their opinions.

Is anyone actually getting mad at Youtube/Facebook for simply allowing dissenting opinions? Most people get upset with the really awful stuff, like, genuine harassment or race-baiting; I honestly don't know anyone that is calling for the removal of people just because they hold an opinion against the norm.

People called for Alex Jones to be banned (which eventually happened) because he was actively and purposefully doing things to hurt people. He was spreading a lot of misinformation, which led to someone with a gun trying to shoot up a pizza shop, and to people directly targeting the victims' parents of the Sandy Hook massacre because he, for years, spread the idea that it was a hoax; he also would constantly accuse anyone he disagreed with of being a pedophile.

Everyone has a line for free speech; the easy example is "yelling fire in the crowded theater", but if I hired a hitman, it's not like it would be a valid court defense for me to say "Well it's my free speech to tell someone to kill someone". Saying that there should be no limits on free speech is intellectually dishonest, and we gain nothing from it. If certain people are causing measurable and unambiguous harm from the things that they're saying, then, to me, that's where we draw the line at giving them a platform.

> Well, I mean, then maybe we should outlaw animals having sex with each other? It's not like they give consent to each other.

I don't believe that you're saying this in good faith. If two thirteen-year-olds have sex with each other, society doesn't typically have too much of an outrage because they're just two kids who don't know better. If a forty-five-year-old has sex with a thirteen-year-old then we get upset, because a grown-ass adult should know better.

There ain’t no right to live without tyranny or oppression. Literally no right to do anything except what society says.

This is just you and your libertarian sentimentalism.

>But the way I see it there is only one dimension: oppression and tyranny on one end and free speech and individualism on the other.

Other people don't see it that way, though, and in fact there are a few well-mounted defences from philosophers which define that "other" view. You're arguing for a roughly liberal (perhaps liberal egalitarian) point of view, but we shouldn't act as though this is the only way to conceive a healthy view of liberty and freedom. Liberalism isn't the only game in town any more, and it hasn't been the only game in town (speaking in terms of relief from the oppression of kings and barons) since the 19th century. It is a valid view that is commonly held and argued for, sure, but it is by no means the only coherent view of liberty there is.

>don't recognize the rights to buy and use drugs or consume pornography

Perhaps it's surprising, but there are actually liberal views against pornography, i.e they claim to proceed from core liberal tenets to positions in which pornography would not be permissible - see Rae Langton's work for example. In fact, this caused so much of a storm that liberal philosophers took it upon themselves to try and argue against it precisely because they viewed it as a threat to some traditional liberal opinions. It may further surprise you that some philosophers have argued that J.S. Mill himself(!) would have been against pornography.

>Social and economic freedoms go hand and hand, which is something both conservatives and liberals both seem to be confused about.

This is actually the core of certain 19th c. German critiques of liberalism.

>The only true human right is to live one's own life free from tyranny and oppression.

This is simply one opinion amongst many. Negative liberties, like traditional liberalism, isn't the only game in town any more, even in liberal circles. The idea that freedom is necessarily freedom from is not supported by some major liberal theorists (look at Rawls, or perhaps Habermas). The distinction itself, Eric Nelson argues, may not even be relevant any more.

Perhaps you didn't mean to say that this is what liberty is, but rather you were only stating your own conception of liberty, so my apologies if so - but to say that the only other possible conception of liberty is fundamentally wrong, or worse, that it is "totalitarian" is pretty shabby (as far as political philosophy goes).

>Well, I mean, then maybe we should outlaw animals having sex with each other? It's not like they give consent to each other.

This misses the point which is that most philosophers don't consider animals to be moral agents. Liberal philosophers themselves are divided on the "rights" of animals, however some prominent theorists argue that the property relations of animals should be viewed as custodial/trustee ones[0].

Even on free speech contemporary liberal philosophers are divided, but vanishingly few argue for no restrictions at all on speech, even considering obvious caveats (like threats of immediate violence). The trouble is finding a justification within a given free speech principle for certain restrictions to be permitted. It is a question of why we value free speech at all. For example, one justification for the primacy of freedom of speech is that freedom of speech aids discerning truth from falsehood, however how would this apply to deliberate lies? Surely most upholders of free speech would allow at least some lies to be uttered. So then comes the next free speech justification: that speech is inseparable from thought, but that also has its critics etc. (see Susan Brison on this point)

What I'm trying to say is this: maybe critics of liberalism have a point, and maybe we ought to rationally investigate why we hold certain liberal ideals rather than, in J.S. Mill's words, cling to them as dead dogma. It doesn't take an anti-porn conservative or a pro-universal healthcare progressive to do that.

[0] https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/97...

> isn't always fair to criticize that comedy since it is important to always judge art in the context in which it was originally created.

I strongly disagree. I very much remember how my dad (an immigrant to the US) felt about it when he saw the Simpsons in the 90s; I remember how obvious the racism was when he pointed it out. Just because you were oblivious to how it made people feel doesn't mean it didn't make people feel horrible.

This historical relativism crap is really just a cheap copout for not taking the time to ask: "is what I'm doing going to hurt or demean someone?" If the answer is yes, dont do it, it doesn't matter how many people are accepting of it at the time. If the answer is "I don't know", ask the person it might hurt.

The reality is, people largely didn't care how others were impacted by the things they did and giving them a lazy and thoughtless copout is nearly just as demeaning as the original actions.

(Think about it, all those guys getting negatively swept up in the metoo movement claiming that they didn't know any better with regard to sexual harassment sounds absolutely absurd; putting "historical context" on racist things is equally as absurd)

(People who are not minorities usually dont come close to understanding how racism feels; I look and sound "white" and it was always troubling to see how my dad who doesn't look or sound "white" was treated relative to me; it's painful to see all the microaggressions that my friends deal with on a daily basis (in a place as liberal as socal) and to see comments like this trying to invalidate the damage done because of copouts like historical context is incredibly disheartening because it makes me realize how far away we are from the point where we no longer treat people like second class citizens because of their grouping)

Well said. I watched Blazing Saddles last night and that film flat out couldn’t be made today.

I would push back on that a little. There are different responsibilities when you only have one instance of a character of a certain demographic verses a multitude of characters. For example, no one would complain if one of the East Asian characters on Fresh Off The Boat was a stereotype (I don't watch the show, so I'm not sure if there is one) because the cast is full of East Asian people are therefore the show is in no way implying that they all fit that stereotype. Apu was the most prominent and sometimes the only South Asian face on television for years and therefore there is extra pressure not to make that character a stereotype. There are so many white people on TV that presenting some in a bad light doesn't lead to stereotyping.

> Blazing Saddles was a comedy. Django is acceptable because it's a drama

That's not at all true; except perhaps for extremely historically-grounded drama (which Django is not), drama tends to get less license than comedy.

> but Mel Brooks' style of humor is no longer socially acceptable

Mel Brooks style of humor was never “socially acceptable”, it’s was always transgressive. It's probably not as commercially acceptable in the mainstream film industry as it once was, but that's more because transgressive video entertainment has other outlets and the mainstream film industry is a more mature and more narrowly-focussed industry than it once was.

> We can take issues like race and anti-semitism deadly seriously, but we aren't allowed to laugh about them anymore.

My experience of currently successful (both live and distributed on major video platforms) stand up and other comedy suggests that, yes, we are very much still allowed to laugh at those things. The particular currently successful forms may not look exactly like Blazing Saddles, but while the latter isn't stale, it's also very firmly grounded in the time it was produced (which seems generally true of Brooks’ comedies).