**Debate Club** Freedom of Speech – Desirable and Necessary?

R&I – TxPAT ***

You don’t have the right to silence the speech of others. You don’t seem to be grasping that point.

Communism , aka leftism in all of it’s forms, is the most vile ideology in the history of human beings. It killed over 100 million people in the 20th century alone, and is still causing death, destruction, and misery to this day. Should I have the right to ban any and all advocation of leftism?

The purported justification doesn’t matter because free speech is a universal human right. Free speech is desirable and necessary for practical reasons as well as philosophical ones.

If you want to make some sort of point, go ahead and make it, I am not going to assist you in playing along that there is some sort of justification for tyranny.

“Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error.” – Thomas Jefferson

It’s plain that our choices are freedom, or some set of fallible people deciding what gets to be said and what doesn’t. People who, being human, cannot in any way be trusted to have pure motives, which exclude their own personal interests – financial, societal, or political.

In the former case, the goal becomes making a better argument than your opponent, and distributing it as widely as possible.
In the latter case, the goal can only be to gain power by any means necessary, and use that power to silence your opposition.

Which do you think is preferable?

ConservativeChick