Many people here bring liberal baggage with them, so they don't understand critique of "free speech". When many people say they are against free speech, they are challenging free speech as conceived by the liberal state. I want to explain my opinion on this and argue for a different understanding of free speech.
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Language can be oppressive, and tangibly so. It doesn't just "hurt somebodies feelings" or "offend". We categorize, hierarchize and symbolically represent and describe our reality through language, in this way language orders and creates our reality.
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Certain slurs serve to ascribe an identity to marginalized peoples, and with these identities comes a knowledge of them as an "Other". You simultaneously take away ones agency to create their own identity, as well as impose and ascribe to them a damaging identity. You are robbing them of self-creation, and helping submit them to an oppressive hegemonic discourse (biopolitics)..
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How far behind marginalizing discourse are the bullets? Violence towards the "Other" is commonplace, look at violence towards LGBTQ peoples. This violence is the result of these oppressive discourses, and the creation of this "Other" as inferior, non-normative. To the defender of liberal free speech, they are a non-conformist who, intentionally or not, is pulled back into the grips of biopolitical administration.
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Power/knowledge both produces and negates at the same time, language/discourse produces and negates, these are not neutral. With liberal free speech, you produce a context within which followers of the ruling ideology can converse, but you negate the conditions for the marginalized who are subjugated to this "Other" discourse from participation, and agency of self-creation.
Conclusion: An alternative free speech should be developed in designated safe spaces that produce a context within which the ruling ideology is challenged, and the marginalized are able to be free from the ruling ideologies normalizing discourse that is intended to submit them. This entails a counter discourse of inflammatory rhetoric towards those who seek to subjubate via identity imposition, and also a counter discourse that encourages self-creation.
TL;DR: we should be predicated on an alternative formulation of free speech that is against identity imposition
chaos wrote
'Free' speech is metered out by the state, so it's anything but free.