I was walking past the MIT building yesterday, and I read the names inscribed on the MIT Math building. If you are facing the Dome and look right at the Math building you see in huge letters Newton, and in smaller letters Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler and some others. This makes sense, the starting point of modern mathematics is Newton, and it's quite likely that the giants on whose shoulders he stood were Brahe, Galileo and Kepler. If you read from the river side, you see in huge letters Aristotle and in smaller letters some ancient Greeks, like Euclid.

But if you read the inscribed names to the left of Newton, the name in huge letters is ... Franklin. This to me was a surprise, but then also a pleasant surprise. It was an admission/recognition that the science of democracy has equal standing with mathematics. If anything, democracy is more difficult to tame than math, because there will always be people trying to hijack a system, and exploit all the loopholes they can identify, while the roots of the zeta function will stay in the same place forever, they will not adapt to the way you try to chase them.

If it’s said on a privately owned platform on private infrastructure then it isn’t free speech. Private companies have the freedom to restrict speech on their platforms, and they enjoy that freedom at the price of having to adhere to regulatory action.

Say it in the actual public square and the public government shouldn’t be empowered to silence you. That’s not an argument for giving Elon free reign to both silence his critics and also promote his own idiot views, that’s an argument for seizing the Internet back into public ownership.

> The only way to defend free speech is to nuke the idea of benevolent censorship from orbit. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth, nobody can discern "misinformation" from truth consistently or without bias, and nobody can define "hate speech" in universally acceptable terms that don't recall blasphemy laws of centuries past.

Then stop supporting it. Really - if you dislike benevolent censorship, stop taking part in moderated and privately-held society. Stop using X, stop using Facebook, just log the fuck off. It's really that easy, if you want to stop these people from controlling your worldview.

The problem with legislation demanding unconditional free speech is what happens to site owners. The current status-quo is frankly great, and allows for moderators to reconcile serious problems (eg. sexual harassment, leaking classified documents, eg.) with impunity and certainty. If you consider Elon Musk a vanguard of whatever stupid point you're making, you've more or less sabotaged your own logic better than I ever could.