Heresy
I think this is an important part:<p>&quot;Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it&#x27;s still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.&quot;<p>Many people proclaim that &quot;free speech is dead&quot; and all of that, but it&#x27;s <i>still</i> at an all-time high if you zoom out a bit. You don&#x27;t even need to go back a few hundred years; look at the number of people persecuted by the government (both through the courts and outside of it) for things like blasphemy, subversion, civil rights, sexual deviancy (homosexuality, among other things), etc. just a few decades ago. In the US burning the flag was illegal in many states until the <i>late 80s</i> when the SCOTUS declared it was legal under the 1st (and only by a 5-4 majority).<p>Yes, there are some developments I am not especially pleased with either, but it&#x27;s also important to remember the historical context.<p>Anyway, I liked this piece of nuance.