NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response
It&#x27;s kind of ironic to attack NPR for allegedly not producing a well thought out argument on the topic, but then proceeding barely talk about what was presented in the show, and instead attacking the presentation (harpsichord music?), the listener demographic, &#x27;elite aristocrats&#x27; and so on.<p>He mostly just sounds offended by what was said because by no means was there a &#x27;trashing&#x27;.<p>Personally I don&#x27;t think there is much justification for these JS Mill type arguments. They&#x27;re based on a sort of pre-Darwinian worldview where individuals voluntary with rational mind engage in free-speech to reach enlightenment.<p>I think that&#x27;s not a scientifically tenable position today. It makes more sense to think of communication as a network, people as vectors in it that exist to spread ideas. Dawkins of course was a proponent of this but even earlier Jung summed it up as &quot;people don&#x27;t have ideas, ideas have people&#x27;.<p>Free speech doesn&#x27;t produce &#x27;true&#x27; ideas, it produces fit(!) ideas and that really takes the principle off a pedestal where it doesn&#x27;t belong. I&#x27;d argue for a systems-thinking based approach. Don&#x27;t think of free-speech policy from a standpoint of individual rights outwards, but start with the health of public discourse.