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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment.

Plausibly so. One area that is grossly lacking any remotely suitable theory is one of character development, especially on a large scale such that it could produce any sort of a coherent values environment (not even necessarily a rigid one). To even think about such a project descends into questions of things like deterrence/rehabilitation and perhaps even free will, itself. One tension I observe is that when the left/communists engaged in large-scale projects of "character development" (given that it is a type of character that many in this forum would think is bad/harmful), many folks are pretty okay with believing that it can, indeed, be relatively successful in producing a coherent values environment (perhaps one that is, indeed, rigid).

That is to say, it is perhaps all well and good to have a heuristic rule where one looks at the population which is considering adopting a norm of free speech and concluding, "If such a population has sufficiently coherent values, a norm of free speech is potentially plausible/possibly beneficial, but if it does not, then it is not." But the core problem is somewhat upstream of that, and it is one that we have almost no clue concerning how it works. There are likely, indeed, almost surely, some feedback loops back upstream, but it becomes an even more impossible task to perform any analysis on such feedback without any conception whatsoever of how the thing it's feeding back into works.