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Notes -
I think you misunderstand me. I see blasphemy laws as the same in character to hate speech laws, and I'm saying both of them are a good thing.
I assume the terrible "pattern" you refer to is stuff like this. Obviously in contemporary Western society, even the most extreme anti-Semite isn't burned at the stake, or even executed.
But the principle - that you can be legally prosecuted by the state for being a dissident - remains the same (It's just that we don't even perform such gruesome acts on actual violent criminals), and I argue that unless you find the management of our current society intolerable (in which case you wouldn't be happy even with the freedom to proselytise your beliefs) this is a good thing.
I have no sympathy for the victims of such government persecutions given that, despite fully understanding the rules, they deliberately chose to disobey them for the purposes of a principled stand. I can't really empathise with such a person because I would never be in such a situation - if I were bound to the post, as an angry Protestant gave me one last chance to renounce my Catholicism, I would just say "I renounce my Catholicism" and walk away a free man, having suffered only a wound to my ego.
I agree with the need for transparency. But you seem to imply that lack of transparency is an issue with the current rules, which I disagree with.
The current rules change with time (About 20 years ago, the statement "a man cannot become a woman" was considered so obvious that no one would even say it, but now this would be considered transphobic) - however it's pretty easy to get a sense of what beliefs are socially appropriate to express.
In my experience, when I have made statements that have fallen outside of the Overton window amongst acquaintances it was made pretty clear to me (an awkward silence, someone explaining that I'm being "narrow-minded" or "ignorant", etc) and so I know to drop the issue and ensure to never bring the idea up again in polite company.
And historically, every famous story about someone being persecuted for their beliefs seems to include multiple opportunities to recant the offending belief, which they explicitly reject.
As for "carefully constructed", I disagree. I assume you mean the rules should be as meta as possible, and try and reflect general moral principles instead of just taking a stance on some specific contemporary controversy (i.e. "It is unfair to blame a group for the actions of an individual" is better than "you can't say Black people are violent because of their crime rate")
It can be tricky to figure out what your foundational moral principles are (I'm honestly not sure about my own) In practise this is just done by considering how you feel about various controversies/thought experiments and then trying to find the simplest possible consistent framework that explains all of these feelings. But you can easily get wider framework wrong, in ways you might not think of.
Consider my example about Black people again. A typical progressive would agree with the object level statement that you can't judge the entire group of Black people by the behaviour of a tiny unruly minority, and the meta level rule is a pretty reasonable attempt to create a general moral framework that would let us derive this conclusion.
But of course a typical progressive would also agree with the idea that "The police are racist towards black people". If you asked why, this would at least in part be because of events like the death of George Floyd, i.e. actions committed by a small subset of the group. This is of course a pretty common right wing talking point, and can be easily patched by amending the general principle to exclude groups you join voluntarily.
But had our progressive tried going the meta route, they would find themselves hoist by their own petard (Even the amended version runs into difficulties - do homosexuals lose their protected status now, as they can choose to just not indulge their preference? I have yet to see a general moral framework for progressivism that doesn't lead to undesired conclusions)
So instead, our censor (whatever their ideological persuasion), should focus on attacking specific object-level beliefs instead of running the risk of logicking themselves into a corner (and this has the bonus of being more transparent)
OK, hard disagree. I'll be honest, I stopped here. We have a completely different understanding of history.
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