Free Speech, Pseudo-Invariance, and the Grammar of Liberal Rights – Part 1

I read from the Wrong Curve: Free Speech, Pseudo-Invariance, and the Grammar of Liberal Rights. This essay is freely available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19636760. This segment is the Abstract and the Introduction.

In this essay, I argue that free speech discourse is structured by a category error whose source lies upstream of speech itself: in the treatment of ‘freedom’ as a stable philosophical primitive when it functions, in practice, as an essentially contested concept operating under a systematically inflated presumption of effectiveness.

tl;dr: I don’t believe in free speech.

We’ve all likely heard that the freedom to swing one’s fist ends at the tip of another’s nose. I can accept this without argument for the purpose of this assertion. Your freedom TO violates my freedom FROM.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The problem is that one’s words don’t stop. In some cases, they continue in the manner of pollution that I don’t want my ear holes to be exposed to this noise. In the social media age, this effect is trebled and molests my eyes. This is especially egregious for misinformation and disinformation, which is to say, much of the internet and beyond.

This impact hasn’t been suitably addressed, so I wrote about it. Here, I read.