There's a difference between taking offense and working towards eliminating certain ideas from the public discourse. One is harmful to one's self mostly, the other one is activism. And activism has changed the world for the better in my opinion in the last 100 years. I can choose not to take offense and also choose to combat ideas that I believe are negatively impacting me and the world.
Eliminating ideas from the public discourse is not something we should work towards. That's censorship, not activism. Understanding why certain ideas or ideals are wrong means we learn not to repeat history. So I'd rather see activism towards education, towards political science, towards learnings history.
Banning ideas will just draw more uneducated people towards them as we've already seen happens.
So the ideas that women should not have the right to vote should be kept in the public discourse so that we can learn from them? Or is it ok that we banned them and women do have the right to vote?
The only country in the world where women still can't vote is Vatican City, which, ironically, hates publicly discussing ideas they don't believe in. In most of the other countries where women are discriminated, public discourse is usually banned (or met with drastic consequences).
Correlation isn't always causation, but if the most oppressive regimes in the world ban public discourse, why would we go down the same route and think that's a good idea?
I think you are conflating censorship by the government with censorship by society.
There are some ideas that we, as a civilization, have decided that should not be re-litigated in the public sphere for every new generation. They are banned not because the government wants them banned, but because society itself has decided they have no place in the public discourse. Ideas like owning other people, child labor, women's vote, colonization by one advanced country of others, etc, all of these were discussed at some point in the public sphere, sometimes for centuries. But once a consensus has been reached in the majority of society, they are banned, and crucially, we do not consider reasonable to be talk about them again. Society evolves like that, always shedding ideas and behaviors that no longer fit the majority of the people.
And it always starts with one activist saying: "This is a bad thing, this should be stopped".
There's a difference between taking offense and working towards eliminating certain ideas from the public discourse. One is harmful to one's self mostly, the other one is activism. And activism has changed the world for the better in my opinion in the last 100 years. I can choose not to take offense and also choose to combat ideas that I believe are negatively impacting me and the world.
Eliminating ideas from the public discourse is not something we should work towards. That's censorship, not activism. Understanding why certain ideas or ideals are wrong means we learn not to repeat history. So I'd rather see activism towards education, towards political science, towards learnings history.
Banning ideas will just draw more uneducated people towards them as we've already seen happens.
So the ideas that women should not have the right to vote should be kept in the public discourse so that we can learn from them? Or is it ok that we banned them and women do have the right to vote?
The only country in the world where women still can't vote is Vatican City, which, ironically, hates publicly discussing ideas they don't believe in. In most of the other countries where women are discriminated, public discourse is usually banned (or met with drastic consequences).
Correlation isn't always causation, but if the most oppressive regimes in the world ban public discourse, why would we go down the same route and think that's a good idea?
I think you are conflating censorship by the government with censorship by society.
There are some ideas that we, as a civilization, have decided that should not be re-litigated in the public sphere for every new generation. They are banned not because the government wants them banned, but because society itself has decided they have no place in the public discourse. Ideas like owning other people, child labor, women's vote, colonization by one advanced country of others, etc, all of these were discussed at some point in the public sphere, sometimes for centuries. But once a consensus has been reached in the majority of society, they are banned, and crucially, we do not consider reasonable to be talk about them again. Society evolves like that, always shedding ideas and behaviors that no longer fit the majority of the people.
And it always starts with one activist saying: "This is a bad thing, this should be stopped".