As I've already had a thread of mine trivialized on this very subject, I doubt my opinion is going to be popular on this, but that's what free speech is for, right?
If anybody here chose anything other than completely unregulated freedom of speech, could you please tell us where you would draw the line? I'd like to know whose job it would be to be the censor, and on what grounds the censoring would take place. It would appear to me that often times people prefer to make the claim that freedom of speech 'has its limits' because people can say some extremely hateful things that could harm world peace, but to those I ask you this: Why do you think it is the person making the offensive remarks that has to apologize for the aftermath of what he/she said? If I were to go on television and suggest that the state of Israel is a terrorist organization and as a result of what I said, thousands of radical Jews begin setting fire to embassies and protesting, whose fault is that? Even if it were a peaceful protest, it is not the entitlement of another person to demand apologies for saying the 'wrong opinion'. In our free societies, there is no such thing as a consequence of thinking or speaking. Having an opinion or making a speech is not harmful; it carries with it no victims and is simply noise in the air waiting to be heard by somebody that will think "I am so offended, I am going to demand that person apologize for harming free expression!" - this is a complete contradiction in terms. I very much resent people claiming to defend free speech whilst trying to make an excuse for advocating censorship. Censorship is censorship, no matter how small the word or how outraged people get.
So far, I have yet to see a single credible excuse for censoring people's thought and expression and at a time when people are being blown into tiny pieces of ash for drawing 'offensive' cartoons, now is the time for us to grow a pair of fucking balls and stand up in-defence of free expression. There is no middle ground. Any sort of compromise is doing a deal with somebody that doesn't want their feelings hurt and will strive to achieve this goal at the cost of many people's voices censored in the process. Even if you only want to slightly curtail free speech, that still means you want to slightly enhance censorship. If you claim you hate censorship but you also wish to give preferential treatment to specific groups in society or you wish to draw the line at 'hate speech', you are advocating censorship. It's as simple as that. I cannot stress enough on how important this basic right is to all of us, and we are beginning to see the first waves of censorship attempt to creep into the judicial systems of Europe and social media, as I have already explained on the forum. If nobody defends 100% free speech right now, we may yet be living within the last generations that still have the ability to express themselves freely.
To deny a person the right to argue his own case not only removes his right to say it, it also removes your right to hear it. Once you remove yourself the right to hear something, you are openly denying the right of you and others to learn just even a smidgen of truth. If you are any sort of reasonably-minded and rational person, it should take no hesitation to want to defend this principle.