I still sense you advocating for coercive equity policies in your comment; i.e. redistribution of power from the slightly more fortunate to the slightly less fortunate but on a whim and flimsy excuses and without due process, because let's pretend for a moment that people at the very top; the one percenters would be affected by this cancel culture nonsense, it's always middle class people and every once in a while, a member of the upper middle class get devoured by the SJW monster and that's it.
You sense incorrectly. I have no qualm with democratic institutions of power. (For some reason I have to explain to people on HN that a username with 'commie' in it does not mean I'm a communist)
As long as they're actually democratic. My qualm is with oligarchies and plutocracies. A capitalist system should allow for the wealthy and it is inevitable that wealth can be used to acquire power. But political systems need to be firewalled from this MUCH more than they are in society today.
The thread is about free speech, and my comment was solely focused on speech. I'm not a free speech absolutist in way that you or Paul Graham might be, because I don't believe words and speech is like physical violence. A bullet is egalitarian. It doesn't care who fires the gun or who it's hitting, it will still do the same damage whether it's fired by a billionaire at a homeless person, or the other way around. Words are not. Words need a medium. The medium's control is asymmetrical.
But regardless of what we think about asymmetrical implications of free speech, ultimately my point was that those who's free speech we are talking about protecting shifted 180 over the last century. Pretending that is irrelevant is naive. Is there a difference between a Russian Soldier killing a Ukrainian Soldier outside of Mariupol this week, and a Ukrainian soldier killing a Russian one? Of course there is. And so there is a difference between restricting the speech of a person to criticize the government, vs restricting the speech of a government to criticize a person.
This whole crusade is just a charade.