I think you think this was a snappy response, but I'm simply paraphrasing John Rawls. If you prefer Karl Popper, you might look up "the paradox of intolerance". You could also take it back to John Stuart Mill, if you'd like.
> But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in or opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
> [some pages later:] For a long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is that they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it that the profession of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in England, than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those which incur risk of judicial punishment.
My understanding of Mill is quite against this claim, and especially your claim upthread 'There is no work of political philosophy anywhere that suggests we should be able to say whatever we'd like "without fear of repercussions".' He was arguing directly this idea that it's enough for free speech that the state not suppress it.
There's no philosopher you can't enlist in the support of any view if you quote them out of context (also: you could have done far better in finding a quote to deploy here; try searching On Liberty for the word "opinion").
The part you haven't come to yet is the Harm Principle.
I don't like the insinuation that I didn't read the book I quoted. I did, and I went to the trouble of finding quotes because memory is fallible (especially in the direction one would like it to err). Using that rhetorically against me is bad for the quality of discourse here.
Yes, Mill's general principles for liberty exclude the right to harm others. But he's very very skeptical of considering speech a harm. He's not a counterexample to the literal sense of what you wrote upthread about "saying whatever we'd like without fearing repercussions": e.g. you should be legally liable for libel, and socially liable to individual opprobrium. But he was clearly against the kind of repercussions for the kind of speech we're talking about here.
So? Then they are wrong as well then, at least in that particular, their eminence notwithstanding. Appealing to authority makes your position no more tenable.
Principles that are abandoned when under duress are no principles at all.
I'm seeing variants of this thrown around a lot here, but I don't see people engaging with tptacek's point, at least to my reading of it.
Let me turn this around. When corporations choose to get actively political, like Chick-Fil-A's support of anti-gay groups and Ben & Jerry's support of Black Lives Matter, should we not take that into account when we decide whether to do business with them? I don't think you'd make that argument, because really, it's not a very sound one. It's not a very sound one to say that we are compromising our principles if we share our stance on those corporations with others and try to get them to come around to our point of view, either, is it?
So why does it suddenly become sound in this case?
"try to get them to come around to our point of view" sounds genteel but rather understates the ferocity of the persuasion, don't you think?
In any case, the Wikipedia article on shunning sums it up nicely:
Some aspects of shunning may also be seen as being at odds with civil rights or human rights, especially those behaviours that coerce and attack. When a group seeks to have an effect through such practices outside its own membership, for instance when a group seeks to cause financial harm through isolation and disassociation, they can come at odds with their surrounding civil society, if such a society enshrines rights such as freedom of association, conscience, or belief.
