The word extremism has nothing to do with right or wrong itself.

If I live in an area that has had a stable climate for 1000 years, but i had at least some evidence that an 'extreme' change was going to occur, most people would consider that extremism. Especially since people will radically have to alter their behavior to survive.

In general extremist are incorrect, yet due to black swans, not always.

>If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words.

Your premise here being it's good to ostracize people? Those who fall into far-right and far-left politics should be talked with because society is far-less isolating than they have been lead to believe. Extremist political groups live by isolating their membership from mainstream society. Mainstream society's way to reduce the reach of the far-right and far-left is to reach out to their low-level rank-and-file members to sooth their fears and invite them back to mainstream society.

This simply doesn't work in a bipolar system. Acknowledging the legitimacy of the opposite party's extremists is directly counter to either party's political goals, as it encourages mainstream opinion to shift in the opposite direction of where they want it to. The only winning play is to demand that extremists be ejected from the dialog altogether.

This ignores the existence of a world outside a single country's political system. Opinions that are labeled "extremist" by the political class in one country, but which are held by leaders in other countries that don't suck, are about as easy to exterminate as cockroaches.

The Chinese government uses a massive Internet censorship apparatus to prevent organized challenges to its preferred ways of doing things. This has worked, but its necessity reflects the fact that key Chinese-government ideas are memetically uncompetitive on the world stage; China is severely handicapped when it comes to winning foreign hearts and minds, and it also isn't great at persuading its own talented citizens to stay when they have the means to emigrate to the West (though it is now benefiting from Western infighting).

Both sides of the US political class agreed to define "extremism" in 2015-16 to encompass sensible opinions that ran contrary to the political class's common interests. However, they did not have the Chinese government's Internet censorship capabilities at the time, so there was a winning play that ran contrary to your claim, and somebody executed it effectively.

Are you against freedom of speech?

Actually, I support the opposite, which is aggressive initiatives for education to inoculate people against lies and manipulation.

However, until our resources are actually devoted towards that, there are political statements that can be made on a mass scale that are the functional equivalent of yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater. I don't begrudge people for doing what they can to prevent this kind of public manipulation from getting amplified.

I think everyone should be allowed to say whatever they want, but I think they should have to face responsibility for the results of that speech once it echoes across the world.