Reminder: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The first amendment protects a natural right, a right we all have, one we are NOT supposed to trample on each other. The 1st comes out of the framers ensuring that the government respects an already-existing right - it does not create one.
That right, then, cannot be upheld if half the country believes it's ok to silence the other half.
There's a huge value disconnect here and that's the fundamental problem. What one CAN do and what one SHOULD do are very different things and I think people's pragmatism is blinding them to how this will work out for people 100 years from now.
> That right, then, cannot be upheld if half the country believes it's ok to silence the other half.
I don't understand this. Donald Trump can say whatever he wants. Alex Jones can say whatever he wants. Why are you saying that their rights are being trampled? Why paint them as victims? As it happen, the right to speak is not a right to be heard and Trump's supporters can hear him as much as they want. Twitter decided that it would not be through their product.
If I invite a bunch of friends at my place and one of them start spewing hatred and lies, I'll kick him out. He can continue in the street as far as I am concerned. Just not in my house... What right were denied here?
I never heard those arguments a few years back when Fox news used to invite liberals on their show just to cut them in the middle of a sentence because they didn't like what they were saying. It infuriated me alright. But I never went as far as to think it was illegal.
Do you propose that Twitter should be forced by the government not to give context to tweets? It seems that the supreme court disagreed with that idea when they decided that a company cannot be forced to sell a cake to a gay couple.
> What one CAN do and what one SHOULD do are very different things and I think people's pragmatism is blinding them to how this will work out for people 100 years from now.
I completely agree with you. The President of the United States CAN instill doubt into the very heart of democracy using all the cynicism and lies he can muster. But SHOULD he do it? What I am saying is that between the theoretical threats of having a private company exercising its right to manage its products in its own way and the president of a country going for a power grab, the urgency, to me, seems pretty clear.
I'll be honest, I don't see your post as a reply to anything I said... so I'll just leave all this as it is.
Stop looking at right now, today, this week. Look forward. Look forward to when you are old; look forward beyond your lifetime; look forward to when this time in history has been forgotten by the cultural memory, to when the transitory arguments of today, this afternoon, or this year, have been forgotten; and ask yourself what kind of world you don't want to see, even if it means you ruefully admit it makes things harder now.
That introspection has been lost and probably, the human race won't survive this period if we don't figure it out.
> It seems that the supreme court disagreed with that idea when they decided that a company cannot be forced to sell a cake to a gay couple.
That is not what the Supreme Court decided. The only decision they made was that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission didn't apply religious neutrality to the case, and reversed the Commission's decision[1].
I don't disagree but I also think that the best way to expose a lie is to push it into the full light of the sun, not try to stuff it into the basement. If someone is going to make a fool of himself, let him.
We have had more than a decade of social media and internet message boards to learn that this whole 'expose the lie' myth promulgated mostly by free speech absolutists turns out to be complete bullshit. Masses of people are dumb, easily manipulated mobs whether they are in the public square or in some online echo chamber. The truth will be buried in a pile of a thousand lies.
A keystone of leftist psychology that "the others" are dumb. This leads directly to "fact checking" and ultimately memory holing information that the masses are "too dumb" to see. This idea that one is correct in deciding what history others can see is a form of mental illness; _throughly_ anchored in human history.
I would tend to agree with this. What I am worried is that Trump has been making a fool of himself for the last 74 years. Yet, more than 70.000.000 people voted for him. So there must be something wrong about our assumption...
With the slow "CCP"-ifciation of US tech platforms… the distinction between entities that incorporate under the jurisdiction of a government and the government that outsources lots of work to said companies is kind of a philosophical one.
War has already started… and it's not as simple as pretty lines drawn on maps to demarcate sides… or ballots dropped off for whose favorite candidate.
Shall we convene a panel with myself, Dave Chappelle, and you, and debate the meaning of “First one not working out”? You’re completely ignoring my and his intended meaning, which is that restricting speech pushes people toward violence.
Based on what I'm seeing, unrestricted real-time social media (with "likes" and "retweets" and easy commenting) appears to have led to serious violence in some parts of the world. Perhaps based on the tendency to amplify rumours, or even bad jokes, until they are widely believed regardless of truth.
In places where it hasn't resulted in obvious violence, it appears to be pushing people towards polarisation and distress, with violence looking plausible if that continues.
We have a real dilemma around this one. It may be that certain forms of "speech" that have emerged in modern society also push people towards violence.
Our risk models are irreconcilable, and I can’t see us coming to agreement on this. Hopefully we can coexist in peace, but if not I’ll be fighting for the other side.
In Germany, a while ago, absolute free speech in the form of hate and blatant lies unleashed an amount of violence that, for the history of humanity, has never been seen. You can choose to ignore that and see the world in black and white.
> Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
This is one of the worst reductio-ad-Hitlers I’ve ever seen. The Nazi party was a minority party throughout, they used violence to seize power, and they certainly did not allow free speech at any time during their rule.
The Nazi party was the second largest in the 1930 elections and became the largest party in parliament in 1932. They didn't need to use violence to size power when they could cut a deal with the Centre (Catholic) party and the Conservative party. The ones who went to violence first was the KPD (communist party) who were losing votes and members of parliament for years; of course when Moscow told them that the Social Democrats were the enemy they spurned an offer to work together against the Nazis at a time when the two of them together had more members of parliament than the Nazis. No need to use violence to sieze power when your opponents are either stupid or greedy.
You need to at least learn the history of the period if you are going to try to play this game.
> Hitler saw the party as a revolutionary organisation, whose aim was the overthrow of the Weimar Republic, which he saw as controlled by the socialists, Jews and the "November criminals" who had betrayed the German soldiers in 1918. The SA ("storm troopers", also known as "Brownshirts") were founded as a party militia in 1921 and began violent attacks on other parties.
> Approximately two thousand Nazis were marching to the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, when they were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi party members and four police officers.
I guess history is difficult when you only learn it through random-walk in Wikipedia. The Nazis were not in government in the 20s when this feeble attempt occurred. In fact, they were a relatively unknown regional party at this point. After imprisonment for the Beer-Hall Putsch, during which he wrote Mein Kampf, Hitler emerged better-known and prepared to plan. Over the following years they worked to become a legitimate party, entered government, and did not actually need to engage in direct violence to attain the absolute control that was desired.
> I guess history is difficult when you only learn it through random-walk in Wikipedia.
Please cut the smug attitude. I’m trying my best not to engage with this kind of low-brow personal attack.
> Over the following years they worked to become a legitimate party, entered government, and did not actually need to engage in direct violence to attain the absolute control that was desired.
This is just flat wrong. You’re ignoring the violent intimidations of the SA during the entire decade from 1920-1930.
> Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, members of the SA were often involved in street fights, called Zusammenstöße (collisions), with members of the Communist Party (KPD).
To say the Nazis simply "used violence to seize power" is extremely reductive.
It's also well known that the Nazis were (at least monetarily) backed by Big Business & the wealthy capitalists at the time who were afraid of the rising popularity of Communism, as well as the threat of Soviet Russia. This included but was not limited to even American companies that happened to have offices in Germany (e.g. IBM). You can bet that money was used for anti-Semitic propaganda (which could deflect unhappiness towards the corporations to be aimed with the Jewish), and bringing this back to Free Speech, you can bet that this was allowed because of unmitigated free speech at the time.
Hitler used blatant lies, hate, stoke fear and division and used the weapons of liberal democracy and turn them against it to destroy it from within. Contrary to what you say, he didn't took power through violent means. His party was elected to the Reishstag and he was then nominated chancelor. Of course, I don't compare Trumpism to Nazism. We are not there yet. But your argument that giving context to Trumps blalant lies (I hope we agree on the lying part) like twitter do is leading to violence is an absolutist position that is very far from the liberal ideals of the founders.
“The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn't work out.”
- Chappelle