But also: in my view, this isn't exactly "the government" doing it. It comes across that the major ABC affiliates already didn't like the show and have been looking for an excuse to get rid of Kimmel for a while. His show has been fading into irrelevance; if you exclude the videos with "Trump" in the title, the Youtube channel has been doing terribly of late relative to the subscriber count (over 20M). And even the Trump videos look lackluster next to the consistently popular documentaries on, say, Veritasium (which puts out science documentaries and has a similar subscriber count). At any rate, "pressure" like this isn't a 1A violation as far as I can tell; no law is being made by Congress.
And also, it does matter what the cause of action is. An allegation that your political opponents are trying to dodge responsibility for a serious crime committed by one of their own, is pretty heavy. Maybe you don't think that's worse than, say, insulting someone in a bigoted way; but the Republicans I've heard from seem to consider that the latter standard isn't applied consistently anyway. Which is to say: if they're getting called "Nazis" and "fascists" and there's no penalty for that, it seems like that ought to establish a standard whereby other insults of comparable severity are fair game.
One thing I've heard many times in right-wing political discourse, though I'm not sure of the exact phrasing, is "my rules applied fairly > your rules applied fairly > your rules as you apply them".
> I don't think the downvotes for those actually sharing their opinions [in a productive way] are deserved
In my experience, the arguments very often come from a place of hurt and a genuine sense of being mistreated. It's hard for them to end up being shared very productively.
Basically, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305810 has the right of it, for the most part.
But also: in my view, this isn't exactly "the government" doing it. It comes across that the major ABC affiliates already didn't like the show and have been looking for an excuse to get rid of Kimmel for a while. His show has been fading into irrelevance; if you exclude the videos with "Trump" in the title, the Youtube channel has been doing terribly of late relative to the subscriber count (over 20M). And even the Trump videos look lackluster next to the consistently popular documentaries on, say, Veritasium (which puts out science documentaries and has a similar subscriber count). At any rate, "pressure" like this isn't a 1A violation as far as I can tell; no law is being made by Congress.
And also, it does matter what the cause of action is. An allegation that your political opponents are trying to dodge responsibility for a serious crime committed by one of their own, is pretty heavy. Maybe you don't think that's worse than, say, insulting someone in a bigoted way; but the Republicans I've heard from seem to consider that the latter standard isn't applied consistently anyway. Which is to say: if they're getting called "Nazis" and "fascists" and there's no penalty for that, it seems like that ought to establish a standard whereby other insults of comparable severity are fair game.
One thing I've heard many times in right-wing political discourse, though I'm not sure of the exact phrasing, is "my rules applied fairly > your rules applied fairly > your rules as you apply them".
> I don't think the downvotes for those actually sharing their opinions [in a productive way] are deserved
In my experience, the arguments very often come from a place of hurt and a genuine sense of being mistreated. It's hard for them to end up being shared very productively.