Yes, everything is a slippery slope. It’s an aggressive binary to make it easy to understand and when something doesn’t fit that binary it must mean that it’s just a deliberate step in that direction, right?
There’s that incredibly popular saying that goes “the right to swing your fist ends at my nose” and that applies to speech as well. When you make life easy for yourself and just say everyone can start smashing noses because stopping them infringes on their right to do so the only people you empower are those who want to do harm. Especially when that issue becomes applied to more than just fists and now it’s rich people buying weapons while poor people still just have their two hands. In social media that’s rich and/or powerful people using money and influence to try to sway elections with lies and deceit.
This shit is hard, and complicated, and very often requires trust in things that are scary to trust or tell us things that might make us face something we don’t want to face. I understand that, really I do, and I’m sorry. Shit like libertarianism and adjecent ideologies promise easy answers and they’ve never delivered.
This shit is hard, and complicated, and very often requires trust in things that are scary to trust or tell us things that might make us face something we don’t want to face.
That trust is being placed in the hands of people like Donald J. Trump. Let that sink in. In the US our judiciary has said that they are not the ones who should decide what is or isn’t valid speech (for the most part, some exceptions apply, yadda yadda) - that this would be left for the populace to decide. And I whole-heatedly agree with that decision.
Because guess what - if people cannot peaceably protest then the will violently protest. You’re not stopping the ideas. You’re not going to stop people from being bad. You’re just giving the government a back-door to silencing criticism.
It’s a risk. A demonstrable one at at that. This isn’t some vague “the gubmint is commin’ fer yer guns” stuff. Governments abuse their vast power to silence individuals all the time. And I don’t need to invoke Putin show show it - right now in Florida there is a government working very hard to outlaw LGBTQ ideas, books, and, yes, speech. You want those people to have a voice even if they’re a threat to those in power.
The people defining “threat” aren’t always going to be people you agree with.
Shit like libertarianism and adjecent ideologies promise easy answers and they’ve never delivered.
That’s entirely uncalled for - I’m not espousing libertarianism any more than you are by having any free speech at all.
Yes, everything is a slippery slope. It’s an aggressive binary to make it easy to understand and when something doesn’t fit that binary it must mean that it’s just a deliberate step in that direction, right?
There’s that incredibly popular saying that goes “the right to swing your fist ends at my nose” and that applies to speech as well. When you make life easy for yourself and just say everyone can start smashing noses because stopping them infringes on their right to do so the only people you empower are those who want to do harm. Especially when that issue becomes applied to more than just fists and now it’s rich people buying weapons while poor people still just have their two hands. In social media that’s rich and/or powerful people using money and influence to try to sway elections with lies and deceit.
This shit is hard, and complicated, and very often requires trust in things that are scary to trust or tell us things that might make us face something we don’t want to face. I understand that, really I do, and I’m sorry. Shit like libertarianism and adjecent ideologies promise easy answers and they’ve never delivered.
That trust is being placed in the hands of people like Donald J. Trump. Let that sink in. In the US our judiciary has said that they are not the ones who should decide what is or isn’t valid speech (for the most part, some exceptions apply, yadda yadda) - that this would be left for the populace to decide. And I whole-heatedly agree with that decision.
Because guess what - if people cannot peaceably protest then the will violently protest. You’re not stopping the ideas. You’re not going to stop people from being bad. You’re just giving the government a back-door to silencing criticism.
It’s a risk. A demonstrable one at at that. This isn’t some vague “the gubmint is commin’ fer yer guns” stuff. Governments abuse their vast power to silence individuals all the time. And I don’t need to invoke Putin show show it - right now in Florida there is a government working very hard to outlaw LGBTQ ideas, books, and, yes, speech. You want those people to have a voice even if they’re a threat to those in power.
The people defining “threat” aren’t always going to be people you agree with.
That’s entirely uncalled for - I’m not espousing libertarianism any more than you are by having any free speech at all.