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...
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.