U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

" this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech."

This is completely upside down.

This is not the 'erosion of free speech' - it's actually the 'explosion' of it.

Free from any kind of filters of credibility, people can now promote whatever fictions they want to promote.

When fictions are emboldened by those in positions of legitimate authority, aka The President, the truth falls by the side.

The ratio of 'noise to truth' has blown up, and it's mostly a result of our ability to communicate in a more direct manner.

The voices of mostly uninformed individuals, free to express themselves on the soap box, are now much louder. That's not a slight: we're all busy and have different roles in life. We can't be experts in everything, ergo, most of us are not legitimate sources of truth on that much. We allocate those responsibilities to people within whom we entrust a certain degree of trust. Like the free press as one example, Science as another.

Far from 'restrictions' on speech, the internet itself, Facebook, Twitter - whatever their policies provide for 100x more communication than existed before.

We used to get information from news, politicians, bureaucrats, teachers - and some gossip from the neighbours. Now the 'gossip, youtube and TikTok information' factor is 10x greater - and that's mostly a function of free expression.

Random people on Facebook will 'like' and 'propagate' whatever 'science' they want to believe is true - which is obviously not going to result in rigorously verified information, rather the opposite.

'Good or Bad?' - that's a more complicated issue - but what we are seeing now is 'much more expression' not 'limited expression'.

I challenge anyone here to demonstrate, over the last 25 years, how there could possibly be fewer channels and sources of public information and expression.

Edit: I should add that obviously there are issues with freedom of expression, on campus, and the in the commons with certain forms of shaming for certain opinions, but that's an entirely different issue from 'public information' and 'how people are misinformed' about things like election results. The public commons is several orders of magnitude bigger than it ever was. It's not even comparable to 25 years ago, this is a completely different era we live in.

That's stupid. No impeachment process could ever finish on time.

It's this one for me, with the guns drawn at the entrance to the House Floor https://twitter.com/GettyImagesNews/status/13469076714259374...

I have seen this article [1] being thrown around among my conservative friends, and while I do not have the statistics background to understand the detailed analysis, it seems to suggest some strange behavior around the reporting of mail-in votes. Not exactly evidence, but something that may have warranted investigation at the time.

[1] https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-...

edit: I'm looking for folks to give their take on this analysis since I nowhere qualified. A good summary is the final two sections of the article.

Many Republicans on TV agree with you.

The party needs to split into the anti-democracy, pro-Trump faction, and the rest of the party. The moderate wing could easily pull some people that voted Democrat this year, and form a stable, coalition government.

This would help de-radicalize our political system.