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My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

popehat.substack.com

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Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#101

Post by jcranmer »

whatshisface wrote: post #87
spdustin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're a member of a protected class, the numbered act violates a law, or the numbered act violates contractual terms: 13.

Under civil rights legislation, we are all members of protected classes. A protected class is defined as a property that you aren't allowed to use when making decisions about how to treat people, not a literal class of protected individuals.

Well, technically, this isn't true for age. You're allowed to discriminate based on age if the person is under 40 but not over 40!

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#102

Post by eapressoandcats »

zoogeny wrote: post #55
medler wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The motte is "we're just criticising Musk" while the bailey is "we're systematically contacting all of his advertisers and letting them know that if they continue to support him then we will campaign against them as well". As a free-speech absolutist, I genuinely don’t see any difference between criticizing a person and telling other people (advertisers) that that person did something bad. That’s what criticism is,…

I disagree that organizations like the ones Musk is railing against are “telling that person someone did something bad” I mean that in the sense that a group of thugs might show up to a business and mention “this is a bad neighborhood, it would be a shame if someone were to break your storefront window” They might argue they were just letting the business owner know a fact. They may even claim to be proponents of fre…

The implied threat was… that they wouldn’t buy from those companies anymore? While I guess that’s slightly worse than just casually notifying a company of bad behavior, it’s not much worse. The whole point of this kind of criticism is to exhort behavior change so I’m not really convinced it’s misleading… and I think that’s Popehat’s point.

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#103

Post by jancsika »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #40
diob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some concrete examples of inorganic, overwhelming influence? And then perhaps contrast it with some concrete organic, overwhelming influence examples. But that's a bonus.

Maybe an organic overwhelming influence is how there's a lot of gay and Jewish people in musical theater? Unless it's actually an inorganic influence (thanks to the shady machinations of Big Sondheim...)

I've only ever understood "organic" to refer to one of four things:

1. Chemistry

2. Farming/food (under one of various specifications)

3. An oddly-named composition technique in which phrases of music are built up using musical "Lego blocks", championed by Beethoven (and used by Sondheim, btw)[1]

4. I didn't do my research but I'd like to exhibit superiority to some other thing/group. (Otherwise, that other thing is more precisely described as "astroturfing," "fraud," "shills," etc.)

1: this used to be a bit superior, but it's old and obscure now so I grandfathered it in

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#104

Post by rpmisms »

vacuity wrote: post #78
rpmisms wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may very well be your own bias. If I say "Christian Communities hate gays", you'll probably think of one or two specific communities. When I saw "Jewish Communities" in gp's headline, I immediately thought "oh, the ADL", because they're bigots and don't really hide it.

Everyone has biases, and you're not exempt. If you know that your language might be grossly misinterpreted, consider changing it, if only for your own image. > If I say "Christian Communities hate gays", you'll probably think of one or two specific communities. That might be true for me, but I'm thinking of "Protestant Christian evangelicals and co." as one community, so...

> If you know that your language might be grossly misinterpreted, consider changing it, if only for your own image.

No, if only to make a point.

> That might be true for me, but I'm thinking of "Protestant Christian evangelicals and co." as one community, so...

Yup. What I expected. I'm positively full of bias, and happy to admit it.

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#105

Post by whatshisface »

spdustin wrote: post #91
motohagiography wrote: post #25

Question I would have for Popehat would be whether a DoS attack is speech or not. If it is, why isn't it protected, because it's inline messaging on the medium it uses and is therefore like any other mediated expression. If it isn't, what is it about attacking the medium and participants that isn't speech? The problem with the cancel culture people is their "working the ref," strategy launches a DoS attack on the par…

A DoS is a theft of computer resources. Since that's specifically a crime in most jurisdictions, it's not protected speech.

Is pestering someone a theft of attention?

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#106

Post by zoogeny »

eapressoandcats wrote: post #93
zoogeny wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no interest in legality or even morality on this topic. This is a question of rhetoric. The actions in question aren’t a criticism of the ideas of Musk. They are collective actions to harm him by harming his business. The lawsuit will help determine whether or not those actions were legal.

The actions were almost certainly legal, otherwise boycotts are illegal, which would be insane, and also the tweet from Elonin the article I linked above would be illegal as well. Criticism and free speech generally includes that the criticism may convince people (including companies!) to change their behavior. Speaking about rhetoric, the point Popehat is making here is that all of the changes in advertiser behavior…

This is a switch to “advertisers choosing not to advertise with Twitter is free speech”.

That is different than “activists engaging in collective action to threaten advertisers to compel them to boycott Twitter are merely criticizing Musk”

As to legality, that will depend on the specific wording they used to compel the advertisers.

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#107

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #53
vaidhy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same holds true for the other side, right? Everyone's speech has consequences and only some can afford to silence others through the power of money, law, personality or just being an asshole.

I'm not sure there is an other side on this? There are a limited handful of legal exceptions to free speech including for unlawful or criminal acts such as defamation, libel, and fraud. I think relatively few people would oppose strengthening these. Where people diverge is when people want to censor, hurt and ideally destroy people who make unpopular but otherwise completely kosher comments. For instance Martin Kulld…

[deleted]

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#108

Post by mcpackieh »

carlosjobim wrote: post #46
mcpackieh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our "public spheres" are in fact not public, but rather are private property. Advertisers having control over them is a consequence of this. If you actually go into town IRL and talk in the public square, no advertiser will be able to silence you because the public square is actually public. Or if you use an actually public means of communication like the postal service, again you won't be cut out because some corpor…

> Our "public spheres" are in fact not public, but rather are private property. You have misunderstood the meaning of the word "public", because it is often used for government provided things. Many private establishments are public spheres, the most common example are Pubs - short for Public Houses. So you have completely misunderstood the word and arguing from your mistaken assumption.

I haven't misunderstood anything. In a "public house" you can be kicked out of the owner doesn't like what you're saying, because it's private property. In places which are actually public, like a town square, this isn't the case.

I understand that it is conventional to speak of some places that are private property as being public, but they are not public in the sense that actually counts for the protection of free speech.

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#109

Post by zoogeny »

eapressoandcats wrote: post #102
zoogeny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that organizations like the ones Musk is railing against are “telling that person someone did something bad” I mean that in the sense that a group of thugs might show up to a business and mention “this is a bad neighborhood, it would be a shame if someone were to break your storefront window” They might argue they were just letting the business owner know a fact. They may even claim to be proponents of fre…

The implied threat was… that they wouldn’t buy from those companies anymore? While I guess that’s slightly worse than just casually notifying a company of bad behavior, it’s not much worse. The whole point of this kind of criticism is to exhort behavior change so I’m not really convinced it’s misleading… and I think that’s Popehat’s point.

No, the implied threat is that the brands name will be conspicuously dragged through the mud using every tool they have in the national media.

Brands don’t care if a small group of activists boycott their product. They are terrified of being featured negatively.

But at this point you’re just off in the weeds. This is all well-known tactics. Believe it or not tactics I don’t have much issue with. It just isn’t merely “criticism”. It’s an active and devastating campaign aimed to do as much harm as possible to bludgeon their adversary into the ground. It’s meant to inflict maximum damage to the recipient to induce fear in anyone who might consider following their example.

But hey, I guess if they call it “criticism” then we can’t criticize them for doing it. Otherwise we’re just being hypocritical.

Re: My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

#110

Post by anonymousiam »

I haven't read Ken White's stuff for years, but I saw it here so I looked. Musk's case is not about free speech or censorship, it's about tortuous interference. Media Matters pushed a false narrative and it was used to convince large companies to withdraw their advertising from Twitter. MM is in pretty big trouble here because Twitter precisely describes what they did, (as retrieved from their logs) in the filing.
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