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How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
351–360 of 994 posts
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you look at it from the perspective of faithless reporting like that from Fox News and Newsmax, the information pipeline has been selling a narrative that the left has been on an authoritarian tear since Obama. The newscasts are chilling: every one of them for more than two decades has taken a position that the left is an existential threat to the United States. With that kind of context, it's really no wond…
The left has been authoritarian. Rewind the clock to 2018, and speak your mind freely on a college campus and at some point you’ll say something that makes you lose your job. That’s one of many examples of the left being actually authoritarian. I’m not saying two wrongs make a right and I’m not justifying the current administration. But if we look to how we got here, that’s a lot of why, if not mostly why.
It is astoundingly intellectually dishonest for anybody who identifies with the American right, which espouses values of personal responsibility and the rights of organizations such as companies and universities to self-govern, to imply that a direct application of these values is "authoritarian".
Free speech is understood as the ability to express yourself and your beliefs without consequences from the government, it has never meant to practically anyone that it means that as a culture no individual or organization will take action against you. This is personal responsibility in action, you must be prepared to shoulder the consequences of what you say and do.
People losing their jobs in universities and otherwise for expressing certain beliefs is not somehow unique to the American political left of the preceding decade, and it is strange that people have been misled into thinking that it is. Of course it is regrettable that some people may have lost their jobs engaging in good-faith reasoned expression of their beliefs, but you cannot argue that this is somehow the result of "the left".
I intentionally make no judgment here on whether I believe the climate that existed on American college campuses during that time is something desirable, but people doing things that you do not like is not "being actually authoritarian".
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#353Now might be a good time to revisit the twitter files and really try to understand what was in them and why it was horrifying. Seems many people wanted to pretend they were nothing because it didn't suit their partisan narrative. We're seeing the same kinds of justification now just with different partisans.
If we don't call out abuses by our own tribe (whichever that is), maybe we're part of the attack.
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It's an issue we're seeing all around the West - previously centre-left parties unfortunately were cowed into supporting 'soft-neoliberalism' over the last 30-40 years, and now that's shown to not improve the living standards of the many (but works amazingly for the wealthy), voters are looking for anything that looks different than the status-quo. Unfortunately that plus a bit of culture war drives them into the pop…
> now that's shown to not improve the living standards of the many
Inflation-adjusted median real income is up 20% since 1990 in the US. Unemployment is lower. Life expectancy is higher. Air pollution is lower. Crime is lower. Gay marriage is now legal.
The living standards of the many in the US have demonstrably improved dramatically over the last 30-40 years.
Housing affordability is worse, but that is largely due to local rather than national politics, and the policies that have lead to unaffordable housing are largely non-partisan (in that homeowners across the political spectrum are for restrictive zoning and against development).
It's true that many people feel that living standards have not improved. I don't have an answer for that beyond speculation.
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Freedom of speech is just the easiest way to have plausible deniability when directly or indirectly defending otherwise indefensible positions. The idea that it's somehow suspicious to be in favor of free speech has got to be one of the worst developments in American politics. And, for whatever it's worth, every vocal "free speech person" I know doesn't like the current administation. Some people actually just have…
I have yet to see a free speech absolutist express concern about the government and media suppressing Gaza protestors or LGBTQ books being banned or anything else that affects the left. Doesn't seem very principled to me.
I can't believe I'm going to say this but if you go over to reason.com and look at reporting on the visa stuff, there are a loooot of arguments going on in the comments. We're not even talking free speech absolutionists! Just like "normal"[0] conservatives being like "this is actually kind of messed up what's going on to these visa holders".
Plenty of people happy to carry water for the admin as well. I just don't really have a great view of what people actually think about this issue.
[0]: to be clear, I do not believe there are normal people on that website.
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#356It started with the Free Palestine protesters. Tesla protesters are next. Citizens will be shipped to El Salvador, non-citizens to where they came from.
We should treat the Free Palestine and Tesla protesters the same way J6 protesters were treated. Throw them in prison until the next Democrat president pardons them.
J6 wasn't a protest
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#357I thought this country was founded on the principles of enlightenment. And the same principles made it a world leader. Now that enlightenment values are actively being dismantled what next can we expect?
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Unlike Peter Thiel, I see democracy as an essential component of individual liberty. Because once totalitarinism takes root, the next victim is individual liberty -- just read some history. By this measure, the current government is the worst.
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#358I thought this country was founded on the principles of enlightenment. And the same principles made it a world leader. Now that enlightenment values are actively being dismantled what next can we expect?
I was under the impression the US became a world leader mostly because of being in the right place after WW2. It wasn't really a leading country before that?
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#359As a European for decades in the US, it is the first time in my life that I feel fear for expressing my opinions. Ps does HN offer the capability of completely deleting the account and all of the comments ?
> Ps does HN offer the capability of completely deleting the account and all of the comments ? They claim to allow deleting the account (just the name, they keep the comments up), but in practice they ignore requests. Source: personal experience.
Is that even legal for a CA based company?
Re: How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
#360It started with the Free Palestine protesters. Tesla protesters are next. Citizens will be shipped to El Salvador, non-citizens to where they came from.
What many of them are doing isn’t a legally protected form of protesting.
Free Palestine protesters have been shutting down roads with their protests, this is illegal.
Tesla protesters are vandalizing the vehicles of private citizens and burning down dealerships. This is also illegal, and due to its political goals, it seems to fit the textbook definition of terrorism.
> the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear
Had we not spent years tolerating these illegal forms of protest, maybe people would remember these are in fact illegal, and wouldn’t be so emboldened to keep doing them.
If someone wants to protest, that is their right. If someone is protesting by infringing on the free movement of other people, or using intimidation and violence to stir up fear to get people to comply with their ideology… that crosses well established lines.