161–170 of 550 posts
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Most societies function perfectly fine without a constitutional protection for speech. In fact a few countries rank better than the United States on press freedom without it.
That's the "trains run on time" argument, though.
They phoned me earlier this year and asked for $1500 USD. I asked them why we live in a country where people are starving, exposed, and sick in a country that has a bounty of food, housing, and healthcare. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind,” says a person who probably has all three of those things. Feed people, and then ask for virtues from them.
> “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind,” That's nonsensical. If somebody leaves the First Amendment behind, they are leaving liberalism behind. If you do not support free speech, you simply are not liberal.
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There’s lots of “speech” that’s already illegal in the US. Please, define where the actual line should be.
What speech is illegal? What is the list of words not allowed by law to be spoken?
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Yeah I think it's interesting to think what people of today will be cancelled for. My best guesses are eating meat, and doing business with China.
Raising children at home. In the near future an idea will arise that trained professionals will be better to train children as they grow up and parents would provide more value to society if they continued to work and not had to spend time with their children. Human animal relationships. Animals will gain rights and it will be a natural outcome. Robot phobia, followed by robot acceptance and relationships. Kissing or…
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Can you please provide examples where you think fire should have stepped in? Universities are hardly right-wing institutions that fire academics for left-wing research, quite to the contrary "academics" too often engage in indoctrination instead of teaching students to engage a subject to mastery. We are at such a bad point that even harvard is so stooped in dialectic that it argue 2+2 is not always 4, something an e…
It'd reveal my identity. More broadly, these faculty members include researchers who work in: * climate science (death threats, widespread media attacks, attempts from politicians to cancel grants) * digital privacy (death threats) * history of policing (death threats, attacks from Hannity, attacks from the Hoover institute trying to prevent her thesis from being accepted) * history of women in medieval europe (see b…
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Its got a huge endowment and a strong brand that can be subverted into fighting for progressive causes instead of what it used to do. It's woke 101 playbook. Basecamp and coinbase showed that you either choose to have zero tolerance of politics in the workplace, or the woke will make you spend as many resources as possible on political activism instead of whatever you used to do. A dynamic that has been so toxic to w…
What does the term “woke” mean in this comment? You use it like it has a specific set of definitions I should know, but it mostly looks like a catch-all for any uncomfortable positions someone would rather not confront.
That doesn't mean you have forbid Nazis from ever speaking (as if this would work), it means you have to make sure your democracy and your institutions are stable enough to survive their first period in government and manage to get a peaceful and fair transfer of power after that (instead of Nazis setting fire to the Reichstag, blaming it on communists, declaring an emergency and never have elections again).
I'd rather loose the right to utter certain inflamatory phrases than loose the right and the possibility to vote the next government out of office in a fair and representative election.
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That's because it's a lot easier to be principled in the abstract, than when it blows up in your face. Pre-Brexit, there were a lot of people that really wanted sovereignty. Post-Brexit, it turns out that sovereignty didn't make a lot of those people happy, because it got in the way of their employment or business, and it turns out you can't eat sovereignty. Same thing happened here. It's a lot easier to defend a des…
> But when people start dying that gets a lot harder to justify. Only for those who were unprincipled in the first place. Those who approach civil liberties from a point of subjective right vs wrong are doomed to failure - the moment a case comes up that clashes with their own viewpoints, they will abandon the liberties they claimed to defend. On the other hand, those who approach civil liberties as a matter of princ…
It's kind of a fairy tale of the kind Disney sells you: if you do the right thing, everything works out for the best. We like that idea because simplicity is appealing, but the real world is complicated and conflicts with such nice notions.
In Disney movies when you do the right thing, it saves the world in the end.
In the real world when you do the right thing, sometimes all you achieve is nazis running over a crowd, and you end up with a crisis of conscience and not much to show for it.
I honestly think they were compromised from the very beginning, with their mission of "defending every civil right... except the 2nd amendment, we don't like that one." But they still fought lots of commendable battles, sticking up for people that nobody else would. I think that's what they've lost... they would be scared to stick up for somebody that might get the wrong people upset with them.
With this new trajectory, they could end up picking up the 2nd amendment by fighting for justice for Breonna Taylor. The NRA seems to have dropped the ball.