The letter you wrote to us out here in society is pitiful. It is also bad and short enough that it merits a classic line-by-line rebuttal that was in vogue in 1997 when people on primitive webforums were first putting your ideas down like so many tumor-stuffed dogs. However, I will spend a couple moments posting a more general response to the overall thrust of your letter before I get to that.
The concept of free speech is one of those redundancies that belies a hidden purpose. By redundancies I mean, "free speech" is something that exists before it is ever codified or defined as a "right" "guaranteed" to "citizens." If you didn't have a formalized notion of free speech, you would still be able to say or write anything that you can say now. When you say "free exchange of information and ideas is the lifeblood of liberal society" it's not much different than saying, "free exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the lungs is the lifeblood of liberal society." The point you're making is not that the free exchange of ideas is important to liberal society, but that not-liberal society restricts the flow of information. And of course, that's just a dumb point for you to make. To understand why it's a dumb point, try considering intellectual property laws, which are very strong in Amerika but not so strong in a place many of you despise, China. The reason Amerikan tech companies and fast food franchises can't succeed in China is because intellectual property laws are not obstacles to recreating a successful business in China the way they are in Amerika. In Amerika, McDonald's includes in its asset portfolio the actual methodology of frying hundreds of millions of suffering animal parts; in China, these ideas are freely exchanged to anyone who wants to open a fast food restaurant. How many of your co-signatories will agree with me that China is therefore a more liberal society than Amerika?
Free speech is a redundant concept; you can say anything already, without knowing that you have free speech, and if someone tries to restrict your speech, they are already committing a recognizable crime. If someone physically restricts your speech they are assaulting or murdering you. If someone uses threats to restrict it, you're being blackmailed, extorted, or harassed, and in many Amerikan jurisdictions a threat itself is thought of as assault. If someone steals your words or unfairly represents them, it's plagiarism, or libel, or slander. These are old concepts because free speech has existed for about as long as independent human thought. None of the average people that I know needs anything like "freedom of speech" to protect them from having their voices suppressed.
Who are the people who most need to have their voices heard in this country? Of course, the millions of people currently dying in the vast Amerikan gulag system. Prisoners have been teleported to another dimension where their voices cannot be heard by the media. Is it fair to say that their "right to free speech is being suppressed"? I think we should say, they are being denied access to family, friends, and lawyers, and these are already crimes; their mail is delayed or lost or confiscated and this is already a crime; they are threatened, harassed, attacked, malnourished, isolated, exposed to COVID-19, baked, frozen, extorted, enslaved, and more in retaliation for speaking against their conditions or the carceral state in general, and these are already crimes. Journalists will report on prison issues without ever talking to a prisoner - when prisoners should be crowding out the careerist wardens and lobbyists in your columns - and you, who arrogantly wrote society a letter about free speech in the year 2020, believe this is not a crime, because the profession of journalism is not capable of self-regulation.
Who are the people who least need to have their voices heard in this country? I thank you for compiling the list in advance. We can add anyone who said there were WMDs in Iraq, just for example. They should be sent back to school, and the class they should be forced to take is "What Happened in Fallujah and How You're Going to Spend the Next Ten Years in a Hazmat Suit Cleaning Up After That 101." Note that this is more than just "losing your career," which for a professional racist means finding a slightly smaller rock to slither under for a year. Cancel culture? People who get "canceled" for writing racist things in a newspaper in the year 2020 are being given an amazing opportunity that no previous revolutionary period in history would have dared afford them: the chance to autodidactically correct their evil beliefs and continue breathing air among non-bigots.
Once you're canceled - and thank you all again for volunteering to go first - you can still say anything you want, just like us normals. The only thing is, no matter what we say, nobody cares. It kind of sucks. But it allows us to see the hidden purpose of "freedom of speech." That is, it's the freedom of rich people to say openly how awesome it would be if they had slaves or if more poor people died. You will also find that "freedom of movement" is not about allowing you to go where you want (you need to be at your second job) but about allowing rich people to fly on exorbitant private jets to islands where they can do tons of pedophilia away from prying eyes. It's about maintaining the class comfort of rapid travel for a select couple million rich people, that most of us common people only use every couple of years when a family member dies of a preventable illness.
Anyway, I appreciate you all trying to discipline the stupid hordes, but we're going to keep canceling the shit out of bigots. Remember: real change comes from within!
Edited by Gssh ()
swampman posted:Katie Herzog, podcast host
lol
88888 posted:swampman posted:Katie Herzog, podcast host
lol
I, too, would be mad if I hadn’t been asked to sign the letter
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) July 7, 2020
Edited by trakfactri ()
swampman posted:Here's a list of famous people who went online today to announce that the public is not interested in what they have to say:
Spoiler!
the only thing that would make this list more hilarious is knowing the order in which these folks and fucks signed on
jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk jk rowling jk
all the stars are here!
journalists are barred from writing on certain topics [...] Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
another criticism could be that the adjective "exorbitant", which does actually mean overly high, wouldn't necessarily be the right way to characterize a jet. ordinarily the high-ness implied by the word exorbitant refers to the cost of something
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:https://rhizzone.net/articles/placeholder/nice url. for me to poop on.
ok. update your urls, fixed.
intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty
institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes
steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal
greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
All of which are core features of free speech, so the letter signers should be protesting free speech. Zephyr Teachout:
Zephyr Rain Teachout is an American attorney, author, and Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University. In 2014, Teachout ran for the Democratic Party nomination for governor of New York and lost to incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo, receiving 34% of the primary vote. Wikipedia
Born: 24 October 1971 (age 48 years), Vermont, United States
Full name: Zephyr Rain Teachout
Spouse: Nick Juliusburger (m. 2016)
Siblings: Woden Teachout, Chelsea Teachout, Cabot Teachout, Dillon Teachout
Education: Yale University, Hanover High School, Duke University, Duke University School of Law
Zephyr Rain Teachout:
Earlier this week, Zephyr Teachout called out the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics.
Nothing new there. The fight against corruption has been at the center of Teachout's legal and political career. She's written books about it. She's campaigned against it. She's an expert on the topic.
This time, Teachout's target was Joe Biden. In a piece for the Guardian newspaper, she said the former vice president has "a big corruption problem."
The blowback was immediate.
Some Democrats, in their eagerness to beat Donald Trump, said there was no place for criticism that could weaken the party's likely 2020 nominee. Some claimed Teachout was parroting a GOP narrative. Some questioned the timing, saying it undercut impeachment.
So hot was the reaction that Bernie Sanders felt compelled to apologize for Teachout's words, though her criticism had no connection to his presidential campaign. (Teachout is a Sanders supporter, but wrote on her own behalf.)
“It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way," Sanders told CBS News. "And I'm sorry that that op-ed appeared."
It will be hard for Teachout to scrub away the tire tracks from that bus. But was she wrong about Biden? Not at all.
Wife of Nick Juliusburger:
In the last decision of the 2019-2020 supreme court term, Trump v Mazars, John Roberts outdid himself in being John Roberts. He authored a 7-2 decision in which he appears to stand up against Donald Trump’s lawlessness, by clarifying that Congress can issue subpoenas for Trump financial documents. However, the congressional power is constrained by a new, vague, four-part test for courts to use in approving subpoenas for presidential documents. Roberts grandly reaffirmed congressional power to investigate the executive branch in theory, while making it harder in practice. He presented himself as the sober, rule-of-law judge, calling balls and strikes in the childish conflict between Congress and the executive branch – while giving himself more power.
Yet there’s one big silver lining in Mazars: while shifting power from Congress to the courts in executive branch investigations, it gave Congress a huge green light for investigations into big corporations. According to the logic of the opinion, Congress is at the peak of its power when investigating economic behavior in service of prospec
Zephyr Teachout, folks.
) and so he never got asked lol. cancellations within cancellations, how deep does it go?
88888 posted:some signees wanted glenn greenwald on the letter but they got "outvoted" on it () and so he never got asked lol. cancellations within cancellations, how deep does it go?
damn these bastards, swampman went to all that effort making an actual good argument but they just had to steal his thunder by preemptively betraying their own idea of free speech in the planning stages