And the media, which is increasingly opposed to free speech.
Today we're seeing journalists talk about how other journalists should be banned from the public square by powerful corporations. They seemingly aren't bright enough to pause and wonder if this will ever be used against them. And this is being done under the banner of progressivism.
There are so many layers of irony here.
I think it's a very confusing time. A lot of people want to be "good people". They don't understand how the definitions of words have changed and what they're really signing up for. "Anti-racisim" sounds great - what reasonable, moral person wants to be racist? But you begin to read the text and you start to see it isn't what you think it is. That it isn't anything like what we've been working towards in terms of civil rights and equality.
I don't think "Progressivism" is the right word. There's not a good name for this philosophy yet other than derogative terms like "woke". Social Justice maybe but I find it unjust. I've seen "therapeutic totalitarianism" as one candidate.
But there are lots of people who want to do something but aren't going to dive full tilt into actually challenging the serious problematics of a violent police force. So there's a huge market for "do something small" which involves challenging fairly petty expressions of racism.
Basically, on "the left" and "the right" you have experts taking people's real grievances and turning them into "feel good" symbology. The idiocy of the social signaling is annoying but the way the actual grievances go unaddressed is a considerably worse problem.
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology” — as in, the successor to liberalism.
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly — and then to explain it to others.
The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game — due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself — must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with — designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.
[1] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/stop-being-...
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
One of the issues is calling media personalities who read from teleprompters, "journalists". Call them actors, call them media spokespeople, but they aren't engaging in anything that can be construed as, "journalism". Further, it isn't in the interest of corporate media outlets to hire people who are smart. They want people who sound articulate, look good on camera and repeat the talking points that they are told to repeat. What we see on cable outlets these days shouldn't be considered, "news" so much as infotainment. By now, most people, regardless of their political affiliation (if any) understand that society has largely gone off the rails, and in their desperation they are left with an appeal to authority to make things better and restore a patina of "normality". It is dangerously seductive to suggest to people who are desperate to end the chaos that if we just silenced the "bad" people things would be okay (leaving unsaid who determines who is bad and what we are allowed to think and say).
Some people consider a lot of speech violence but nearly everyone considers a small amount of speech violence or some equivalent. Telling someone to grab a electrified wire is violence by nearly everyone's standard. A mafioso directing a hit man to kill is nearly everyone's standard. The famous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is mostly violence etc.
So you can't say the situation is "free speech or not". The situation is always where the boundary is. Of course, the question of where quickly spreading slander on the eve of an elections is on the spectrum of protected speech is a complicated question. But it's a bit different than the question of whether a given dogma can be challenged.
To my point though there is the idea that “silence is violence” which implies if you don’t actively work towards a certain groups objective then you are in fact committing violence.
Does this mean that when their social revolution is complete I will hang from the gallows pole because my named social media accounts do not account for me actively promoting their cause? After all my silence on the matter was a hostile act. Maybe I’ll just get a struggle session and be re-educated. Lifelong ban from participating in society but alive at least. If I’m lucky.
Are you thinking of “clear and present danger”? That used to be the test in the United States, but since the 1960s it is “imminent lawless action.”
> I think nearly everyone finds this reasonable.
I don’t know about that. From what I can tell, the US legal system is extremely accepting of speech that incites violence relative to many other democratic governments. I think the current test is unreasonably lenient and likely allows a lot of speech that directly advocates and incites violence.
Yeah, certain kind of leftists are prone to over-the-top rhetoric. What does it mean? Not a lot given these aren't organized group, not even ineffective organized group but just individuals seeking attention for themselves.
And who is "they"? Specifically. Not some amorphous "group" like "progressives" or "the left" or "SJWs".
I'm not being snarky here. It seems to me that one of the most damaging trends we're seeing is equating a hundred million (and more) people with the loudest, most obnoxious and nasty .01%.
Painting folks with such a broad brush is a recipe for division, conflict and mayhem.
Assuming that someone with a Trump bumper sticker is a dyed-in-the-wool racist and white supremacist fascist is stupid in the extreme. And so is assuming that someone with a Biden bumper sticker is a totalitarian monster bent on total mind control.
People are individuals and should be assessed and measured as such.
It's intellectually lazy to just stick anyone who doesn't share your beliefs about Trump or Biden or abortion or gun rights or any of a hundred other contentious issues into a big box called "enemies."
And when you do so, you play right into the hands of the tiny group of folks who want to profit (politically, economically or both) from dividing us.
You have the choice not to do so. It's up to you and me and everyone else to step up and judge people on their individual actions, not some invented "in" or "out" group.
>...In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"
Even Holmes seemed to quickly realize that the Schenck decision was odious since in the same term, he also wrote:
>...In what would become his second most famous phrase, Holmes wrote in Abrams that the marketplace of ideas offered the best solution for tamping down offensive speech: "The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
The only speech I would consider to even approach violence is a direct threat. And even that isn't really violence - it's the threat of violence.
And credible threats of violence aren't protected speech either.
Shouting fire is speech. Shouting fire is illegal Violence is illegal. Therefore spec is violence.
I don't even know where to begin picking it apart. It has the -form- of an argument, but...
These are strange times.
How does this contradict anything I said? I said it was not violent. It isn’t.
Nitpick: It's not "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" it's "Falsely Shouting fire in a crowded theater"
If there were a fire, I'd certainly want to know about it, wouldn't you?
Think about it. How can calling for violence be violence? The violence is the violence, the calling for it is incitement.
Redefining terms like this is nothing more than subverting the truth to control a narrative.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
> limitations on free speech balance rights to free speech and other rights, such as rights for ... protection from imminent or potential violence against particular persons.
The speech is not violent. However, we can say that speech that promotes such might not be allowed under "free speech."
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not violent though it can cause people to panic and cause harm.
People should be able to boycot people, free enterprises should he able to manage their media channels, the state should not.
That is not regulated in the capacity of speech.
>yelling "fire" in a crowded theater
That line is from a 1919 court case about whether you could oppose the draft.
>calling for literal violence against others
This is permitted under Brandenburg v. Ohio. Calls to illegal action are only prohibited if they are (1) intended to cause illegal action, (2) reasonably likely to produce such action and (3) imminent.
Violence is fundamentally a physical thing. Incitements to violence and threats of violence are bad, but they are not the same thing as violence.
Who is they?
The radical left as some name them. But more specifically the activist culture motivated by “critical theory” to dismantle scientific-liberalism and enlightenment principals/philosophy.
Can you also explain what you mean by scientific liberalism?
- Johnathon Rausch
1) no one owns the blessings of what is knowledge by virtue of any sort of implied authority.
2) all accepted knowledge is open to revision upon new evidence or proof
This is a good read that articulates this more than I can.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703086.Kindly_Inquisitor...
Except if you claim that you're offended, you're suddenly given the right to control what others say. If you claim that you are fighting racism/sexism/etc, you're shielded from 90% of critique. So this "safe haven" has attracted all kinds of opportunists that just enjoy attacking others to feel better about themselves.
Look at your typical BLM protestors. It's not Black doctors protesting against being treated differently from White doctors. It's unhappy people from both races that have found an uncriticizable cause to justify their own disappointment in life.
And it's dangerous because when you equate speech with violence then how far are we from responding with a so called violent act with actual violence?
One thing they've gotten right is that discourses (how we talk about things) does in fact have a lot of power. So controlling discourses means you consolidate power. When you control how we talk about things then you can control what we talk about. When you control that, then you control how people think about things and you've now successfully won the culture and therefore seized actual, real power. Like being able to use a small minority of corporate activists to pressure a company into viewing certain content as violent or "problematic" and other content as orthodox and therefore appropriate to "platform".
This is how the church worked in the West for years, how it still does in certain places (Saudi Arabia) - by using dogma to determine what is right and wrong. To become the sole arbiter on what is knowledge and what is blasphemy and therefore the authority to discipline and punish.
This is where we are.