Truly, even the artificial satire of DPRK Thread cannot hope to compete with the actual, true-to-life satire that occurs in AmeriPol. It is the only conclusion one can come to when...
If that were true, then for example no one could be banned from bay12. It would infringe on free speech, after all.
And conservatives are by no means obligated to offer democrats any method of speaking, except perhaps in actual government (congress has to work somehow). Someone could set up a soapbox on my front lawn if they wanted to, but I'm still within my rights to tell him to get off my property. Freedom of Speech does not obligate anyone to listen to the speaker, nor accommodate them for their speaking.
...MrRoberto says that freedom of speech is only a concern when protecting people from the government under the strict wording of the Constitution, and...
So if a bunch of the biggest companies in America got together and, say, founded a mutual blacklist of everybody who had ever publicly supported a politician who wasn't "business friendly" or a laundry list of "sensitive issues" and fired them all, that's cool with you? Or who issue lawsuits against consumer critics for harming their productivity?
Because you can reframe a lot when you make freedom a government-only thing. The state need not act directly to suppress people, it can do so through orthogonal channels. Unless, of course, the right to free speech is guaranteed as a practicality and not a minor hurdle to overcome.
...I respond that this is not a meaningful defense of free speech because any organized group can suppress speech in the same manner as the state....
Inter-corporate cooperation (beyond buying and selling) has no place in capitalism and corporate blacklists should be heavily illegal in general. "Freedom" isn't a government only thing, that was never my argument. My point is that free speech in specific means something specific and if you're going to use free speech as part of an argument you should know what it means. More broadly, shutting down criticism is still shutting down someone's speech; you have a right to say what you want, I have a right to criticize that speech. And I always have the right to show you the door when you're on my property, and I always have the right to just stop listening.
Freedom is already protected. If I attack you that's a crime, if I imprison you that's a crime, if I hurt your livelyhood unduly even in a variety of petty ways then you can sue me. But "freedom" doesn't mean the right to other people's stuff. No one has to give you a job, no one has to let you onto their private property, no one has to amplify your voice. You don't have a right to control other people's words, and you don't have a right to anyone's ear. That includes critical words and the sympathy of critical people, freedom doesn't mean that you get those things.
But yes, if no one wants to hire Richard Spencer because he would hurt their company's image that's his own damn fault and I have no sympathy. And again, did you even read my wall of text? You are using the words free speech 100% incorrectly.
...leading to EH jumping in out of nowhere and not responding to my argument aside from asserting his own construction of freedom of speech again...
Well, given that I didn't respond to a post made by you, I'm not sure why you think I would have read your wall of text. Unless MrRoboto is your alt?
The xkcd-level of "banning people from websites is not a violation of free speech" is not what is at issue here. Public protests aren't anybody's property, so allowing one group of people to "shut down" another, even if that is the extremes of antifa and neo-nazis, is indeed a functional violation of free speech. If the group activity of corporations shouldn't be allowed to reach out and suppress people orthogonality, than surely non-corporate group action meets the same bar. And have no doubt that the members of the state are involved, on some level, with these activities with the intent of enforcing suppression.
But even if they were not, the state absolutely has a legitimate role in preventing people from being intimidated or assaulted for filming protestors, not just because those things are crimes on their own but because they violate the free speech of the victim.
Free speech is not just a plain law but a foundational value of the United States. The state is obligated to ensure our liberties exist in fact, not just in word. Much of the struggles in this nation are based in people insisting that rights on paper are all we ought to have. Black people had the same rights as whites on paper since the end of the Civil War, but yet we clearly see that it was not respected in fact.
As long as a right leaves open orthogonal avenues of attack, it doesn't exist. It is child's play for both the state or any other group to avoid such a simple restriction.
...which I respond to by offering both a competing interpretation of free speech and the consequences of the strict "government speech" line, and am then hit with....
Antifa has a right to freedom of assembly in public places. With all the shit that was said and done at Trump's rallies I (and the vast majority of other liberals) never said he shouldn't have a venue right? Even tho he's hateful and violent. Yet you are saying, because Antifa is hateful and supposedly violent, that they should lose their right to assembly.
...a bale of straw....
Yet you are saying, that a space that is appropriate for Trump supporters to protest in, should NOT be available to his opponents. Even tho it was already blocked off and everything. That we, nay, the government has a moral obligation to pick and choose who is allowed to show up to a protest.
Here's the thing. Trump supporters are facing off against Antifa supporters. The Trump supporters aren't trying to take away anyone's right to free speech or freedom of assembly. The Antifa crowd, aren't trying to take away anyone's rights either. Their beef is with the message, not the means by which that message is spread. The only person who's trying to take away someone's rights is you. I mean listen to yourself, you're calling for the US government under Trump to suppress an anti-Trump movement because of a "spirit of the law" that vastly contradicts the letter of the law as repeatedly interpreted by generations of supreme courts... and you think you're defending the right to assembly? You're trying to take it away from someone you don't like.
....which is about the equivalent of....
Wrong. It’s been 5,000 years since God created it. If it was 4.6 billion years old and evolution, as you say, is real… then it should be an animal now.
...this, in having anything to do what we were talking about or my actual position.
Honestly, AmeriPol. Keep your lines of conversation clear from one another.
Remember, people are still allowed to protest in front of Planned Parenthood, legally, despite those protests being obviously about inconveniencing and intimidating people that want to use that service.
Oh, and there are laws, several in fact, about the nature of protests near a business and especially an abortion clinic. You definitely aren't allowed to grab pregnant women going for an abortion and hold them down to prevent them from committing what you think is murder, so you also aren't allowed to start a fascist/anti-fascist street war as part of free speech. And it is in the state's interest to prevent both those things, not just because they contravene the criminal code but because they prevent the practices of a free society.
Unlike most other valid bits of law, the Constitution at several points calls for purely subjective judgement (What is "cruel and unusual" in the 8th, what are "unenumerated rights" that can't be denied in the 9th, what constitutes enough "reasonability" to ignore the 4th, etc, etc). If you want to get into Founder-talk, one
particularly famous fellow mentioned that the founders are all going to be dead men soon and America's people shouldn't be bound to the failures of the past during the future. I'm fairly certain that isn't' the only mention of such a sentiment, either. The Constitution is not sacredly invariable, it has subjects that are up to interpretation, that can never be pinned down anymore than the question "What is 'a few' of something?" can be pinned down. It is our responsibility as citizens to advance the philosophy of liberty ourselves and apply it in ways that are less hypocritical and more effective.
Though in other news somehow related to the presidential twitter typo (twypo?), what in the blue hell is wrong with spicer? Apparently the official white house line is that it wasn't a typo, it was intentional, and some small group of people know what it means. Sweet fornication you bloody idiot all you had to do is say typo! That was the whole of what you needed to do to do your freaking job!
Praise Kek
Wrong.
Command
Orb
Victim
Field
Energy
Feed
Eternally
He's telling them to feed The Orb the blood of the innocent so it may complete its Dominion Field over the Earth and enslave humanity. Bad form, Spicer. Bad form.
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4279029 times)