2010 wrote:Meat wrote:2010 wrote:
Compromising rights based on terrorism and fear is never a good idea.
Dead people in school or supermarket ain’t so grand either
Challenge yourself or our politicians to come up with a solution that doesn’t remove rights. Otherwise, you are a part of the problem in the grand scheme of things. People can always be counted on to take the short-sighted approach.
I've thought a lot about this.
Personally, I support a paradigm that returns to the idea of protected speech and 'tolerated' speech.
Protected speech encompasses all forms of speech that unquestionably accept the pluralistic frame that the First Amendment specifically created; tolerated speech is speech that is advocating for totalitarianism in one form or another, be it religious or secular. Within my proposed framework, this tolerated speech is only tolerated so long as an exploration of its roots is useful for understanding the underlying roots of the phenomenon.
There are many forms of totalitarianism - some secular, some religious. All of them have one thing in common - that is, were they to triumph, the First Amendment would be history. In my opinion, Fundamentalist strains of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc., as well as political movements such as Jacobinism (as in the Jacobins of the French Revolution), Marxism, Fascism, etc. are all inescapably totalitarian - as is any appeal to supremacy based on racial or ethnic identity.
History demonstrates that there are invasive ideologies that, if left to spread, represent a dire threat to a pluralistic society. The First Amendment will not protect us from creeping totalitarianism, inasmuch as recent history demonstrates that bad ideas can spreadly as easily, if not more easily than good ideas. We used to believe that good speech would necessarily crowd out bad speech - but in an era where there are few responsible gatekeepers, and in which many Americans pick and choose their preferred news from social media, this belief has become untenable. No amount of 'good speech' can crowd out 'bad speech' so long as those audiences susceptible to the appeals of' bad speech' (like advocates for white supremacy, religious totalitarianism, etc.) are not exposed to it.
This is a complicated issue, to be sure - but I fail to see, for instance, why any media advocating for racial or religious supremacy should be tolerated going forward, inasmuch as the first thing that these movements would seek were they to become ascendant is to abolish the protections of First Amendment for everyone else!
RIP mags
