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Can Freedom of Speech truly be juxtaposed with a call to Stop Bitching?
- Thread starter Minwu
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TheValkyries
proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
The answer is blatantly no. And sadly this would be a great discussion to actually have where we talked about the nuance of power dynamics of the majority vs the minority and how not everyone's speech is afforded to them on equal terms. But, no one is gonna fucking respond to this thread. The people who disagree will not take the bait, as it were, and they aren't going to even attempt to reconcile the cognitive dissonance required to say that shit. Their only interest is to protect their own hegemonic speech rights, not any concept of true free speech.
...Freedom of Speech (in the context of, say, the United States constitution) simply means the government can't regulate any speech. Your peers, however, can object to what you're saying, and private entities (i.e., news media outlets) are under no obligation to broadcast your views.
I had this as a draft since about 4:30 pm EST. Didn't post because I figured this thread would be elsewhere by now. I still am not sure if posting is a reasonable option...
To be blunt, black female millionaire Jane has incredible social power compared to Joe, the white male in poverty, which includes her right to freedom of speech. I'd wager to say, this is why divides made on these insignificant factors are so prominent: they keep the majority fighting each other, so the very affluent minority can continue to remain affluent.
I find the game of "you are more privileged THAN ME" to be a side show. I'm white, yet I live in poverty and suffer from a severe disability. The disability alone will, statistically, be the most negating factor to a happy, successful life, much more than any other factor for any other typical individual (other than wealth, of course).
I had this as a draft since about 4:30 pm EST. Didn't post because I figured this thread would be elsewhere by now. I still am not sure if posting is a reasonable option...
The Koch brothers and George Soros have infinitely more free speech than any random, non-rich citizen. This includes you or me. In the end, "privilege" is weighted. Race/disability/religion/nationality/etc, all of that has some dynamic push and pull on how privileged someone is out of the gate if wealth is excluded. However, money is the most powerful privilege and quickly overtakes and "systematic" disadvantages you'd have; all other factors become meaningless.
To be blunt, black female millionaire Jane has incredible social power compared to Joe, the white male in poverty, which includes her right to freedom of speech. I'd wager to say, this is why divides made on these insignificant factors are so prominent: they keep the majority fighting each other, so the very affluent minority can continue to remain affluent.
I find the game of "you are more privileged THAN ME" to be a side show. I'm white, yet I live in poverty and suffer from a severe disability. The disability alone will, statistically, be the most negating factor to a happy, successful life, much more than any other factor for any other typical individual (other than wealth, of course).
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In my opinion far too much is expended for an absolute ideal of societal free speech, and so I am not going to remotely defend it as something worth upholding anyway except in a state context. What is remarkable (yet unsurprising) about the concept of free speech is that it is often phrased as an abstention from ideology and an abnegation of responsibility to hold oneself and one's peers to standards higher than the bar set by it, yet wherever it is implemented it is never free from ideology. For example, the United States, the country associated most with absolute free speech as a sign of its virtue (along with its allies), applies selective force to types of dissent and the demographics responsible for them; social pressure is applied to academics who are open about their ideology, while hegemonic ideology continues to infiltrate the works of their peers; permitted self-expression may be legally allowed but result in discriminatory social consequences with chilling effect. While it is probably obvious that I have a different operative definition to most people on Smogon for what dominant and hegemonic ideologies are in the United States, I think neutrally phrased we can probably actually all agree on that, inferring from the behaviour and opinions I see expressed on this forum.
The overarching point is that little or nothing is free from ideology; not all ideology is bad, but it is important to recognise the ideology in your thoughts and behaviours. My ideology is blatant because it is non-hegemonic and because I do not hide it; to me, mainstream American ideologies are extremely blatant, but many Americans are unaware because it is simply 'the default', 'common sense', or consensus. Am I arguing against there being real truth? Nope. I believe all research and investigations must be corrected for ideological biases and oversights in order to get closer to it, and to do that requires awareness of one's own ideology and how it contextualises the work.
Continuing about free speech... the United States was responsible for the Red Scare, a huge cultural and political purge, and has a ridiculously politically powerful (and influenced) media industry, while it continues to criticise countries like Cuba over their own press freedoms or lack thereof. In Australia, the government recently published a manifesto on violent extremism wherein it was directly expressed that actions, not ideas, matter; yet it is the ideas that catalyse these actions and many would hold that these ideas implicitly cause violence, bias, and discrimination the holders would explicitly not commit if they were aware they were doing it. So it's not okay to call for violent action against immigrants and black people, but it's okay to promote ideas that provoke or seem to 'justify' violence against them. These ideas, dominantly held, allow for permissive of acts which are unjustly violent (I specify unjustly because I do not believe all violence is equal) or cruel. Implicit associations, which result in hard-to-quantify damage as a result of their implicitness but can be demonstrated in blind tests (and have been), go unremarked upon, in part because of the belief that implicit associations cannot change without ''''brainwashing''''' (ideology)
So free speech as we generally understand it matters little to me, although I do see political freedoms as important (not absolutely). This is probably why I am so critical of free speech; I consider it to have failed most of the world and suppressed a lot of things that it should be allowing, because of its insistence on absenting itself from criticism of power and its refusal to acknowledge the standards itself sets, thus not allowing for other standards to be set.
I think everyone is aware that free speech does not give you the right to speak without criticism, given that whenever protestors burn a flag this is the debate that comes up, yet criticism itself is skewed and distorted by being a function of the same variables (and coming in many forms of force). I also think everyone is aware that free speech does not give you the right to be heard. The consequences of this is a massive bias towards dominant ideology that supports the state and the social context in which it takes place. So, again, I am not particularly interested in unadulterated free speech. What use is it to those who have truly minority views on American-aligned sites? Look at Reddit and its own self-unawareness.
And, no, free speech is not unadulterated anywhere, but hate speech laws do a terrible job; they merely mask the explicit views people have, making more subtle their prevalence, making people feel that they are truly wildly outside of the protections mainstream identity and ideology afford because they are simply outside of 'political correctness'. Furthermore, while speech that incites violence explicitly is usually curbed, speech and ideas that lead to violence are not criticised because of fears that, on top of free speech, we think critically, that the standards people might feel need to be held by might not be the hegemonic ones.
I also think the majority of free speech on the internet is just people refusing to explicitly endorse their ideologies due to thinking all ideologies are bad and not being forced to by virtue of their ideologies being accepted in the spaces they are in, and not seeing a need to enforce a standard for permitting other speech, even if that means equalising power dynamics. Believing free speech is the utmost pragmatic, ethical, or correct ideal is itself a moral and ideological judgment juxtaposed with deprioritisation of protecting suppressed speech or those who are harmed by certain hegemonic ideas, etc. etc. I'm supposed to be studying and I think I made my point.
As for the question in the thread, I think it is actually perfectly normative, because of the conditions I have lied out, to restrict speech (often through direct silencing as well as social and institutional pressure) while having a general layer of Free Speech underneath. I see nothing out of the ordinary about it. I do think, however, that it leads to terrible and harmful results, and that it is a result of an extremely black-and-white voluntaryist worldview rather than an investment in understanding societal dynamics on a subtle level and various types of force!
P.S. I'm not talking about anthropogenic climate change denial, that is a perfectly accepted (if terrible) mainstream view to hold even if it will get you jeered at by people who know better. Many Western politicians have leaned towards denial or scepticism in recent years; it serves the short-term economic interests of their country and their political careerism well, it should also be noted, to do nothing about it. In fact, the insistence on Free Speech and its associated Objectivity allows for a disproportionate exposure of climate change scepticism in the media due to the compulsion to fairly represent both sides. I forget the term for this, but basically there's been a lot of research done to show that there's like a 50/50 split in popular media of climate change 'sceptics' and everyone else, which introduces bias via obscuring the fact that there is scientific consensus about the basics of anthropogenic climate change.
I was going to reply to veiva about how they're basically half-wrong, half-right, but I'm too tired. result: conciseness!!
Sorry, veiva, I'm not ignoring your post and I agree with some of your analysis about class and power dynamics and access to the Right to Be Heard and the Right to Silence and Coerce. I agree intersectionality by itself (as opposed to incorporated into other ideas and theory concerning material struggle... after all, it was never meant to be an all-encompassing theory of everything) fails with regard to class perpetuation and disability, but note that severe disability is considered an axis of oppression and also one that reinforces poverty, and that using the same framework, for every Oprah we have many more Koch brothers, which might suggest something to you about privilege theory; it's not, understood correctly, deterministic for an individual, but important for explaining societal trends and harm in culture and interactions.
The overarching point is that little or nothing is free from ideology; not all ideology is bad, but it is important to recognise the ideology in your thoughts and behaviours. My ideology is blatant because it is non-hegemonic and because I do not hide it; to me, mainstream American ideologies are extremely blatant, but many Americans are unaware because it is simply 'the default', 'common sense', or consensus. Am I arguing against there being real truth? Nope. I believe all research and investigations must be corrected for ideological biases and oversights in order to get closer to it, and to do that requires awareness of one's own ideology and how it contextualises the work.
Continuing about free speech... the United States was responsible for the Red Scare, a huge cultural and political purge, and has a ridiculously politically powerful (and influenced) media industry, while it continues to criticise countries like Cuba over their own press freedoms or lack thereof. In Australia, the government recently published a manifesto on violent extremism wherein it was directly expressed that actions, not ideas, matter; yet it is the ideas that catalyse these actions and many would hold that these ideas implicitly cause violence, bias, and discrimination the holders would explicitly not commit if they were aware they were doing it. So it's not okay to call for violent action against immigrants and black people, but it's okay to promote ideas that provoke or seem to 'justify' violence against them. These ideas, dominantly held, allow for permissive of acts which are unjustly violent (I specify unjustly because I do not believe all violence is equal) or cruel. Implicit associations, which result in hard-to-quantify damage as a result of their implicitness but can be demonstrated in blind tests (and have been), go unremarked upon, in part because of the belief that implicit associations cannot change without ''''brainwashing''''' (ideology)
So free speech as we generally understand it matters little to me, although I do see political freedoms as important (not absolutely). This is probably why I am so critical of free speech; I consider it to have failed most of the world and suppressed a lot of things that it should be allowing, because of its insistence on absenting itself from criticism of power and its refusal to acknowledge the standards itself sets, thus not allowing for other standards to be set.
I think everyone is aware that free speech does not give you the right to speak without criticism, given that whenever protestors burn a flag this is the debate that comes up, yet criticism itself is skewed and distorted by being a function of the same variables (and coming in many forms of force). I also think everyone is aware that free speech does not give you the right to be heard. The consequences of this is a massive bias towards dominant ideology that supports the state and the social context in which it takes place. So, again, I am not particularly interested in unadulterated free speech. What use is it to those who have truly minority views on American-aligned sites? Look at Reddit and its own self-unawareness.
And, no, free speech is not unadulterated anywhere, but hate speech laws do a terrible job; they merely mask the explicit views people have, making more subtle their prevalence, making people feel that they are truly wildly outside of the protections mainstream identity and ideology afford because they are simply outside of 'political correctness'. Furthermore, while speech that incites violence explicitly is usually curbed, speech and ideas that lead to violence are not criticised because of fears that, on top of free speech, we think critically, that the standards people might feel need to be held by might not be the hegemonic ones.
I also think the majority of free speech on the internet is just people refusing to explicitly endorse their ideologies due to thinking all ideologies are bad and not being forced to by virtue of their ideologies being accepted in the spaces they are in, and not seeing a need to enforce a standard for permitting other speech, even if that means equalising power dynamics. Believing free speech is the utmost pragmatic, ethical, or correct ideal is itself a moral and ideological judgment juxtaposed with deprioritisation of protecting suppressed speech or those who are harmed by certain hegemonic ideas, etc. etc. I'm supposed to be studying and I think I made my point.
As for the question in the thread, I think it is actually perfectly normative, because of the conditions I have lied out, to restrict speech (often through direct silencing as well as social and institutional pressure) while having a general layer of Free Speech underneath. I see nothing out of the ordinary about it. I do think, however, that it leads to terrible and harmful results, and that it is a result of an extremely black-and-white voluntaryist worldview rather than an investment in understanding societal dynamics on a subtle level and various types of force!
P.S. I'm not talking about anthropogenic climate change denial, that is a perfectly accepted (if terrible) mainstream view to hold even if it will get you jeered at by people who know better. Many Western politicians have leaned towards denial or scepticism in recent years; it serves the short-term economic interests of their country and their political careerism well, it should also be noted, to do nothing about it. In fact, the insistence on Free Speech and its associated Objectivity allows for a disproportionate exposure of climate change scepticism in the media due to the compulsion to fairly represent both sides. I forget the term for this, but basically there's been a lot of research done to show that there's like a 50/50 split in popular media of climate change 'sceptics' and everyone else, which introduces bias via obscuring the fact that there is scientific consensus about the basics of anthropogenic climate change.
I was going to reply to veiva about how they're basically half-wrong, half-right, but I'm too tired. result: conciseness!!
Sorry, veiva, I'm not ignoring your post and I agree with some of your analysis about class and power dynamics and access to the Right to Be Heard and the Right to Silence and Coerce. I agree intersectionality by itself (as opposed to incorporated into other ideas and theory concerning material struggle... after all, it was never meant to be an all-encompassing theory of everything) fails with regard to class perpetuation and disability, but note that severe disability is considered an axis of oppression and also one that reinforces poverty, and that using the same framework, for every Oprah we have many more Koch brothers, which might suggest something to you about privilege theory; it's not, understood correctly, deterministic for an individual, but important for explaining societal trends and harm in culture and interactions.
I take it you live in a Western state too :pveiva said:
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I do say I'm lucky in that regard. Psychosis in, say, a poverty-stricken, highly religious, and otherwise uneducated state or community (there's plenty of them, even in the West; i.e., rural fundamentalist Christian farming communities) would be worse than simply living in a civilization where people are just ignorant of mental illness or skeptical I'm even sick...
I'd also like to say I largely agree with most of what you said. It's essentially what I think, but you spent more time expanding on it and worded your post better.
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