Testing My Commitment to Free Speech

 

Do you, like me, have certain commenters that get under your skin? After you have battled with them fruitlessly enough, do you just start to ignore them and not engage? Or do you wish that something proactive would occur so that their offensive speech would just not be in the posts you follow?

This is when it is important to stand back and ask yourself: Am I committed to free speech? If the First Amendment protects anything it is speech that offends and irritates you. That doesn’t mean you have to listen to it; you just don’t get to suppress it. 

I dearly wish that thinking that I find “insane” would not be voiced, but I also acknowledge that my attitude on things change over time. Does this mean that I will be persuaded by these irritating and repetitive observations that I find so annoying now? No way! (heh, heh) But you never know.

That is the value and threat of free speech: You run the risk of not only persuading someone to your viewpoint, but to being persuaded to their viewpoint. 

But what about the bad ideas in the world?! If they are truly bad, you will not be persuaded. And so long as there is free speech, the bad ideas will not have free reign.

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  1. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    MarciN (View Comment):

    The stakes are really high now. More so than ever before in human history. The climate change agenda is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I was thinking about it all last night.

    New Englanders have always been a hardy bunch, people who believed in not putting all your eggs in one basket and always having a plan B. :) That’s why so much alternative energy research has been done here. Nuclear, natural gas, coal, wood, windmills, and solar energy technologies were embraced here. That’s because “the grid” was a dumb idea to begin with. Ask any shivering New Englander. You need lots of viable and inexpensive sources of energy. There is no hospital in New England that does not have emergency generators.

    The left is trying to reduce us to a single poor source of electricity. It’s wild.

    Last night I was thinking that the parents and grandparents of the boomers used to say of us kids, “They think money grows on trees.” The comparable statement today about today’s young people is, “They think electricity comes out of the outlets on their walls all by itself.” :) :)

    It takes planning and investment money to stay cool or warm. It doesn’t happen by itself.

    We need to celebrate and honor the engineers and investors of the past. We’re alive because of them.

    • #31
  2. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    MarciN (View Comment):
    We’ve lost our once-active ability to sell our political points effectively. It takes work to boil down complex issues to single-sentence selling points. But I think we must.

    I’m not sure that’s actually possible for most conservative viewpoints.  That’s one advantage the left has, it’s easier to appeal to stupid people.  And there are a lot of them!

    • #32
  3. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Rodin (View Comment):
    Good point. The concept of “academic freedom” arises from higher education, not basic education. The function of K-12 is to produce functioning individuals armed with the tried and true information basic to employment and maintaining a household. I am convinced that a lot of the problem with K-12 is how boring the job is to transmit basic information over and over. We get “new math” as a means of making life more interesting for teachers. We get “wokeness” because teachers need to have an exciting and challenging mission to get out of bed. Teachers need to find fulfillment in the success of transferring basic knowledge to a lot of kids, and solving roadblocks for individual students, and not as officers in a crusading army. 

    Or, the way I sometimes put it, “the social purpose of education is not for teachers, administrators, etc, to feel like they had a rewarding career – they made a difference, or whatever – followed by a comfortable retirement.”

    And, there simply aren’t enough geniuses for every child to have a Nobel-winning science teacher, etc.  And those people have more specific things to do anyway.  A lot of teachers are barely up to the task as it is, and they should be working just about exclusively by rote, from respected textbooks and materials, not trying to be “innovative.”

    • #33
  4. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    MarciN (View Comment):

    By the way, I have to say that the right to say whatever you want anywhere anytime ends at the classroom door if you are a teacher.

    I am ardently and unequivocally devoted to the First Amendment, with one exception: teachers do not have the right to say whatever they want to other people’s children.

    Parents have the obligation and right to protect their children from undue influence, and that includes the classroom.

    The teachers’ unions drive me nuts on this point. To them I say, “Hey, guys, if you want to ‘make a difference,’ take on people your own size. Stop trying to influence my children behind my back.”

    They don’t see it. They laugh at parents who try to monitor the school’s library holdings.

    If they think it’s funny now, just wait until the next bond issue.

    Or maybe the state will start issuing vouchers.

    • #34
  5. BDB Inactive
    BDB
    @BDB

    Government with regard to its citizenry has duties, not rights.

    One part of government may have rights or similar with regard to another part of government, but toward citizens it has only duties and restraints.

    Likewise teachers with regard to students.  Teaching in a public school is a government or government-adjacent job, which comes with duties, not rights.  There is an element of conscience without which we would not want any tachers, so there is naturally some play in the joints — teachers do not surrender their personal rights just because they teach for a living, or because they are on school property, or are actively engaged in teaching.  But teachers get paid and students do not because the teacher is supposed to provide a service and an opportunity — not receive!

    If Congress should pass and the President should sign an unconstitutional law today which required the teaching that some race is awful tomorrow, teachers would be within their rights to protest, and very likely within their duties.  Instead, they teach this exact idea without even being forced to — they are only too happy to, and they call it their right.  It is neither a right nor a duty to teach this anti-human, anti-American, anti-family slop when on the government payroll teaching to our families.

    • #35
  6. BDB Inactive
    BDB
    @BDB

    Free speech, like so many other benefits of civilizatin, depends upon manners.  Our Constitution does not work if transplanted to a foreign culture, and By God, it no longer works now that we are being replaced by foreign cultures.

    More locally, there are some people here on R> whose most annoying conduct seems to come not from disagreement, but from bad manners.  After all, many of us disagree in quite civil fashion even on issues fundamental to one or both parties.  Manners facilitate civility in society regardless of an individual’s recognition or acceptance of that fact.  Just because a person lacks the ability to self-monitor or to read a room, this does not make it any easier to swallow his bad manners.

    [slides down in chair]

    Some subset of manners is codified in the CoC, and I’m glad that it does not reach further.  We mostly self-police here, and our own Ricochet-local Leviathan is empowered to remind us of things from time to time.  It’s not perfect, but it’s better than just about anywhere else.

    • #36
  7. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    Hoyacon (View Comment):
    There is one credible newspaper of national stature with even a conservative tilt on its opinion pages (WSJ).

    Barely conservative.

    Their conservatism is about the Benjamins and that ain’t nothing, but it’s only a small piece of the coalition. 

    And as has been pointed out elsewhere, favoring business isn’t the same as favoring commerce. 

    • #37
  8. Skyler Coolidge
    Skyler
    @Skyler

    Rodin (View Comment):

    Skyler (View Comment):

    Free speech might be required and protected by the government, but it doesn’t work unless it is embraced by the people throughout our culture.

     

    Kind of like the 11th Amendment — powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are retained by the States and the people thereof. When you are taking federal money withdrawn from the pockets of other states it enervates the 11th Amendment.

    I believe you meant the 9th and 10th Amendments.  The 11th restricts people from suing states in federal courts.

    • #38
  9. Rodin Member
    Rodin
    @Rodin

    Skyler (View Comment):

    Rodin (View Comment):

    Skyler (View Comment):

    Free speech might be required and protected by the government, but it doesn’t work unless it is embraced by the people throughout our culture.

     

    Kind of like the 11th Amendment — powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are retained by the States and the people thereof. When you are taking federal money withdrawn from the pockets of other states it enervates the 11th Amendment.

    I believe you meant the 9th and 10th Amendments. The 11th restricts people from suing states in federal courts.

    Thank you for your correction. It was the 10th Amendment that I had in mind. I made the mistake of relying on my memory and not verifying my reference. But at least I spelled out the point so that others understood the point I was making. Glad I did that.

    • #39
  10. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    Rodin (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    Freedom of association is such an outdated concept. Today we must vote against someone simply they were seen on a stage with a person of Orange hue.

    Yes, “association” has been weaponized by everyone. The stories about nefarious associates seem to focus on a contact, not an involvement in nefarious acts. To the extent that the tactic is successful in smearing people it assures that we will all be locked up in bubbles.

    I replied toa comment made by Caitlin Johnstone over on twitter.

    I can’t remember if it had to do with “Global Climate Crisis” or the war in the Ukraine.

    But she immediately replied that I needed to answer for my 4 years of   support for Trump before I would be allowed any credence in discussing any political issues, including ones that had never involved my hearing any statements from Trump reflecting his ideas on the subject.

    Apparently now the Lefty individual will quit assigning those of us who don’t like current day Biden- initiatives with the once ubiquitous  slur of  being smeared with “racist” or  White Supremacist. The Left has caught on that the overuse of those perjoraties now bounces off of us, as the slurs were just too ludicrous.

    So the new directive from Party Leaders is that it best for the Left’ s commentators  to continue along the lines of “But Trump!”

     

     

    • #40
  11. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    Rodin (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    Freedom of association is such an outdated concept. Today we must vote against someone simply they were seen on a stage with a person of Orange hue.

    Yes, “association” has been weaponized by everyone. The stories about nefarious associates seem to focus on a contact, not an involvement in nefarious acts. To the extent that the tactic is successful in smearing people it assures that we will all be locked up in bubbles.

    I replied toa comment made by Caitlin Johnstone over on twitter.

    I can’t remember if it had to do with “Global Climate Crisis” or the war in the Ukraine.

    But she immediately replied that I needed to answer for my 4 years of support for Trump before I would be allowed any credence in discussing any political issues, including ones that had never involved my hearing any statements from Trump reflecting his ideas on the subject.

    Apparently now the Lefty individual will quit assigning those of us who don’t like current day Biden- initiatives with the once ubiquitous slur of being smeared with “racist” or White Supremacist. The Left has caught on that the overuse of those perjoraties now bounces off of us, as the slurs were just too ludicrous.

    So the new directive from Party Leaders is that it best for the Left’ s commentators to continue along the lines of “But Trump!”

    It’s a standard ad hominem fallacy/attack: “you said/did ‘X’, so we don’t have to listen to you on the subject of ‘Y'”.  

    • #41
  12. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patriot) Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patriot)
    @ArizonaPatriot

    What an astonishing faith you have in reason, and reasoned argument.

    This faith does not seem to be empirically supported.  People are rarely rational.  People are easily misled, and panicked, and manipulated.  This seems to be the true state of the world.

    Yet people persist in their commitment to a theory that doesn’t seem to be in accordance with reality.  There is quite a bit of irony in the irrationality of those who say that they are committed to reason.

    • #42
  13. Rodin Member
    Rodin
    @Rodin

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):

    What an astonishing faith you have in reason, and reasoned argument.

    This faith does not seem to be empirically supported. People are rarely rational. People are easily misled, and panicked, and manipulated. This seems to be the true state of the world.

    Yet people persist in their commitment to a theory that doesn’t seem to be in accordance with reality. There is quite a bit of irony in the irrationality of those who say that they are committed to reason.

    I am afraid I have lost the thread of your thought — not that it is incorrect, only that I am not sure to what point you are responding.

    • #43
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