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This Is What We Should Not Do
This is an example of what I don’t want.
Protesters disrupted a Shakespeare production in Central Park on Friday night shouting, “The blood of Steve Scalise is on your hands!” and “Stop leftist violence,” according to reports.
A woman identifying herself on social media as Laura Loomer jumped on stage shouting, “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right,” and, “This is violence against Donald Trump.”
Fellow protestor Jack Posobiec, who taped her from the audience, then shouted, “You are all Goebbles,” referring to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Loomer was arrested following the incident when she refused to leave the scene, The New York Times reported. She posted video of her protest on Twitter.
We on the right should not be breaking the law in order to shut down what we consider to be offensive speech. That’s the left’s shtick. We need to be respecting the right of free expression, even when it offends us — and then using that right to push back against the left.
Rather than trying to shut down the juvenile assassination-porn the left enjoys, let’s say some things that we believe, but that we know offend the left.
In my case, that means saying things like “the trans movement is nonsense, an unhealthy pandering to emotionally challenged individuals who need counseling, not surgery.” Or “men and women are different, and feminism has tried to fool women into believing that that isn’t true, depriving them of their uniqueness in its efforts to persuade them to be ersatz males, men-lite.” Or “the Black Lives Matter movement is ugly racism founded on a lie about the nature of anti-black violence in America, directing attention away from the real crisis of violence in the black community by scapegoating police instead of acknowledging the disintegration of the black family.” Or “same-sex marriage is legal, but it isn’t normal and it isn’t ideal. Children benefit from having good role models of, and the support from, both a father and a mother.” Or “the Russia story is a nothingburger, a desperate effort to deprive the people of the choice they made in a fair election because that choice offends the leftist establishment.”
Etc.
Don’t suppress speech. Use it.
Published in General
Ok, fair enough. I am not clear on what you want. I have seen you use the phrase “hate speech” in all seriousness. In my experience, the only people who use that term are those who want to shut down free speech and make speech that they disagree with illegal: they are virtually always leftists, but now conservatives seem to be buying into this idea of “hate speech”.
You seem to believe that hate speech is partially responsible for the shooting, and needs therefore to be addressed? What, exactly, do you believe, because you come across as a conservative who wants to stop hate speech, which seems bizarre to me. “Hate speech” is leftist code for “any speech that offends me”, and leftists want to shut down all speech that they find offensive. You sound like them. I realize that you are not them, but you sound like them.
EJ, great comments here and above. Thanks. We just have to think about things in a creative fashion — just look how this served the founding fathers so well. That and the French army and the French navy and sedition. Not that those latter things were necessary — it was just the sign of the times when people always had to settle things with violence. We’re above that now.
See, that’s the problem. A lot of us would like to stop the escalation well short of that, but we’re told that we shouldn’t engage in civil protest. I guess that makes us look icky. The danger is if that type of free speech is repressed, the protest will then break out in some dangerous and harmful form.
Just because you are a pessimist doesn’t mean you are psychic :) Did you predict the outcome of this most recent election correctly? If you didn’t, then why should I look to you for predictions about the future?
Who said you shouldn’t engage in civil protest?
Thank you for the compliment. I try. For the past 35 years I’ve been trying to use their words and cliches against them, to make them live up to their own standards. That doesn’t work very well unless I can make myself sound like them.
The OP.
You still haven’t explained exactly what it is that you want. You are not just making them live up to their own standards, you are making the rest of us live “up” to their standards too, and that is a problem, because their standards are fundamentally wrong. You are reinforcing their standards when we should be undermining them.
It’s not arguing that at all.
Ok, having been in many civil protests, I understand something about this. What the protestors did was totally non violent, and not a big deal, but it was not a civil protest. A civil protest would have been if they had stood on a public sidewalk outside the theatre with signs protesting. That isn’t what they did. They disrupted the play, and they were rightly arrested for it: not a big deal, but it isn’t civil protest. There is no constitutional right to take over a theater.
I totally support civil protest, and I wish that there was more civil protest of this play: if I lived in the NYC area, I would be out on a sidewalk outside the theater protesting this play, but what these two did was not civil protest.
I am not making any predictions as such but observing that mankind has not deviated much from its course in thousands of years.
My political hero has always been Churchill. The great man was never one to look at his opponents, both foreign and domestic, with nothing more than a clear eye. You may call it pessimism, I call it reality.
You and Jamie may be done with me and that is fine. I can only assure you that your enemies are not yet done with you. And if I do that from my own wilderness, that, too, is fine.
I said we shouldn’t break the law. By all means protest. We have done far too little of that. We’ve allowed nonsense to gain currency while most of us were silent for fear of being branded bigots or haters — or, more often, simply out of laziness.
Speak up. Organize. Protest. But don’t break the law.
This is untrue. The American Revolution was a an incredible deviation from the path mankind had been following for thousands of years; the fact that the country has lasted and thrived for the past 250 years is also a deviation. The election of President Trump is also a deviation.
I don’t claim to know the future, but I am betting on the principles this country was founded on. Pessimists always believe that they are realists, but they aren’t. If they were realists, they wouldn’t be so sure of themselves.
I really am very curious about what exactly you are trying to accomplish. You are very good at sounding like a leftist, and you have stated many times that you want leftists to live up to their principles, but when I point out that you are also pressuring the rest of us to live up to leftist principles, you go silent. I realize that maybe you just had to go, and you didn’t really go silent, but when you come back, I would really like you to address this issue. I think that you have not thought this through.
Good. So then you agree with the actions of the theater protesters?
Because I am right more than I am not.
I think you might be misinformed.
Do you know what was going on when the people were attacked with the bike lock?
I have no idea what that means.
I will point out that I would be delighted if some leftist would explain to me (for example) that the whole concept of hate speech is problematic. But there is always some conservative who ruins things by doing their work for them, keeping them from having to grapple with the concept.
Can you prove that? :)
They were not arrested for disrupting the play. One of them was arrested afterwards for going a step further, but not for disrupting the play. They didn’t take over the theater. They left when they were told to (though not without continuing their civil protest on the way).
They seemed to have a good sense of how far it was appropriate to push the issue. Some people might think they went a tad too far, and some people might wish they had gone a bit further, but they seemed to have a good sense about how far to go without alienating people of good sense and good will.
When you use the phrase “hate speech” you are validating the idea of hate speech. I know you think that you are challenging liberals, but you aren’t. You are validating and strengthening their ideas: when you embrace or pretend to embrace the concept of hate speech, you are putting wind in their sails. When you pressure them to live “up” to their standards, you are pressuring the rest of us to live “up” to their standards too.
I don’t understand why you are so obsessed with the hard left. Yes, they are aggressive, but they are a minority. Out of curiosity, how many hard leftists have you succeeded in converting?
I have no idea what was going on when the the people were attacked with the bike lock. The guy who attacked them should obviously be prosecuted, but beyond that, I don’t care. At a time when many of our elected representatives are acting like totally wimps, we should be devoting all of our energy to pressuring them to do what they were elected to do, but apparently there a few who would rather go to Berkley to yell at the thugs, or something. Fine, but I think what they are doing is a total waste of precious energy that would be far better devoted to yelling at people who actually have power.
I am happy with the responses I’ve had, so far as I’ve been able to detect what is going on.
They are not a minority. They dominate the media, the universities, the entertainment industry, and our government.
As to how many I’ve converted, hopefully none. I’m trying to weaken them, not convert them.
Now if some of them convert themselves, that’s wonderful, too.
But you aren’t weakening them: maybe in your dreams, you are weakening them. In reality, you are making them stronger by validating their ideas.
Well, he thinks he isn’t, but he has a somewhat narrow view of what constitutes civil protest. Apparently I have a slightly more expansive view than he does.
The people who dominate media, the universities, the entertainment industry, and our government are, even when you put them all together, a tiny minority, and every day, people are rejecting them and their ideas more and more and more. If you want to argue that they are a powerful minority, that’s fair, but they are most definitely a minority, and they only have power to the extent that people trust them, and increasingly, people don’t trust them.
You’re making that up. You have no basis for saying that.
I have every basis for saying that: as I have said several times now, when you embrace or pretend to embrace the concept of hate speech, you are validating and strengthening that concept. When you pressure liberals to live according to their standards, you are pressuring everybody to live according to liberal standards, and in doing so you are validating liberal ideas and making them stronger.
Some people are rejecting them and their ideas, and they are fighting back with increasing semi-organized violence. They don’t care whether people trust them; they want power. They hate the people, so why should they crave their trust? They want obedience, not trust. People who should know better are advocating passivity in the face of it.