the Free internet is being fitted for chains

[White Beard]

You put your finger on an issue with ‘free speech’ that has existed since the ancient Greeks. The city-state of Athens confronted this in deciding what to do about Socrates: his teachings and philosophy led to the ‘capture’ of several of the Hellenic city-states by his students, who ruled as tyrants, styling themselves as philosopher-kings who knew best how to order society.

These ‘superior men’ were overthrown with considerable disorder and bloodshed, and Athens faced the question of governing free speech when that speech encouraged the destruction of free speech itself.

It was for this, and for Socrates’ defense and his displayed indifference to the issue and its importance to his fellow Athenians, that Socrates was tried and executed.

Every time someone interjects that ‘this is a republic, not a democracy’ I remember the first time I heard that line from the head of the state John Birch Society chapter, who went on to praise Plato’s ‘Republic’. That book is Plato’s rendering of the views of Socrates that gave rise to the problem. Because it’s regarded as a Great Book, almost no-one reads it critically - and it needs criticism.

 

[Gry]

[YOUTUBEIF]Vkfpi2H8tOE[/YOUTUBEIF]

 

[gaiusmarius]

And exactly who is Bill Maher other than a comedienne looking for laughs?

principles are just another buzzword for personal belief systems, it doesn't make them right or wrong, good or bad.

a principle is a principle, thats true, some are good some are bad, free speech however is a good principle or not?

No one is censoring Alex Jones, he still has his website/show where he can say whatever he wants.

...... but it's OK to not carry his BS, to not give him a platform to disseminate his crap.

Why should a search engine or Facebook/Twitter be expected to treat info from verified fake news/sites as though it had any validity/merit in the real world?

you are missing the essential part of my argument. who decides what is fake news? do you really want to give that power to the tech monopolies? free speech has clearly defined legaly limits in law. thats what the limits of free speech should be, no more.

FB and co can not be trusted to decide what has merit and what not. this leads to a totalitarian state on information.

yes letting every weirdo disseminate his stuff can have bad consequences, but doing the opposite leads to much bigger problems for a free society, it loses it's freedome.

Should an easily disproved belief in a flat earth be allowed to carry as much weight as belief in a proven roundish earth?

the only correct way to deal with this is withon limits of the laws on the books and the free market. people will read what they want to, if they want to read about flat earth, let them, sooner or later they will realize it's bs

Like take for instance the late website PLANETGANJA, with 2 idealistic admins (Prawn and Gad) dedicated to the noble (principled!) cause of free speech.

They allowed a very talented and entertaining sociopath (Plural of Mongoose) to use that free speech platform to try his best to destroy a good mans profitable business and STEAL all his customers.

Was this OK because someone wanted to exercise his right to free speech and everyone had a right to hear what he said?

in the end he only managed to do what he did because he was already in Gypsy circle before, it had nothing to do with free speech, and there are laws already against liable, hacking and blackmail, no need to take away the 1st amendment to protect from blackmailers and thieves.

Now ICMag isn't a free speech site and very few websites are, you take the good and filter out the rest for a reason.

You know darn well that FoxNews is doing their fare share of filtering yet you hear no complaints about them, why is that?

i personally include fox news in my list of what is msm.

we at IC don't have a monopoly though, and we do allow free speech in the political and current events threads after all.

but if google takes away your free speech people don't find your url? don't you get that its not the same?

the US founder wrote whole books about why they included free speech in the law of the land, they knew that it's vitally important to have any kind of freedom, without free speech, there is no free thought, without free thought, there is no progress, no art, no philosophy, no anything. it creates a societal stagnation as we saw in the soviet union.

 

[White Beard]

Occurs to me there’s confusion about the distinction between free speech vs protected speech.

Speech is free when it is uncoerced and unrepressed. That means that one is neither forced to say, or not say, anything, for the coercion part. To be unrepressed means that the speaker is not under duress of any kind, and that the speaker is not liable to official retaliation for speaking.

Speech is protected if it is ubiquitous, taken for granted, customary among one’s people, and if challenging speech is comparatively disabled by authorities.

Speech is unprotected when the speakers are made subject to coercion for speaking while speakers of opposing speech are not subject to the same, or are aided in amplifying their speech.

On the level of principle, this means free speech is not protected speech, except case by case. We are free to speak, but we are not free of the consequences of our speech. This applies to you or me or Paris Hilton or DJ Trump. The constitutional right of free speech is specifically the right to say what we want without fear of government action against us. Further, it implicitly guarantees that the government will not enable de-fact repression by turning a blind eye to threat and violence against speakers

...which, really, is what selective enforcement is all about

 

[gaiusmarius]

really interesting interview about social media and the way it's a manipulation machine that is made to make you angry or afraid so they can basically manipulate you.... second part is about Kashoogie


Will Saudi Arabia execute one of its top clerics? | UpFront

[YOUTUBEIF]1fbd44E_QZo[/YOUTUBEIF]

 

[wantaknow]

i just tryed to upload some youtube videos to fb ,they were the dew,fire in cali,dew is direct energy weapon ,not one made to the account ,streight up sensorship ,to me that equals guilty, those fires will cause a civil war, if its true ,then trumps guilty also

 

[White Beard]

i personally include fox news in my list of what is msm.

we at IC don't have a monopoly though, and we do allow free speech in the political and current events threads after all.

but if google takes away your free speech people don't find your url? don't you get that its not the same?

the US founder wrote whole books about why they included free speech in the law of the land, they knew that it's vitally important to have any kind of freedom, without free speech, there is no free thought, without free thought, there is no progress, no art, no philosophy, no anything. it creates a societal stagnation as we saw in the soviet union.

Love all you say here, but I disagree blacklisting or 404ing a website is very much the modern equivalent of destroying press equipment, it is suppressive, because if your free-speech zone is a mile and a half away from the people you need to hear you, then fuck your “free speech” and your zone. But you are quite right the freedom to speak without government coercion is not the right to be heard. This brings up the whole issue of money as speech, and that brings up original constitutional context and that drags in all of textualism and constructionist of the varying sorts.

But sure that’s for a different set of photons...

The key to the current downslide of the main media came during the Reagan years, when reporters were essentially handed press releases, with no questions taken. Heavy message control. Read what we give you, pull your punches, ask less intrusive questions, be respectful, or you won’t keep your pass, you won’t get on the bus, on the plane. Public broadcasting was heavily pressured to grant more time to “conservative” regime-friendly voices, to softball the interviews or have their funding cut by Congress. By the end of 12 years of Reagan-Bush, the press tore into the Democrats, just to have something to DO after all that.

Wielding the club of access for cooperation returned with a vengeance when Shrub hit the room, and now again in the new Trumpire - bigger, louder, more garish, more out of control, you bet, believe me!

Almost unanimously, we believe as a nation that we have been fooled by people, our fellow citizens, who mean us harm and seek to destroy us and cause grave harm to the nation, and beyond that to the stability of the world. We are divided as to who we see as being fooled, how they/we are being fooled, by whom, and for what purpose.

It is undeniably true that things are falling apart: the center cannot hold, is not holding, because we’re out of balance.

We’re out of balance because there are powerful forces at work that don’t give a rat’s ass about us and if we’d stop pointing at each other and start wondering what unknown purpose this is serving for THE PEOPLE WE KEEP PUTTING IN POWER.

We can say we should avoid falling back on failed policies of the past, but WE’RE HERE. AGAIN. All this MAGA bullshit is a dog’s breakfast from many rounds in the past, don’t even try to deny it - history always catches up. (Not *you*, GM)

The wheel is destabilizing. Don’t know if we can stop it or even slow it, much less restabilize it, but we need to see the danger, the real danger, and learn how to see through the chaff of deliberate misinformation to see the danger and work together to stop it.

Gee. I talk a lot.

 

[St. Phatty]

but if google takes away your free speech people don't find your url? don't you get that its not the same?

Google has been de-listing technical websites, at the request of advertisers, since 2002 - if not earlier.