I’ve always been an advocate of having a bill of rights in Australia similar to that of the USA but the more I think about it the less convinced I am that it would do any good unless it truly was a right to “free speech” for the “people”. Our high court has always held that there is ann implicit right of free speech. Maybe we don’t have it so bad it even if it isn’t spelt out explicitly in our constitution.
The Australian Constitution does not explicitly protect freedom of expression. However, the High Court has held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an indispensable part of the system of representative and responsible government created by the Constitution. It operates as a freedom from government restraint, rather than a right conferred directly on individuals.
In Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (1992) 177 CLR 1 and Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v the Commonwealth (1992) 177 CLR 106, the majority of the High Court held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an incident of the system of representative government established by the Constitution. This was reaffirmed in Unions NSW v New South Wales [2013] HCA 58.
As often happens when reading Unglossed, I don't quite get the point. However, one thing does stand out to me: if free speech should be a states' rights thing, how do you stop speech at state lines? Have a special Facebook for each of the 50 states?
Perhaps I'm not anti-censorship in the same sense that you're describing here, which seems to be focusing on race, but for me the biggest problem with censorship is the question of who gets to decide what to censor. It will inevitably devolve into political power moves, as we see happening today.
My own biggest concern is with the scientific censorship that accelerated with Covid. 'Consensus-defined wrong-think' is a great description.
While you might be all in on forbidding stories about George Floyd strangulation or the futility of recycling, what about stories which are less determinate? Where is the line drawn, and who draws that line? So to me, the most practical solution is to not allow any censorship at all. Admittedly it's not a perfect solution, but seems better than the alternatives.
This is an unfortunate and profound misunderstanding of the right of free speech, and why it should be absolute, and absolutely protected. The right you're protecting isn't the right for someone else to say something stupid - the right you're protecting, when you clutch your pearls, is your *own* right to speak your mind.
Only partly right. America’s free speech rights are not a placeholder for political interests as Stanley Fish and the author assert. Just because our Founders’ Constitutional vision has been suborned by powerful groups doesn’t mean it never existed or can’t recover.
The Devil can quote Scripture for his purpose, but don’t tell me that that that invalidates Christ’s teachings—revival is waiting in the wings!
Americans are more and more reasserting our faith in righteous law & order, and rebelling against Globalist falsehoods like global warming induced disasters, political endangerment of the food supply, and endless wars that only enrich the ruling class.
"America's free speech rights" do not exist. You cannot say things in the US without recrimination. Literally a former president has just been indicted for speaking about a rigged election.
And that’s why you’re partly right; the part you neglect is that our Constitution is the touchstone to recovering & securing the rights we’ve been stripped of. This is what political titans like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump are working tirelessly toward.
I mean, this is a lofty and admirable position, but it isn't what the founders envisioned. They were just trying to assuage the qualms of different state elites that the Federal gov wouldn't favor any particular state elites. Today it largely still doesn't, but we don't have free speech, if you say something that offends coastal elites then you lose your job and never have children. This has nothing to do with the government or what the founders envisioned for it, and everything to do with how the press interfaces with society.
It is illegal to question the Holocaust narrative in 17 countries. How is simply asking a question hate speech? Is asking the wrong question considered antisemitic?
Depressing essay mainly because your vague hope that open government censorship may serve to convince people to rethink their opposition to the censored topic is silly. Go back and read what you wrote at the beginning: you traffic in what the government would make illegal speech.
Do you mean "go back and read what you wrote at the beginning" - of his current article? Or of his substack? Specific examples would make this discussion easier to follow.
The contradiction is obvious. Everyone loves pure freedom, but societies cannot allow it. So when anyone purports to be a defender of free speech in an American political context they are just happy with whatever the current or just-before-current set of impermissible speech is. Berenson is JBC.
'So when anyone purports to be a defender of free speech in an American political context they are just happy with whatever the current or just-before-current set of impermissible speech is.'
Please. That doesn't apply to everybody. Not me, anyway.
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Twitter did not implement "Community Notes" because it's interested in "truth". Community Notes will be weaponized eventually. They're just letting the rubes feel like they can "correct" falsity for the time being.
And yet dropped the ball on explaining the nuclear "sploding stuff" videos. This is like my comments on crowdsourced Tik-Tok knowledge, crowdsourcing only works if reinforced by institutional status that is subject to the same limitations on wrongthink that one might imagine crowdsourcing can solve, i.e. wikipedia is excellent but thinks box cutters caused 9-11.
On a lighter(?) note I wonder how censorship by law would work out for some Substacks - including yours. For now you can action your almighty Cancel/Block button in the Comments section but then only (some) egos would be affected, nobody would look for jail time or worse.
It would look like me not having a substack, because I don't want to risk my other liberties unless as part of an actual civil war where there's potential change. But that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
At the same time there's plenty of jobs I can never have in the future thanks to what I've written here.
For this you have my gratitude and I think that of many others. For all of Berenson's many faults he has also paid a high personal price (socially if not economically) for the things he has said. To knowingly violate taboo and pay that price takes a lot of courage. You have made a sacrifice for the betterment of your community and I thank you for that.
I would never - the former is infinitely more confining
State-enshrined free speech is merely a tentative agreement not to criminalize complaining about the government. But any intelligently-designed government will already make such criminalization borderline-impossible simply via rote checks and balances that give the minority a veto on the majority.
As for A.B., I usually find myself rolling my eyes in askance when reading one of his Substack posts. (I kind of expected him to offer up how he "...almost got killed for the NYT" in return for a paid subscription 😃).
I had liked this reply, but have removed the like. I know that Alex has some content free to read after a week. It may be all of his content, I am not sure about that though.
Vibes are going to vibe. I don't strangle my keyboard to purport to be a free speech defender, and none of my work is paywalled for any length of time. Hmmmmm
I am reading your take on this with a grain of salt and I could agree that overt censorship might be "better" (like in easier to detect) than "covert suppression".
However I doubt -from experience- that the former would induce more resistance and if that would really be the case then why would any government/power make it visible and even legalise it just to make it easier to fight against it?
As a counter argument to the easier-to-resist-if-overt theory I should mention the eastern europe's communist countries where free speech was explicit in every state propaganda but self-censorship was implicit (self inflicted) in most social interactions. The so called "resistance through culture" meant that a very small number of people were absorbing as much forbidden information/culture they could get their hands on and share it in their small groups. I am sure a similar -quite small- percentage of people would do the same these days in America or elsewhere. I would hardly call that resistance.
As for Fentanyl Floyd, C'mon man, CNN so diligently cut out the part where he was sitting in the spacious police car, complaining about breathing difficulties with the same intensity as later laying on the floor, suggesting the orientation to be an invariant to the problem.
Another thought on the "i would ban this or that speech".
I guess the biggest problem is that you don't really know all of the consequences in advance. Something may seem obvious to you, but it's different than expected, more complicated. Deciding that in advance mightprevent reality from being understood. Whether some topic seems subjectively unpleasant to someone or not... oh well.
But I'm for legal liability after the fact, e.g. if it can be demonstrated that someone did not just voice an opinion, but propagated falsehoods about someone when actually knowing better - there were/are scenarios where that's feasible.
" guess the biggest problem is that you don't really know all of the consequences in advance. Something may seem obvious to you, but it's different than expected, more complicated." - but here, again, there is no essential difference between a speech restriction and any other restriction. All attempts by the collective to minimize the negative externalities of free individual action can have unintended negative externalities. That said I'm generally comfortable with societies making legal speech conform to collective preferences - I just want it to be transparent., not rendered into a Kabuki where journalist-magicians eat the heart of taboo-violating teens while playing violins over their twitter bans.
Enjoy the particular brand of fire you're playing with, as if we're handing out the restriction of speech button I'd be happy to make it feloniously illegal to lie about the enforcement and sentencing gaps like you just did, Glowie-for-free. It's not Black and trans people with carte blanche. It's people who are politically important to the regime. Go ahead and pretend a vaxx-decimated left won't ever find new leadership.
And yes, our terrible drug laws killed George Floyd, not Officer Chauvin who was already a crook for other reasons.
Yeah, he's alleged with some credibility to have done that... pity we only criminalize it when the little-guy does it, but he didn't choke to death swallowing counterfeit US currency in a panic.
Perp implies you have no respect for the constitution. I presume innocence, otoh. And ethical people are supposed to resist crimes, including when those crimes manifest themselves in the form of an arrest...
And finally, 1. No they don't, but Brian won't ever throw you in jail for exaggerating, because it meshes with his awful politics.
2. If someone enjoys the presumption of innocence, misrepresents their condition infront of so many witnesses, and is not charged with a crime, we may have an actual issue there, but again, we live in anarchotyranny, and you seem only to argue for a different pariah class.
We live in an anarchotyranny? What is that, exactly?
Last I knew, resisting arrest was a crime. So in addition to being high on illegal substances and a counterfeiter, Floyd resisted arrest. Of all the criminals to turn into a hero.
The government, any government, isn't fit to exist, let alone decide what is acceptable for an individual to say. Controlling speech is the same as controlling thought. It's the holy grail of totalitarian governments.
Then explain how our free-to-lie-about-anything media is not our de facto totalitarian gov, and name an entity other than an authoritarian gov that could dethrone it
The corporate media is absolutely an arm of the government. The more powerful the government, the worse the indoctrination coming out of your televisions and radios.
Agree. But this is fundamentally a revolutionary statement. The media has operated as an arm of the state since at least WWI, when the Paris press generated French popular support for war on Germany to suit the Quai d’Orsay. Unless there are laws regulating the media then voters have no say over the media class's influence on controlling speech, and so in America deposing the media class would require a revolution.
You said it. If you want to change this government, it would require a revolution. But the worst thing you could do would be to replace it with an even more totalitarian version.
Why? Ultimately the qualitative nature of any government depends on the beholder. There is no such thing as a universally perfect government. Really the current US and coastal/leftist US are the freest places that have existed outside of pre-colonial America, /despite/ the fact that the media can impose lockdowns by hyping a virus, but this nearly total freedom is also why everyone is aimless and childless.
I could not disagree more with that last statement. Many of the people we would prefer to see having children are childless because they believe they no longer have to be dependent upon their children to care for them in their old age. The state will take care of me so there's no need to have children. At the same time the state is encouraging the least worthy among us to have children by subsidizing single parenthood.
Any time a person advocates for an increase in the state's power, it's so important to keep in mind that your enemies will be wielding that power over you very soon. Just ask all of the neocon, patriot act supporting "conservatives" who are now being called MAGA terrorists.
It's one thing that MSM can orate on some kaleidoscopic version of "free speech" for, after all, that is their constitutional right. The problem is that this is opinion-swaying powerful media, lockstep across US, Canada, Europe and Australia/NZ. These opinions are presented to and digested by a hive of sap suckers, who have been programmed to sap-suck for the last 3 generations (at least). It is very discomforting to see friends and family lap up the narrative, never questioning or having a single critical thought about the topic du jour, not recognizing they are being led like a horse by the reins, into a particular stall of perspective. It took the Covid madness and welcome anarchy to make me realize this has been the way for a long time. And Alex is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. He of all people should recognize the NYT as a shill since inception.
I'm honestly not sure what your point is here, but one thing I would make "taboo" but not outright ban - capitalizing Black but not white, which is racist, and just foments unnecessary resentment and division. Besides, there is not one person on the planet who is legitimately "black" or "white" in skin color unless you count albinos. Skin tone value statements should be simple adjectives and not divisive racial categories in a more enlightened society.
My point is that while free speech, like any other pure freedom, might be bodacious for the individual, it is impossible in a viable society, and we don't have free speech exactly for this reason. But by pretending we do, we allow the media to impose media-class preferences and values on everyone. We only stop noticing periodically when they take a break from revising their values, otherwise it's obvious. The solution is not "protect free speech all caps!" because how could the solution be something impossible outside of anarchy?
Capital-B Black is just intuitively natural to me. A proper noun for a unique social category - former sub-class, current ostensible equal, transplant from a particular continent based on race, what does this mean? This question is implicitly answered by any lifestyle/philosophical/political choice made by the American Black after desegregation, from Black Nationalism to Black conservatism. Most white equivalents were region/race-specific, e.g. Irish, German, and have become obsolete, save one.
That's a lot of word salad. You can't say that American blacks are monolithic because they aren't, in part precisely for what you just pointed out - black nationalism and black conservativism are at polar opposites of a political spectrum, just for an example. Also, not all American blacks are slave descendants. So if blacks aren't monolithic and whites aren't either (as you said, Irish, German, and have become obsolete) then if you capitalize Black and not White too, it's racism, that is, treating people differently based on their race.
I'm not saying it's a mean-spirited racism, but it's still racism, and it leads to more division and resentment in the long run, because it gives disenfranchised whites a reason to point a finger and go "Why are you making 'Black' more important than 'white'"? In short, it's just virtue signalizing that inflames racial tensions for no good reason.
PS I'm also old enough when we liberals were told "black" wasn't cool to use anymore, that the preferred term was "African-American." So capital B Black is also most assuredly temporarily and my prediction is that someone will decide soon enough it's time to reclaim the word Negro. If not that, then some native term from an African language. Already we've replaced POC with BIPOC. Just watch. I give it about 5 years or so.
"A lot of word salad" - I argued why Black denotes a unique status, meriting a proper noun. Wanting to be culturally and mentally African and wanting to be Anglo-Saxon would be polar opposites for anyone, but Black tells you information about the wanter. "white" might in the future but doesn't right now. Today, "Black" is useful and natural, "White" wouldn't be. Simple. I don't have to contort myself to capitalize the B, it feels right.
Your downstream reply: You are still used to a operating status where merely being uncomfortable with your preferred wrong-think will lead to its inevitable extinction. You imagine that if the left's preferred wrong-think did not exclude your own beliefs on health, this wouldn't lead to your extinction. Yet we have the NYT endorsing the state's criminalization of its preferred wrong-think, ie your beliefs on health. Why? Because merely being uncomfortable is not the engine of change you think it is. "Socially unacceptable" does not permit acceptance in society, how can you not see that.
"I argued why Black denotes a unique status, meriting a proper noun. Wanting to be culturally and mentally African and wanting to be Anglo-Saxon would be polar opposites for anyone, but Black tells you information about the wanter." HUH? Once again, more word salad. What "information" does this give you in particular? What does "wanting" have to do with any of this? We are simply using words to identify people's race, and when you capitalize one race and not the other, you are making the races NOT EQUAL.
FWIW, I shared this thread and the whole capital B thing with a black friend and his text back to me was simply: "White Liberals are racist as fuck."
You are making assumptions here about people based on their race and what they want and don't want...don't assume.
""Socially unacceptable" does not permit acceptance in society, how can you not see that." This is still nonsensical, we are always going to have certain words, ideas, and utterances that are frowned upon in "polite society," which in and of itself is not the same thing as government or corporate censorship. You are free to call me a "cunt" if you want - I might be pissed off, but I won't have you arrested.
What information - the wanter is a descendent of a Southern African-imported slave, whose ancestors endured or tried unsuccessfully to transcend Jim Crow, then to partially integrate into the US middle class in the late 50s / early 60s, only to be locked into subclass status by American industrial outsourcing and Great Society largesse. This is only the tip of the iceberg. "Black" denotes a concrete and unique condition, it's a proper noun. Being Black is not a figment of word salad, it's real.
The quote "White liberals are" etcetera is an amusing paradox. Tell your Black friend to look in a mirror.
What's really stupid about "Black" is it doesn't describe anyone's skin color. (Nor does "white".) I have a light-skin brother in-law whose skin is lighter than my Turkish husband's in the summer.
Interesting that Turks call American Indians "kizilderiler". Which means "redskins". They do call Blacks "siyah" which means "black'. Without any meddling from the US govt.
The we is a tenuous consensus produced by the "plinko-game" of audience approval to rhetoric; this consensus includes allowable debate, i.e. Red v Blue.
I was out in the garden looking at a hornet's nest, when I suddenly realized that the acronym White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is not exactly a neutral & friendly description of my tribe.
Well, in rejecting the term "colored", we chose to permit "people of color". Did that make sense? None of this really does.
In rejecting "Negro", we turned to "Black" but both are words for "black". "White" has positive connotations, "black" has negative ones. Choosing "Black" to designate your ethnicity is to fight against embedded linguistic associations. I think it was a horrible pick.
When I'm asked to fill in my ethnicity on forms, I put down "Anglo-Saxon". Does that have connotations? Maybe North-western European is best. That's not going to offend anyone is it? Well maybe it is. I give up.
Once the US government started meddling with hiring and university admissions on the basis of the notion of ethnic group, it has become standard practice to have a "gender"/sex and "race"/ethnicity list. Pure steaming horse manure.
I don't know that the word "black" has substantially inferior connotations to "white" in the grand scheme. There's always a place for the anti-hero. This would seem to be why "Black excellence" is a naturally coherent and potent term, there's no dissonance being invoked.
So a large group of people has inadvertently been identified with antihero. I have to disagree with you on this one Brian. Blackguard, black-hearted, black eye, blacklist. I'll stay white, thank you.
I similarly struggle with what this is exactly about.
When people say "me for free speech", then it usually means, by institutions of power from above, whether it was the state, now big tech / media, and the string pullers they are the proxies for.
It seems to be somewhat obvious that the greatest powers (able to do arbitrary shit by force, whenever they like) have the highest relevance and hence, it's what most people have in mind with free speech.
As for cultural taboos - well, at least hypothetically, those can shift, organically, as opposed to some force from above shaping things to their will. (influence by manipulation can turn into inofficial forces, of course)
Being for free speech w.r.t. instututions means to not make this unnecessarily easy for nefarious forces.
But it's also late and I have not fully parsed it all, lol.
Black is an ethnicity, is the point they've been making in capitalizing that word, like Irish.
But go ahead and let all your awfulness and speech restriction come out, I'm sure that it being taboo to talk about pivotal moments in Postmodern History isn't going to lead to the collapse of Western Society or anything.
Black is not an ethnicity. "African" is an ethnicity. BTW, I am in favor of free speech. I'm just saying it should be socially unacceptable (i.e. uncool) to use racially divisive language like Black uppercase vs. white lowercase.
It can't be "free speech" if things are socially unacceptable. Socially unacceptable means being outcast, unpersoned, defined as an animal with no rights whose death should not require state reply.
That's a ridiculous statement on a number of fronts. The main idea of free speech is that the government can't censor. Second, there's a vast continuum between knowing that it's not cool to call a woman cunt to her face vs. "being outcast, unpersoned, defined as an animal with no rights whose death should not require state reply."
And whether you like it or not, I do think a little less of you for using Black and white vs black and white or Black and White. I still care about you as a human being and appreciate much of the rest of your content, but I called you out on this *precisely* to make it less acceptable to promote racial division under the guise of good intentions. I want people to think a little bit more about what they are doing when they make distinctions like this in their written language. Now, I'm not trying to go crazy overboard about it like woke people do by dehumanizing and canceling people, but I can still say that I think the idea being the capitalization disparity is ill-intended and frankly a bit dumb.
Black within the North American milieu, is an ethnicity, black is a racial category. Language is a pain in the ass, I know. I highly recommend a book called "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness."
And Africa is host to more than a hundred ethnicities.
You're right about those being ethnicities, but Black, in the North American milieu is also one. Being a young one it often looks very subcultural, but it is an ethnicity.
You can slice or dice this however you want, but when you capitalize Black and not white, you are being racist if unintentionally. So somehow "Black" is an ethnicity but not "White"? Yet the same people promoting this ridiculous division are more than happy to use extremely hateful terms like "Whiteness."
Best form of the counter-argument here Stephanie. GJ.
Except I don't think whiteness is particularly hateful, nor queer, just some people use the word in a mean way and we get some flimsy associations as a result.
But it's all just divisive rhetoric. It really shouldn't matter, except that we have been trained to think it matters. True, there is no black or white, but many buy into this language-based binary system that keeps us arguing with each other. It's a mechanism of manipulation. Personally, one taboo I would like is transvestites around children. But that's my own opinion. It just feels wrong on so many levels.
Are you making the argument that culture has no genetic component? Because I would think that's one of the topics our host made the point that we are not allowed to discuss.
If culture does have a genetic component then those genes are entwined with the genes that express as skin color. In which case skin color is a visible marker of a cluster of genes that code for behavior. So the divider is both culture and skin color.
What people think of as black culture here in the US is just southern white trash culture that migrated all over the US after the emancipation of southern slaves. It ruins people. Blacks who were free and educated before the Civil War, either as freedmen in the South or just free in the North, had the same culture as educated whites and still do, unless they start aping the white trash again in the mistaken idea that that makes them more authentically black. That white trash culture was imported to the US from the borderlands of Northern England and it changed there over 100 years since immigration started here in the 1600s. But it didn't change here. And it keeps both whites and blacks down. No, I don't think there's any genetic contribution to culture except what damage is done by malnutrition and street drugs.
I'm not big into genetic explanations for race differences as opposed to lifestyle trends that can't be well-captured by statistics due to the imperfection of language to convey reality. I don't recall ever discouraging comments regarding genetics however.
Brian I worded it poorly. I meant any such discussion is taboo in the same way de Field's arguments are today. I would feel a lot more comfortable if I knew someone as rigorous and open minded as you were in charge of censorship.
Culture is an emergent phenomena with many inputs. I just have a hard time believing that the individual behaviors of the majorities that make up a culture don't drive that culture in certain directions and that some of those behaviors are instinctual/genetic. Swedish children aren't inborn with a sense of Swedish culture but Swedish culture is impacted by the behavior of Swedish people and some portion of that is likely genetic. If you accept that Swedish culture has high outgroup empathy then is it Swedish culture that drives Swedes to behave this way or is it high inborn genetic potential to empathy that drives Swedish culture?
Great post and very topical in regards to the current debate in Australia regarding a proposed new law banning “misinformation”.
https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/australian-governments-misinfo-bill
I’ve always been an advocate of having a bill of rights in Australia similar to that of the USA but the more I think about it the less convinced I am that it would do any good unless it truly was a right to “free speech” for the “people”. Our high court has always held that there is ann implicit right of free speech. Maybe we don’t have it so bad it even if it isn’t spelt out explicitly in our constitution.
https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/freedom-information-opinion-and-expression#:~:text=Constitutional%20law%20protection,government%20created%20by%20the%20Constitution.
————
Constitutional law protection
The Australian Constitution does not explicitly protect freedom of expression. However, the High Court has held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an indispensable part of the system of representative and responsible government created by the Constitution. It operates as a freedom from government restraint, rather than a right conferred directly on individuals.
In Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (1992) 177 CLR 1 and Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v the Commonwealth (1992) 177 CLR 106, the majority of the High Court held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an incident of the system of representative government established by the Constitution. This was reaffirmed in Unions NSW v New South Wales [2013] HCA 58.
As often happens when reading Unglossed, I don't quite get the point. However, one thing does stand out to me: if free speech should be a states' rights thing, how do you stop speech at state lines? Have a special Facebook for each of the 50 states?
Perhaps I'm not anti-censorship in the same sense that you're describing here, which seems to be focusing on race, but for me the biggest problem with censorship is the question of who gets to decide what to censor. It will inevitably devolve into political power moves, as we see happening today.
My own biggest concern is with the scientific censorship that accelerated with Covid. 'Consensus-defined wrong-think' is a great description.
While you might be all in on forbidding stories about George Floyd strangulation or the futility of recycling, what about stories which are less determinate? Where is the line drawn, and who draws that line? So to me, the most practical solution is to not allow any censorship at all. Admittedly it's not a perfect solution, but seems better than the alternatives.
This is an unfortunate and profound misunderstanding of the right of free speech, and why it should be absolute, and absolutely protected. The right you're protecting isn't the right for someone else to say something stupid - the right you're protecting, when you clutch your pearls, is your *own* right to speak your mind.
Only partly right. America’s free speech rights are not a placeholder for political interests as Stanley Fish and the author assert. Just because our Founders’ Constitutional vision has been suborned by powerful groups doesn’t mean it never existed or can’t recover.
The Devil can quote Scripture for his purpose, but don’t tell me that that that invalidates Christ’s teachings—revival is waiting in the wings!
Americans are more and more reasserting our faith in righteous law & order, and rebelling against Globalist falsehoods like global warming induced disasters, political endangerment of the food supply, and endless wars that only enrich the ruling class.
"America's free speech rights" do not exist. You cannot say things in the US without recrimination. Literally a former president has just been indicted for speaking about a rigged election.
'"America's free speech rights" do not exist.'
Aren't you confusing the constitutional right with the reality today? The whole point is that the constitutional right has been undermined and gamed.
That means his rights have been abridged, and he should be prepared to defend them. As should we all.
And that’s why you’re partly right; the part you neglect is that our Constitution is the touchstone to recovering & securing the rights we’ve been stripped of. This is what political titans like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump are working tirelessly toward.
I completely agree with your first sentence.
Bannon, Carlson and Trump are "political titans". You can't be serious.
If they aren't, the phrase is meaningless.
They are, and I am!
I mean, this is a lofty and admirable position, but it isn't what the founders envisioned. They were just trying to assuage the qualms of different state elites that the Federal gov wouldn't favor any particular state elites. Today it largely still doesn't, but we don't have free speech, if you say something that offends coastal elites then you lose your job and never have children. This has nothing to do with the government or what the founders envisioned for it, and everything to do with how the press interfaces with society.
I understand and agree with this comment. If that's what you were trying to say in the blog post, thanks for clarifying.
We have only those rights we can defend. To have a right, you must exercise - and defend it.
You'd think it's blindingly obvious.
It is illegal to question the Holocaust narrative in 17 countries. How is simply asking a question hate speech? Is asking the wrong question considered antisemitic?
https://kenkrypto.substack.com/p/when-did-truth-become-hate-speech
Depressing essay mainly because your vague hope that open government censorship may serve to convince people to rethink their opposition to the censored topic is silly. Go back and read what you wrote at the beginning: you traffic in what the government would make illegal speech.
Do you mean "go back and read what you wrote at the beginning" - of his current article? Or of his substack? Specific examples would make this discussion easier to follow.
From this current essay: "as a critic of the Covid vaccines, I trade in censored opinions and would seem an obligate free-speech supporter."
The contradiction is obvious. Everyone loves pure freedom, but societies cannot allow it. So when anyone purports to be a defender of free speech in an American political context they are just happy with whatever the current or just-before-current set of impermissible speech is. Berenson is JBC.
'So when anyone purports to be a defender of free speech in an American political context they are just happy with whatever the current or just-before-current set of impermissible speech is.'
Please. That doesn't apply to everybody. Not me, anyway.
I prefer Twitter's strategy: let them say what they want then let community-led fact checking be attached to the incorrect drivel they spewed.
Sunlight is brilliant disinfectant.
Twitter did not implement "Community Notes" because it's interested in "truth". Community Notes will be weaponized eventually. They're just letting the rubes feel like they can "correct" falsity for the time being.
edit: to correct punctuation
I agree with you in that I believe every single system that human beings invent will eventually be gamed.
Musk is an enigma to me, I won't pretend otherwise
The whole thing with him is theater, and I wish people wouldn't fall for it (again).
And yet dropped the ball on explaining the nuclear "sploding stuff" videos. This is like my comments on crowdsourced Tik-Tok knowledge, crowdsourcing only works if reinforced by institutional status that is subject to the same limitations on wrongthink that one might imagine crowdsourcing can solve, i.e. wikipedia is excellent but thinks box cutters caused 9-11.
On a lighter(?) note I wonder how censorship by law would work out for some Substacks - including yours. For now you can action your almighty Cancel/Block button in the Comments section but then only (some) egos would be affected, nobody would look for jail time or worse.
It would look like me not having a substack, because I don't want to risk my other liberties unless as part of an actual civil war where there's potential change. But that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
At the same time there's plenty of jobs I can never have in the future thanks to what I've written here.
For this you have my gratitude and I think that of many others. For all of Berenson's many faults he has also paid a high personal price (socially if not economically) for the things he has said. To knowingly violate taboo and pay that price takes a lot of courage. You have made a sacrifice for the betterment of your community and I thank you for that.
One should not confuse polite speech, or honest speech with Constitutionally protected free speech.
I would never - the former is infinitely more confining
State-enshrined free speech is merely a tentative agreement not to criminalize complaining about the government. But any intelligently-designed government will already make such criminalization borderline-impossible simply via rote checks and balances that give the minority a veto on the majority.
"State-enshrined free speech is merely a tentative agreement not to criminalize complaining about the government"
--------------
Grim. And probably accurate.
I'm with you, Brian. I get it.
As for A.B., I usually find myself rolling my eyes in askance when reading one of his Substack posts. (I kind of expected him to offer up how he "...almost got killed for the NYT" in return for a paid subscription 😃).
Support free speech! [Pay to see speech]
I had liked this reply, but have removed the like. I know that Alex has some content free to read after a week. It may be all of his content, I am not sure about that though.
Vibes are going to vibe. I don't strangle my keyboard to purport to be a free speech defender, and none of my work is paywalled for any length of time. Hmmmmm
I am reading your take on this with a grain of salt and I could agree that overt censorship might be "better" (like in easier to detect) than "covert suppression".
However I doubt -from experience- that the former would induce more resistance and if that would really be the case then why would any government/power make it visible and even legalise it just to make it easier to fight against it?
As a counter argument to the easier-to-resist-if-overt theory I should mention the eastern europe's communist countries where free speech was explicit in every state propaganda but self-censorship was implicit (self inflicted) in most social interactions. The so called "resistance through culture" meant that a very small number of people were absorbing as much forbidden information/culture they could get their hands on and share it in their small groups. I am sure a similar -quite small- percentage of people would do the same these days in America or elsewhere. I would hardly call that resistance.
As for Fentanyl Floyd, C'mon man, CNN so diligently cut out the part where he was sitting in the spacious police car, complaining about breathing difficulties with the same intensity as later laying on the floor, suggesting the orientation to be an invariant to the problem.
Another thought on the "i would ban this or that speech".
I guess the biggest problem is that you don't really know all of the consequences in advance. Something may seem obvious to you, but it's different than expected, more complicated. Deciding that in advance mightprevent reality from being understood. Whether some topic seems subjectively unpleasant to someone or not... oh well.
But I'm for legal liability after the fact, e.g. if it can be demonstrated that someone did not just voice an opinion, but propagated falsehoods about someone when actually knowing better - there were/are scenarios where that's feasible.
" guess the biggest problem is that you don't really know all of the consequences in advance. Something may seem obvious to you, but it's different than expected, more complicated." - but here, again, there is no essential difference between a speech restriction and any other restriction. All attempts by the collective to minimize the negative externalities of free individual action can have unintended negative externalities. That said I'm generally comfortable with societies making legal speech conform to collective preferences - I just want it to be transparent., not rendered into a Kabuki where journalist-magicians eat the heart of taboo-violating teens while playing violins over their twitter bans.
Enjoy the particular brand of fire you're playing with, as if we're handing out the restriction of speech button I'd be happy to make it feloniously illegal to lie about the enforcement and sentencing gaps like you just did, Glowie-for-free. It's not Black and trans people with carte blanche. It's people who are politically important to the regime. Go ahead and pretend a vaxx-decimated left won't ever find new leadership.
And yes, our terrible drug laws killed George Floyd, not Officer Chauvin who was already a crook for other reasons.
Wasn't Floyd also passing counterfeit US currency? That's still a crime.
Yeah, he's alleged with some credibility to have done that... pity we only criminalize it when the little-guy does it, but he didn't choke to death swallowing counterfeit US currency in a panic.
"I can't breathe" is something every perp says when resisting arrest. Unfortunate that language so clear can be used to misrepresent one's condition.
Perp implies you have no respect for the constitution. I presume innocence, otoh. And ethical people are supposed to resist crimes, including when those crimes manifest themselves in the form of an arrest...
And finally, 1. No they don't, but Brian won't ever throw you in jail for exaggerating, because it meshes with his awful politics.
2. If someone enjoys the presumption of innocence, misrepresents their condition infront of so many witnesses, and is not charged with a crime, we may have an actual issue there, but again, we live in anarchotyranny, and you seem only to argue for a different pariah class.
We live in an anarchotyranny? What is that, exactly?
Last I knew, resisting arrest was a crime. So in addition to being high on illegal substances and a counterfeiter, Floyd resisted arrest. Of all the criminals to turn into a hero.
The government, any government, isn't fit to exist, let alone decide what is acceptable for an individual to say. Controlling speech is the same as controlling thought. It's the holy grail of totalitarian governments.
Then explain how our free-to-lie-about-anything media is not our de facto totalitarian gov, and name an entity other than an authoritarian gov that could dethrone it
The corporate media is absolutely an arm of the government. The more powerful the government, the worse the indoctrination coming out of your televisions and radios.
Zelkova's response here is exactly correct.
The media is a tool of our government, but it can be dethroned by the people. If they would just stop watching and reading it.
Agree. But this is fundamentally a revolutionary statement. The media has operated as an arm of the state since at least WWI, when the Paris press generated French popular support for war on Germany to suit the Quai d’Orsay. Unless there are laws regulating the media then voters have no say over the media class's influence on controlling speech, and so in America deposing the media class would require a revolution.
You said it. If you want to change this government, it would require a revolution. But the worst thing you could do would be to replace it with an even more totalitarian version.
Why? Ultimately the qualitative nature of any government depends on the beholder. There is no such thing as a universally perfect government. Really the current US and coastal/leftist US are the freest places that have existed outside of pre-colonial America, /despite/ the fact that the media can impose lockdowns by hyping a virus, but this nearly total freedom is also why everyone is aimless and childless.
I could not disagree more with that last statement. Many of the people we would prefer to see having children are childless because they believe they no longer have to be dependent upon their children to care for them in their old age. The state will take care of me so there's no need to have children. At the same time the state is encouraging the least worthy among us to have children by subsidizing single parenthood.
Any time a person advocates for an increase in the state's power, it's so important to keep in mind that your enemies will be wielding that power over you very soon. Just ask all of the neocon, patriot act supporting "conservatives" who are now being called MAGA terrorists.
Funny how the left has gone from anything goes to shutting people up. I guess now that they have power they don't think anything goes anymore.
It's one thing that MSM can orate on some kaleidoscopic version of "free speech" for, after all, that is their constitutional right. The problem is that this is opinion-swaying powerful media, lockstep across US, Canada, Europe and Australia/NZ. These opinions are presented to and digested by a hive of sap suckers, who have been programmed to sap-suck for the last 3 generations (at least). It is very discomforting to see friends and family lap up the narrative, never questioning or having a single critical thought about the topic du jour, not recognizing they are being led like a horse by the reins, into a particular stall of perspective. It took the Covid madness and welcome anarchy to make me realize this has been the way for a long time. And Alex is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. He of all people should recognize the NYT as a shill since inception.
I'm honestly not sure what your point is here, but one thing I would make "taboo" but not outright ban - capitalizing Black but not white, which is racist, and just foments unnecessary resentment and division. Besides, there is not one person on the planet who is legitimately "black" or "white" in skin color unless you count albinos. Skin tone value statements should be simple adjectives and not divisive racial categories in a more enlightened society.
My point is that while free speech, like any other pure freedom, might be bodacious for the individual, it is impossible in a viable society, and we don't have free speech exactly for this reason. But by pretending we do, we allow the media to impose media-class preferences and values on everyone. We only stop noticing periodically when they take a break from revising their values, otherwise it's obvious. The solution is not "protect free speech all caps!" because how could the solution be something impossible outside of anarchy?
Capital-B Black is just intuitively natural to me. A proper noun for a unique social category - former sub-class, current ostensible equal, transplant from a particular continent based on race, what does this mean? This question is implicitly answered by any lifestyle/philosophical/political choice made by the American Black after desegregation, from Black Nationalism to Black conservatism. Most white equivalents were region/race-specific, e.g. Irish, German, and have become obsolete, save one.
That's a lot of word salad. You can't say that American blacks are monolithic because they aren't, in part precisely for what you just pointed out - black nationalism and black conservativism are at polar opposites of a political spectrum, just for an example. Also, not all American blacks are slave descendants. So if blacks aren't monolithic and whites aren't either (as you said, Irish, German, and have become obsolete) then if you capitalize Black and not White too, it's racism, that is, treating people differently based on their race.
I'm not saying it's a mean-spirited racism, but it's still racism, and it leads to more division and resentment in the long run, because it gives disenfranchised whites a reason to point a finger and go "Why are you making 'Black' more important than 'white'"? In short, it's just virtue signalizing that inflames racial tensions for no good reason.
PS I'm also old enough when we liberals were told "black" wasn't cool to use anymore, that the preferred term was "African-American." So capital B Black is also most assuredly temporarily and my prediction is that someone will decide soon enough it's time to reclaim the word Negro. If not that, then some native term from an African language. Already we've replaced POC with BIPOC. Just watch. I give it about 5 years or so.
"A lot of word salad" - I argued why Black denotes a unique status, meriting a proper noun. Wanting to be culturally and mentally African and wanting to be Anglo-Saxon would be polar opposites for anyone, but Black tells you information about the wanter. "white" might in the future but doesn't right now. Today, "Black" is useful and natural, "White" wouldn't be. Simple. I don't have to contort myself to capitalize the B, it feels right.
Your downstream reply: You are still used to a operating status where merely being uncomfortable with your preferred wrong-think will lead to its inevitable extinction. You imagine that if the left's preferred wrong-think did not exclude your own beliefs on health, this wouldn't lead to your extinction. Yet we have the NYT endorsing the state's criminalization of its preferred wrong-think, ie your beliefs on health. Why? Because merely being uncomfortable is not the engine of change you think it is. "Socially unacceptable" does not permit acceptance in society, how can you not see that.
"I argued why Black denotes a unique status, meriting a proper noun. Wanting to be culturally and mentally African and wanting to be Anglo-Saxon would be polar opposites for anyone, but Black tells you information about the wanter." HUH? Once again, more word salad. What "information" does this give you in particular? What does "wanting" have to do with any of this? We are simply using words to identify people's race, and when you capitalize one race and not the other, you are making the races NOT EQUAL.
FWIW, I shared this thread and the whole capital B thing with a black friend and his text back to me was simply: "White Liberals are racist as fuck."
You are making assumptions here about people based on their race and what they want and don't want...don't assume.
""Socially unacceptable" does not permit acceptance in society, how can you not see that." This is still nonsensical, we are always going to have certain words, ideas, and utterances that are frowned upon in "polite society," which in and of itself is not the same thing as government or corporate censorship. You are free to call me a "cunt" if you want - I might be pissed off, but I won't have you arrested.
What information - the wanter is a descendent of a Southern African-imported slave, whose ancestors endured or tried unsuccessfully to transcend Jim Crow, then to partially integrate into the US middle class in the late 50s / early 60s, only to be locked into subclass status by American industrial outsourcing and Great Society largesse. This is only the tip of the iceberg. "Black" denotes a concrete and unique condition, it's a proper noun. Being Black is not a figment of word salad, it's real.
The quote "White liberals are" etcetera is an amusing paradox. Tell your Black friend to look in a mirror.
What's really stupid about "Black" is it doesn't describe anyone's skin color. (Nor does "white".) I have a light-skin brother in-law whose skin is lighter than my Turkish husband's in the summer.
Interesting that Turks call American Indians "kizilderiler". Which means "redskins". They do call Blacks "siyah" which means "black'. Without any meddling from the US govt.
"{Free speech] is impossible in a viable society, and we don't have free speech exactly for this reason."
Do we have a viable society, or a collapsing one?
And who is the "we" that is allowing the media to impose their values on everyone?
The we is a tenuous consensus produced by the "plinko-game" of audience approval to rhetoric; this consensus includes allowable debate, i.e. Red v Blue.
LoL, Brian works "bodacious" into reply on comment about taboo words 😉
"protect free speech all caps!"
It makes more sense when viewed as a force vector instead of a position. As with most political entities.
I was out in the garden looking at a hornet's nest, when I suddenly realized that the acronym White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is not exactly a neutral & friendly description of my tribe.
Pretty good hair metal band too.
Literally worst animal!
Well, in rejecting the term "colored", we chose to permit "people of color". Did that make sense? None of this really does.
In rejecting "Negro", we turned to "Black" but both are words for "black". "White" has positive connotations, "black" has negative ones. Choosing "Black" to designate your ethnicity is to fight against embedded linguistic associations. I think it was a horrible pick.
When I'm asked to fill in my ethnicity on forms, I put down "Anglo-Saxon". Does that have connotations? Maybe North-western European is best. That's not going to offend anyone is it? Well maybe it is. I give up.
For a European like myself, the idea of having to state one's ethnicity on forms is otherworldly racist.
Once the US government started meddling with hiring and university admissions on the basis of the notion of ethnic group, it has become standard practice to have a "gender"/sex and "race"/ethnicity list. Pure steaming horse manure.
I don't know that the word "black" has substantially inferior connotations to "white" in the grand scheme. There's always a place for the anti-hero. This would seem to be why "Black excellence" is a naturally coherent and potent term, there's no dissonance being invoked.
And while I'm thinking about it, "black as the ace of spades". Ace of spades always portended doom to those who claim to read cards.
So a large group of people has inadvertently been identified with antihero. I have to disagree with you on this one Brian. Blackguard, black-hearted, black eye, blacklist. I'll stay white, thank you.
Right, but antihero is intrinsically positive, otherwise the word "nemesis" would obviously suffice
I similarly struggle with what this is exactly about.
When people say "me for free speech", then it usually means, by institutions of power from above, whether it was the state, now big tech / media, and the string pullers they are the proxies for.
It seems to be somewhat obvious that the greatest powers (able to do arbitrary shit by force, whenever they like) have the highest relevance and hence, it's what most people have in mind with free speech.
As for cultural taboos - well, at least hypothetically, those can shift, organically, as opposed to some force from above shaping things to their will. (influence by manipulation can turn into inofficial forces, of course)
Being for free speech w.r.t. instututions means to not make this unnecessarily easy for nefarious forces.
But it's also late and I have not fully parsed it all, lol.
Black is an ethnicity, is the point they've been making in capitalizing that word, like Irish.
But go ahead and let all your awfulness and speech restriction come out, I'm sure that it being taboo to talk about pivotal moments in Postmodern History isn't going to lead to the collapse of Western Society or anything.
Black is not an ethnicity. "African" is an ethnicity. BTW, I am in favor of free speech. I'm just saying it should be socially unacceptable (i.e. uncool) to use racially divisive language like Black uppercase vs. white lowercase.
It can't be "free speech" if things are socially unacceptable. Socially unacceptable means being outcast, unpersoned, defined as an animal with no rights whose death should not require state reply.
That's a ridiculous statement on a number of fronts. The main idea of free speech is that the government can't censor. Second, there's a vast continuum between knowing that it's not cool to call a woman cunt to her face vs. "being outcast, unpersoned, defined as an animal with no rights whose death should not require state reply."
And whether you like it or not, I do think a little less of you for using Black and white vs black and white or Black and White. I still care about you as a human being and appreciate much of the rest of your content, but I called you out on this *precisely* to make it less acceptable to promote racial division under the guise of good intentions. I want people to think a little bit more about what they are doing when they make distinctions like this in their written language. Now, I'm not trying to go crazy overboard about it like woke people do by dehumanizing and canceling people, but I can still say that I think the idea being the capitalization disparity is ill-intended and frankly a bit dumb.
Black within the North American milieu, is an ethnicity, black is a racial category. Language is a pain in the ass, I know. I highly recommend a book called "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness."
And Africa is host to more than a hundred ethnicities.
There's only one human race, with various ethnicities with their own cultures.
"And Africa is host to more than a hundred ethnicities." So is Europe but I'd also call "European" an ethnicity, just a broader one.
""African" is an ethnicity."
Almost!
Let's say, Bantu, Yoruba, Khoi & San, are ethnicities :D
"black", lol, good one.
You're right about those being ethnicities, but Black, in the North American milieu is also one. Being a young one it often looks very subcultural, but it is an ethnicity.
You can slice or dice this however you want, but when you capitalize Black and not white, you are being racist if unintentionally. So somehow "Black" is an ethnicity but not "White"? Yet the same people promoting this ridiculous division are more than happy to use extremely hateful terms like "Whiteness."
Best form of the counter-argument here Stephanie. GJ.
Except I don't think whiteness is particularly hateful, nor queer, just some people use the word in a mean way and we get some flimsy associations as a result.
But it's all just divisive rhetoric. It really shouldn't matter, except that we have been trained to think it matters. True, there is no black or white, but many buy into this language-based binary system that keeps us arguing with each other. It's a mechanism of manipulation. Personally, one taboo I would like is transvestites around children. But that's my own opinion. It just feels wrong on so many levels.
The divider is really culture, not skin color.
Are you making the argument that culture has no genetic component? Because I would think that's one of the topics our host made the point that we are not allowed to discuss.
If culture does have a genetic component then those genes are entwined with the genes that express as skin color. In which case skin color is a visible marker of a cluster of genes that code for behavior. So the divider is both culture and skin color.
What people think of as black culture here in the US is just southern white trash culture that migrated all over the US after the emancipation of southern slaves. It ruins people. Blacks who were free and educated before the Civil War, either as freedmen in the South or just free in the North, had the same culture as educated whites and still do, unless they start aping the white trash again in the mistaken idea that that makes them more authentically black. That white trash culture was imported to the US from the borderlands of Northern England and it changed there over 100 years since immigration started here in the 1600s. But it didn't change here. And it keeps both whites and blacks down. No, I don't think there's any genetic contribution to culture except what damage is done by malnutrition and street drugs.
I'm not big into genetic explanations for race differences as opposed to lifestyle trends that can't be well-captured by statistics due to the imperfection of language to convey reality. I don't recall ever discouraging comments regarding genetics however.
Brian I worded it poorly. I meant any such discussion is taboo in the same way de Field's arguments are today. I would feel a lot more comfortable if I knew someone as rigorous and open minded as you were in charge of censorship.
Culture is an emergent phenomena with many inputs. I just have a hard time believing that the individual behaviors of the majorities that make up a culture don't drive that culture in certain directions and that some of those behaviors are instinctual/genetic. Swedish children aren't inborn with a sense of Swedish culture but Swedish culture is impacted by the behavior of Swedish people and some portion of that is likely genetic. If you accept that Swedish culture has high outgroup empathy then is it Swedish culture that drives Swedes to behave this way or is it high inborn genetic potential to empathy that drives Swedish culture?