Rights are what makes me really care about politics
I'm a socialist and I have some ideas about foreign policy and economics, but when push comes to shove I care about individual rights secured against the government the way a parent cares about a child. It's a kind of caring that transcends politics.
Anybody who thinks the government can tell anybody what they can and cannot say is the flat-out enemy.
That's just what it is.
It is the same as depriving people of their voting rights. It is precisely that evil.
And I would be interested to know why anyone who thinks the government should dictate expression believes that people should be allowed to vote.
It makes no sense.
People do terrible damage by voting. They often vote "wrong," in ways that hurt other people. Millions are murdered as a result of the people voting their conscience.
The franchise a terrible power.
So what the fuck is it we revere in people that "we" would let "them" turn the US nuclear arsenal over to whatever irresponsible psycho the thought looked good in a suit?
(See... we and them. "We" should have the power to tell "them" what to say or not say. One seldom hears that "they" should be able to tell "us" what to think and say.)
Consider whatever that is in a human being that we revere by letting people vote and ask why that reverence for the autonomy of the individual does not extend to saying some shit.
"We" allow people to reproduce indiscriminately or not reproduce at all because there is something we hold secularly sacred in people... something that makes us say that the government cannot tell you to have babies or to not have babies, even though the creation of human beings is as serious a thing as can be, and even though we all have have to live with the humans thus created. If we were just being pragmatic "we" would exert great control over some class of "them" reproducing.
But even though the effects are immense we recoil at the idea of the government deciding. Deciding to make babies is too central to our being somehow. We revere the choice. (And share the consequences.)
Yet that reverence apparently does not extend to what people think and say. (And if anyone thinks proscribing speech is not proscribing thought, try outlawing some religion totally until the last person who remembers it is gone and then see if it reappears spontaneously when the ban is removed. None of us have thoughts that are not largely informed by what other people think and have thought... the expression of thought and the thinking of thought cannot be glibly separated.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
