I think your comment smacks of retribution rather than justice, and it is a very dangerous attitude.
Social consequences should only happen if you say nice things about socialism or support LGBT rights, apparently.
How about you just answer the question? Do you think Trump should or shouldn’t have his reputation ruined, and should he or shouldn’t he be prevented (by conviction of impeachment) from holding public office? Do you think these efforts are “cruelty”?
I think his reputation should rest on his own merits or lack thereof, and he should be impeached if and only if he has broken the law according to whatever your constitutional rules are. Is that not enough for you?
Yes, please start another thread on cancel culture.
This doesn’t conflict with what I said. This isn’t a hypothetical – “his own merits” include years and years of history up to the present. By those “merits”, his reputation should be ruined. Do you agree or disagree? Do you think efforts to convince everyone as to his misdeeds (i.e. trying to ensure his reputation is seen as ruined) and hold him accountable (convict him due to “high crimes and misdemeanors”, which is a category determined by Senators and not otherwise defined) are “cruelty”?
You don’t think there should be consequences to someone’s reputation for engendering hatred?
I’m in agreement that having a bad moment or cracking one inappropriate joke should be the end of someone’s career, but that’s not what this thread is about, really.
Are you perhaps responding to the wrong person?
Or did you miss the quite obviously dripping sarcasm?
Sorry, my sarcasm meter was off and misread it.
Okay, dude, can we get back to the thread? Srsly
If his reputation is ruined on its merits then it’s already ruined. Everyone already knows what he’s done, he was president of the goddamn United States. What you are looking for is vengeance.
And this is really not about Trump. He doesn’t care and will be okay whatever, but that is not true of all the ordinary people who are caught up in cancel culture.
Nah, it’s about holding people accountable. Too many people who’s “reputation have been ruined” pop up over and over and over again. People though Karl Rove’s reputation was ruined after the Iraq War lie was exposed. He’s had a very lucrative career as a lobbyist and Fox News.
Sweeping things under the rug isn’t justice. And interestingly enough it seems white men get those third and fourth chances a lot and then are told holding them accountable is ‘cruely’. That’s nonsense. Deal with the consequences of your actions like everyone else.
Republicans are extraordinarily victimized by censorship in the same way that Michael Phelps was extraordinarily victimized by gold medals in the swimming event.
I’m at a loss as to why I should care about someone incurring the sort of negative attention that they thrive upon and purposely strive to attain.
This is just totally ridiculous. Not even worthy of discussion. Holding people accountable is not remotely “vengeance”.
No, I don’t think I did. I do believe that your statement is not as true as you would like it to be. They certainly are more vocal in their victimhood and persecution complex, where anyone speaking back against them is decried as censorship, but I disagree that that is actually the case. It is simply part of their misinformaiton.
This too, I must disagree with. It’s not really true that the majority of the media is on the Democrats side. It is a bit true that the media tends to be on the side of truth, and that happens to be the same side that the Democrats are on, but your way of framing it is much more accusatory than reality would indicate.
As pretty much the entire AM bandwidth is full of right wing talk shows, Sinclair Media has taken over a large number of local news outlets, and the prevalence of Fox, OAN, and Newsmax, I would say that there are quite a number of media outlets that actually do take sides, and have taken the side of the right over that of the truth.
When they were in power, there was reason to worry both about misinformation and censorship. How much did Trump et al attempt to push back against the rights of journalists to report the truth about his activities.
This is simply an accusation based on your biases, not on any factual information.
It is not laws that allow employees to be fired for no reason and with no notice, it is a lack of laws binding employers from letting employees go. That is a rather important distinction.
I support unions, and I think that firing people for no reason is silly. But no one is ever fired for no reason, it takes time to recruit and train someone, so letting them go is a loss for the company, unless it isn’t.
Not having to justify to a govt bureaucrat before you are allowed to terminate someone’s employment is not the “barbarism” that you seem to think it is.
Do you think that employees should be required to give a reason or a notice before they are allowed to quit?
Well, if you do let someone go for no reason then they get to apply for unemployment, and have some of their pay paid by the state. Here in Ohio, if you quit, you generally are not eligible for unemployment, unless you can show a compelling reason as to why the employment environment was untenable for you to continue working there.
So, would you consider that if someone was of a particular marginalized demographic, and their co-worker had a bumper sticker with a slur against that demographic, that to be a valid reason for them to quit, that they would find that employment environment untenable?
So, now that you understand the situation, would you approve unemployment for the employee who quit because they felt that their co-worker displaying this created a hostile work environment?
With my experience with JFS, if I were to fire someone for having hatespeech on their bumper, they would get unemployment. If someone were to quit because they are uncomfortable working with someone who displays hate speech against them, they wouldn’t.
As an employer, if I am just weighing overall harms, the bigot is harmed less by being terminated than the marginalized employee is by quitting.
Yes, they absolutely have a persecution complex, and lash out at any perceived slight. “Hit back 10 times harder.” As has been said on this board, those are the words of an abuser.
We already know that they make up their own realities, so obviously they are going to believe that they are victims and act accordingly. Oft times by censoring their opponents. Declaring that it is wrong for their speech to be responded to, declaring that boycotts should be illegal, that counter protests should be stymied. The entire pushback against “cancel culture” is them creating a boogieman, and then demanding censorship of their opponents to respond to their “beliefs.”
Yes, that is what the believe, and act accordingly. I see that you also believe their delusions and misinformation.
So, you think that people shouldn’t be allowed to respond to ideas that they disagree with, for fear that it may cause someone to have to apologize?
The only one that is calling for restriction of speech are those calling for people to stop criticizing speech, declaring that there should be no consequences of speech. That’s censorship.
I don’t see it as “hiding behind phony first amendment defenses”, I see it as defending the first amendment and the principles of free speech and expression.
I once had a manager that didn’t believe in the moon landing. I told him, “It goes deeper than that, there is no moon!.” I told him I had read it on a website, and that I would bring in the URL the next day.
That night, I went home and wrote a website that claimed that there was no moon. It had all sorts of fun counterfactual claims, like that there was no mention of the moon in any literature prior to 1945, that scientists couldn’t explain why there was a high tide on the side away from the moon, and a few other things that I made up on the spot. All stuff that would actually be very easily fact checked and debunked with minimal effort.
I showed him the URL, and then the next day he was a true believer in the no moon theory.
I actually felt bad about this, and took it back down shortly thereafter. But, I had the same ability to spread disinformation as facebook. Anyone in the world could have seen it. Just because it wasn’t popular doesn’t mean anything, I’m not all that popular on twitter, I think I had about a half dozen followers back when I was trying to use it to organize our weekly role playing game. If I had put out my no moon theory on that, it would have been just as widely viewed as when I had it running on my computer at home.
Replace every mention of social media with “printing press” in your post, and we could be having this conversation 500 years ago.
You say this like they’re mutually exclusive. They are not.
Yes, but talking about them is censorship.
Encouraging social media companies to regulate themselves and enforce their own standards doesn’t represent an attack on free speech. Individuals are still free to say what they want on or offline; social media can still decide to allow misinformation, but if that’s the case, then they need to make that abundantly clear. Make clear what is and isn’t misinformation. And if they allow all sorts of distasteful speech, then don’t tell people it violates their TOS; tell people that they have no such standards and let people abuse the product as they wish. But the lying and pretending to be one thing on one day, and something else on another, is the problem, you see.
In fact, the Onion actually makes a business out of printing misinformation; it’s just that everyone knows the Onion is a joke, which is not the case with Twitter or Facebook. When advertisers convince consumers to part ways with their money over misleading claims, we don’t allow companies to hide behind free speech defenses. Similarly, news organizations are not allowed to knowingly broadcast false news. Free speech “rights” and “freedom” of the press end when irresponsible speech when it leads over half of the general population to believe that vaccines are more dangerous than a deadly virus itself. Free speech “rights” and “freedom” of the press end when they inspire mobs of people to overtake a legislative house that belongs to all of us, not the stupid fucking racist mob. I don’t give a damn what you believe. A liberal democracy, and all of the rights that come with it, will wither and die if we take “freedom” to the extremes that you believe they should be taken. Rights don’t exist in isolation; they are balance against other rights and even with other necessary powers and responsibilities that governments have when acting on our behalf.
The key to prevent the big, bad government from becoming the bogeyman hiding in our closets and under our beds is to convince people to be good, informed citizens and to persuade them that they have the power to determine who the government is made of, whom it represents, and what it does on our behalf. If you fall prey to “I don’t trust government” under any circumstances, then you are already acknowledging that democracy will inevitably fail. “The government” is us. The government needs institutions that represent the public’s interest.
Governments can regulate social media responsibly and fairly – if we elect the right people to the government. If we elect the wrong people to the government, then it doesn’t matter whether you refrain from regulation; you will ultimately be led by authoritarians for whom rules, laws, constitutions, and your enumerated civil liberties won’t mean a damn. They’ll regulate social media on their own and for their purposes, whether the rest of us like it or not. We need social media companies to be responsible corporate citizens and to use their institutional powers as corporate and economic giants to operate in our best interests. We - not “the government” - but we, the liberal democratic citizens, have the right and the duty to use government on our behalf to compel them to represent these interests.
Encouraging them, no.
Making laws as to what they may allow on their platforms, yes.
And who is in charge of determining what is misinformation?
I do not believe that this is the case. I think that it is a complex subject that has no clear bright line answers.
There is some truth in advertising laws, and that is something that I earlier said could be enforced. If someone pays twitter or facebook to put information out there, then the one who paid should be liable if that information is not true.
Should not, or are not? I’d agree with the former, but we can clearly see that they are perfectly allowed to.
I see that.
Those are the “extremes” that we have enjoyed for the past 240 years. I’d say that a liberal democracy dies much faster when you start telling people what they are and are not allowed to say.
No, they exist because we fight to keep them, against those who would discard them for some sort of sense of security.
This is not something that I have indicated. The only bogeymen that have been referenced in this thread are your concerns about “FANG”, and you would protect us from that “bogeyman” by inviting the govt to come in and keep watch over you while you sleep.
And what if they think of themselves as good, informed citizens, and they disagree with who it should represent, and what it does on our behalf?
I would suggest not falling prey to assuming that that is anything like my position here. There are things that I trust the govt to do, and there are some things that I do not. Telling me what I can and cannot say is something that falls into the latter category.
Would you be saying that if Trump had won re-election, if the Senate were in Republican hands?
That’s a big if. What about if we do not?
That’s quite the dichotomy that you have proposed there. The govt is either 100% good and on your side, or 100% evil and oppressive. I would say that that slide into toltaritarianism only happens if we have already given up those rights.
How about well meaning but misguided people who agree that someone should be sanctioned for saying the n-word on twitter, but also that someone should be sanctioned for saying that Republicans are vermin?
Trump was president, and both houses, as well as SCOTUS all were Republican heavy, and yet, we could still criticize the govt and those in it. This proves your contention here to be false. It would only become true if you, in your paranoia that these social media companies are out to get you, invite the govt in to restrict the rights of others, as well as your own.
Look, as I said earlier, this thread is really about the other side of the coin, about whether or not social media companies should be allowed to restrict speech on their own platforms. It’s not all that useful to be fighting against two fronts, here, and it actually does undercut my point to @DemonTree that liberals are not calling for censorship when you are here calling for censorship. (I do still think that there are far more on the right who call for censorship than on the left, and do it much more aggressively, as well as much more cynically, but yeah, you are the kind of example that she can point to and say, “See?”)
That’s why we have a separation of powers. Even Trump appointed justices still believe in the constitution, and would strike down laws or orders that are in clear violation of 1A. Unless of course, it is already undercut by those looking to rein in speech.
Like I said, you can clearly see that they did not when they had the chance.
Well, you are right on one thing here, “we” are the govt, which means that we can disagree on things and what areas the govt should be used for our own good. I’m really glad that we are allowed to disagree. You may disagree that I should have the right to do so.
I am strongly of the opinion that, as much as you hate it, the First Amendment really is the foundational right that allows a liberal democracy to exist. As long as you have it, you can bring things back, as long as we are allowed to freely disagree with what the govt has declared as THE TRUTH, we can fight back against pretty much anything that the govt throws at us. Once we have compelled the govt to determine what is true, and only allow speech that is true, we have lost the right to disagree with the govt.
You may not see that as a big thing, but it really is. It may cause you some inconvenience, as people say things that you don’t want them to say, or to even say things that you don’t believe to be true, but it is an inconvenience that I think that we should be willing to put up with, as the alternative is far worse.