There’s great attraction in being a “martyr” for bad causes. Another example is the Brave Medical Mavericks who speak out against Covid-19 health measures and vaccines in general, suffering the slings and arrows of social media and occasionally being sanctioned by their employers and state medical boards, plunged into the black night of repression and financial ruin.
Of course, becoming celebrities and making $$$ from public speaking engagements, books and Substack platforms helps ease the pain a bit.
There’s a variety of new income sources for Scott Adams to pursue.
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
And to run where the brave dare not go
And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star
Leaving aside his wilfull ignorance of the key phrase used in the push-poll in question, my very first thought when I read that particular factoid was wondering what the reciprocal poll would have said about white people’s hate. So why didn’t Rasmussen commission that poll too? [And for that matter why didn’t Adams wonder where it was?] And if the results had come out more or less equivalent to the first one, would Adams have come out and declared white people to be a hate group?
It’s all in how you categorize people. Adams considers Black people one group.
White people are not a group. They can be split in a variety of ways, with the two primary divisions being intelligent, good people like him, and commie liberal idiots like everyone else.
I had the same thought: If you could sort the results by party affiliation, what percentage of MAGAts would agree with the statement, “It’s OK for black people to vote”?
The people who refused to answer would be considered as “don’t think black lives matter” if we’re being consistent with Adams’ summary of the Rasmussen poll.
Now, he’s screaming that he was taken out of context. His new strip on his subscription site stars Ratbert as the “context editor” at a major newspaper who’s job it is to remove all context. You know, like the white supremacy context surrounding a phrase like “It’s okay to be white”.
Well now that he is self publishing on the web and out from under the heal of his comic syndicate he’ll be free to fully express his ideology through his comic. I predict that it will have all of the humor and nuance of Mallard Fillmore.
The SDMB can take away your “right” to post even if you don’t break the rules. They can be capricious. That’s the difference.
The government cannot without legislation/change in the Constitution. Big difference.
But that’s not what is supposed to happen. If it did, everyone would be upset about it. They just couldn’t take them to the Supreme Court.
It’s a difference in the enforcement process for fairness, not in the ethics of the matter.
The classic example of a driving license being a “privilege” and freedom of movement being a “right” shows what nonsense this supposed distinction is. Neither can be taken away capriciously. Both can be taken away according to a specific set of rules.
The distinction is between a “right” and specifically a “Constitutional right”.
The problem is that so many Americans thing that anything that is not enshrined in the U.S. Constitution doesn’t matter, to a point where they want to change the scope of meaning of words like “freedom of speech” and “right”.
States could up the requirements for a license, requiring more robust and regular testing. There would be no rights taken from those who do not pass the new requirements.
States cannot pass a law that tells you that you have no freedom of movement, unless they’ve gone through the due process of removing it from you.
I think that’s the problem. No one thinks that, no one at all. However, there may be the case that there are some who think that only things that are delineated as rights matter, so they try to frame everything in the terms of rights.
There would no rights taken because that’s not capricious. It’s just a different sent of objective rules that apply equally to everyone in the state. And it’s absolutely no different from any state deciding to change the rules by which your freedom of movement is restricted. You can be put in prison in different states for different reasons.
Driving is a right in every conceptual sense that freedom of movement is a right. It’s just not a Constitutionally protected right.
What on earth is the relevance of that? The existence of rules and limits does not define a right. Does freedom of movement imply that I have the right to walk into your living room? Can a 5-year-old vote?
A right is simply something that applies equally to everyone, is not taken away capriciously, but can only be taken away according to consistent objective standards.
Like freedom of movement, driving licenses and the right to post on SDMB.
If I have a right to drive, then that means that there must be a car available for me to drive. Not giving me a car to drive would be violating my rights exactly like not giving someone a platform for their speech is violating theirs.
