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Bluntly, that’s just the cost of freedom. How many people get punched in the face for saying something unsavory, yet there is no national conversation about cur

by tjs8rj 4y ago

Bluntly, that’s just the cost of freedom. How many people get punched in the face for saying something unsavory, yet there is no national conversation about curtailing speech? Why didn’t we have that conversation after the Dallas police shooting shortly after Obama talking about police violence? Or the mass riots spurred on by democrat politicians? Or the Jan 6th riots following trumps speech (actually, he got deplatformed everywhere following that). Or the congressional baseball shooting following Bernie Sander’s calling Republicans hateful for not passing healthcare bills? Obviously this attack is unacceptable, but if these other instances didn’t move people to curtail speech, the fact that this relatively minor event does tells me this is more about pushing an agenda and putting politicians ahead of freedoms. As far as I’m concerned in the conversation about the limits of free speech, Pelosi is nobody special. Would we curtail speech because some random person in Ohio got assaulted for saying mean words? Of course not, so why would we do it for some powerful politician, who’s used speech in just as inciting ways as well no less? To put it plainly: should we curtail freedoms because somebody attacked Pelosi? The answer to that is the same as the answer to “should we curtail freedoms because speech makes people mad sometimes”. The way we’ve answered that as a society in all other instances is “no”, so the answer remains the same.

kenjackson 4y ago
Actually there was a lot of discussion about this sort of thing after the baseball attack. But in any case, we can't limit freedom of speech because of "unreasonable" implications of speech. Simply saying you hate Pelosi, isn't grounds for any reasonable person to think you try to kill her with a hammer. But if someone said, "we need to kill her" then that is much more prosecutable IMO. Unfortunately what probably works best to avoid these sorts of incidents is critical thinking and common sense. I do think the echo chambers on the internet create less of this - so these sorts of things will happen more frequently.

by tjs8rj 4y ago

kenjackson 4y ago

Actually there was a lot of discussion about this sort of thing after the baseball attack. But in any case, we can't limit freedom of speech because of "unreasonable" implications of speech. Simply saying you hate Pelosi, isn't grounds for any reasonable person to think you try to kill her with a hammer. But if someone said, "we need to kill her" then that is much more prosecutable IMO. Unfortunately what probably works best to avoid these sorts of incidents is critical thinking and common sense. I do think the echo chambers on the internet create less of this - so these sorts of things will happen more frequently.