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Mind you, those opinions are held by the powerful, who's opinions also need no protection. The unpowerful, unpopular ideas don't even get calls for protection

• mlindner 4y ago
  If the powerful have no protections then they won’t be the powerful for long and then the shoe will be on the other foot and a new powerful elite will be created (ostensibly what is happening right now as a certain group of elite have largely taken control of both the media system and the school system).
  • CommitSyn 4y ago
    Care to share who that certain elite group is?
    • bozhark 4y ago
      A billion to one, it’s new money
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
• whatshisface 4y ago
  Free speech as a concept means that the unpowerful, unpopular ideas are protected by the same laws that protect powerful unpopular ideas. If you want to protect only the latter, you need to convince your culture that they want free political speech with exceptions. The whole point of lumping all speech together for the purposes of making it free is that the powerful can't make exceptions. Once you've said one kind of speech is coming from "the powerful," you've said that they are the ones deciding which ideas get to be exceptions! Surely we know better than to give the powerful more power as a means of protecting the powerless from them. Is it not contradictory to imagine that "the powerful" will not write these laws and decide how they are interpreted and enforced, when their ability to do those things is the definition of the set we, in this thought experiment, identify them as? In fact, the point you are making about unequal protection under imbalances of power is perhaps even an argument for maintaining an absolutist stance against reasonable exceptions - because that's an effective tactic for protecting something in a flawed political world that can turn those exceptions into things you didn't imagine when voicing support for them.
• culi 4y ago
  The "Free Speech" movement started on American campuses as a reaction to the red scare. At the core it was anti-war and a lot of college students who wanted to talk about the little red book without ending up on a list. College students died in some of these protests Kinda similarly, the "right to bear arms" interpretation of the 2nd amendment didn't really happen until the Black Panthers. Everybody talks about the "right to bear arms" part of the amendment but for some reason we no longer bring up how that sentence starts: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" It's kind of a confusing amendment in general. For most of it's history it was basically treated like 3rd Amendment (about soldiers not having to be quartered). It seemed kinda odd and in fact was the second least often cited amendment behind the 3rd amendment because of this. It was actually the Black Panthers, a bunch of young hip highly educated commies (mostly), that strongly pushed for this interpretation. Both "right to bear arms" and "free speech" are much more recent in American politics/history than most people realize. Yes the original amendments had those words, but the meanings of them weren't really hashed out until rather recently.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    Where can I read about the Black Panthers starting the contemporary Second Amendment movements? As I'm sure you know, it's an especially right wing movement.
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Your interpretation of this is pretty popular today, but is completely historically false on both the first and second amendments. On the second, privately owned ordnance weapons and warships were extremely common in the 1800s, and the definition of "well-regulated" was closer to "well-equipped" than to the modern word "regulated." In fact, the earliest "gun control" laws were about when and where you could fire your cannons. It took until the really 1920s to start thinking of the second amendment as a "collective" right which allowed any restrictions. On the first amendment, it has been under societal attack since the founding of the country. The laws against sedition were some of the first laws ever passed, and were an attack on speech. In the early 1900s, it was all about preventing protests from labor groups and women who wanted to vote. The red scare was a very recent instance. Thankfully, the judiciary, since 1800, has been very good at striking down governmental attempts to control speech, and created the strongest legal regime around free speech that has ever existed. This regime had its last great test with the red scare. Twitter-FBI "state-informed" moderation and these ridiculous speech codes are just another attempt, in a 200 year old tradition, of the powerful to control other people's speech. You are looking at a narrow slice of American history and generalizing from it. The whole history of the country is quite encouraging in terms of the rights of the individual, and I think we will see a turnaround on the current situation around speech, as we have every other time. Meet the new puritans, same as the old puritans.