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The complaints about “free speech” I heard from conservatives over the past five years often had nothing to do with constitutional free speech, either. They wer
by matthewdgreen 10mo ago
The complaints about “free speech” I heard from conservatives over the past five years often had nothing to do with constitutional free speech, either. They were almost always directed at private companies and organizations moderating content; from time to time someone would try to claim a government nexus, but it was rare and always something like a request to take down some content (that often got rejected.) Given that we’ve spent years having a broad conversation about the principle of free speech, to suddenly demand that we restrict the conversation to one about pure First Amendment requirements seems a bit disingenuous.
Speech is important. Scientific speech more important. A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future. You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
- petcat 10mo ago[flagged]
- Ar-Curunir 10mo agoYou’re responding to is Matthew Green, who has done more for deployed cryptography and internet privacy than most people alive. He has absolutely “hit the pavement”
- petcat 10mo agoThat's great. He should keep doing it. Also study what the constitutional requirements and limitations of "free speech" are.
- zahlman 10mo ago> They were almost always directed at private companies and organizations moderating content Yes. They were motivated by private individuals losing their livelihood, rather than by organizations losing government funding that was not a priori owed to them. > You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses. Or you could fund it.
- stefan_ 10mo agoYou mean they were motivated by people losing their job, like when this government funding is gone? Thanks for playing.
- griffzhowl 10mo ago> A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future. This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet another scientific research institute. To me it seems more productive to get more specific and more substantive from there: How much of the research presently carried out at NCAR will continue? Are there alternative institutes or sources of funding that might save some of it? What are the likely tangible implications? Is the whole place even closing down or just some of it? Going in the other direction, less specific, more amorphous abstraction about whether or not this is a free speech issue risks derailing the conversation into semantics. There are interesting questions about wider meaning of free speech than what's protected by the first amendment, but getting moralistic because someone doesn't consider this a free speech issue, while you both agree that it's government defunding a research institute, and that it's bad, seems unnecessarily fractious