"Party of free speech," my ass.
replies(6):
That's funny, considering Bush II effectively established the coalition of business interests, religious zealots, and neofascist militias, which then expanded to be the backbone of Trump's support. Cautionary tale about consequences of one's political choices? I wish.
There is, they just don’t like it for aesthetic and/or historical reasons.
The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
If the centrists and moderate conservatives could make common cause, they would easily shut out both the far left and far right wings of American politics. The demographics are there.
I think the main wedge preventing this unification is still abortion, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. But it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings. Real tail wagging the dog stuff.
These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing. They aren’t extremists. They are the party views.
The ACLU won our expansive free speech protections defending the KKK in the 1950s. But today, the ACLU has become short-sighted. They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy which allow social progressives to continue fighting. Young progressives are happy to sacrifice free speech protections to prevent hate speech.
On the other hand, social conservatives have always been eager to curtail speech they consider obscene or liscentious, and now Trump is using executive powers to punish protesters, creating an authoritarian atmosphere unlike anything we've experienced since perhaps the McCarthy era.
There are organisations like FIRE and EFF that give me some hope, but it increasingly feels like all sides would rather cement themselves in power than continue the infinite game of liberal democracy.
"The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation."
1. The Constitutional right to free speech under the first amendment (i.e. specifically that the government may not use its authority to limit or punish its peoples' expression of ideas)
2. The vague notion that others should not be able to criticize you for something you've said or written
In this thread we are more concerned with the former. No one on the left is trying to enact laws to punish anyone's impolite use of pronouns. At worst, maybe someone has asked you to be considerate in some non-official setting (which has little to do with the first amendment).
Elections are by and large not contests of policy, and I think it’s likely that most American voters (across the spectrum, not just the GOP) aren’t voting in their own self-interest anymore.
What is a boycott but cancel culture? The idea of the free market is that good behaviors and products emerge because consumers "vote" with their wallet. If a company has bad values I don't support then I don't shop there. Enough people do that and the company collapses. So, what remains is an economy where every company acts virtuously.
Theoretically. Then enters propaganda and the GOP. They tell you this invisible hand is bad, and companies should be able to do anything. At a glance this appears to be free speech, but it's not - it's the exact opposite.
You see, they can say anything they want, but we can't. We may not criticize them. Our opinions are not valid, they're "Cancel Culture".
Furthermore, spend a little time on BlueSky and you will find huge support for the hate speech laws found in other countries.
Finally, the distinction between government regulation of speech and private regulation of speech is key in the court of law, but it is almost irrelevant from the point of view of a philosophy that values open inquiry, debate, and dissent as indispensible to human dignity and progress.
What Democratic president has issued an executive order anywhere equivalent to Trump's order requiring pronouns match the gender "at conception", and the anti-scientific claim that gender is a male-female binary?
The right also wants to block books which have nothing to do with gay characters, including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, “Maus”, “The Handmaid's Tale“, “Of Mice and Men“ and “Brave New World”.
"We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement."
That's a boycott.
Quite the opposite. I stopped donating to the ACLU after a few years of the last trump administration because I could no longer stomach it given the clear direction trumpism is taking the country. I still support the mission ideologically but can't back it up with my money. Seeing trump this time around I'm glad I haven't wasted the money - the constitution is dead.
Mill distinguishes between natural penalties (which are just results of others distancing from the person) and artificial punishment:
"It makes a vast difference both in our feelings and in our conduct towards him, whether he displeases us in things in which we think we have a right to control him, or in things in which we know that we have not. If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable."
I think it is clear that actions like urging an employer to fire such person are more on level "make his life uncomfortable" than "we may express our distaste and we distance".
For actions "which concerns others" Mill writes:
"The evil consequences of his acts do not then fall on himself, but on others; and society, as the protector of all its members, must retaliate on him; must inflict pain on him for the express purpose of punishment, and must take care that it be sufficiently severe. In the one case, he is an offender at our bar, and we are called on not only to sit in judgment on him, but, in one shape or another, to execute our own sentence: in the other case, it is not our part to inflict any suffering on him, except what may incidentally follow from our using the same liberty in the regulation of our own affairs, which we allow to him in his."
That's absolutely not true
In 2017 they filed a lawsuit defending conservative / far-right Milo Yiannopoulos [1] and spoke up for suppression of Trump [2]. Defended someone wishing death to gay people [3]. Filed an amicus brief supporting the NRA's free speech in '18 [4]
And tons of other examples every single year after that: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-dc-metro-over-...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/donald-trump-has-free-...
[3] https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/06/aclu-defending-guy-calle...
[4] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/new-york-state-cant-be...
"But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty."
"It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological."
"The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it."
(Also note that your original citation was also related to judgements based on actions that concern only the judged person: "Though doing no wrong to anyone, a person may so act as to compel us to judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a being of an inferior order")
How are you defining "deficit-reducing"?
>Over the four years of President Biden’s term – from January 2021 through January 2025 – we estimate that he approved $4.7 trillion in new ten-year debt through legislation and executive actions.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-biden-add-...
That rate of debt increase is neither responsible or sustainable - though such irresponsible behavior has now been adopted by both parties. Both parties seem to have become radicalized and are catering to their worst instincts.
There are two ways to lower the deficit: increase revenue or lower spending.
As you say, neither party does particularly well at lowering spending.
The moderate Republican approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through regressive taxes. The general theory since Reagan (and before) has been taxing the upper brackets hurts economic growth. The ideal of this is a flat tax or “fair tax.”
The centrist Democrat approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through progressive taxes. The general theory is that wealth inequality is overall bad, and since purchasing power is more or less logarithmic in dollars, the upper brackets suffer relatively less from higher tax rates. The ideal of this is the post-war 90% top bracket.
Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking. Household debt is already frighteningly high and the savings rate very low despite relatively high interest rates. If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
Of course this is all written in very broad strokes and there are a hundred nitpicks one could make on this general point of view, but this is a forum comment and not a dissertation on political economics.
>...Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking.
Many people point to the high government spending in some of the OECD countries, but what they fail to recognize is that the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. The difference is that in those other OECD countries, the middle class pays a higher share of the taxes and there is more money available because there are a lot more middle class tax payers than high income payers.
>If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
The tax to GDP ratio has remained fairly stable for decades: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The effective tax rates paid by the high income earners is fairly close to the highest it has ever been.
Your original point was:
>The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
Again, I have a hard time considering a party that increases spending so much that debt will be increased by $4.7 trillion to be one that can be called "deficit-reducing". (Nor can the R party be called that either of course.) Just because the D party talks about raising revenue doesn't really mean anything.