Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other.
This is all so disheartening.
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This is all so disheartening.
Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).
No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.
In the copy I found of their constitution, it only mentioned freedom of speech for the government. On their house floor.
What was it like there in recent times? Much state repression for political thought or unapproved opinions?
The Chinese constitution guarantees free speech universally, another part of the constitution is used to control all facets of life in line with the state narrative, and that’s a charitable interpretation when we just pretend that the process of law matters at all, and distinguish when it is just procedural theatre or a real constraint on the state
Conflicting parts of constitutions can change everything
The jetset class doesn't really care about a single nation. For good (trade binds fractious governments) or ill (neofeudalism), they try to separate themselves from the proles.
In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight.
As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.
It's a bit like that Game of Thrones scene where Sean Bean brings a slip of paper into the throne room.
It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.
How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around, but apparently their memories and experiences now fall into death hears.
Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
False
“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1].
Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3].
[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh)
[3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...
Press, academic and political speech freedoms are at a generational low point in America.
The President has never before had the power to directly police academic speech and the media’s coverage of him. MAGA voters have no idea the power they’ve given the Presidency, which could be used in the future by a Democrat President to literally just cut funding and pull licenses for people who say stuff the left doesn’t like. (On the other hand, we can put the J6’ers in a foreign prison for a few months, mothball the antivax movement and maybe dismantle the coal plants.)
That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.
In reality long periods of political instability make people quite happy to trade freedoms for peace.
At 3.5% of the populace taking up arms (not in protest but in war), that would far outnumber armed government officials in most countries. I don't doubt that a government choosing to concede at the point those 3.5% signaled peacefully they are likely to get violence soon, since the government conceding before that happens indicates they are weak enough to not be able to fight it off. Of course, If you have 3.5% of the populace fighting you can defeat even a horribly asymmetric situation, as the Chechens showed when they gained independence in the first Chechen war against Russia where almost everything beyond small arms were obtained via capture from the enemy.
At best your study shows that a government that capitulates before violence is more likely to be defeated, which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win -- and if both sides think they can win then odds are quite good the odds of winning lie somewhere closer to the middle of the odds if the actors are rational. Concession before violence is more likely to indicate the odds lie outside the middle.
On the other hand, you have the government meddling with the political alignment of educational institutions, which is both new and alarming (e.g. the Harvard thing).
Domestic use of military is another really bad precedent from a "freedom" point of view, so I think the current administration is significantly net-negative so far.
No. The 3.5% figure specifically refers to nonviolent resistance [1].
Would note that “new research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak” [2]. But the fact remains that it’s harder to identify ineffective mass protests than effective ones.
> which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win
This assumes a lot more rationality than violent resistance (and corrupt governments) tend to have.
Instead, the evidence is that violent resistance fails more often than nonviolent resistance. In part because violent resistance helps the government consolidate power over its own violence apparatus in a way nonviolent protest inhibits.
[1] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/978...
[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questi...
There are billboards covering my local highway reminding me daily that I'm a racist antisemite because I don't support Israel's imperial occupation, political manipilation and wholesale genocide of Palestine civilians.
People in other cities who voice this same concern are getting kidnapped or become the subject of targeted harassment campaigns that include vans rolling around with the names and faces of dissenters hoping to inspire local stochastic terrorists to commit violence against them.
The federal government put out a memo attempting to ban government employees from using words such as "Black", "female", " marginalized ", "equality", "climate crisis", "sex", "victim" and more in their communications. [0]
Free speech is already dead, and is being held up in public like a puppet, brought out and paraded around when it serves the administration and then locked back in the basement when the day is over.
You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care. But get 50,000 truckers (let alone 12 million people) to go on strike over something, and the whole country will grind to a halt.
OP is wrong. But billboards that upset you aren’t evidence of restrictions on speech.
To be fair, the Romans traded long periods of recurring civil wars for peace. We’re nowhere close to that in America.
e: cmon, downvoted just for providing the example all of these replies are asking for - really?
The billboards contribute to an overall campaign backed by billions of dollars to create a chilling effect. If you are unfamiliar with the chilling effect:
> The "chilling effect" means that people are being discouraged or intimidated from engaging in expression for fear of negative consequences, such as social disapproval, retaliation, or lawsuits.
This is a well-established phenomenon and a direct threat to freedom of speech in the US.
Very real threats of violence, disruption and social ostracization have been levied and sometimes carried out against conscious dissenters of the ongoing Palestinian genocide. If the ultimate effect of something is to chill free speech, then it is textbook restrictive.
Further reading:
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/chilling-effect-overv...
Essentially they are tools that affect democratic coordination more so than fighting. If you can still coordinate despite them, then the amtal rule applies.
Not by telling them they should care. They have to experience. Unfortunately, with dictatorship, once you are experiencing it, it's already too late.
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The reasons democracies slide towards less freedom is that in theory decisions should be made by people who care and are informed. But in reality, a single vote every few years is too imprecise to express any kind of informed opinion.
You pick and issue, do research and vote according to what's best for you and/or society. Except you can't vote on the issue. You vote for a party or candidate which also has stances towards dozens other issues. So even if you provide signal in one dimension, you provide only noise in others.
Voting for parties/candidates is like expressing your entire opinion, a multidimensional vector, by picking one point from a small number of predefined choices.
The only solution is for the left-wing of US politics to stop disarming itself. The reason that voting power exists is because it represents the fighting power of the voters. When you decouple the two, you create a power imbalance that gangsters and tyrants can exploit.
Capitol riots are just a symptom of that power imbalance.
I’m not sure how anyone listening to the American discourse around Israel and Gaza can conclude there is a chilling effect around anything in the public space. (Note: not academia.)
More specifically, this argument —one side is trying to chill the other by speaking too much—could be used to justify censorship around anything.
Speech around Gaza is absolutely being suppressed. But billboards aren’t evidence of that.
What is to be done?
0. Start by moving the overton window to the edge of civility. Do not provide any justifications for your opinion. For example, "Protestors inside a government building should be met with violence"
1. Don't address any points they make
2. Make a snarky passive agressive response, thus winning.
3. Flag them for hurting your feelings. By discussing your ideas concretely ("who should perform the violence" "why?"), they have explored the "uncivil" aspects. This grounds for deleting their comment.
You need moderation both ways.
Yes to the First.
But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.
Bonus points if the cops arrest him before he goes to school tomorrow.
Couching threats of violence in political language shouldn’t change anything in that regard.
(Well, it does these days. But it shouldn’t. That’s how you get kids gunned down at prayer.)
Anyway, bottom line is, adherence to the First doesn’t mean we abandon law enforcement, or military sense.
While absolute free speech remains unattainable in practice due to inevitable societal boundaries, it should serve as an aspirational ideal toward which we continually strive, minimizing deviations rather than expanding them. Speech restrictions often and quickly devolve into subjectivity, fostering environments where only dominant ideologies prevail.
So, of course, by all means, restrict speech that harms children, incites violence, etc., but be very careful to not open that door too widely.
I think that everyone (yes, literally everyone) would agree that direct incitements and threats of violence such as this would be fine to censor and deal with appropriately. As a free speech advocate, I know a lot of folks with free speech absolutist views yet I don’t know a single person who’d be against any of that.
The reality though is that, in practice, these extreme examples tend to be used to justify censorship only to end up making the rules vague and subjective enough that, sooner or later, folks start being censored for wrongthink.
Also, “moderation” is just a soft term for censorship.
I think Westerners and perhaps especially Americans think it has intrinsic power because they have a strong rule of law and effective independent courts so they are used to their Constitution being well inforced.
However, in a country where this is not the case the Constitution is just a piece of paper...
Growing up in Nepal and witnessing some large non-violent and violent protests, I was frankly, baffled to see people standing on the sides of the streets and holding sign boards as protests
Where's the rallies? Where is the mass involvement needed for a successful protest? where are the street blocks? non-voilent doesn't mean just standing there.
The first time I actually saw something worth being called a protest was during the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it exposed the American police system for what it was, and the system's inability to control protesters peacefully
I've seen a lot of protests around NYC on various topics
Recently more with Palestine
> You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care.
I think you're wrong here Do it for one day nobody cares Do it for a week, people notice Do it for a month, you've got regime change
Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?
I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.
Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done
When I was young and still under the illusion protests did anything, I recall going to a protest during the 'occupy' days. Obama was coming into town and we wanted him to be able to hear us chanting or see our signs.
My memory is pretty bad at this point on the context, but roughly how I remember it going was he was going to some sort of convention center. We started walking there, and about halfway there this mysterious but incredibly confident and authoritative person with a megaphone showed up and told us we had succeeded and the protest was over. About 90% of people actually believed that and left. The 10% of us that were like "who the hell is this lady and why would anyone listen to her" kept going. Then the police surrounded us and beat the shit out of anyone they could get to. We never got anywhere close to Obama's route.
[] https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/gwen-walz-said-she-kep...
Maybe I'm missing a pun somewhere, but the phrase is 'fall onto deaf ears'!
I think everyone understands tribalism to some extent. You would probably expend more effort to protect your child than you would a stranger. Populism just turns up the knob on this instinct.
Honestly, would be nice for modern day leaders to have that kind of commitment to collaborative institutions.
I feel like some of them are just trying to openly accumulate power for personal gain.
Occupy Wall Street lasted longer than a month, and I'm not sure they achieved regime change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
You could argue that it's below the 3.5% of the total population threshold mentioned in the previous comments tho.
It was an anti-vax protest [1]. Canada isn't anti vax [2]. The protests were unpopular [3][4].
The convoy didn't go anywhere because it had nowhere to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#cite_not...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/measles-vaccination-poll-1.75...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/15/politics/fact-check-canad...
[4] https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/two-thirds-of-canadia...
You're just not being targeted, aren't exposed to it or aren't paying attention.
In my comment, I said, "People in other cities who voice this same concern are getting kidnapped or become the subject of targeted harassment campaigns that include vans rolling around with the names and faces of dissenters hoping to inspire local stochastic terrorists to commit violence against them."
CNN article on it: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/business/harvard-doxxing-truc...
Excerpt:
"The “doxxing truck” appeared days after the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups, a coalition of Harvard student groups, earlier this week released a statement that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” following the attacks by Hamas that have killed more than 1,200 Israelis and more than 25 American citizens. More than 1,400 in Gaza have also been killed since Israel started strikes on Gaza following the deadly Hamas attack.
Some students and their groups have since distanced themselves or withdrawn their endorsements from the statement amid an intense backlash inside and outside of Harvard."
Video evidence of these vans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2C7gw02WoY&t=142
If you watch the entire video, you will see people talk about the chilling effect they personally experience regarding publicly expressing their dissent against the genocide.
There is a chilling effect, it's not debatable, and it's not debatable that they are the result of well-financed disinformation campaigns seeking to protect the US-Israeli colonial empire. This is all open, well-documented information.
> More specifically, this argument —one side is trying to chill the other by speaking too much
No one made this argument. That is a straw man provided by you seemingly out of nowhere. The billboards aren't about "speaking too much", they're subtle propaganda campaigns. You have not even seen the billboards I'm talking about, have not asked me about them, you're just dismissing them out of bias before even understanding their content, purpose or who is paying to have them literally cover my local highway. They are actively creating a conflict narrative.
What you view as hateful, others will view as loving. And what you view as loving, others can view as hateful. Painting the opposition in simplistic terms like "evil" and refusing to even try to see why they feel they way they feel solves nothing and empowers extremists. And when groups led by such people "win", the majority still lose.
IMO, any side of any belief, be it individualism vs collectivism, atheism vs religion, sexual openness vs sexual restraint, free speech vs censorship, capitalism vs socialism, etc, etc. can easily morph into something harmful. You may have discovered "evil", but after many decades, I've come to see that most people's hearts are in the right place. But there are always a significant fraction on any side of any issue that, for whatever reason, cannot regulate their emotions and seem to need to strive for the extremes.
Compromise can happen if you reject extremists. Solutions can be found if you understand that the extremists on your own side are as much the opposition as the other side of an issue. Purity of belief always seems attractive on the surface. But moderation is not a cop out, it's pragmatism. Moderation is the practical philosophy through which solutions can be found. Fundamentalism, extremism, dogmatism, are approaches that lead to worse outcomes. Moderation leads to better outcomes. History has shown this again and again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
When you centralize power you’ve created a point of control/leverage with significant value. It will eventually be captured.
> except for when it leans authoritarian
Totalitarianism, Crony Capitalism, State Enforced Communism, Authoritarianism, etc. are all variations of the same root rot: centralization.
When you centralize power you will always get centralized power. A global centralized power is terrifying.
Armed citizenry? I do not see any other way. Power always corrupts.
Called out academia as an exception.
> You have not even seen the billboards I'm talking about, have not asked me about them, you're just dismissing them out of bias
I’m dismissing them on the basis of being billboards.
> They are actively creating a conflict narrative
Yeah. That’s legitimate speech. To pretend there isn’t a debate about what to call what’s going on in Gaza is a bit insular and counterproductive.
Again: there is a chilling effect. Disagreeable billboards aren’t an example of that.
My curiosity is piqued by this. Do you mean to say you've moved there from somewhere place? And what do you mean, why is it the only country for which you're politically optimistic?
I don't mean to pry, and have no ulterior motive or point in asking. It just seems like a strong statement, and I cannot guess what you mean, or if I'm missing some cultural insinuation here or something. Taiwan does sound like a very interesting place to me, generally, though.
Particularly when the mistake you're correcting was so reasonable and charming. It's an excellent example of an "eggcorn".
If you haven't heard of eggcorns, fear not: the word "eggcorn" is itself an autology, i.e., a word that is an example of the phenomenon it describes. So if you remember the word, "eggcorn", you should be able to remember the concept. An eggcorn is a type of malapropism, but one that could plausibly fit the context of the misheard original word or phrase.
So, for example, "eggcorn" could plausibly have been the word for the object which we actually call an "acorn".
Similarly, when I read "into death hears", I immediately knew what the writer meant, and had a little chuckle to myself thinking about how it actually made total sense. So perhaps we could point out to them nicely the lovely eggcorn they were using, rather than text-shouting.
Political activity is high in Taiwan and there are many viewpoints represented. The government doesn't lash out mindlessly against protestors which is something I've never encountered having attended protests throughout the West - the USA, the UK, France, Australia, it seems governments are compelled to meet all protests with violence.
Furthermore taiwanese activists are incredibly organized. At the bluebird protests it was estimated there was many tens of thousands of people, but within hours of the protests being announced there were tents, food lines, water, and bathrooms set up for people. Some anarchists even set up a sound system and had a little rave down the street. There were also anarchists peppered throughout the crowd with medical supplies, and inevitably communists selling newspapers lol. There were two massive PA systems on side roads with hundreds of chairs for people to sit on, and plenty of cover to block the rain - and all these people her despite the massive rain storm!
I saw similar during the multiple pedestrian rights protests I've been to. The only bad protest I went to was a poorly organized bike protest.
I also very much enjoy the shenanigans of the Taiwanese legislative yuan. Throwing sausages at each other, stealing bills and running to the MRT so they can't be signed, barricading each other, getting into fist fights. It shows proper respect for the life or death nature of the decisions they're making.
Here's some photos from the bluebird protests https://photos.app.goo.gl/45L8FE6bVPDLVmdFA
I recently also went to a massive music festival that was highly politicized. Did you know there's a taiwanese politician that's also a singer in a metal band? Anyway his band did a lot of political speech during their show, which I found interesting. Furthermore there was a great deal of anti PRC messaging and art (which is often implied to be anti kmt as well). Another random memory of the music festival is that people will just leave their things lying around in the park, and the festival is ungated in the middle of the city, but nobody will take people's things because that just doesn't really happen in Taiwan. It's incredibly safe here.
I rambled. My overall point, is that people here genuinely feel like they can make a difference individually, because they truly can, and therefore they do. In my pictures you can see people sitting around on laptops. That's an impromptu working group to organize some recall efforts or something along those lines.
Other countries convince their populations that to make anything happen you need to convince 30 million people to agree with you first. In Taiwan you can go to a g0v hackathon and change the country in a small way in an afternoon.
A good thing to remember is that shitloads of people didn't learn from those kinds of events.
The young adults who threw rocks at black girls going to white schools in the southern USA are still alive and still voting and still hold a grudge.
Look when the civil rights act passed, and look how hard the south went republican after that.
>Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
A lot of genuine Nazi believers went to "political" camps during the Nazi regime and they did not change their tune. They eventually got out, and just kept being Nazis, because they were Nazis because they genuinely believe the ideology. People who were literally sidelined by stupid Nazis infighting continued to advance the goals of the Nazis regime. Getting targeted and harmed by their very own regime did not change their opinion of it.
The same happened in Soviet Russia to all sorts of genuine communists who got gulag'd anyway, and still strongly held communist (stalinist even) beliefs (if they survived)
Tribalism is one of the strongest buttons humans have. We should be less surprised that it works so effectively
You are taking for granted how many of these damn billboards have cropped up recently and how prominent they are. Don't you make the connection to McCarthyism? We've seen all of these tactics before, and road signs have long been a prominent medium for controlling public opinion.
Very much appreciate the insider story. I've had a quick browse of your blog and will go back to it when I get a bit more time. Kudos to you for pursuing your interests boldly.
When Audrey Tang was digital minister, you could just walk into their office during office hours and talk about whatever you wanted, so long as you consented to the meeting being recorded and uploaded to youtube. I met them at a g0v hackathon once and came to say hello, and they bade me sit down struck up an instantly deep-dive conversation into how to maintain data integrity using technology like ipfs what with the PRC constantly cutting our fiber cables.
I'm not quite sure what they're up to now that they're tenure's over, I saw their face on a massive billboard about some tech conference and heard a rumor that they're teaching at some university in like Australia or some such?
This is my concern when I photograph protests, but in my experience the people that don't want to be identified are taking pretty big steps to ensure it, e.g. wearing masks and whatnot. Anyone else should safely assume they're being photographed, after all Taiwan has ubiquitous CCTV. And again, it's not like the USA where you shouldn't even bring your phone, and there's a high likelihood you'll be blackbagged by the cops, it's just safe and not a big deal to be at a protest. I'm very convinced Taiwanese people enjoy far more enforced rights than Americans.