For those of you who wonder about whether I can defend those I disagree with or remain calm during discussions, I want you to read this comment thread. I feel like Dwight on the last episode of the office while Jim "explained" Battlestar Galactica to Andy.
Oct 11, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
8 comments:
I don't use my DIGG account anymore because of the comment threads that resulted...I was once accused of being a racist and capitalist because my comment was misread, or rather, misunderstood...Good luck in your commenting sir, apparently you'll need it.
Just some thoughts on free speech...
That guy Brian is right that they are limiting his free speech, but they are not limiting his right to free speech.
The right to free speech as provided by the First Amendment is narrow and circumscribed. It only applies against the government and it only applies when the speech is "constitutionally protected," which generally means it contributes to a constitutionally meaningful discourse. (So the Supreme Court has established things like "fighting words" and "obscenity" that are not protected speech, and in the case of defamation, we have a complicated tissue of rules to balance between the right to disparage and the right to be free from false and damaging disparagement.) In practice, that means we have scads of limitations on our free speech.
Depending on how you look at it, we have far more limitations on our freedom to speak than we have extensions. For example, there are economic limitations (I can't afford to speak my mind in a nationally televised advertising spot), customary limitations (I'm not allowed to say certain things in certain company), linguistic-ideological limitations (I'm not "allowed" to say things that our language, as controlled by our society, does not allow me to communicate), and practical limitations (I'm "allowed" to say things that other people don't understand, but if they don't understand them, I can't do anything about it). There is no legal recourse for those limitations: you cannot get somebody else to subsidize your speech, you can't force people to let you say things in their presence that they don't want to hear, you'll have a hard time escaping the "box" of the dominant ideological paradigms, and if people don't understand you, you cannot force them to.
All those limitations are limitations on free speech—they're just not constitutionally cognizable limitations. But most people have a standard for freedom of speech that is much wider than what is constitutionally cognizable, and they are only vaguely aware, often unconsciously, of the non-legal limitations I mentioned above. So when the people who run an online form like Opinion Talk say, "Don't use personal attacks," they receive a response like, "Hey, you're limiting my free speech!" That's what Brian does when he asks, rhetorically, "Are there rules to Free Speech[?]" The answer can only be an unequivocal yes.
Whether there should be "rules" to "free speech," and what they ought to be, are other questions, and difficult to answer.
Where this can be troublesome is when the non-legal limitations are employed, either overtly or covertly, by people in positions of power, whether governmental or not (like moderators of online discussion forums). The classic literary example is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the government actively works to pare down the language into something that no longer expresses anything meaningful. Since the particular expressivity of people's thoughts is generally confined to the language they have to express them in, that kind of program essentially destroys free speech by non-legal means, but makes it possible for the government to say, "No, you can still say whatever you want."
In my view, we have seen some of that, though not so obviously or systematically, from our government during the last few years. When they insist on using certain words like freedom, terrorist, insurgent, good, evil, patriotism, homeland, war, etc., they control the rhetoric and limit what people can effectively say. Since we attach so much political and emotional baggage to those words, if you try to disagree, you look much worse than perhaps you ought, which creates a chilling effect on disagreement and dissent. This is dangerous to freedom because there is no legal recourse against, say, the Bush administration, for its word-choices. They create a de facto limitation on free speech, especially for people who are not aware of what is happening with the language, to whom it does not occur that there may be different ways to talk about the issues with more nuance. For those people, their ability to think about the issues is hampered by the language in which the issues are presented to them. That, in my opinion, is the most insidious threat to free speech of them all.
I think Brian has an inkling of that, but he expresses it imperfectly when he calls the limitation (which is really just a suggestion, because the stated policy does not include enforcement) a "socialist" one.
The other commenter you interacted with, Wayne, is a good example of the Orwellian tendency when he suggests that the logical coherence of speech can (and perhaps should) take a back seat to its "entertainment" value. While he clearly believes he has a "right" to say whatever he wants (since he sees your criticism as "rule-mak[ing]"), so long as it is entertaining (one wonders what he thinks of illogical non-entertaining speech, or whether he believes that illogic is intrinsically entertaining), his position is essentially, "Let's batter all the meaning out of language. Then we can all say whatever we want because it won't matter what anyone says."
Despite Americans' acute sense of "free speech," which is far vaster than their legal right to free speech, few of them seem to have gotten much further along in their understanding than what Mark Twain suggested over a century ago: "[I]n all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane." You can see that pretty clearly in the comment thread you linked (and in most comment threads online). But when people can move past that informal "rule" and begin to do as Jim Boren suggested—"you punch a hole in the other person's logic rather than call them names"—the concern about suppressing "free speech" ceases to be an ideological counter-"argument" in specific conversations and regains its position as a political and philosophical topic. In other words, rather than responding to the limitation against personal attacks by complaining that his "free speech" was being limited, Brian should have addressed the specific limitation at issue—as many of the other commenters did. When he simply complained that his free speech was limited, he substituted ideology for reason and that emptied all the meaning out of the idea of "free speech." For him, "free speech" just became a tool to get his way.
And, ultimately, isn't that the root of the problem? When we use language and discourse as means of control rather than means of communication, we devalue our ability to think, which is the quintessential human quality.
Adam,
Was it you who posted this cartoon in the past?
You might live longer if you let it go.
Yeah Jay, I might. Call me pretentious or overly lofty or what have you, but I've often been reminded lately of the poem usually attributed to Martin Niemoller. I also think the poem cited furture down on that same wiki page is a great sentiment.
There's no reason why someone as willing and able as I am shouldn't speak their mind on even the most, presumed to be, trivial of issues.
Have at it, then. You enjoy the fight, so CHARGE!
You're not being pretentious, you just pick your battles according to your priorities, and everyone's priorities are different. I personally don't get much out of blog comment arguments-- I have rarely seen anyone change their minds or consider other points of view in limited-identity cyberspace... My windmills are in other fields, hence my sporadic and (generally) apolitical blog postings.
I completely understand your perspective Jay.
On my little blog it's not such a big deal, but slightly bigger blogs like the Bee that get five or six thousand hits a day means that while maybe 20 people are leaving comments, there might be another 100-200 just reading. I would hope that maybe some of their minds are open to change.
But again, I understand those who don't have a dog in this particular fight and I don't hold it against them. Like you said, we all tilt at different energy gathering devices.
just looking at the still frame of this you tube clip brings back happy feelings for me.
In defense of doing battle in online discussion forums:
I have to agree with Adam on the Niemoller poem, even in the context of the internet, which raises the tension apparent in the XKCD cartoon.
While we all know that the internet is filled with people who are wrong, and while the line from Mark Twain that I quoted above surely resonates with the XKCD cartoon, many of us are starting to see, in the vast stupidity manifest on the internet and elsewhere, a barrage of straws about to break the back of our collective discursive camel.
In our milieu, we see:
- the inarticulate mumblings of the President giving rise to a running gag on David Letterman's program, the ironically-titled "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches";
- contrasted with an articulate and inspiring orator, Barack Obama, who seems vastly smarter and more sure-footed than the President in both verbal ability and analytical skills, garnering significant popularity for the Presidency and giving hope to people who long for a higher level of discourse; and
- interesting web features like "Mail Goggles" for Gmail, which, when enabled, requires users to do some simple math before sending an email late at night or on weekends, to keep them from firing off too much stupidity in their email, and audio comment previews on YouTube, in hopes of stemming the tide of insipid comments there.
Meanwhile, on the more serious substantive side, we have the proliferation of ill-considered religious ideology at home and around the world and widespread acceptance of pseudoscience (you can observe this particularly acutely by working in a general bookstore or watching the "non-fiction" bestseller lists). The rise of popular critics of religion (e.g., Maher, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, et al.) and popular advocates of rational investigation (e.g., MythBusters, Snopes.com, et al.), in my opinion, signals a shift. People are not willing to put up with idiocy any more and they are willing to fight back the forces of foolishness.
If that means volunteering some free time to go on websites like the Bee's Opinion Talk which, as Adam alludes, is associated with a print newspaper, which gives it a little more gravitas in the marketplace of ideas, then I think that's awesome.
The cry of "lighten up" and "let it go" and "don't take things so seriously," to people like Adam, or people like me, just sounds like code for, "Hey, we like living in a world where stupidity and irrationality and foolishness get to run rampant without anybody calling them on the carpet!"
But why would you want that? Why would you not want to live in a world where people are as intelligent and articulate as possible? Is it because you have some misguided, ill-considered idea that intelligent and articulate people, who work to really communicate with each other, in ways both useful and artful, are killjoys? Do you see someone entering an argument and fighting for clarity and civility as someone who gleans no joy from life at all? Is the only way to take joy from life and seek happiness to be a sloppy thinker and let foolishness run amok, even when it crosses your own front path?
Rather, as many throughout the history of humanity have discovered, the examined life, the life of reason, is vastly more satisfying. If you want to live longer, exercise your mind, stay keen, and root out foolishness wherever you find it.
Post a Comment