https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
I do not have a better response than this. Some people never learn anything from history...
I do not have a better response than this. Some people never learn anything from history...
Burning the Koran is offensive, should it be restricted? No! Freedom! Next they'll stop us watching old westerns and doing fancy dress etc! We have to be able to prevent this being extended to things which affect me.
Burning the Koran is offensive, should it be restricted? Yes! If we allow it then they can burn the flag/constitution/bible/effigies of the president/??? we have to be able to prevent this being extended to things which affect me.
"First they did x" construction works in both cases non?
This is the status quo and it's accepted by nearly everyone on the free speech side. There is no sequence of future reductions in human rights to prevent.
You are indeed making the “things that work in other places won’t work in America because of differences in race and ethnicity” argument.
This is a fairly lazy analysis that plays on America’s often unspoken cultural beliefs around race. While it is true that race is a major cultural marker in America, this fact is not innate and the oft repeated argument that “homogenous” societies can do things that we can’t amounts to little more than “we can’t do it because we are different”.
The determinants of diversity in the sense that it might be relevant to a discussion on free speech depend on a multitude of cultural factors. You can’t just say “well they aren’t diverse because they don’t match the criteria set out and defined by _America_”.
95% of Americans speak English. If half the country didn’t speak English well that would make for a very different society and culture than the one we have now.
Whether or not such changes lasts through several dozen generations is still undecided though.
You italicized innate so I assumed you meant to put special emphasis on that part?
For example, it's at least theoretically possible for someone who had ancestors a few generations ago that were enslaved to suffer some bonafide inherited and disadvantageous epigenetic mutations.
Or for those who has ancestors who got shell-shocked in past wars, got involved in serious car crashes, etc...
I'm not sure if such factors should be considered legally, lest competition turn it into some kind of pity olympics, but there's a non-zero chance large segments of the population came out of the womb genuinely, innately, disadvantaged slightly.
Emphasis on theoretically.
> there's a non-zero chance large segments of the population came out of the womb genuinely, innately, disadvantaged slightly.
may be slightly affected. Again, how is this relevant to a discussion on free speech?
My point was that there is no innate reason why race would lead to politically divergent opinions, at least not to the degree that it would lead to such major discord that it would require a fundamentally different model of free speech in society.
It's somewhat relevant since these epigenetic mutations can increase the probability of someone being a misanthrope, for example, that just hates other people and who doesn't care about their lack of free speech.
Or vice versa, someone with increased anxiety/nervousness/etc., and would be exceedingly disturbed by even small regressions in free speech rights.
White western Europeans have very similar cultures and societal norms due to their shared history. A Frenchman, Swiss and German are likely to have generally similar views on what would be acceptable speech for example.
But not all Americans have a shared culture and history that would influence their ideas. That's because, from even the very beginning, we have had a very civic minded form of nationality that 300 years ago was unheard of. And today is still fairly unique. But if I am a Presbyterian New Englander my cultural norms and what would be considered socially acceptable behavior will differ than a Baptist Southerner, A Catholic West coaster or an Atheist Midwesterner. There different regional cultures, religions, and cultural influences from our immigrant ancestors are going to shape things quite a lot. When I was growing up we called this the American melting pot. I don't know if that terminology is still used.
When you have a nation of immigrants they are going to have different ideas they want to express. Usually you will have one majority but many majorities. Traditionally that majority was rooted in the descendants of early English colonists. Sometimes derisively called WASPs. America has had a lot of strife between different groups interacting such as the large Irish influx during the potato famine. German and Italians during periods of upheaval in the late 19th century. Chinese immigrants on the west coast around the same time. Interactions and immigration both ways with our northern and southern neighbors. The consequences of the African slave trade. It goes on and on.
I'd love to hear an argument about how Switzerland is heterogeneous, but here's what I found:
Switzerland is a country of ~8.5M, or the same population as New York City, or 2/3 the population of the rest of New York State, or less than the population of Virginia and 11 other states.
And Switzerland is ~40k km², a bit less than New York State.
What I'm saying is it's very small compared to the US, with 330M people across 9M km² of land.
As for homogeneity, Switzerland doesn't have birthright citizenship (where the US does), so foreign nationals may remain foreign for multiple generations; it's also part of the Schengen, permitting EU members to travel and reside without a visa or other permission. All of this makes an apples to apples comparison with the US much harder.
Switzerland is ~75% Swiss nationals, with ~25% foreign nationals, but ~85% of those are from the Schengen area.
About 15% of the US population is foreign born, but almost half of those are naturalized citizens -- there's also 10M+ foreign nationals in the US illegally (more than the pop of Switzerland), though any children they have in the US will be natural-born citizens (unlike in Switzerland). If we include the first US-born generation, it jumps to 28% of the US population. And when we look at where those immigrants come from, two of the top three origins are in Asia (India and China).
Again, I don't know how to make an apples to apples comparison. It's likely that Switzerland is more heterogeneous than some places in the US, while less so than others. But if I had to make a broad statement, yeah, Switzerland is much more homogeneous than the US, and I'd love to hear an argument against it.
Already the direct-democracy bills of county elections destroy me. The _majority_ has voted to steal from me to pay for their daycare, housing, and other non public good subsidies every single voting cycle.
A direct democracy allows majority theft with no recourse or limit. It's proposterous!
There was a reason for voting qualifiers at the founding of the country. I say we bring them back if we want to switch to direct democracy so that only those with skin in the game get to vote: restrict voting to only those persons that pay income taxes on agi.
The phrase “tyranny of the majority” was rarely used by writers and thinkers in the founding period. It was alluded to in one of the 85 essays that made up the federalist papers and the coining of the phrase is generally attributed to a French writer several decades later.
Your characterization is largely historical revisionism.
I think Peter Thiel made some remark (maybe in his poorly moderated student youth period) along the lines of "Freedom is incompatible with democracy" which has an uncomfortable amount of truth to it assuming the state you are in remains actually committed to protecting those freedoms.
It is very similar to the rhetoric I hear when the left talks about attacks on democracy. They don't seem to actually mean democracy. They seem to mean their version of it, as in those voters that are aligned with them.
Absolutely. The big questions are if the transition to this state is inevitable, and once the transition has occurred are you better or worse off than under the Swiss system.
Going by the state of both societies the Swiss one seems to have a lot going for it.
I can say with certainty that I would be in jail for speech related offenses in any other country than the US.
Also, how is a minoritarian rule of the rich (plutocracy) a more just system than democracy? Yeah, they have skin in the game, and the game is protecting their wealth instead of contributing to the commonwealth. There's a happy balance to be found in there, of course, but you don't want to arrive at it via pitchfork.
Certainly, but if the government doesn't have regular election cycles it's an all-or-nothing approach.
Consider MBS. If he doesn't want to play ball with the cia, he won't, and there isn't much the cia can do about it. He's not going anywhere anytime soon, or potentially ever during his lifetime. Contrast that against a gov that holds regular elections. The cia gets the opportunity to influence the election outcome (chance 1) and then gets a chance to influence the winner if they're not already captured (chance 2), all the while knowing if they fail chances 1 and 2 they will get to try again in a handful of years.
> Also, how is a minoritarian rule of the rich (plutocracy) a more just system than democracy?
I don't consider it minoritarian rule. The minority can only say no change. They can't craft change of their own. This helps prevent the tyranny of the majority problem. However, the majority is what is needed to actually make changes, or more aptly a super majority. This helps to make change slow and harder, which is not a bad thing in my opinion, especially considering how the ruling parties tend to oscillate every decade or so. The change that happens trends to be good for both parties, not just one.*
*Obviously a lot of things pass that are terrible (e.g, inflation protection act), but at least it required more than just 51% agreement.