I "get" that you don't "get" the idea underlying the First Amendment

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Wed Dec 4, 2013, 06:49 PM - Edit history (1)

And I don't care. Folks who don't "get" it by now are just lousy people. It's like explaining to some wing-nut for the tenth time that Obama wasn't born in Kenya... at some point you realize they are highly resistant to "getting" it, and that is what it is. Write 'em off. Hopeless cases..

Unfettered, even dangerously unfettered speech and expression is America's one great remaining political idealism contribution to the world.

We jail everyone. We shit on workers. We murder people right and left. Our whole government is owned by corporations. We blow up anyone around the world who makes us nervous. We spread democracy through murder. We are a bunch of anti-intellectual religious kooks who have fallen behind in many ways.

After a remarkably bold idealistic start, we have been over-taken by most first-world governments in so many things... healthcare, wages, wars, environment, etc.. We don't lead the world in many of our ostensible ideals any more except in our extremely uncomfortable level of Freedom of Expression.

In terms of who is ahead of whom, our current level of freedom of thought is ahead of most of the rest of the first-world. (It is all relative. The question isn't how free we were in 1910, but how free we are relative to our comparable fellows today.)

We can draw cartoons of Mohamed, deny the Holocaust, write fan fiction about Eric Cantor having sex with Mister Spock... because the government cannot be trusted to censor shit. Not this government. Any government, past, present, future or hypothetical.

This is America's only remaining unique positive ideal.

So OF COURSE to some crackpots this one thing we have... this one area where we are BETTER than the bulk of the rest of the world is something to cry about.

Well, authoritarian stooges are authoritarian stooges, and are the enemy.

So there.

[font color=green]An addendum, re: the "1st Amendment isn't an absolute right as defined by the Supreme Court" argument... yes. That is absolutely true. It isn't, and in the past it was even more restricted. And precisely the same is true of voting. Now, does that strike anyone as a sensible argument for disenfranchising more people? I assume not.