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Specifically think tanks and organizations. Now I still think it's wacko, as are of course a lot of things about the man, but on paper the idea that individuals have free speech, not organizations, is perfectly coherent.
Having one's rights end where those of a legal fiction begin is one of the more insane accepted beliefs of our time.
There's definitely a bi-partisan contingent of people who think corporations should shut the fuck up about politics, that their involvement amounts to bribery and that Citizens United was a bad decision.
It's of course a longstanding gripe in US lefty circles, "take the money out of politics" and so on, but individualistic libertarians on the right and even MAGA people don't hold woke corporations in their hearts. So RFK codes as a friend more than he does as an enemy.
No it's not, it's completely bonkers. An organization - especially something like a think-tank - is just a group of people gathered for a common purpose. Anything that a member of the organization says can trivially be rebranded as the speech of one or more of the organization's component members.
My individual natural rights come from Gnon. And are therefore inalienable.
Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?
The only coherent theory of rights that provides for organizations to have rights is one where those are privileges granted by the State, which are as revocable for corporations as they are for individuals.
From the rights of the natural persons they are made up of.
Let's assume that rights are transferable or transitive, which they are not.
What then of organizations that only exist on paper as objects of ownership, that contain no people or people that have no rights? Are these rights revocable by the participants?
This is evidently not the source of such rights, corporations are treated as facsimile persons, and the rights they are granted are legal fictions that only exist by analogy and have no serious philosophical backing.
They may be agents of people who have rights, but they themselves possess no such thing.
Such an organization cannot do anything without a person being involved somehow. That includes corporations. If it does not do anything, the question of rights is moot.
The idea that if I make a film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, it's my right, but if I get together with a bunch of other people and make a better film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, that can be censored, makes no sense. And the no-rights frame makes it absolutely pernicious, because it means there's no reason the law cannot be such that organizations are forbidden from denigrating Hillary Clinton, but not from praising her.
How about you making that film on behalf of people who are not allowed to make such a film by themselves, such as Hillary Clinton and her agents?
The idea that you can launder bribes through this mechanism should be an argument against this being a coherent framing of the world rather than for it.
And that's regardless of whether you view bribing politicians as something that ultimately is a right or freedom.
I don't view it as that binary because to me the whole frame is wrong. Applying rights as a category to something that's not an individual is a category error that yields strange results as legal fictions always end up doing.
Hillary Clinton is certainly allowed to make a film about how bad she is, or how good she is.
Not beyond certain limits of funding she isn't. Isn't that the whole controversy?
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