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"Free Speech" doesn't exist now, and hasn't for some time. One cannot lose what is already long gone, and perhaps never existed.
Even if that's true, it doesn't address how a "modern conservative" regime should deal with the issue. Instituting a policy of "agree with the government's agenda or face retribution" doesn't strike me as compatible with my (potentially inadequate) understanding of what conservatism stands for.
A "modern conservative" regime should attempt to maximize conservative values: high trust, low crime, broad-based economic prosperity, building for the future, stability and order, cultivation of virtue, legible consequences for wrongdoing, social cohesion, etc. To that end, it should allow speech as long as it doesn't disagree too much with conservative values. Speech that does disagree too much with conservative values should have social, economic, political and legal consequences enforced by the full weight of social institutions.
In other words, more or less the existing regime that you and other "reasonable" types have observably assented to, just with my people on top. None of this is mysterious or obscure. If you're curious as to how it would work, just look around you. The alternative, where we create some rigorous ruleset that covers all contingencies and bridges any level of values disconnect with a shared framework of impartial institutions and norms, didn't actually work, because that sort of framework isn't actually possible. Pretending otherwise is stupid and unproductive.
Speech has consequences. Speech is always going to have consequences. Yes, including via the Government. No, it doesn't matter what's written on the old parchments; ink and paper cannot and have not constrained human will. That's reality. The government constrains my speech in any number of ways, thumbs the scales, tilts the balance. It should do so to advance my values, not to quash them. I contend that the principles this entire argument is built on are a figment, a mirage, of no durable substance. There's no there there.
Negotiation within a shared ruleset as a viable method of conflict-resolution requires trust. There's insufficient grounds for cross-tribal trust any more, so that sort of negotiation isn't a viable method of conflict-resolution between tribes. Or are you really going to argue that the apportioning of "districts and partnerships and special privileges" and their analogues is rigorous and fair everywhere throughout the land, and that DeSantis' unreasonable attack on Disney is the unique, utterly unprecedented intervention?
I appreciate the candor. I think it's bad when governments punish speech that disagrees with government values. I thought it was bad when the communists do it, I would think it's bad when conservatives do it. Both are a manifestation of authoritarian government rule, and I find it dispiriting to see conservatives abandon this principle.
DeSantis was more than happy to give Disney a special carve-out for his social media bill. I think it's bad to for the law to give corporations special carve-outs. DeSantis changed his mind after Disney said things he didn't like. I think it's bad for government officials to retaliate against private entities for speech they engage in.
Does trying to crush all non-party-owned media count? Does blatant party lawfare against entire industries count? how about siccing the NSA on artists for making art the party doesn't like? Do you ever even hear anything negative about these things except from us? What precious principle would we lose if Republicans were the ones doing this instead?
At least it might get you noticing and complaining about it happening.
Yes, yes, yes. One hundred percent to all three examples you cited. I think it's bad when governments punish speech that disagrees with government values no matter who runs the government. Did you expect me to answer differently? And yes, principled parties continue to point out these issues, like some libertarians and advocacy groups like FIRE (ACLU has given up that mantle long ago). If you want to argue that it's ok for Republicans to abandon principle when their foes do, I suppose that's a coherent position to adopt, and I appreciate you being transparent about it.
But it's not a principle if the only time someone ever mentions it is when group B makes some feeble attempt at retaliation. It's just a weapon for clubbing group B with.
I agree!
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Why is it bad when governments punish speech that disagrees with government values? Why that formulation specifically? If we're going to punish speech, why does the mechanism matter more than the result?
And yet, it seems to me that government officials retaliating against private entities for speech they engage in is the norm, and arguably always has been the norm. "Hostile work environment", "Diversity and inclusion", contract preferences, selective prosecution, isolated demands for rigor, the list is endless. You can, by selective framing, build a coherent and consistent story where Blues are in the right and Reds are in the wrong. I contend that such a framework is isomorphic to "it's okay when and how blues do it."
My model of you is that you are willing to watch me and mine suffer functionally unlimited amounts of abuse, as long as that abuse doesn't tweak your idiosyncratic and highly legalistic value prescriptions. I know for a fact that you're willing to advocate lawless violence against people very like me when it suits you, and then blame my tribe for the easily-predicted consequences of that violence when they arrive. I know this because I've actually watched you do it. "Dispiriting" is a start for the feelings this engenders, yet what is the point of complaining about it? The world is as it is, not as we might wish it to be. What is there to do but to seek as clear an understanding as possible?
Because governments are powerful, and have the legal authority to cage you and kill you sometimes. Examining government action in this context seems like a reasonable per se (bad no matter what) demarcation line, but I'm open to considering similar concerns if they're a result of some another mechanism.
I think it's bad when governments punish speech that disagrees with government values no matter who runs the government. There's no need to refute positions of mine you've made up.
Uh what? Consider my curiosity piqued.
Edit: I think you're referring to burning down Minneapolis police precinct building? Yes, I support lawless violence against the government whenever it abdicates using its authority in a responsible manner. Although I'm not sure what you mean by "people very like me", are you the government?
People are powerful, and can coordinate your death or caging in a variety of ways, only one of which is Government as such. Government does what some specific group of people want it to do. If you have a problem with what the Government is doing, you have a problem with the people wielding it.
Here's a handy example I just came across.. Here we have a government official advocating a completely insane law. Yet I maintain that this is a cultural problem, not a Government problem. Leave the population the same, and no system you devise will prevent this woman from doing some approximate analog to what she's doing, because all she's doing is executing the coordinated meanness of her ingroup through the channels available to her. It hardly even matters if her plan succeeds, because if it is blocked procedurally the meanness will simply be routed through some other channel. If the harm she's threatening is halted, it will be because some other population coordinated meanness better, not because the system "works". The coordinated meanness holds all the explanatory power; systemic analysis is the pursuit of epiphenomena.
Speech is a coordination mechanism. Speech is the coordination mechanism. What we should be concerned with is what's being coordinated. How it's being coordinated seems to me to be largely a question of immediate practicalities. Speech can, by itself, destroy government and law, norms, whole societies. It can destroy everything you know and love and plunge you and everyone you care about into a lifetime of horror and immiseration. It has done this repeatedly in the last century alone, and unless the viruses or the AIs get us first it will without question do so again.
If that regrettable eventuality is to be forestalled, we are going to have to suppress bad speech. Such suppression is going to need to be effective, and Government can be effective in at least some cases.
I disagree that partisan Government action in this context is bad per se. I submit that politics as a whole cannot be separated into public and private spheres in any meaningful sense. The personal is not necessarily political, but once it becomes so, unilateral disarmament is neither an effective response nor a reasonable ask. Further, the phrase "private", in the context of one of the largest, richest, most influential concentrations of raw power on the planet, does not seem to me to contain meaningful information. They are a nakedly political actor in a culture war that is well past any semblance of restraint. They openly support criminalizing my community. They do not give the slightest fuck about my rights. I do not see how caring about theirs while they are actively trampling on mine will contribute to better outcomes.
If Disney helps coordinate political changes that destroy our society by, for example, successfully communicating to Reds that literal warfare is their best remaining hope for the future, the bullets and bombs don't hurt less because it was a putatively "private" entity that got the avalanche rolling. Conversely, if punishing Disney's political actions through political actions of my own is effective, it might prevent the bullets and bombs.
I do not wish to assign to you positions you do not actually hold. It seems to me that you see Red Tribe culture warring is relatively more dangerous and destructive than Blue Tribe culture warring, given your choice of engagement points. This impression forms from watching your (highly effective, and genuinely admirable, IMO) critique of some of the more prominent Red Tribe foibles, a perceived absence of similar criticisms of Blue Tribe foibles, and a general attitude of, if you'll forgive the paraphrase, "aren't these things I'm pointing out reprehensible? Aren't we better than this?" This is effective rhetoric, but I think it is both dead-wrong and deceptive, to others or at least to oneself.
You carry yourself as a mistake theorist. Probably you are a mistake theorist! I disagree with mistake theory, and so I disagree with you. No, it is not reprehensible. It's war, and this is quite mild for a war. No, we aren't better than this. I'm not, and I do not and will not concede that you or any other of the politically-engaged moderates are either. The conflict contains all politics. If your are politically active, you are already a combatant.
Suppose there's a rule you care about. You don't care who breaks the rule, you just don't want it broken and want people who break it punished. Two groups are engaged in a struggle, and break the rule in their fighting. Side A breaks the rule ten times. Side B breaks the rule once. For various reasons, it's a lot easier to enforce the rule against B than against A. What to do? One way of looking at things would be that more enforcement is better than less enforcement, so you should enforce against side B, and hope that successful enforcement helps establish a durable norm. Another way of looking at things would be that you should put your enforcement effort into the side breaking the rule most frequently.
In my view, both answers are foolish. The rule is being broken because of the struggle. Attempting enforcement in such a context doesn't uphold the rule, it only contributes to the struggle. Intervening is indistinguishable to both parties to picking a side. If you are willing to pick a side, you should pick the side more likely to implement your rules once the conflict is concluded. If you are not willing to pick a side, you should look for ways to broker a peace, or figure out how the struggle started and how to prevent it in the future. What you should not do is intervene from behind a pretense of neutrality, on the expectation that the people you intervene against will understand that it's just the principle of the thing. Even if it really is the principle of the thing to you, it isn't to them, and insisting that it should be so, or worse simply assuming that it is so, is a waste of everyone's time.
To be clear, I do not criticize you for supporting lawless violence in a context you deem appropriate. It seems abundantly evident that almost everyone does, myself certainly included. It's just that most people seem determined to lie about it, to themselves most of all. I too admire candor, genuinely and deeply.
But in the first place, the government is people. In the second place, the violence so unleashed did not confine itself to Government people or property. It metastasized out of all control, nationwide and without restraint. It laid down hatreds and sorrows that will in all likelihood outlive us both.
In the third place, when the easily predictable and repeatedly predicted massive, nationwide increase in murder and other forms of violent crime asserted itself, you argued that it was the fault of cops not doing their jobs right. I think the ideas you espoused, ideas based on a lie, made effective policing impossible in large swathes of the country, and the result has been thousands of extra dead people and thousands more maimed and brutalized, yearly, for the indefinite future. I think the ideology you subscribe to is directly responsible for all that carnage, a small but significant portion of which was directly and explicitly aimed at people like me, with the support of both the culture and the government. I think you are willing to cheer on the destruction of an order you despise, but take zero responsibility for the worse horrors that replace it. And perhaps I'm wrong, but I think you'll do it again, because you've learned nothing from the exercise. Real people, thousands of them, will be dying every year for the foreseeable future, because of something you personally spoke in favor of. The world will be measurably worse in significant ways because of something you personally spoke in favor for. I've had that experience before. I spent a lot of time and effort chewing on my tongue over the last two years, trying (with limited success) not to have it again.
It was the cops versus the mob. You (individually and Blue Tribe generally) backed the mob, and they won. And once they won, they came for people like me, over and over again. They pointed guns at people like me. They threatened people like me, beat people like me, humiliated and victimized people like me. A couple times they murdered people like me, and a couple more times they viciously persecuted those who declined to be victimized or murdered. One could say that none of that was your fault; you just made some abstract arguments about destruction of property. On the other hand, one could say that much is learned about a tribe by looking at what reasonable individuals are willing to accept and argue for. It seems we share this view, given your comments upthread.
I feel bad that I can't give this the attention it deserves, as it's buried several levels down in last week's thread. Your argument for the suppression of speech is quite a remarkable position, and one I don't believe I have ever encountered presented this transparently. Perhaps you should rework this post as a top-level comment?
I'll briefly respond to some other points meanwhile:
What I believe != what I write != what you read != what you remember reading
I've written a lot about blue tribe foibles (gender identity inanity and my firm support of Kyle Rittenhouse to name just a couple), but even so, I wouldn't expect my writing to be representative of anything. If there's a suspicion of hypocrisy, I think I've demonstrated that I don't shy away from answering direct questions.
Ok but you said:
"You directly advocated for X" is not at all the same thing as "You directly advocated for Y, which had X downstream effects".
I have a vague recollection about our conversation regarding the so-called Ferguson effect, where I admitted that it likely was a real phenomena. To the extent that your accusation of not taking responsibility is true, I should be rightly called out for it. I just don't think this actually happened.
I'll see what I can do. It'll come up often enough in any case; arguing against free speech ideals and the Enlightenment generally is a hobby-horse of mine.
This is quite true, and based on the rest of this comment, I offer you my apologies for making an unsupportable and unkind accusation. Some of the things you've posted have rubbed me the wrong way, but it's probable that it's a me problem, not a you problem, and coming at it the way I did was sloppy and unbecoming of the forum. I will endeavor to do better in the future.
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If we aren't better than... THAT, then we must become so. Both A and B should be punished for breaking the rule, damn the difficulty of doing so. True, you won't ever construct a system that is fully and completely 100% objectively impartial and fair to all, but that's no reason not to strive for the ideal.
Don't give up on a beautiful shared world because it's hard. Realize that literally everyone benefits from fairness and impartiality and pick up your tools alongside others who realize that to work towards it. No matter how dispirited you are by the current state of things, we are - even now! - more fair and impartial than we were a thousand years ago. How did we get there? How can we go further?
By building, maintaining, and respecting systems that are more impartial than the last. I would love to work with you to punish the defectors, but that's hard to do when you're explicitly stating you don't believe in working together with those not of your tribe!
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