I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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You can’t even get to the place of agreeing on values if you’re constantly telling yourself and your allies that those other guys are to be destroyed and kept away from power at all costs. I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot, but having that conversation is difficult because of the filter bubbles and the attention economy made worse by the rhetoric that the other tribe wants to destroy the country.
I think we're overcomplicating things (not refering to you, but to society). All preferences align as you approach the source from which they originate. For instance, if the left says "Trump is violent" and the right says "Left-wing activists are violent", then both sides agree that "violence is undesirable". Of course, you see a lot of left-wingers advocate for violence, and a lot of right-wingers indirectly doing the same: "The tree of liberty...". Here, the agreement is "Violence might be necessary in self-defense" and "Violence is an acceptable means against tyranny".
The actual conflict is whether or not Trump is tyrannical, and whether or not Charlie Kirk's rhetoric is dangerous (an attack which should be defended against). Another comment of yours mention pedophilia, but the real disgreements are things like "Is teaching children about anal sex education, or is it grooming?" and "Is a 20-year-old male dating a 17-year-old woman natural and innocent, or is it predatory?", for we agree that grooming and predation are immoral.
I offer this perspective because it keeps me clearsighted (prevents me from drowning in complexity) and because any conclusions generalize to all similar issues.
On the contrary, lots of things are dangerous., A foreign policy that increases the chance of nuclear war is dangerous. Not putting up a stop sign at a busy intersection is dangerous. It just is not true that "danger" means "should be defended against with violence".
Blurring together "is dangerous" and "should be met with violence" is exactly the issue.
That's a good point. "Dangerous" is meaningless unless it's a strong and direct effect. Perhaps "calls for something which is against my human rights". This has to actually be true, it's not enough to argue "It's an attack of my person that you don't give me special rights which suit my uniqueness".
How people interpret dangers is strongly influenced by propaganda, so if you convince group X that group Y is out to get them, group X will start attacking group Y in perceived (but non-existent) self-defense. I feel that this second part, the interpretation, is where most conflict happen. Actual value disagreements seem minor. Perhaps the value hierarchy (order of priority) is different, though.
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Indeed. I think the points of agreement are so broad and deep that they almost vanish into the background. We take them for granted and so the only things that are salient are the outliers.
We can't agree on what constitutes murder, or child abuse. We can't agree on what Rule of Law means. We can't agree on what the Constitution means, or what laws require generally. We can't agree on how to run a Justice system. We can't agree on what is valuable, honorable, decent or depraved. We can't agree on who should be protected or venerated, or who should be disgraced or shunned. The disagreements and others like them cut deep through every facet of our culture, and that culture is visibly coming apart at the seams as a result.
For what it's worth, the cultural divide between red and blue America is still far lesser than the divide between the two great bay colonies that would eventually unite against the crown, even if current levels of general contempt for the other are about the same.
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
Its easy to pick out salacious examples of this not being the case, but how much of this is driven by:
a) The various outrage optimization engines, and b) One's own human tendency to remember the remarkable and aggregate exceptions, ie to over pattern match
How is that a far lesser divide? These things are completely superficial.
People spend the majority of their waking lives largely doing these things, they are important regardless of superficiality. Most people's impact on the world is primarily what they do, not what they think. And even in terms of ideology, MeanRedMan and MeanBlueGuy are most critically, promoters of the American cultural hegemony and distributors of various propaganda.
I'm pretty sure "important" and "superficial" are antonyms. I'm not saying it's impossible for, say, food to be the focus of an irreconcilable difference of values (see: "I will not eat the bugs"), but whether one person eats Itallian and the other Chinese won't affect their ability to cooperate, so declaring there's a smaller gap because people eat the same just sounds bonkers to me.
"American" here only means "originating on roughly the same continent", and it's not even clear how many people of either tribe even want to be cultural hegemons of the world.
Superficial just means surface level or shallow so far as I typically use it. Lots of superficial attributes are important in achieving various outcomes. We haven't elected a president shorter than 6 foot since Jimmy Carter, there's about a 0.04% chance of that happening by random chance if that superficial characteristic is unimportant to electability. Google's "41 shades of blue" experiment likely cost millions in developer time for a superficial change to hyperlink colors. And so on.
There's significantly more baggage that comes with being American than just being born in a particular place. And whether or not an American wants to be an agent for the empire, they are. They spread their American ideas, American perspectives, and other products of the American culture, as effortlessly as they breathe. When most people in the English speaking world go online, they feel like they are digitally transported to America. Not only the people but the structures, the dominant ideas, etc, are all American. Americans on the other hand, almost never seem to experience this sensation.
Ok, if you want to make this point about the things you listed before, you'll have to show me similar statistics about work relationships breaking down due to cullinary choices, etc.
Correct, which is why they're not both "American". Or at least not the same kind of American
Completely irrelevant to the point being discussed.
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