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4 Reasons Why Free Speech is So Misunderstood Today

4/26/2024

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Freedom of speech, despite being a fundamental principle of liberal democracy going back to the Enlightenment, has recently become a dirty word. Why? Because in today's regressive environment, freedom of speech misunderstood. One misunderstanding essentially boils down to the fact that defending someone's right to free speech is not the same as endorsing their views. These two things get conflated all the time, probably because people are not well educated in history and civics, and NGOs, government officials, and even journalists are increasingly exploiting people's ignorance about freedom of speech.

Also, and I'm not going to mince words here, many people today who should know better are cowards and ideologues. Even most "liberals," no longer have the stomach to defend freedom of speech when it is used by someone they disagree with. People often argue that, "Hate speech isn't free speech," or, "We should crack down on misinformation." The problem is, it doesn't work like that. Free speech is all or nothing. The American Civil liberties Union historically held that:

"History teaches that the first target of government repression is never the last. If we do not come to the defense of the free speech rights of the most unpopular among us...then no one's liberty will be secure. In that sense, all First Amendment rights are 'indivisible.'"

Setting aside the thorny issue of what actually constitutes offensive speech, it's important to understand that we don't tolerate offensive speech because we agree with it. We tolerate offensive speech because that is the price we pay for being able to criticize the state. This is a key point to understand. In what follows, I'll break this point down, as well as the 3 other important reasons why freedom of speech is misunderstood today:


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3 Unpopular (But Likely Correct) Opinions According to Cicero

9/7/2023

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It's time for this year's iteration of the According to Cicero series. I've been writing these posts since 2016, and they are a lot of fun, as they allow me to explore ancient Roman history, culture, philosophy, and how Cicero's ideas can be applied today. 

Cicero has garnered renewed attention in recent years.
He was a Roman Senator whose writings, as Historian Edward Gibbon put it, “breathed the spirit of freedom.” Particularly influential was his idea of natural law, followed by John Locke and other enlightenment thinkers: Human nature included reason, which could discover justice, which was the basis of law. Voltaire said “He taught us how to think.”

This month's post will focus on 3 of Cicero's opinions that may be unpopular, but are likely quite correct. Read on to find out what they are:
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War Is A Racket: A Few Profit, the Many Pay

4/1/2022

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In the 1930s, a retired Marine Corps General made a speaking tour of America. His message? War is racket. This was unusual enough that it created quite a stir at the time, and General Smedley Butler's message is so important and revealing that it is still often discussed, especially among anti-war and critical thinkers, almost 100 years later. 

Smedley Butler was one of the most decorated generals in American history, having served during the Mexican Revolution and World War I. He won 15 medals, including five for heroism, and the Medal of Honor twice. 
Butler's moral courage was a match for his physical courage. When he retired from the military, he took the unusual step of pointing out that war is a racketeering scheme in his 1935 book, War is a Racket. What did he mean by this?

I have been planning to write this post for for several years, but it seems especially timely now with the war in Ukraine happening. In what follows, I will break down Butler's message and explain why it is the key to understanding the deeper reasons (with rare exceptions) that nations go to war, along with the true costs of war to regular people.
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How Propaganda Makes Us Pyschologically Totalitarian

9/30/2021

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The 20th century witnessed both the rise of sophisticated psychological manipulation techniques and the technology necessary to disseminate them broadly, a trend which has continued into the 21st century. The French philosopher Jaques Ellul set out to study modern propaganda in the 1960s. What he found should be a warning to us all. Our inability to take propaganda and its effects seriously now seem to me like old chickens coming home to roost (perhaps another topic for another day).  
 
In his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Ellul diverges from previous scholarship in that he considers propaganda to be a sociological phenomenon, one in fact that we cannot live without in modern technological society. Propaganda exists to adjust a normal person to an ever-changing social and technological environment which is profoundly abnormal given the vast majority of our evolutionary history. A modern individual must endure psychological alienation, dissolution of ancestral groups, enormous taxes, brutal wars, inescapable working life. Propaganda both integrates us into this milieu, and acts as an intermediary between us and the state.
 
Modern propaganda may be socially necessary, but it is not harmless. It exists everywhere, even in democracies, and its effects make us totalitarian in our mindset. We are easy victims because we lack the proper framework necessary to identify it, and because we underestimate its power. In Ellul’s words, "Propaganda is a direct attack against man. The question is to determine how great is the danger."[1]
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This post aims to condense and demystify Ellul's analysis, and to build on it by suggesting concrete ways in which we can avoid propaganda's detrimental effects.
 

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Is Honest Journalism Dead?

11/2/2020

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Why is there such lack of professionalism and ethics in journalism in recent years? My guest Brendan Malone of Left Foot Media and Monday Night live and I discuss the many problems with contemporary journalism and what can be done about them.

​To be clear, there are some excellent journalists who try to adhear to time-honored standards of objectivity still doing great investigative work. However we focus on the general negative trends that we see occurring in media - bias, clickbait, dishonesty, illiberal cancel culture, and lack of humility, backed up by references to hard data where possible.

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Conservatism Is a Defense of Liberalism, Not Its Enemy

10/20/2020

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One thing creating unnecessary division in politics is that people don't understand that Conservatism as a political philosophy is actually a defense of Liberalism and not strictly its enemy.

Conservatism arose historically to defend Liberal Democracy against the inherent flaws in Liberalism. That actually makes Conservatism a branch of Liberalism.

Conservatism also seeks to defend Liberal Democracy against leftism and reactionism, which seek to overthrow Liberal Democracy entirely. That makes liberals and conservatives natural allies against illiberal extremism from the far left and far right.

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This One Idea Explains Most of What is Wrong With Politics

9/21/2020

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Why do governments tend to become more corrupt over time? It turns out that the best answer to this question may have been floating around for over 100 years, and I think everybody should know about it. 


“Who says organization, says oligarchy," states Robert Michels, a German historian who produced one of the most scathing assessments of government ever written. He argues that bureaucracy and democracy don't mix. Michels is best known for the ingenious Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, published in 1915. The book positively begs us to examine the maxim that power corrupts, and to seriously consider if democracy is nothing more than a idealistic impossibility. 
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Oligarchy is defined as rule by an elite or privileged few. Today people often use the word oligarchy to refer to a leadership class of corporate plutocrats, but what is less understood is how oligarchies form. Oligarchy is rule by a few to be sure. However, the concept of oligarchy in Michels' lexicon - the “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” - is both an explanation for how oligarchies originate, as well as a compelling critique of the inherently flawed structure of all forms of democratic government itself.  
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What is the Purpose of Government?

8/29/2020

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What is the purpose of government? We all can define the purpose of medicine or of car repair and so forth, but with government, the purpose is undefined.

We wouldn't tolerate our doctor or mechanic talking to us in the way politicians do - never addressing the details of the problem, running away or becoming hostile when difficult questions are asked. So why do we tolerate it in politics?

This discrepancy indicates that we haven't defined the purpose of government well enough, which is the focus of this Socratic dialog. 

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Read These 5 Books For a Deeper Understanding of Politics

7/31/2020

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This being an election year in the United States, and given the dismal state of political discourse, I felt inclined to share this list of 5 books that have changed my perspective on politics. 

These books​ are part of the reason that I stopped looking at politics in partisan terms. (The other reason is that I've worked to develop a more Socratic temperament where I try to look at the other side(s) of any argument.)

​A partisan perspective is actually a severe handicap when it comes to examining politics, because partisanship creates a false dichotomy where we tend to ignore alternative or conflicting information. When we think that "This is my party/preferred media outlet and I agree with what they do and say," this mindset compels us to just scratch the surface of what is really going on.

​If we want a real understanding of politics, we need to dig deeper, and that's where this list comes in. Here are the best 5 books to read for a deeper understanding of politics: 



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How to Change Your Mind

7/3/2020

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The Socratic Method is a way of thinking which helps you to become more open-minded and less afraid of being wrong. Socrates felt that we are more ignorant than not, so to achieve excellence, we can’t be satisfied with what we already know, we should keep striving to gain knowledge and get closer to the truth.

Changing your mind is more Socratic than dogmatically clinging to your beliefs throughout life. But it's not always easy to do, and that is what I discuss with my guest Justin Vacula.
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We cover the important point that free speech - even controversial free speech - is essential for true critical thinking and for Socratic Dialog and therefore must be protected. Without free speech, we have what happened to Socrates himself - he was imprisoned for speaking freely and committed suicide. Human knowledge cannot be advanced without open discourse, without which, we remain in ignorance.

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