Should evil be free to speak?
Posted by Solver 5 years, 3 months ago to Philosophy
“The communists and the Nazis are merely two variants of the same evil notion: collectivism. But both should be free to speak—evil ideas are dangerous only by default of men advocating better ideas.”
- Ayn Rand
- Ayn Rand
I do not believe that he would extend me the same courtesy and right. He seems to be one that likes to silence what he sees as evil. It seems to me that most collectivist of all flavors would like to remove this right from those that are not their flavor of collectivist.
Instead, he did his best to end our military.
His wickedness was (and is) only matched by Hillary Clinton who twists and manipulates reality continuously.
She is a truly evil woman.
I supported her because I thought she was less statist than Trump, by far the best at managing a bloated empire, not an attention-seeking clown like Trump, and the most responsive to me and people I work with. I did not think she or Trump had an ideology, so that was not an issue for me.
I do think Gary Johnson had a clear anti-statist ideology, unlike mainstream candidates, and I would have voted for him if there were instant runoff. But as it is, I don't think ideology is an issue with mainstream politicians. I think many voters are even less ideological than I am, so it just isn't an issue for them. They're politicians.
This notion of candidates as communicators of ideology is an ideal model that does not happen in the real world, in my experience.
You didn't support Clinton because of Trump. You liked her well before the primaries. You liked her because you liked her welfare state policies posing a superior "liberal" intellect.
If she had become president she likely would have imposed it. If she had won she likely would have given the Democrats a majority in the Senate, too, and they expected to have it all by now.
Obamacare was intended to lead to "single payer" socialized medicine. They knew it would not work; it was not intended to work. Even Obama was caught on a leaked tape promoting "single payer" socialized medicine with his scheme as a step to get there, acknowledging that they couldn't do it in one step.
With the Democrats controlling both the House and the Senate they jammed every statist precedent they could into Obamacare as a base to build on, expecting that it would cause such chaos that people would be begging to 'fix' it by going the rest of the way. That is what Clinton expected to do. Her personal corruption and lack of ethics is the least of what she intended to do to us.
Clinton's lack of ethics and hard left collectivism dates back to her college days as an admiring fan of Saul Alinsky.
You hit this one on the head
The insurance companies knew exactly what Obamacare and the previous Clintoncare plan meant. As Ayn Rand put it, big business has been the last to defend freedom. They are Pragmatists who go along with the socialism hoping to influence the rules to be something they "can live with" -- until next week.
Clinton is notorious for her collectivism and corruption. Trump is a Pragmatist with unacknowledged collectivist premises, but not a collectivist ideologue like Clinton and Obama who want to make it worse on principle. He ran to make the country what he thinks is better (mostly by the standard of "deals"), not to get attention; his antics are his means, not the ends. Johnson was a confused, ignorant subjectivist fool who was a clown, not a serious candidate.
This is an apparent contradiction. Are you saying the use ideology to get popular appear, to get their end goal of power?
I think of politics as show business for ugly people, and power's part of it. You know I think you're wrong about ideology because I don't think people are as ideological or philosophical as you do. I'm cautiously optimistic that if they did think about philosophy, they'd be for liberty.
Except for rare individualists, implementing their world-view requires the power to control other people. They want and need political power to do that. They seek office to exercise power for that purpose, not to preach. There are many other ways to spread an ideology other than running for office. But to get power they have to appeal to enough voters. They do that by appealing to what they thing the voters' philosophy of life is. If it's not exactly the same as their own, then they publicly suppress some of their own beliefs and emphasize others, distorting and employing ambiguity to aid their own dishonesty.
That is not a contradiction and it is not "show business". It's deadly, and if you don't expose the ideological aims, explain what they mean, explain what is wrong with them, and explain what is right it will continue. People need the principled explanations because most of them are not philosophical, do not have much of a source of such ideas, and do not think about it, as, contrary to your assertion, I have said many times here.
They have absorbed their philosophical world-view from whatever was around them in a hodgepodge of unthought out fallacies and contradictions mixed with what they were indoctrinated or told to believe beginning at an early age and continuing through school and beyond. Others, like educated Marxists, progressives and viros, have thought about their ideologies and consciously accepted wrong and malicious ideas.
But if you don't understand it yourself you can't explain it to anyone. People do not automatically favor liberty if they happen to think about the concepts, and there is much more to it than political concepts like an isolated "liberty". You cannot endlessly appeal to what is left of the implicit philosophy of the American sense of life (which originally came from the Enlightenment) and expect that the wrong ideas and premises bombarding the population from the schools, universities and media will have no effect on the course of the nation.
A philosophy identifying correct principles required in all the branches of philosophy is an intellectual achievement; it is not automatic and not a frivolous sideline. It is what Ayn Rand accomplished and illustrated in her novels, where she portrayed her view of the ideal man, and her subsequent non-fiction. It is the opposite approach of the anti-intellectual a-philosophical libertarians and conservatives who think philosophy doesn't matter and that people can somehow be appealed to through a supposed automatic disposition to "liberty" regardless of the false premises they are constantly fed and emotionally cling to.
People have the potential to embrace freedom if they are rational and if they understand the philosophical principles of reality, thinking and ethics that it depends on. None of it is automatic.
convinced otherwise..
description of what the masses bought. Any
mention of that person whatsoever sends me to
the vomitorium
bought - lock, stock and barrel. Think it was Karl Marx who said "the masses are asses" which ain't
no lie.
can never get enough!!!) Thanx much.
"he was elected because of his collectivism that not enough knew to oppose."
I supported him along with most people I know, so I can at least tell you about my non-random sample of my corner of the world. I never detected anyone supporting him because of race. I did detect people who believe in socialism, as you said, voting for him because they thought he was more socialistic. OTOH, I and many people who are not statist or socialist supported him. At the time I thought he was clearly the less statist choice, but I'm not sure of that anymore. Also at the time, I thought regardless of which mainstream candidate became president, I would be sending in roughly a third of profits in quarterly estimates to run a global empire, social entitlement system, and a domestic prison system. The only candidates I thought might put a dent in that were Ron Paul and third-party candidates. I still think that today.
Think about the 13 years of public school indoctrination.
i thought when I voted for Trump that we could stall out socialism for 4 years, but after that the dems would regroup with the "stronger together" leftists and win in 2020.
There are penalties for some forms of speech: slander, telling untruths about someone that could harm them; inciting to riot, using inflammatory speech that leads to violence. Unlike some of our European friends, we do not criminalize "hate speech." Even groups that advocate criminal activity aren't punished for their speech. The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) which advocates for pedophelia is a prime example of such an organization, which I consider evil.
I like Maxine Waters in that she just tells it like she sees it- so I know where she stands. Same with Ocasio-Cortez, and Beto O'Rourke. I disagree totally with all of them.
I dont like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or Obama, because they lie and one never quite knows where they are coming from.
People need to put up defenses against emotional manipulation arguments. I would be happier if people only discussed facts with the emotional baggage attached to them by the leftisits.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Fake news is mentioned in there. Evil is free to speak and the modern version of "the press," aka the media, has been spewing their foul blather for a very long time.
I refuse to ever watch CNN or SNL yet I have to endure the crap from both that gets replayed over and over on FOX. Something is evil there.
A proper answer is yes, evil AND good should be free to speak...it's just a shame that many cannot tell the difference.
One should not judge or follow anything based solely on emotion.
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
“Each of us has to decide that collectively.”
Absolutely correct. Both on no difference between communists and Nazis, and that both should be free to speak their evil ideas
Because then question becomes “Who then controls the ‘evil’ speech”?
Only The State can do that, and since the statement implies that speech is not currently censored, it must be some kind of democracy.
So what happens when the majority changes?
Imagine the Far Left, or the Conservative right, changing the rules defining “evil speech”. based on which populist majority dominated the last election.
Meet the new boss. He’s the same as the old boss.
We’d be screwed either way.
The extreme left would like it to also mean speaking the wrong pronoun.
The extreme right might use it to also mean using God’s name in vain.
That said, we are living in pretty much a predominately fascist USA. People own the means of production primarily, but governments tell us what to do. Reality sometimes rears its ugly head and causes disaster from the effects of particular regulations of the governments.
With a federal government, the whole country has to do what one huge fascist government dictates. With states being more in control, each state figures out its own fascist regulations and laws- resulting in various degrees of collapse depending on what they do.
When things get bad enough, a state can change its laws on its own, in an attempt to mitigate the disaster their previous regulations caused. I say this competition between states (some of which COULD convert to being run by objectivist principles) will be more beneficial to the residents of states than what we have now.
I call it a pragmatic approach in the short term while I am still alive to enjoy it.
- Ayn Rand - Altas Shrugged
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