NYTimes editorial board: America Has a Free Speech Problem

[jct74]

America Has a Free Speech Problem

By The Editorial Board
March 18, 2022

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.

How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

Many Americans are understandably confused, then, about what they can say and where they can say it. People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through — all without fearing cancellation.

However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden. In a new national poll commissioned by Times Opinion and Siena College, only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely. The poll found that 84 percent of adults said it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

...

This editorial board plans to identify a wide range of threats to freedom of speech in the coming months and to offer possible solutions. Freedom of speech requires not just a commitment to openness and tolerance in the abstract. It demands conscientiousness about both the power of speech and its potential harms. We believe it isn’t enough for Americans to just believe in the rights of others to speak freely; they should also find ways to actively support and protect those rights.

...

read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html
https://archive.is/aMpo1

 

[Anti Globalist]

Least the NYTimes are being honest about not being supporters of free speech.

 

[jct74]

Least the NYTimes are being honest about not being supporters of free speech.

The editorial is making the case that cancel culture has gone too far, and it says they are going to do further reporting on the topic.

 

[acptulsa]

The editorial is making the case that cancel culture has gone too far, and it says they are going to do further reporting on the topic.

They are making the case that...

Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

...demanding that pedophiles let kids be prepubescent is taking censorship three or four bridges too far.

 

[ClaytonB]

The editorial is making the case that cancel culture has gone too far, and it says they are going to do further reporting on the topic.

Everybody all hard for cancel culture until they start getting canceled...

 

[acptulsa]

Everybody all hard for cancel culture until they start getting canceled...

Start getting canceled? Protecting the right of children to grow up before being sexualized used to be the one type of censorship everyone agreed was a good thing. Remember the MPAA movie rating system? Now pedophilia speech is the only kind that is sacrosanct.

 

[dannno]

Funny how the only example they have of the right "banning free speech" is against government institutions.. that's called having a say in how your tax dollars are spent.

 

[ClaytonB]

Start getting canceled? Protecting the right of children to grow up before being sexualized used to be the one type of censorship everyone agreed was a good thing. Remember the MPAA movie rating system?

I should have explained myself more completely. If I had to guess (and that's all I can do), I think that the "partly somewhat rational" wing of the Left is starting to get cannibalized by the extreme-woke maniacs who drank the whole Kool-Aid punch-bowl, then double-barreled lines of Kool-Aid, then raided the Kool-Aid factory and took the Kool-Aid Man hostage and started mainlining the syrup they dehydrate to make the Kool-Aid powder. I think your basic entitled virtue-signaling Leftist understands how the rabid NPC Kool-Aid drinkers can help them, politically and monetarily, and some of them may even believe a little bit of it, kind of. But what they weren't prepared for was to be turned on by their own wolf-pack and eaten alive.

The Right are the original champions of censorship. Between Left and Right, censorship is a fight the Right will win every time, without even breaking a sweat. The Right can censor far more, far harder, than the Left ever imagined possible. The 1A is the very cradle in which the Left came into being... without it, it would never have existed to begin with. So, my guess is that this editorial may be the result of a few Leftists -- with some functioning brain-cells that haven't yet been completely devoured by rabid-zombie Wokism -- realizing that they lose the censorship war. A future of omnipresent censorship is a hard Right-Wing future. The throbbing fascist schlong is iron-hard and glowing hot for a future of absolute censorship, and it's the Left which is strapped over that barrel. So, that's why the Left is suddenly hitting the brakes, and it's not just on this issue, it's happening across the board. They have massively miscalculated. I think we haven't even begun to see just how badly they have screwed up, from a purely pragmatic/political standpoint. The amount of damage-control in their near future is absolutely biblical in proportion.

Now pedophilia speech is the only kind that is sacrosanct.

This is pretty much the dumbest fantasy, ever. Yes, you can shift society. Yes, you can play all kinds of games with birth-control and disrupting family values, and all of that. But jumping on the back of the Beast and riding the "We are proud to disrupt child development before it even has a chance to get started"-argument is a fast-track to endless political pain and loss. It is an inherently self-defeating project. It will never fly in China or Russia or the Middle East or pretty much anywhere in the East. Yes, the psychotic pedo clown "elites" in the West are mad-scrambling to put the finishing touches on their global kid-diddling empire project, aka the NWO Great Reset. But unless I've missed my guess, the Russians and the rest of the eastern world have seen this coming, miles away, and are basically just waiting for the West to follow through to the point of insanity, implode on itself, and then move in and buy up all saleable land in the resulting fire-sale aftermath of the inevitable socio-political collapse.

Hopefully, the Q theory is correct (in substance, even if not in form) and the West will be averted by guardian angels from this otherwise inevitable collapse. But no matter which way it plays out, the pedo empire has no future. It never did. It is insanity-incarnate. Nature doesn't give a damn about your pedo fantasies, she's perfectly happy to eat you alive like all the other useless organisms that are not contributing to the long-run survival of the genome...

 

[acptulsa]

 

[Occam's Banana]

Funny how the only example they have of the right "banning free speech" is against government institutions.. that's called having a say in how your tax dollars are spent.

I was going to point this out. The First Amendment is supposed to protect people from government censorship, not the other way around.

Having said that, though, I don't know what else people expect to happen when they turn the education & indoctrination of their children over to the government. This is what comes of regarding government employees as "public servants" (who are to be chided and corrected by putting marked up slips of paper into boxes), rather than as what they actually are - "public masters" (who are never to be trusted, and whose authority should be sharply delimited and harshly curtailed, if not eliminated altogether).

 

[TheTexan]

Censorship comes from big tech most of all and I don't think Big Tech at this point can be considered a private enterprise. Over the past 15 years they have become so entangled with government so as to become inseparable. Besides the big contracts that we do know about, they have contracts with government that we arent even allowed to know about (e.g. Snowden).

I consider big tech at this point to be an agent of the state, in the literal sense.

1st amendment was not designed to work correctly when federal spending is 30% of the GDP

It was designed to prevent that from happening in the first place ..

 

[acptulsa]

Censorship comes from big tech most of all and I don't think Big Tech at this point can be considered a private enterprise. Over the past 15 years they have become so entangled with government so as to become inseparable. Besides the big contracts that we do know about, they have contracts with government that we arent even allowed to know about (e.g. Snowden).

I consider big tech at this point to be an agent of the state, in the literal sense.

1st amendment was not designed to work correctly when federal spending is 30% of the GDP

It was designed to prevent that from happening in the first place ..

Not to mention the known fact that the CIA funded Zuckerberg when he set up fedbook, for one.

The only way to separate government and the social media giants is with a crowbar.