queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2003-12-28 06:00 pm
queerbychoice) wrote2003-12-28 06:00 pm
Free Speech Rant
I recently discovered the existence of the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
liberal_fascism community, and am very disturbed by it. I'm actually acquainted (to varying degrees) with several of the people involved in it, but I cannot understand how they can support it. The community's userinfo page states that it is "NOT for those who are pro-life, conservative, and who seek to ban/censor things on religious grounds," yet declares the community's purpose as follows:
HELLO!? Have you never noticed at all what kinds of decisions "we as a society" dictate when "we as a society" dictate decisions en masse? We make people like George W. Bush president! I don't fucking care if he didn't technically get "elected," he still got very nearly the largest number of votes, and "we as a society" did elect Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush who filled the Supreme Court with the people who made George W. Bush president. These are the kinds of decisions that get made when "we as a society" make decisions collectively.
One of the most important quotes I've ever come across is one I found in the book Conversations with James Baldwin (a collection of interviews with him) that I got from my college library and read during my first year of college. I later bought my own copy of the book so that I could quote from it freely on a regular basis, because there are so many important things James Baldwin said in those interviews. But one of the biggest sentences that really leapt off the page at me the first time I read it was this one from a 1961 interview: "The majority is usually - I hate to say this - wrong. There is a great confusion in this country about that. . . . Now when we talk about majorities and minorities, I always have the feeling that this country is talking about a popularity contest in which everybody works together, you know, toward some absolutely hideously material end."—James Baldwin
"Democracy" is a system designed inherently to support the ability of the majority to pass any laws they want and totally ignore the opinions of all minority groups. I am not an especially big fan of it, even though I concede that there are a few systems that can be even worse. But I am a much bigger fan of well-written constitutions which make it practically impossible for the majority to revoke the principles laid out in the constitution, no matter how badly the majority wants to revoke them. I find the first amendment to be extremely well-written.
The power to censor is inherently only ever going to be held by people who are already in power. They will use the power to censor against anyone who challenges their power. Sure, the capitalist system already favors the distribution of ideas that support those already in power - but giving those in power censorship powers only favors them even more! If you start letting the majority vote on what to censor and what not to censor, the decisions made will be made by the white heterosexual Christian majority, the middle-of-the-road Bush-Gore swing voters, and sure, they might censor some occasional really extreme racism or sexism or other right-wing politics that you would prefer to get rid of, but they will also censor anything radical on the left-wing end of the spectrum too - they will censor, essentially, anything extreme on either end of the spectrum, anything non-"middle-of-the-road." The spectrum of ideas available in society will be narrowed, the same way that the spectrum of ideas available on television is much narrower and more "middle-of-the-road" than the spectrum of idea available on the internet. The ideas that get on television are narrowed by the capitalist system's inherent catering to what sells - in other words, to the majority of people with money. The ideas available on the internet are much more varied because they have not been narrowed by the capitalist system and because, so far, the amount of censorship the internet is subject to is fairly minimal. Who among us doesn't find the internet vastly more interesting and educational than television???
Yes, I fully agree that Larry Flynt's pictures of feeding women into meat grinders are misogynistic. But I'd infinitely rather put up with those pictures' existence than have to put up with not being allowed to paint my own pictures of anything I feel like, including Larry Flynt himself being fed into a meat grinder, etc. The only people that censorship will favor are the middle-of-the road centrists who so fervently hate all ideas that disagree with their own that they would seriously like the whole world's spectrum of ideas to be limited to just the narrow spectrum available on television. And THOSE PEOPLE DISGUST ME.
liberal_fascism community, and am very disturbed by it. I'm actually acquainted (to varying degrees) with several of the people involved in it, but I cannot understand how they can support it. The community's userinfo page states that it is "NOT for those who are pro-life, conservative, and who seek to ban/censor things on religious grounds," yet declares the community's purpose as follows:"This is a community created for those fed up with the American Civil Liberties Union, and similar organizations, who defend causes that are protected under the 1st amendment, regardless of the effect they have on society and individuals within society.So in other words, it's a community for people who think that "causes that are protected under the first amendment" should not be allowed freedom of expression after all, unless "we as a society" decide to include it in what "we as a society" collectively "dictate" as acceptable.
If you are tired of pornographers, child molesters, racists, homophobes, and misogynists hiding behind their right to "freedom of expression", this community is for you.
If you feel that we, as a society, have the right to dictate what is acceptable & what is not, this community is for you."
HELLO!? Have you never noticed at all what kinds of decisions "we as a society" dictate when "we as a society" dictate decisions en masse? We make people like George W. Bush president! I don't fucking care if he didn't technically get "elected," he still got very nearly the largest number of votes, and "we as a society" did elect Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush who filled the Supreme Court with the people who made George W. Bush president. These are the kinds of decisions that get made when "we as a society" make decisions collectively.
One of the most important quotes I've ever come across is one I found in the book Conversations with James Baldwin (a collection of interviews with him) that I got from my college library and read during my first year of college. I later bought my own copy of the book so that I could quote from it freely on a regular basis, because there are so many important things James Baldwin said in those interviews. But one of the biggest sentences that really leapt off the page at me the first time I read it was this one from a 1961 interview: "The majority is usually - I hate to say this - wrong. There is a great confusion in this country about that. . . . Now when we talk about majorities and minorities, I always have the feeling that this country is talking about a popularity contest in which everybody works together, you know, toward some absolutely hideously material end."—James Baldwin
"Democracy" is a system designed inherently to support the ability of the majority to pass any laws they want and totally ignore the opinions of all minority groups. I am not an especially big fan of it, even though I concede that there are a few systems that can be even worse. But I am a much bigger fan of well-written constitutions which make it practically impossible for the majority to revoke the principles laid out in the constitution, no matter how badly the majority wants to revoke them. I find the first amendment to be extremely well-written.
The power to censor is inherently only ever going to be held by people who are already in power. They will use the power to censor against anyone who challenges their power. Sure, the capitalist system already favors the distribution of ideas that support those already in power - but giving those in power censorship powers only favors them even more! If you start letting the majority vote on what to censor and what not to censor, the decisions made will be made by the white heterosexual Christian majority, the middle-of-the-road Bush-Gore swing voters, and sure, they might censor some occasional really extreme racism or sexism or other right-wing politics that you would prefer to get rid of, but they will also censor anything radical on the left-wing end of the spectrum too - they will censor, essentially, anything extreme on either end of the spectrum, anything non-"middle-of-the-road." The spectrum of ideas available in society will be narrowed, the same way that the spectrum of ideas available on television is much narrower and more "middle-of-the-road" than the spectrum of idea available on the internet. The ideas that get on television are narrowed by the capitalist system's inherent catering to what sells - in other words, to the majority of people with money. The ideas available on the internet are much more varied because they have not been narrowed by the capitalist system and because, so far, the amount of censorship the internet is subject to is fairly minimal. Who among us doesn't find the internet vastly more interesting and educational than television???
Yes, I fully agree that Larry Flynt's pictures of feeding women into meat grinders are misogynistic. But I'd infinitely rather put up with those pictures' existence than have to put up with not being allowed to paint my own pictures of anything I feel like, including Larry Flynt himself being fed into a meat grinder, etc. The only people that censorship will favor are the middle-of-the road centrists who so fervently hate all ideas that disagree with their own that they would seriously like the whole world's spectrum of ideas to be limited to just the narrow spectrum available on television. And THOSE PEOPLE DISGUST ME.
Oh, Gayle...
Re: Oh, Gayle...
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I am very much with you.
And 'held personally accountable'? Who decides that? People are already held socially accountable for their views and actions, and that sort of accountability is damn hard to legislate.
But most of the people in the community seem more than a little incoherent.
good rant
I think there's some real complexity to be wrestled with in this area, but looking at the community's dialogue is disappointing. The best written entries oppose the community.
I think the concept of "speech" needs deconstruction and I think we have to question why we protect it.
I agree with the community's statement that some groups take advantage of the first amendment to cause oppressive situations for others, and that this is a problem. But I don't trust the powers-that-be to decide what I ought to consider oppressive. I disagree with the powers-that-be on many counts.
Sometimes speech can be considered incitement, in which case I judge it as an action, not solely dialogue for the purpose of intellectual exploration. If someone yells "Fire!" in a theatre... and all that. And I think that "hate speech" is a valid term for something less than incitement but still an action that causes an oppressive environment for others and thereby infringes on their rights to life and security. Unfortunately people have different ideas of what constitutes "hate speech". (But clearly a KKK rally calling for "putting niggers in their place" is hate speech. Should this be allowed in a public space or not?)
As you wrote, who is going to be in a position to judge what is hate speech and what is acceptable speech? Who is going to weigh the negative and the positive of a certain form of speech? For example, is flying the Confederate flag an act of free speech which should be allowed to show so-called "southern pride", or is the fact that it creates an oppressive atmosphere for a lot of people, similar to a Nazi swastika, worthy of banning it? Are KKK or World Church of the Creator rallies acceptable?
I think these are questions that need to be discussed by people representing different viewpoints. However, I don't trust the existing power structures, such as the U.S. Congress or Supreme Court, to make those decisions for me or for any other group.
On a nongovernmental front, I think it's a very important issue. I worked in my local IMC (Independent Media Center) while we were having issues regarding this. The IMC websites generally have an "open publishing" newswire where people can post news stories and they appear immediately. We were getting tons of white supremacist and conservative rants of other sorts. A number of people voiced their concern that the IMC was becoming a platform for these groups because of its open publishing policy and has become a hostile environment for a lot of people, and annoying to all. We discussed a new policy whereby we could delete the offending posts. There was a liberal faction who argued that it was more important to protect freedom of speech. There were others, including me, who said "we created this site and it's in our right to protect it".
Complete libertarians (unless they're "social libertarians") privilege individual "rights" to the almost total exclusion of social effects of individual actions. I think that rights have to be seen both individually and socially, and that there has to be some kind of balance. This obvious on the level of murder -- even the most far out individualist libertarian doesn't say murder should be allowed. But in the realm of speech it's trickier, more complex.
So I guess I just posed more questions.
Re: good rant
Short Version:
You mentioned the concept of 'speech' needing deconstruction & also why we need to protect it. This reminds me of some interesting essays (that I haven't read recently) by Judith Butler in a collection called "Excitable Speech". In fact, some of those who drafted our local IMC editorial policy were influenced by her essays -- in particular discussions of injurious speech and appropriate responses (censorship vs. allowing community debate & censure, etc.).
Re: good rant
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Good rant.
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