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Politics : The Trump Presidency
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To: Sam who wrote (192557)1/27/2021 10:09:13 AM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (1) of 359689
 
I'm pretty sure no government has yet tried to make it illegal. OTOH, society gets to apply whatever pressure it is able and allowed.

I meant in the US, where we have constitutionally guaranteed freedoms--speech, religion, conscience, thought. Clearly there's a cohort in the US that is wallowing in perceived victimhood and hollering before having been hurt.

But you bring up a good point. We have sister countries that ban hate speech. I have no sense of all as to how that works for them. I'm reminded of the USSC decision on pornography--"I know it when I see it." Yeah, so do we all, but we don't all see it the same.

The same goes for fact. We can't even agree anymore on what is true and false. There is no touchstone. You can't just go to the Encyclopedia Britannica anymore to resolve a question of fact.

I consider big lies more dangerous than hate speech. Hate is inherently fuzzy. Fact is supposed to be firmly fixed.

I've been trying to think about how one might control speech such as "the big lie" by framing it in another context, a thought experiment without the baggage of actual threat. What if the notion got started that protein was unhealthy and it began to spread? Moms in droves stopped feeding their kids protein and rose up against schools that offered protein in their lunch programs. The government and TV experts would declare otherwise but not be believed and the problem worsened. What would we do in the face of US law and custom? Conundrum.

It never occurred to me free speech could ever produce a critical mass of Americans falling for truly dangerous nonsense, that it could reach a tipping point such that the trust in institutions would utterly collapse, that reality would become unanchored.
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