Can’t vs Mustn’t
When it comes to speech, there is:
Shouldn’t (Bad) Mustn’t (Unthinkable) Can’t (Illegal)
If broadly celebrating political murder of national figures is merely “Shouldn’t”, we will end up with “Can’t”.
Free speech is **all** about “Mustn’t”.
We bet all of society on “Mustn’t”.
It’s hard to remember how many times I’ve had to say this. It’s like we don’t understand and teach our own culture’s particularly American genius.
Mark this prediction: the First Amendment alone *cannot* save free speech. If you lose the nebulous concept of the unthinkable in common culture you will end up with laws against “Hate Speech” because directed murder and mayhem will normalize and spread like wildfire. You either load the prohibition against the unthinkable, on culture or you will be forced to load it upon the law.
And, as a proud American Patriot, I want there to be no such thing legally as Hate Speech. At all.
In a culture of free speech, we should be able to count the number of public celebrations of Kirk’s murder on one hand. And they should all be from the most obviously backwards pitiable members of our society.
Saying the dumbest, meanest, nastiest, edgiest, most outrageous thing you can think of for thrills is not bravely exercising free speech. It’s eroding it’s culture, frivolously.
Ghoulishness will either need to be prohibited by culture (shunning and made unthinkable) or by law (codification of hate speech).
The point of modern “Cancel Culture” in revolutionary terms was to broadly cheapen traditional shunning. The rarest of punishments for the rarest of unthinkable abuses of free speech.
And our institutional organs fell for the revolutionary trap.
The judicious and rare practice of social shunning of those who truly transgress the unthinkable is a load bearing wall in a society of free speech. You can’t afford to lose it in a free society to those clever revolutionaries who would cheapen it so as to overturn your society.
Long live American Free Speech.
Attorney General Pam Bondi: "There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society...We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."
Contrarian opinion lightly held:
The so-called “Naturalistic Fallacy” may be just that. But we should probably rapidly reconsider the wisdom of trying to get rid of it. Or even pointing it out at scale.
Said differently, assume that society may have previously used religion and/or nature to create a coordinated sense of “ought”, “must” and “mustn’t”.
In the absence of both, there is no coordinating source. And we may need one or the other to coordinate a needed sense of obligation.
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