Whatever your thoughts on institutions firing people for social media outrage, any institution that cannot distinguish support for Hamas butchery from opposition to Hamas butchery is morally bankrupt.

etba_ss
10 hours ago
I do not understand all the pearl clutching over hateful speech, "misinformation", etc. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not less. Regulating, stifling and controlling speech is always a bad idea. Expose the bad ideas and expose the lies.

If you try to ban them, whoever has the power to ban them gets to be the one who tells you what is true and what is not. I don't trust anyone or any organization to do that. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Yes the result of free speech will be people saying really bad, nasty things and lying. That has always been true and is the price paid for liberty. If something is really egregious and violates actual laws, there are methods that can be employed to track and trace the origin. Platforms can suspend accounts, etc. There are some controls already in place and frankly, many of us have been arguing the controls are already too restrictive with social media companies censoring what they don't want to be heard and viewpoints they don't like. If anonymity is removed, this will only get worse, not better. Do we want the government controlling the algorithms? Is that better than big tech doing it? I don't like either, but the government has a lot more power over my life than big tech.

Weminuche45 etba_ss
9 hours ago edited
Theae people control the populace and overthrow foreign governments by way of speech, so they are acutely aware of its power. Not surprisingly, they assume other are trying to do the same thing they do, so they want to make sure they are they only ones who can win at that game.

They do it for your own good and they know what's best for everyone else.

etba_ss Weminuche45
7 hours ago
I was making this argument earlier in a discussion about just how bad her instinct is. The government controlling speech, which is what her proposal does, is just as bad as the government controlling who has and doesn't have firearms. In order to keep a government in check or correct a tyrannical one you have to have the ability to organize in secret, speak out anonymously and have weapons to fight back. Free speech and the right to bear arms are equally important in keeping the government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Speech without guns makes you of little threat because you can be killed and beaten down. Guns without speech prevents your ability to join with like minded individuals, thus also making you of little threat more than a nuisance.

Having the government know who every social media account belongs to is the equivalent of having the government register every firearm in this country. We've argued for years how bad that it because it allows the government to take them one day. The same is true for speech. If they know who everyone is, silencing them becomes much easier. //

anon-csn0
10 hours ago edited
Big Mommy government is likely worse than Big Daddy government.

etba_ss anon-csn0
7 hours ago
Steve Deace often says the only thing worse than the patriarchy is a matriarchy.

Tyranny is tyranny, but it is also a scientific fact that on the average women think and react more emotionally and relationally and men think and act more rationally and instinctively. Therefore, there is a lot of truth to that statement.

Nikki Haley made a huge unforced error Tuesday in the 2024 Republican presidential primary when she said that one of the first things she'd do as President of the United States is require that social media companies ban anonymous accounts and that they verify all of their users by name. Haley was roundly criticized over this likely unconstitutional plan, which is so tone-deaf that one could easily believe that she just spoke without thinking and would surely issue a statement walking it back a bit.

Nope. Apparently this is a plan she'd been thinking about and developing talking points about for awhile, because in addition to her initial comments on Fox News Channel, Haley said basically the same thing on the Ruthless podcast - only worse. //

Any time there's an attempted paradigm shift in the public discourse, those leading the way are generally vilified by those who benefit from the current system. It's not easy and can be personally and professionally dangerous to express views that aren't politically correct, or to expose corruption or malfeasance. That's why three of our founding fathers wrote the Federalist Papers under the pen name "Publius." It's why Benjamin Franklin wrote letters to the editor under the name "Silence Dogood." During the Constitutional debates, dozens of people on both sides of the issue (Federalists and Anti-Federalists) used pen names to publish tracts aimed at persuading the public. Sure, it's easier these days for foreign governments to employ this type of information warfare, but it's ignorant to think it didn't happen before. We know that foreign saboteurs have plied their trade here for centuries, and we've done the same.

That Haley either doesn't know all of this, or that she pushes for such government overreach despite that knowledge, is, in my opinion, disqualifying in a Republican candidate for President of the United States.

Ali has come to the realization there can be no liberalism apart from the Christian faith from which it emerged. She’s right. //

Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades.

Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end. //

She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about. '//

There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.

According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.

But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”

Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.

In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.

There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue.

Helsinki prosecutor Anu Mantila argued Finnish courts should ban from the internet the booklet, Rasanen’s tweet, and an audio recording of Rasanen defending Christian views. Mantila also seeks punitive fines. “Male and Female He Created Them” was published in 2004, several years before Finland adopted the antiterrorism laws now being used to prosecute the two Christians for “hate speech.”

“With the right police and prosecutor, we could expect to see similar cases crop up across Europe and in fact around the world,” noted Alliance Defending Freedom International lawyer Paul Coleman, who is assisting the Christians’ legal defense. Hate crimes laws like Finland’s are on the books in many European nations and American states and cities.

Rasanen said the most difficult part of her prosecution has been the prosecutor’s false accusations against her, including that Rasanen considers homosexuals inferior. She said that is “against my conviction” as a Christian. Christianity teaches that every human is made in God’s image and so beloved by God that He sacrificed His own Son to wash away every sin ever committed.

“We represent the common traditional classical understanding of family and sexual ethics, and now this has been labeled widely in our society and also in the established Lutheran church as something which is … not only offending and extremist but it’s also criminal,” Pohjola said.

Pohjola is the bishop of a small non-state church body that adheres to the Bible’s teachings, which Finland’s state church has in large part abandoned. The Federalist interviewed Pohjola in person in 2021, and Rasanen in person in 2022.