Free Speech

[Bomb#20]

The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, whereas the political thoughts of individuals most often are not about increasing corporate profits but involve many factors. So far as I know, Milton Friedman was not a business "censorship fan."

What's your point? He wasn't, therefore you aren't?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Are you under the impression that the Supreme Court decides cases by inquiring as to whether Don2 (Don1 Revised) is able to come up with a rationalization convincing to himself for whatever double standard he wishes them to apply?

There is nothing in either the text of the Constitution or in the last 229 years of Supreme Court case law to support the contention that free speech and free press are supposed to be judged by different standards.

1st amendment: "...or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."

These are two different concepts even if a lot of overlap.

 

[Bomb#20]

Corporations and unions and any group of people take positions as the group entity with no individual identifications. That is clearly what is meant when people are talking about corporations or unions or any group speaking.

Well, if Congress passed a law saying every corporate-paid-for political message is required to contain an "I'm Joe Blow." identification, I'm pretty sure the CU v FEC SCOTUS would have upheld it. I'm pretty sure "Hillary: The Movie" contained individual identifications -- movies typically run credits at the end.

To hear the censorship fans talk, you'd think corporations were autonomous robots.

I don't think that when I hear people debate the notion whether spending money on speech is speech or not.

Oh, is that what JohnG was doing when he wrote:

Whatever the wording, when people speak on behalf of corporations, they are not speaking on behalf of people.

Whether spending money on speech is speech or not is not a topic that depends on whether the money passes through a corporation. The people claiming that the First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations are self-evidently not doing so to debate the notion whether spending money on speech is speech or not.

I.e., some of the shareholders' property is confiscated from them, or else a minority of shareholders are stripped of the limited liability protection shareholders in other companies are guaranteed because the government didn't like what those particular shareholders paid somebody to say. That plainly qualifies as punishing one or more living breathing H. sapiens organisms for what some living breathing H. sapiens organism uttered.

That is, at best, an indirect punishment on specific living H. sapiens.

Um, so if a million dollars is confiscated from an account you own 1/1000000 of, that's at best indirectly taking a dollar from you? Do constitutional rights go poof if the government defines the punishment as "indirect"? Technically, taking a dollar directly out of your own wallet is an indirect punishment too since it's the not getting what you would have bought with it, rather than the not having the dollar itself, that hurts you.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You're blindly defending immorality. Blindly defending dictatorship.

You are either immoral or ignorant.

You're still obsessed with morality above practicality.

This is a half-formed idea.

I have no clue what you are talking about.

No surprise. Fanatics are incapable of comprehending blasphemous ideas.

Something which is moral but doesn't work isn't a good answer.

Bullshit!!!

Doing away with dictators works.

That is what the Anarchists proved.

They proved that when you neglect the expenditure to create and defend you can outperform--but in the end it catches up with you.

That is not an issue.

We could do away with the dictators and things would be much better. We would have a much more vibrant economy.

For grave diggers. That is, if society could even afford them.

Massive hoarding is what we get with dictators.

Hoarding and massive tax evasion.

That is what the dictators give us.

Fanaticism again. You still can't understand that in your world big things don't happen. You might think small is good--but there are an incredible number of very big things that are required for society to continue.

Continuing to say it's power does nothing to refute the fact that it's also a measurement of resources.

That is like saying: Continuing to say it's a bomb does not refute the facts that it is made of metal and has wires.

So fucking what?

It is power. Massive power in the hands of dictators.

Humans used to have enough sense to know that is not good.

How, specifically, does your system ensure there is enough production for the needs?

Take your "hoarding" and shove it---that's a standard leftist denial of reality. In the big picture hoarding is not a factor (if anything, our system suffers from a lack of hoarding. We drive inventories down to the razor edge and people then suffer when the supply system glitches.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think that is key: Corporations are commercial entities, by definition. They can have free speech relevant to their commercial activities. And they can be regulated according to commerce laws.

Citizens United is a non-profit corporation. The New York Times Company is a for-profit corporation. That makes it more of a commercial entity, by definition. If Congress gets to censor Citizens United because it's a commercial entity, then it gets to censor the New York Times. Is that really what you want?

Exactly. We have a lot of fools here who think that free speech should only apply to the sort of speech they approve of. Never mind that the whole point of free speech is the protection of unpopular speech.

 

[untermensche]

You're still obsessed with morality above practicality.

Of course.

That is the correct order of things.

Morality first.

And in this case morality is more practical in every way.

For grave diggers. That is, if society could even afford them.

Absolute insanity.

Nothing connects elimination of capitalist dictators with graves.

Except of course in the US there is the insanely violent history of capitalists attacking unions and union leaders.

You still can't understand that in your world big things don't happen.

This also is pulled straight from your ass.

You have nothing that connects the elimination of dictators with the size of projects groups coming together can accomplish.

Total shit pulled from your ass is a complete waste of my time.

You are a complete waste of my time.

A sycophant to dictators and dictatorship. You sing the praises of dictatorship and claim we need dictators. In a sane world you would be considered incredibly immoral.

How, specifically, does your system ensure there is enough production for the needs?

That is a technical problem that was solved already.

You are grasping at straws.

You have no position to take seriously.

 

[laughing dog]

Oh, is that what JohnG was doing when he wrote:

Whatever the wording, when people speak on behalf of corporations, they are not speaking on behalf of people.

Yes, exactly.

Whether spending money on speech is speech or not is not a topic that depends on whether the money passes through a corporation. The people claiming that the First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations are self-evidently not doing so to debate the notion whether spending money on speech is speech or not.

Not necessarily. They simply be focusing on corporations. For example, I don't think that spending on speech is speech. I think that spending on speech by any group can be limited as long as the limitations do not differentiate between groups.

Um, so if a million dollars is confiscated from an account you own 1/1000000 of, that's at best indirectly taking a dollar from you? Do constitutional rights go poof if the government defines the punishment as "indirect"?

You asked how a corporation could be punished. I said fines come to mind. There is nothing about constitutionality your question, so why bring it in?
I suppose you feel your first question is somehow a good analogy to the issue, but it is not.

Technically, taking a dollar directly out of your own wallet is an indirect punishment too since it's the not getting what you would have bought with it, rather than the not having the dollar itself, that hurts you.

Nope. Taking a dollar directly from my wallet is a direct punishment - there is no intermediate party.

 

[Bomb#20]

I.e., shareholders hire directors to hire a CEO to hire employees to hire publishers to write or broadcast messages. Biological humans all. To hear the censorship fans talk, you'd think corporations were autonomous robots.


I.e., some of the shareholders' property is confiscated from them, or else a minority of shareholders are stripped of the limited liability protection shareholders in other companies are guaranteed because the government didn't like what those particular shareholders paid somebody to say. That plainly qualifies as punishing one or more living breathing H. sapiens organisms for what some living breathing H. sapiens organism uttered.

Your first problem of logic comes where you gloss past "Hired" in your language.

Here, someone is paying money to have someone else represent a view. Money is not speech,

So who said money is speech other than leftists misrepresenting court decisions?

it is commissioned action, and hiring implies that not making said speech makes it not strictly "optional" to the hired speaker.

Yes, yes, working for wages and not being able to force somebody else to provide you with free stuff when you stop doing anything for him in exchange means you're a "wage slave". People who talk about paid work not being optional should try being chained up and whipped for not doing unpaid work, for some perspective. Yes, when the Sulzbergers pay a worker to operate their printing presses, that's strictly optional.

In the real world, there are consequences to turning down action commissioned by your employer; asymmetrical power structures are involved.

So the question really is "should we be in the business of treating PAID communications the same as we treat original and voluntary communications?"

When you ask that, what do you mean? On one level, the answer is yes, of course we should, because rule of law is important, and the Constitution is the highest law of the land, and the First Amendment plainly applies to paid communications every bit as much as to unpaid communications. What, are today's people so ignorant they think that back when the Constitution was ratified, all the newspapers were one-man-band outfits and Tom Paine personally printed a hundred thousand copies of Common Sense without paying anybody to help him do it? The states clearly weren't agreeing to ratify an amendment that excluded exactly the publications their legislators had in mind when they demanded protection from Congressional censorship.

On another level, of course "Should we amend the Constitution to repeal the First Amendment's protection of paid communications?" is a perfectly legitimate public policy question. If you think a narrower free speech guarantee than the one we have would be better, write one up and let's have a look at it.

I posit that while we should let any individual say anything as an individual representing their own individual views. Is it acceptable to allow one person to speak with the voices and authority of their employees? Because that is what is happening when a company commissions a message as a company.

I lost you. How do you figure the New York Times Co is writing its editorials with the authority of its factory workers? It's speaking with the authority of its shareholders, because they hired the CEO who hired the editor, and they authorized him to spend their money for them on stuff like that.

And that steals the agency of all who disagree with that message within the company to not say the thing.

Who are you, untermensche? No, it most certainly does not steal their agency. It buys their agency. They voluntarily choose to sell their agency to the Sulzbergers in exchange for considerations they consider worth more than their agency. Calling a voluntary sale "stealing" is demagoguery.

It literally gives some people a greater voice than others, and robs people of their agency to speak their own message,

Oh for the love of god! It doesn't even metaphorically rob people of their agency to speak their own message. Every NYT factory worker who wants to can go home at the end of his shift pounding ink onto newsprint to make a living and climb on a soapbox or log into TFT and speak the opposite message from whatever Arthur Sulzberger paid him to print for him. And the notion that Sulzberger's greater voice reduces the worker's voice is ridiculous. What, you think those printing presses would still be there for the worker to run off a million copies of his own opinion if there weren't a capitalist giving somebody a reason to build printing presses? Sulzberger paying the worker to print Sulzberger's message is what makes it possible for that worker to buy a home computer and get a hundred people to read his TFT post. Some people having a greater voice than others amplifies the ordinary worker's message, the same as some people having more wealth than others raises poor people's standard of living over what it would be if equality were enforced. Life is not a zero-sum game, no matter how much faith people stuck in their hunter-gatherer economic intuitions have that it is.

in a world where all voices should be viewed not by how loud they speak but on the content of the message, where the real source of the message is anonymous and hidden from consequences.

So show us your proposal for a First Amendment replacement, and then we can talk about whether it would actually bring about such a world.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course.

That is the correct order of things.

Morality first.

Except that way you end up dead. It's not really moral after all.

And in this case morality is more practical in every way.

Nope. You've never shown your system actually works and now you show you don't really even care if it works.

Absolute insanity.

Nothing connects elimination of capitalist dictators with graves.

The lack of productivity causes the graves. Without the big things that simply aren't going to be built in your world the carrying capacity of the planet falls to far below the population. Billions die.

How, specifically, does your system ensure there is enough production for the needs?

That is a technical problem that was solved already.

You are grasping at straws.

You have no position to take seriously.

You are saying that we can produce enough. I'm asking how you ensure you produce enough if you don't measure.

 

[untermensche]

Except that way you end up dead. It's not really moral after all.

OK.

Eliminating all these man-made dictatorships causes everybody to explode and we are all dead.

It is amazing what the defenders of immorality will say.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Except that way you end up dead. It's not really moral after all.

OK.

Eliminating all these man-made dictatorships causes everybody to explode and we are all dead.

It is amazing what the defenders of immorality will say.

Eliminate the big projects that can only be accomplished by organizations you dislike and most everyone dies.

 

[untermensche]

Except that way you end up dead. It's not really moral after all.

OK.

Eliminating all these man-made dictatorships causes everybody to explode and we are all dead.

It is amazing what the defenders of immorality will say.

Eliminate the big projects that can only be accomplished by organizations you dislike and most everyone dies.

Tell me exactly what can't be done by groups of democratic companies coming together and prove it is impossible.

The shit the defenders of dictatorship try to pass off as knowledge is amazing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Eliminate the big projects that can only be accomplished by organizations you dislike and most everyone dies.

Tell me exactly what can't be done by groups of democratic companies coming together and prove it is impossible.

The shit the defenders of dictatorship try to pass off as knowledge is amazing.

Consensus of a large number of entities gridlocks.

Nobody's building billion-dollar facilities in your world.