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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Oh how quickly the concept of politically correct humor has gone back to being a justification for right wing censorship. I'm sure we'll see such consistent logic from everyone involved.

The logic of "this is your petard, right?" is perfectly consistent. I don't see what hypocrisy you could possibly be pointing at.

in my opinion The right wing gets free speech and all it entails, and the left wing freeze peach and all it entails. That means I'm judging them based on their own standards without any hypocrisy involved and I get to keep my moral high ground, thank you very much.

Wanting to kill the president is disgusting. It's morally reprehensible. There's not some "both sides" hypocrisy consistency "true free speech" liberal norm where I'm forced to concede that, hey, live and let live man. "I want to kill the president." "That's disgusting." "I'm only joking." "Oh, ok, sounds like free speech."

It's free speech even if he's not joking. The whole point of free speech is to protect reprehensible speech. Inoffensive speech needs no protections.

That's missing the point. No one is denying that you have the free speech right to say you want to kill the president. It's also morally reprehensible. Cowering behind the defense that, it's just a joke man, that's my free speech, man, is retreating. It's pretending that they didn't say what they said.

"I want to kill the president."

RIP Trevor Moore.

It really can be a joke, though.

Sure, it's possible to make a joke about killing the president, and it's even possible for it to be funny, but this is obviously a bad faith justification people are applying after they get criticized for bad taste. There's a big difference between a dark joke comedy sketch and actually admitting out loud that you want the president to be killed.

The sketch was in reference to Bush, and what made the joke funny was the fact that everyone could tell Moore was not actually joking.

Morally reprehensible is definitely an objective line for determining the boundaries of free speech. Not at all something with competing definitions.

I'm not saying it's not free speech, I'm saying it's bad stupid and morally reprehensible speech. Falling back on, "it's just a joke," "it's free speech" is the lowest possible justification. Being sarcastic about it doesn't make your defense any stronger.

One day I'm going to stand for election on a platform of legalising comedy.

Australia is going to have to add a right to freedom of speech in their constitution first then. And an actual one, not a "subject to reasonable restrictions" one

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