On 08/02/2012 03:37 AM, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote: > The liberal ideal of freedom of speech goes beyond a norm constraining > government actions; it's a norm about how public debate ought to be > carried out: with everyone free to speak their mind without fear of > suffering a backlash, and nobody intimidated into silence. The liberal > ideal is that ideas stand or fall on their own merits, not on the > personal connections of their proponents.
This is the ideal, but our current social structures fall far short of it. As head of a multi-billion dollar company, the president of Chick-fil-A has access to media and politicians that makes his speech more potent than mine. It's more likely to influence legislation and set social rules for many other people, regardless of its merit. Much like a pacifist who eschews self-defense even against those who would do her harm, you're advocating a sort of speech pacifism: that we should counter this speech with our own, but go no farther, lest we give up on our ideal. Even more than that; here is a person who has clearly expressed his desire for all of us to harm some of us, and you propose that we continue to give him the money that enables him to make those desires real. I believe that doing so would make me, at best, knowingly and willingly complicit in my own oppression. And that's a bridge I simply will not cross. This is a painfully typical liberal political debate we're having here, weighing the relative merits of two social goods, and the impact of what happens today against our hopes for tomorrow. These discussions are never easy. Using words like "evil" to characterize another position makes them even harder. [And in case you started worrying: yes, I'm still a vegetarian of twelve years. I haven't given money to Chick-fil-A in at least that long, and even if your argument convinced me, it's not like I'd start now. So I was speaking a little hypothetically two paragraphs ago.] -- Brett Smith -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-discuss
