by In America, we tend to use “Freedom as Speech” as a cudgel to allow hate speech in the public square and to encourage “Stupid Speech” via the quaint notion that, “Everyone has a right to express their opinion.” I argue today there are some people who have no right to a private opinion, let alone the right to be heard expressing that opinion.
Too often, in America, we believe the individual overrules the majority and can silence the minority. Instead of cohesiveness and understanding as a group, we tend to give wide berth to idiots and loudmouths using the “every opinion has value” excuse to let them rattle on while we race the other way.
Public opinions should be carefully thought out, managed and tempered by experience and by private feedback from others. Opinions must be informed by formal education or by a non-craven work ethic or by a tremendous survival rate based on direct experience on the street.
Instead of those cross-checked and peer reviewed people offering their experience and insight, we instead get untrained minds prattling on about conspiracies and Muslim enemies and an elected president who “illegally” took power. Those insane voices are given a tremendous public staging as if what they were saying actually had proof and verity to back up their wild and willfully misleading insanity.
How do we handle these braying know-nothings who believe lies and spread their opinions as hardened truths? One clear example of this non-sense is evidenced in John Kerry’s branding as a Vietnam misfit when he was really a war hero. Nobody in the Kerry camp believed it was possible to paint the decorated war hero as a traitor — but the lies took root, the sham opinion was believed, and a good man was ruined in the slant of a shady presidential election loss.
We must not let that flipping deceit happen again this November.
The only way to out shout a purposeful lie or an unwitting, vocal, stooge — is to put forth the truth in the most blunt and powerful way. You call out the lie and then you ban them from responding with more loud lies.
Yes, you censor the lie.
Yes, you deny the “right” of the “opinion” to be heard.
Yes, you close down deceit by refusing to fall for the “every story has two sides that deserves to be heard” scam because then you end up finding the truth in the tar pit as the lie shapes national policy — and condemns those who know lies have replaced truths — with a false, shouted, shaming that conquers as it devours goodness.
I think this makes sense. Why entertain a fool unless you want to become one yourself.
I am amazed at how the TV network “news shows” put confirmed liars on the air — not to expose them as liars, but rather to give them an international platform to continue to lie!
You’d think with the Internet making it easier to find out truths and weigh them against lies that it would be easier to shoot down falsehoods — rather, it seems that falsehoods spread faster than ever!
Yes, the internet doesn’t require — or want! — any sort of fact checking.
I wonder if there are certain times in history when we don’t discourage the blatant lie or the outrageous discourse. Times when you could die not because of the lie but of the willingness of others to seek out lies. Obviously McCarthyism, the Holocaust, the Salem Witch trials and Spanish Inquisition spring immediately to mind and perhaps this also applies to the former detainees of Guantanamo Bay and other eras. Why is this happening? The enthusiastic take up of the cry to sterilise drug users is alarming and a few years ago would have been marginalised and derided. Instead it has spread to include perpetrators of child abuse. What are we really afraid of and who is benefitting from this fear? Gosh, what a heavy way to start the week-end.
Wow, Kathe! What great questions!
In my lifetime, I can think of one, shining example when there was a public effort to put the truth to the lie of the State: Perestroika. The movement required confession and public admissions of private sins and it took a great man in Mikhail Gorbachev to lead that initiative.
The Freedom of Information Act is another cudgel against the State lie. We are lucky to have it even though one can still fight an FOA request in court.
The Downing Street Memo was another bright flash of truth in the dark like of a misbegotten war.
Wikileaks is a divine example of doing the right thing in the midst of neverending war when the bomb makers and the baby killers prefer to keep pressing the flesh forward into the grave.
The lie preserves power and makes money in evil methods — while the truth equalizes people by finding the human neutral, and that sort of equanimity among people is dangerous to the power majority because content people don’t need to be separated from each other and there is power in mass — so the lie covers their truths and hides their real motives and irrational moves and illegal behavior while the rest of us suffer knowing full-well that we’re being fed a lie… but we know in our bones if we want to survive, we’d better swallow it whole or else.