Comment by kevingadd

> "Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

yes, the left doing that was pretty bad and I have gotten into many arguments over my left leaning friends over it. But it was largely private companies capitulating to pressure. To compare that to people being abducted and incarcerated by the government without trial or even an actual law being broken is worse.

You do understand why thats worse right?

How many of the conservatives complaining about it would support government regulations preventing people from being fired for expressing controversial viewpoints? AFAIK those complaining are the same people who support ‘at will’ employment and the liberty of religious organizations to impose more or less arbitrarily discriminatory hiring standards. So yeah, in that lax regulatory environment, your employer might decide to fire you if you (e.g.) feel the need to be an asshole to your trans colleagues.

Well for brevity I did trivialize it but I will expand:

The left side got people fired. This is objectively not as bad as getting people disappeared. You can get a new fucking job. You can’t get freedom from detention and you cannot easily return to the country (if at all)

Additionally there is the motivational factor behind both sides:

The lefts argument in policing language was to reduce harm to marginalized groups. You may not agree with it, but that is the rational.

The rights argument is to erase those marginalized groups.

These are extremely different in motivation. Asking you to respect a persons gender identity in professional contexts is far different than forcing someone to not be able to express it on federal documentation.

One side of this was “we want to create inclusive spaces that make people comfortable and if you don’t want to participate in that there is the door”. The other side is “we did not want to participate in that so go fuck yourself and we will do whatever we can to deny your right to express your identity”

“Any attempt to control speech” is an absolutist statement that is absurd in its fallacy. So I can say I can murder you? I can say you’re planning a terrorist attack? I can say you want to kill the president? Of course not. Speech is limited contextually and by law

> Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

People are being shipped to a Salvadorean mega-prison for having autism awareness tattoos. Law-abiding students who write peaceful op-eds are being disappeared to a facility in Louisiana. Yes it sucks to lose your job, but it sucks a lot more to be indefinitely detained without even seeing a judge.

> "Your side" isn't any better than the other's.

Your argument reminds me of high schoolers that argue the US was just as bad as the Nazis for operating Japanese internment camps. Yes, both were wrong, but one was much, much worse.

The problem with such reflexive absolutism, as I've pointed out many times, is that you end up advocating for the speech rights of people who are advocating for genocide. I shouldn't need to point out that killing people also terminates their speech rights and that advocacy of genocide is thus an attack on free speech.

You do not have to defend the free speech rights of people who are themselves attacking free speech (and free life). In fact, it is foolish to do so.

Eh, I’ve railed quite a bit against the left. But looking back, we should have fired and deplatformed more aggressively. The social menaces who weren’t fired or arrested went on to become a plague.

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When I see the left's recent brazen devotion to "winning" and "sticking it to the other side", sometimes it feels like Democrats have started acting like Republicans.

And it turns out that wasn't sustainable.

I know it's glib and coarse and lacking in nuance but when I hear American conservatives complain about the ways of the liberal countrymen I can't help but think, "That's how you guys sounded for a long time. Now they're doing it, lo and behold: everyone loses."

If you get fired for saying something stupid, you might want to consider the notion that you deserve not to have a job. They’re called consequences, and if you don’t like them, remaining silent is free.

Put otherwise, it’s very possible that your livelihood is trivial.

By the same logic the students got themselves vanished by not strictly following the rules of the visa ( one example, student had a dui ). It is not better, but the moment you erode basic speech protections it spills over to a lot of other areas.

Telling your employer you were a dick is extremism?

The speech isn't why he would go to prison in a just world (that would be Georgia, the fake electors, and the toilet paper documents), and the impeachment that was a consequence of the speech is always a purely political trial. Someone can be impeached for any reason and no reason whatsoever, that is unfortunately how the system is designed. Two kinds of justice, with a few batshit SCOTUS rulings that make a criminal president unprosecutable as long as 34 senators are willing to go to bat for him.

It's not his speech that gave him trouble with the DOJ (before he dismissed all charges against himself), it's all the other parts of his conspiracy to steal the election.

Notice how none of the talking heads on TV were in legal trouble over their speech on the matter.

Every one of the cases against him had a bit more to it than 'well he said some bad words', the same way that a conman doesn't go to prison just for saying some bad words, or the same way that a war criminal gets a noose, despite simply saying words - giving orders.

There's been a lot in usian news about people having been deported because of things like tattoo of the logo of some spanish or other soccer club.

Here's one case where the deportation seems to be based mainly on having worn sports branded merch and a hoodie, and some supposed anonymous snitch, which the state has agreed was an error:

https://www.newsweek.com/kilmar-armando-abrego-garcia-deport...

Is wearing an "autism awareness " tattoo considered speech?

I agree that at-will employment is a problem. So is a lack of safety nets. Do you know who supports at-will employment and a lack of safety nets?

If the past decade is any indication, nothing has stopped the long list of cancelled right wing grifters, racists, and various other flavors of fools and bigots from finding gainful employment and signal boosting and platforming among like-minded people who do exercise their right to associate with them, despite their behavior.

For (allegedly) being so persecuted and silenced, it's weird how so many of them have so much more power, reach, and wealth than ever before.

Perhaps getting booed at in the last college campus they held a rally at is not quite the yellow star, or the mark of Cain that they convinced you it is.

Surely one can find ways to fight the irrational, inconsequential leftists (which there are many) without bullying institutions by cutting their funding, or kidnapping people in broad daylight in the street?

Civilized western countries do it all the time.

The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.

This is just the 'you made me do it' defense argued by every abuser ever. Someone is behaving as an ass, they get told 'you're an ass, stop that' and then they escalate and say 'you made me do this'. It happens in families, it happens in schoolyards, it happens on streets, it happens in business, it happens in dictatorships. Just yesterday, the president of South Korea was formally removed from office after trying to stage a military coup and this was his whole defense.

Free speech in the US is about not having consequences for what you are saying. In particular not having consequences from the government. Therefor you can only say that it is a legitimate consequence if you disregard free speech. Free speech in the US is about being able to be an asshole to 10%, 50% or 90% of the population without having to be responsible for what that part of the population does. And even more so what they do with the government. As such if you believe in free speech the government's actions stand on their own. What you actually don't get to say is that it is a consequence. Because that is what free speech in the US is supposed to prevent. Consequences from the government.

In many countries in Europe we have hate speech and defamation laws, we don't have at-will employment and many of our universities are public. This means there is less freedom to make others upset, questioning someone's character, firing them and ways to affect our education. This is by definition illiberal. (Worse or not is an open question). In Europe we can't say that "I might have offended 50% of the population, but sending me to prison is worse" because our laws says it isn't. In the US you can.

Does US law also say that the government can do all kinds of things, including pardoning criminals? Yes, but it still goes against the credibility of free speech in the US. One of the things the US still had over other countries.

Eh, you can prove anything but starting history at a particular point.

For instance, "GamerGate", where a bunch of anonymous people on the internet tried to get a number of women in the game industry fired, predates "cancel culture" by a year or two.

Or how the whole #MeToo movement was, you know, a response to powerful people abusing people in their power, and firing or otherwise limiting their careers if they resisted.

If <insert famous talking head from ten years ago> didn't want to be "canceled", well, he could have always just not sexually harassed his underlings.

Part of the problem here is that you're abstracting the actions of a handful of relatively powerless people to a principle: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." The 'I' here is, from your framing, the 'left' or something.

Strawman. The fired people you're talking about weren't banned from society by the people pointing them out on the internet. If someone's on an international flight yelling racial slurs and causing a commotion, and someone else publishes video of that person yelling racial slurs on an international flight, it's not the people commenting on the video who fired that person from their job. It's their employers. What would be the alternative? No one takes video of the person yelling racial slurs? Or, if the video is posted, no one comments on it? Or, maybe, the person yelling racial slurs could simply avoid losing their employment by not yelling racial slurs on a flight full of people with their phones out? Or maybe the employer could choose to ignore the negative publicity and keep the person on staff despite the risk to their revenue? Who exactly is the responsible party here?

I generally find it pointless to point out that 'right' perspectives suffer from a lack of practical logic--pointing out the fundamental irrationality of a position rarely changes the mind of the person holding that position. But, your position ignores power differential between people--your argument is a matter of 'principle,' but this isn't fundamentally about principles.

Is your argument then that a person yelling racial slurs on a full airplane shouldn't have their employment threatened by their behavior? That their employer shouldn't fire them?

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First it’s people disagreeing with me, then it’s deportation to the death camps. There is zero nuance and the slippery slope is basically guaranteed so I should have freedom of consequence for everything I do!

Took me all of 5 seconds to find an example. Tattoos are a form of protected speech: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-041258/https://www.theatlantic...

all parties are beneficiaries of the institutional structures that allow for a party to do those things

so the things you are bothered by and demand everyone to prioritize are actually solved by addressing the underlying mechanisms, as opposed to simply trying to propagate your preferred party's numbers

something... both sides... might actually be into. if the other party is afraid of the opposition party doing the same thing to different people, then there might actually be overwhelming consensus to change the thing that a "both sides" person is trying to point out

Not in my America.

I welcome any and all persons from anywhere in the world if they want to come and protest the American war machine

Our forefathers would be absolutely ashamed at what you just said. Protesting a totalitarian government that lacks proper representation is the most American thing you can possibly do, and that makes these immigrants more American than you will ever be, as long as you hold such views.

Edit: It seems you have edited your post in order to remove the extremely distasteful language you originally expressed. I assume you still hold such views or you'd not have expressed them to begin with, and as such my comment still stands.

Fuck that!

We have this thing called the First Amendment. It applies to all people under the jurisdiction of the United States. There’s no exception for “guests.” Criticizing the government is a time-honored American tradition. Throwing people out for it is absolutely vile.

It's hard for me not to be extremely cynical about the anti-Israel protests that happened. For one thing, a lot of people who favor them gloss over the illegal things done at them like break-ins, vandalism, trespassing, and illegal occupations.

But in general I think the case made by the pro-Palestinian side was that somehow universities bore responsibility for what Israel did because of vague investments in their endowments. I didn't think owning an ETF that held a weapons manufacturer or some Israeli company on the stock market was explicitly Zionist but this was the premise for protests. Why not protest the US or Israel directly? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

It felt like they were asking universities to explicitly be pro-Palestine which is a strange thing to ask for in America.

We were talking about the Tufts PhD student who did not engage in any violence or disruption, but wrote an op-ed advocating for a boycott of another country.

Making America subservient to Israel's interests is anti-American. The fascist zionists play at being "America first" but this couldn't be further from the truth.

A protest is disruptive by definition.

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No, it is not.

It absolutely is not. And your views are very concerning. Everyone residing in the US is entitled to the ammendments. That is exactly why Guantanamo bay was formed, as a matter of fact. What makes this so much worse is these individuals were not arrested for criticizing these United States, but for criticizing a hostile foreign nation, that just so happens to be the darling of billionaires of a certain faith, who constitute an overwhelming majority in the aristocracy of the US (and have been there since around the 70s). It can in fact be traced back to AZC, when JFK forced them to register as foreign agents.

> The best argument I have heard is that visa revocation may be like firing: the US can do it for almost any reason and you can fire someone for no reason, but can't do it for specific prohibited reasons. Speech would probably be one of those bad reasons under the US's civil rights framework.

No, the U.S. has the prerogative to pick and choose foreigners who are allowed to immigrate based on categories that would be impermissible for employers. That includes nationality, e.g. our green card quota system, as well as speech and affiliation. The Supreme Court has upheld deporting communists who are foreign nationals: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/342/580/.

This is reflected in the statute. Aliens can specifically be excluded for political beliefs and views if the Secretary of State determines that is necessary: "An alien, not described in clause (ii), shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest." 8 USC 1182(a)(4)(C)(iii).

You have case law to back that up?