More observations of the hypocrisy running rampant in 2017.
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"I'm boycotting this company for supporting Trump! Booyah! Watch my activism!"
"This other guy is a sensitive snowflake for boycotting a company for no good reason! Ha ha!"
If you support boycotting companies to make a political point, understand it works both ways and is an equally valid choice between consumers where they want their money to go. That's part of capitalism.
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"Since Nazis abuse freedom of speech, we should revoke it and start banning them from speaking!"
"Yeah, and since ISIS could abuse immigration, we should revoke it and start banning immigrants."
That's the kind of retort I wish would cause people to pause and reflect. But it really just makes them even more intent on being dim.
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New trend: "Bias Response Teams" on college campuses. Students can report anything they find offensive and said teams will act to censor it. Sometimes they dispatch police to warn offenders.
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Casey Anthony has re-emerged into the public spotlight.
As part of the Women's March. Protesting Trump.
Uh oh. I think 2017 got infected with 2016's weirdness.
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Just got unfriended for sharing a news article clarifying and dispelling rumors. Apparently linking to news over hearsay makes me a fascist, too.
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Of all the Monkey's Paw wishes out there, the wish to silence one's enemies is perhaps the most common and the most mutually destructive.
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"We should make it illegal for people to say you ought to take their freedoms away!"
"So, make it a crime to do what you're doing right now?"
Banning types of speech is such a nasty double edged sword. We seem to have forgotten George Carlin on the matter.
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Anyone who advocates restricting free speech is a fascist. Maybe not a Nazi type, but definitely a fascist. Authoritarians always target speech first because it's the marketplace of ideas that threatens their rule the most. Resist the nonsense to "ban certain speech" as soon as you see it.
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Dog whistle terms that mean supporting censorship and restricting your free speech rights:
1. Punching down - Implies some types of humor should be outlawed.
2. Hate speech - Implies some thoughts warrant special punishment for having been thought.
3. Yelling fire in a theater - False equivalency to imply that an idea is somehow an agent that will cause violence, rather than people's choices.
This is some of the vocabulary of fascism right now.
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Our society today has people who argue that supporting free speech makes you a fascist. Let that stunning bit of horrible sink in.
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