I was amazed to see the move to destroy the First Amendment and how channels such as Time have enshrined it in its propaganda. The writer states:
But “free speech” in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution. The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform. This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation.
One must remember that really racist and misogynistic President, Wilson, who had Bernays as his chief propagandist, we now apparently call it misinformation, promote our entry to WW I as well as promote the massive acceptance of cigarettes resulting the death of tens of millions. Bernays was a propagandist supported by Washington.
Now we struggle with information and disinformation. I use as a working definition that information is the transmission of verifiable facts. Namely one asserts something but that something can and should be checked. If one asserts that: "all chickens have blue feathers", then is that disinformation of information which upon a process of verification can be proven wrong. Clearly the latter. Just find a chicken with white feathers.
The problem is that our educational system is devoid of logical thinking. It contains basically religious assertions that students must accept at face value.
The advantage of free speech is that through verification, or as Popper stated verifiability. Free speech allows for, in fact guarantees that false statements see the light of day and are attacked for their falseness. The left's desire to control free speech is in my opinion a clear act of subversion, subversion of what is indeed a verifiable fact.
The challenges of understanding what the "science" was is best exemplified in the polemics during the pandemic. We still do not really know the mechanisms for transfer, and that is good because it makes us continue to search. Also we now know that infection can continue even with those vaccinated. Vaccination mitigates the effects of infection and it does not prevent it. But if one tried to promulgate that at the beginning of the pandemic one would have been accused of disinformation. Science is a process of continual renewal. As we learn more, as we have better means to measure, we often change the very fundamental paradigms.
The challenge in my opinion and my experience is that we must deal with uneducated but politicized users of the public square who want their view and only their promulgated. We have seen this process again and again in our civilizations. It is to eliminate that by asserting the right of free speech that out Founders saw as a mechanism to cleanse society of those who wish to control us.
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