Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

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USA is literally founded on this principle:

Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous.

True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality of US government has often fallen short of the noble ideals laying at its foundation. But until recently, it has been a widely recognized principle that unmediated and un-gated access to speech and expression - be it audio, printed, electronic or any other means of speech - is a vital cornerstone of a modern free society. Unfortunately, recently certain part of political and cultural establishment decided they want to "move past" these antiquated ideas of equality and appoint themselves as gatekeepers of speech - "for our common benefit and the benefit of the society", of which they are but selfless servants, to be sure.

The new Twitter CEO is, unfortunately, one of these people, and has unashamedly promoted this approach personally. Thus, we can expect only redoubling of effort from his side to suppress and remove speech that he considers "harmful" and discussion of topics he considers not up for discussion. Fortunately, there's an easy way to deal with it. As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them rot in their own bubble.

>As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them rot in their own bubble.

Agreed. Part of that is the 'hot take' represented by the limited characters of a tweet are inimical to nuance. So much of it is just people taking turns 'dunking' on each other, and it gets increasingly heated and rage inducing. Add to that an inflammatory algorithm, where outrage drives interaction, and of course you have a cesspit.

Part of the good thing about the old internet is when you have to construct a blog to share your thoughts, you have to be driven to actually, y'know, build something. It also has the added benefit of being relatively closed off. Now everyone has easy access to an empty field with which to yell into the void... and it turns out with that low bar and high inter-connectedness comes a lot of yelling.

USA is literally founded on this principle:

Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment" rights.

The "founders" were not a monolithic entity with a single opinion. The history of the Bill of Rights makes it quite clear that there were many founders in favor of those amendments.

The Constitution was ratified in June of 1788. The 1st Congress convened in March of 1789, and the Bill of Rights was introduced in June of 1789. I think it is quite reasonable to consider the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights as part of the foundational principles of the nation.

They didn't indeed. And you know why? There was a big discussion, between the fraction that said you have to spell out the most important rights so that nobody would think that it's ok to violate them, and the one that said "we already said the government has this set of very restricted functions, if we start spelling out the specific rights, people would think these are the only rights that should be protected, and others are not important and the government is OK to expand their function and violate those rights, just because we didn't include them in the list! We can't have that!" After a while, it ended up looking like it does now.

Of course, both of them turned out to be wrong. Not only people think that rights that are not explicitly enumerated do not deserve protection, not only the idea of limited government bound by constitutional limits is completely dead and buried, now people think that explicitly named rights too can be violated at will. Maybe because they have been spelled out a bit later, so they can't be that important. After all, First Amendment isn't something that's very important, that's why they made it the first one. Like the trial one, we'll do some silly stuff first, to warm up, and then we'll get to really important things.

Over George Mason's (among others) protest the convention decided not to include a bill of rights in the constitution. There are a few reasons for this, one of the two more traditionally held is that it was seen as unnecessary given that many states already had their own bills of rights. The other reason supported by the historical record is that many of the delegates were concerned about giving the appearance of those being the only rights guaranteed to the people.

There is a third popular opinion, which is that the convention had been a hot, contentious affair that dragged on for months and everyone wanted to go home so they tabled the bill of rights for a later date.

You will note that none of these reasons is that anyone objected to the principles in the bill of rights. More importantly, many of the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments are directly targeted at the causes of the revolution. This lends significant credence to the "it's important but let's not do it now" argument, and undercuts rather dramatically the idea that the country was not founded on those ideals.

Your founders were a bunch of tossers. The American fascination with elevating them to god like status is laughable.

Citation? :)

Yes, one possible explanation is that in a country where so many people take christian scripture seriously you can kind of see that they might not see the intellectual absurdity of treating the constitution as if it were some sort of sacred text. The problem, as ever, is that it's hard to have conversations about modern western humans being rational if we are obliged to be polite about their childish religious superstitions.

And that's what you usually get on twitter. Great example. That's one of the reasons why it's a cesspool - people like this.

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