They keep giving these low, slow pitches.
Once again Cracked plays the game of article title is different from the url with 5 Cases Of Free Speech That Will Make You Hate Freedom
With the url of: /5-groups-people-who-will-make-you-hate-free-speech/
And yes... this comes out days after the Garland Texas shooting... You know... timing!
And to be clear here's how the article starts:
Knowing how to make good use of our right to free speech can be tricky. We all know you can't scream "fire!" in a crowded theater, but would it really be so bad if we were to lower the threshold just a skootch? Yeah, probably, but while certainly no American has any sort of God-given right to go through life without ever being offended, when that theater we were just talking about starts filling up with wild-eyed yahoos jabbering things like, "Slap your children so we can stop the fags from putting the Devil music inside us with vaccines!" one might start seeing the lure in tweaking the limit to, let's not say silence, but ... encourage those folks to shut the fuck up for the sake of society at large. Folks like ...
Damn. And emphasis in original.
You see. Using mockery and satire to put down people you disagree with (as the article itself does) that's free speech.
But when you couple that "encourage" with openly lamenting why that the threshold for free speech is too high... well then it starts to get a bit scary.
That it's framed as " wild-eyed yahoos jabbering things" well that just puts a nice level of classim on it.
Now in fairness. The article was pretty even (as could be with 5 entries) of right wing and left wing asshattery.
Though Cracked... a bit of advice, when you run an article that asserts, as one of its main concluding points, that "the line between rich and poor has a barbwire fence built over it" don't release it concurrently with the above article where you bemoan that powerful and well connected are legally unable to jail "wild-eyed yahoos" who say things you don't like.
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