Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Did They Spell His Name Right?

Yes, this turned into a thing yesterday. Of course, the real purpose of the internet is mostly to generate outrage. At some point it's like complaining about porn by saying "LOOK AT THIS! ISN'T THAT PORNOGRAPHY TO YOU??!!!???!!! Which brings us straight back to Maggie Habermann's observation: The usual redoubt, itself just a variation on "cancel culture!"  Am I tolerating hateful speech by not declaring it hateful speech which all right-thinking people should want to see expunged from the public discourse?  (Which, no, is not a free speech issue.)  Maybe I simply oppose hateful speech by ignoring it? I understand Greitens is in a large field of primary candidates, which means he's the poster child for "Ignore him and maybe he'll go away."  Don Hoffman and Allen West made some truly outrageous claims in the primary against Greg Abbott.  No one really cared, and they vanished without a trace.  Lyndon LaRouche regularly ran for POTUS, and regularly alleged the Queen of England sat at the center of an international drug ring (what, you thought "Q" was original?).  Anybody remember him now?  Nobody "implicitly tolerated" LaRouche; they treated him as a crank.

My suspicion is no small portion of Missouri does, too.
That's the free speech issue, because the actions are not those of the government. The joke is right, too:  are we free if we insist on binding ourselves to every person whose expression is annoying, offensive, or just stupid?  If I do fight every statement that I disagree with, am I tolerating it if it isn't banned/taken down/removed?
Is it really worth the effort?

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