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Sinclair Broadcasting Takes A Break From ‘Protecting Local Communities’ (By Banning Comedians) To Spread Tylenol Disinformation
from the what-fresh-hells-from-state-TV dept
Our mad, idiot king recently declared war on Tylenol. Nobody really knows why, exactly. There’s only shaky, correlational data to support any link between Tylenol and autism (did you know summertime ice cream consumption leads to an increase in shark attacks?).
And even the backers of those studies say telling pregnant mothers to avoid Tylenol is irresponsible. Mostly, Trump appears to be trying to maintain his flimsy veneer as a populist for the conspiratorially minded MAHA movement. He lies to that gullible segment about cracking down on pharma much like he lied to Matt Stoller types about cracking down on corporate power in general.
That’s certainly not stopping the MAGA propaganda machine from behaving irresponsibly. Sinclair Broadcasting, the local broadcast affiliate that has been censoring comedians that give our mad idiot king a sad, has been really busy helping the administration spread disinformation about Tylenol.
Media Matters notes that while you couldn’t watch Jimmy Kimmel on Sinclair last week, the affiliate was repeatedly platforming a member of an organization who has spread medical misinformation on more than 60 Sinclair stations across 37 states in segments since the Trump announcement:
“[The] guest was Dr. Elizabeth Mumper of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which pushed a bogus COVID-19 treatments long after it was proved ineffective. Sinclair has previously turned to this group to spread criticism of COVID-19 vaccines and to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary.”
Mumper also took time in the Sinclair segments to also falsely claim that vaccines are harmful to infants, regarding the development of autism, something for which there’s absolutely zero supporting evidence. Keep in mind this is occurring while Trump FCC’s boss claims to be cracking down on affiliates for airing content that poses a threat to local communities (Carr is a shameless liar, if that’s not clear yet).
I hate to beat a dead horse, but media academics have been warning for fifty+ years about the dire problems created by letting media companies (especially local broadcasters) fall into the hands of just a few rich people. Most of the time, the press, public, and even policymakers yawned. Now, every single day, we get ugly, glaring examples why it was a bad idea to ignore their advice.
Authoritarians and corporations in particular love having a monolithic, homogenized media (with all the critical, informed voices marginalized to the fringe), happy to parrot their lies and bullshit. Still, we were endlessly told by corporations (and even “free market Libertarian” groups purportedly super concerned about unchecked state power) that maintaining functional media consolidation limits was a dated relic that “harmed innovation.”
Now the Trump administration is pushing to remove the last remaining media consolidation limits that exist in the U.S., built over generations of bipartisan collaboration. Local right-wing broadcasters Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna are all preparing to merge. In addition to massive consolidation among major national networks.
And this isn’t just a “problem for dying traditional media” you can casually dismiss as irrelevant. As we let Twitter, TikTok, and other major social, telecom, and media companies all fall into the hands of a few authoritarian-loyal billionaires, the evidence of harm from mindless consolidation is everywhere you turn. And it’s not remotely subtle.
Filed Under: autism, causation, correlation, disinformation, elizabeth mumper, maha, misinformation, pregnancy, tylenol
Companies: sinclair
Comments on “Sinclair Broadcasting Takes A Break From ‘Protecting Local Communities’ (By Banning Comedians) To Spread Tylenol Disinformation”
When did “innovation” (devoid of any context, natch) become the highest of virtues? Innovative new ways to screw customers. Innovative forms of deceit. Innovative fraud.
Fraud is innovative revenue streams. Authoritarianism is innovative leadership. Maybe more businesses should do less innovation and more basic competence.
Oh hey, you know what would have helped keep this from being a bigger problem, had they become established norms by now?
Laws requiring truthfulness in newscasts. AKA censorship laws!
Re:
You know what would prevent those kinds of laws? The First Amendment!
Christ, it’s like you’re aching to burn the parts of the Constitution that you don’t like. Are you really that eager to let the government control what speech is acceptable any- and everywhere, to the point where the billionaire techbro fantasies of a national panopticon become a reality?
Re: Re:
Why should I care about a document written more than 200 years ago, and worse one that’s clearly not working?
As I’ve said before; I’m as unsympathetic to appeals to the first amendment as I am to appeals to the second. Guns shouldn’t have been a right. Nor should people possess the right to promote harmful lies.
Re: Re: Re:
Because that document is still the underpinning of this country’s laws, regardless of whether you (or the Justices on the Supreme Court) like it.
Most lies cause harm. Sometimes, the truth causes harm. Do you want to ban “harmful” truths? If so, who decides what truths are harmful—people who think talking about the historical fact of chattel slavery in the U.S. “harms” the “moral fiber” of the nation or some shit?
We already have defamation laws. I don’t see how you can have laws against stochastic terrorism and mis- or disinformation without treading upon the First Amendment or turning the country into a panopticon straight out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is why I again ask if you’re enamored with the techbro push for such bullshit.
Re: Re: Re:2 Checks and balances motherfuckers!
How’s that working out for you? ;-P
Re: Re: Re:2
Dude: You keep acting like wanting a little bit of protection from tech bro’s quite deliberate lies is the same as what the tech bros want.
The brunchlords y’all hate so much got where they are because there were no punishments for their actions. The solution to the current attack on democracy is a stronger government, not a weaker one. There’s a very strong reason that the republican party spent the last 40+ years tearing down government protections.
Lies, especially political lies, but also ones about medicine as mentioned in this article, need legal consequences.
If we passed the laws I wanted, NFTs and LLMs wouldn’t be be touted as miracles and sold to fools either, but that’s just ‘Truth in advertising’ not ‘political truth’.
And once frankly, banning harmful falsehoods is not a slippery slope to banning harmful truths. Lying degrades the ‘marketplace of ideas’, and you personally are proud of the fighting you’ve done to allow people to spread lies and degrade the marketplace.
Re: Re: Re:3
When what you want is a series of laws that will effectively turn public spaces into a panopticon that surveils everyone’s speech in search of lies to criminalize? Yes, you want the same thing as the techbros.
Tell that to the president, who wants museums to stop talking about slavery. You think he wouldn’t ban that speech if he could?
Ain’t no such thing—and if there is, lies are cheaper and easier to sell than truths, and it’s been that way for a hell of a lot longer than you or I have been alive, so I hope you’re ready to regulate that level of human behavior.
Re: Re: Re:4
Once more: Make truth a defense against the crime, just like it is for defamation, and then banning history would be pretty difficult.
Also, you know, none of Trump’s rise to power could have occurred had he already been in prison due to his campaigns of lies. It’s true, we’ve got a fascist in power now. It’s really too bad we didn’t act to ban their speech while we could, but perhaps we’ll have the opportunity in the future.
And if we do, we should take it.
Re: Re: Re:5
And yet, it would still be attempted. I’d prefer we give those who attempt to censor history as little a chance of success as possible; giving them the power to censor what they deem to be “lies” gives them a higher chance.
By that token, no one could ever be a politician because all politicians lie, intentionally or otherwise. Consider a politician who promises to pass a certain law while in office but fails to pass that law. Wouldn’t that be a lie that requires prosecuting? Wouldn’t that make politicians hesitant to talk about anything they want to do while in office so any such promises won’t come back to bite them on the ass and toss them in jail?
Also consider the cultural scapegoat of the moment: trans people. If a trans woman tries to change her documentation (e.g., license, passport) to reflect her gender identity, wouldn’t the government have every right to toss her in jail for lying about their gender identity when her birth certificate says she was assigned male at birth? And before you go giving me shit about “oh, that would NEVER happen!”, keep in mind that the Trump administration is attacking trans people in such a way that if you handed them the power to prosecute and jail “harmful lies”, the Supreme Court would likely defer to Trump and let him claim that trans people propagate “harmful lies” when they say they’re the gender identity they identify as. That’s the kind of power you want the government to have, even if you didn’t intend for that particular outcome.
No. No, we should not.
Re: Re: What can't bend gets broken
I think they were aching for us to defend ourselves from the ongoing epistemic assault.
You know there’s a deeply unequal capacity for speech here, and they’re using all their power and advantages to fuck us. What else are we supposed to do to defend ourselves, if not regulation (already a joke of a tool for such a job)?
You’ve talked to their brain-rotted alt-reality victims, so you should understand that these oligarchs have already devalued your speech. Your ability to counteract their speech with your own, already uneqal to the task, has nonetheless also been undermined by unending and unrestrained lies.
Hey, bro? We’re the Nazi bar now.
In part because absolutists like you wouldn’t (and won’t) let us do anything at all to even try to shut Nazi propaganda mills up.
You’d rather let everything get broken because you refuse to bend even a little.
Re: Re: Re:
Exactly. And if you’re worried about ‘overreach’ just make ‘truth’ a defense against the crime, as well as making sure that the cases go in front of a jury.
Believe it or not, Stephen, The USA already has checks and balances in our criminal system to prevent the exact sort of slippery slope scenarios you’re worried about.
I feel like we’re all here being constantly punched in the face by Republicans, and we’re begging for a law against punching people in the face, and Stephen is here saying “What about self defense? What about face pats? Where does the line lie?! It’s a slippery slope!”
Finally: Stephen has asked before my opinion on obscenity: I don’t want to ban obscenity. I could not care less about obscenity.
I want to ban harmful lies. I would not vote in favor of an obscenity ban. And a harmful lie ban does not automatically lead to an obscenity ban any more than a ban on attacking people leads to a hug ban.
Re: Re: Re:2
And in case you haven’t noticed, the people running the goverment want to either do away with those checks and balances or tilt the scales in their favor for at least the next 20 years. Yes or no: Would you trust Trump to use censorship power only for “harmful lies”, considering how he likely believes “Trump lost the 2020 election” is a harmful lie?
When they’re literally punching you in the face, feel free to punch back. I don’t, and won’t ever, promote suicidal pacifism.
As to your metaphor: You’re asking me to sign on to censor speech because it’s potentially “harmful” or stating a “lie”. I’m not going to do that because, as I pointed out in another comment, some people consider certain truths to be harmful, lies, or harmful lies. How would you determine what speech can objectively be censored when you want to apply a standard more subjective than the ones used to judge defamation and incitement?
And I never said it did. But on a long enough timeline, giving people the power to ban “harmful lies” will lead them to ban content they judge to be “obscene”, even if it’s only as racy as a Playboy centerfold. Censorship seduces everyone who falls for its allure into going further than their original intent. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t need to be pushing back against credit card companies and paypros for de facto censoring adult content on Steam, Itch, and sites like Patreon.
Re: Re: Re:3
The only slippery slope here is the freedom of speech slippery slope, because there’s financial incentive:
Imagine you’re an amoral newspaper manager instead of the scrupulously moral Stephen T Stone.
There are no laws against reporting flat out lies. The populace has already been on a steady diet, the last 20 years, of propaganda with very little connection to reality.
The only thing important to you is watching your numbers go up. Do you save your newspaper some money by firing the last of the fact checkers knowing that there will be no consequences for doing so, and the vaunted Stephen T Stone will ague against the act, but fight against laws that would punish you in any way for firing your fact checkers?
Re: Re: Re:4
You mean other than defamation laws?
Also, holy shit dude, you’re making this a bit too fucking personal. I’m here arguing for the values of defending civil rights and keeping government overreach to a bare minimum, and you’re out here shittalking me personally like I’ve got more power than the president. What the actual fuck.
Re: Re: Re:5
You’re the one who, earlier, made a big deal about how you were willing to quite literally fight and die to preserve freedom of speech.
Look: I want to make this clear. I like you as a person and respect you. I honestly do. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother spending my time arguing with you. You are a pretty amazing person in a lot of ways, and I do earnestly look up to you and appreciate your facility in written communication.
Re: Re: Re:6
Forgive me for Pressing X to Doubt; every time I see someone say that to me, I feel like they’re lying—especially if they have to say they’re being honest about it.
See, now I know you’re lying. Flattery won’t get you anywhere with me because I know myself well enough to reject that kind of empty bullshit.
Re: Re: Re:
And when the last Nazi propaganda mill is destroyed, who will you go after next? That’s part of the issue with censorship and trying to stomp out “bad speech”: You’ll always find more “bad speech” just around the corner. Today, it’s Nazi speech—okay, nobody but those goosestepping fucks will complain about that. Tomorrow, it’s racial slurs—sure, the intent is fine, but without careful carveouts for artistic expression (e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird), you’re gonna ban more speech than you might think. The week after that, it might be sexual content that you personally find disgusting—and while even I might be with you on wanting to never see certain kinks/fetishes, your tastes might be different enough from mine that you end up banning some content that I enjoy, and then you and I will be at odds.
Censorship is a slippery slope precisely because the idea of banning all the speech you don’t like, from the most heinous to the least vulgar, is a seductive one. It asks you to develop the most stringent moral standards and uphold them through the law. Give in to that allure and you’ll eventually find yourself commiting the same kinds of acts as the Nazis—because they burned books that they found offensive, including legitimate scientific research into queer people.
I may be an absolutist. Sure, I’ll own that if it’s true. But I’d rather be someone who defends the rights of a Nazi to say his bullshit than be a Nazi who wants to take away my right to call myself “queer” because some people still see that word as a “harmful” slur.
As far as the bit about not stopping Nazi propaganda mills: Unless you want me to endorse violence as a method of doing that—which I won’t do now or in the future, fuck you very much—I don’t have any answers for you. I’m a schmuck with a laptop, not a political organizer or whatever.
Re: Re: Re:2
“When the last person who punches people in the face is in jail who will you go after next?, people who hug?”
Stephen: slippery slopes like that simply are not real. That’s, quite simply, not how laws work.
If it was how laws worked, everything would already be illegal. After all, it’s been more than 2000 years since the first law against murder.
Re: Re: Re:3
You may not like that they’re real, but they are. Just ask Moms for Liberty about their push to ban books from schools and public libraries: Do you think they were going to stop with just the books they considered “porn”? Because they didn’t. They went after (and are still going after) books as anodyne as And Tango Makes Three because those books have “woke” content. Or consider Collective Shout, the Australian group responsible for the current situation with content censorship on Steam and Itch.io: They initially complained about a game focused on rape and incest, but once they got a taste of success (i.e., they got that game taken off Steam), they set their sights much higher—to the point where they openly said they wanted to go after high-profile mainstream games like Grand Theft Auto VI.
Censorship is a slippery slope because it presents an alluring idea—“get rid of this offensive kind of speech forever!”—and doesn’t provide any guardrails for how far it can/should go. If “offensive” speech is to be banned, who sets the standard how “offensive” speech should be before it gets banned, and how large an amount of speech would that standard cover? Hell, under the strictest and most literal interpretation possible of a law against “lies”, all fictional stories would have to be banned because those stories never happened. (Before you get mad: I’m not saying you’re seriously suggesting such a thing.) I watch a couple of accounts on social media that post sexy images of women who have muscular/toned bodies; if someone in a position of power finds that kind of content offensive because the women don’t look “feminine enough” and wants it banned, why should their standards for “offense” override mine? Therein lies the problem with censorship: Rather than using more speech as a counter to “bad” speech or ignoring “bad” speech altogether, a person with the power to censor unilaterally decides that some kinds of speech are “too offensive” to be expressed even if plenty of other people disagree. And when someone with even stricter standards replaces that other guy, the censorship net will always grow wider. Shit, man, the whole point of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four was to point out how giving the government any power to censor speech the government deems “offensive” will inevitably shrink the amount of “acceptable” speech in such a way that people will only be able to express any idea the government has pre-approved.
And you want the power to punish speech that the government deems “harmful lies” placed in the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, who currently run this country and have accepted the lie of “Trump won the 2020 election” as ideological gospel.
What the fuck, dude.
Re: Re: Re:4
Yes, because a ban on porn is absolutely the same thing as a ban on harmful lies told in political contexts.
Oh, wait, it’s not.
Re: Re: Re:5
Doesn’t matter if they are. They’re both acts of censorship, and once you give people who want to be censors the power to censor a specific and narrow amount of speech they don’t like, they’ll always find a way to ban more speech. Censorship always comes with mission creep. What little legal censorship we have in the U.S. comes with strict-as-hell guardrails, and even then, it doesn’t stop people from doing a censor—it only punishes them after the fact.
Re: Re: Re:2
If subject was guns you’d agree with Kirk that some kids getting popped sometimes is worth no one ever touching the 2nd amendment
Stone over here worrying about maybe-future Nazis while real ones are taking us over. Are you controlled opposition? You might as well be
Re: Re: Re:3
I wouldn’t and I don’t. We need stricter gun control and a rewrite to the Second Amendment that enacts such regulations without needing to go through a conservative-leaning SCOTUS. No child’s life is worth unfettered gun ownership—and Charlie Kirk can rot in Hell for suggesting otherwise.
Re: Re: Re:4
We also need stricter speech control and to rewrite the first amendment to allow it.
It’s silly to treat an amendment as sacrosanct.
Re: Re: Re:5
No. No, we do not. And for God’s sake, man, stop pushing that line—not only are you failing to get any actual “I like your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter” replies, you’re sounding more and more like the goddamn Trump administration.
Re: Re: Re:4
I think, perhaps(?), their point was that your absolutist attitude towards 1A is equivalent to (and as self-destructive and frankly silly as) the stance of the 2A absolutists.
Notice you’re perfectly fine with regulations to 2A, but the moment anyone so much as tries to suggest any regulation to 1A, you start hyperventilating about the sky falling. Someday. Probably. Any regulation is a slippery slope to The Man taking away our guns! –I mean speech.
No child’s life is worth a completely unfettered 2A. I agree. Yet you think the facturing of society through lies and propaganda, the corruption and planned murder of a democracy is, somehow, worth a wholly unregulated 1A.
You cannot make that make sense to me.
And hey, again: what can’t bend breaks.
2A nuts have to accept a broken world full of mass shootings because they refuse to bend.
What will you come to accept?
What do you already accept.
Re: Re: Re:5
Regulating speech is a hell of a lot tricker than regulating guns. A gun is an object that, regardless of form, has a finite function. Speech is a concept that, regardless of form, has a myriad of functions. You talk about regulating “harmful lies”, but you never talk about who gets to determine what constitutes “harm” in regard to “lies”. As I mentioned in a different comment, consider trans people: A transphobe could argue that a trans person “lying” about their gender identity is “harming” everyone else by forcing them to “affirm” a lie. (And that’s the bare minimum argument they could make. They could go a lot further.) How do you balance the concerns of transphobes who sincerely believe trans people tell “harmful lies” by existing as trans with the rights of trans people to exist as trans—especially in a country where, as I write this, a majority of the Supreme Court would likely approve of the Trump administration using a “harmful lies are illegal” law to effectively ban the existence of trans people?
The right of all people to speak freely is one that I hold sacrosanct because squashing that right makes squashing other rights much easier to pull off. That’s why I firmly believe in the phrase “trans rights are human rights”, and that’s why I’m bringing it up in this context: If you take away the right of a trans person to express themselves through their gender identity, you’ll make the squashing of the rest of their civil rights much easier—and that will set the stage for squashing the civil rights of cisgender people who happen to be Black or atheist or female.
We should all have the right to speak our mind without government interference. That some of our speech may cause some kind of imagined harm to another person is not reason enough to regulate that speech. We have defamation laws to handle lies that rise to the level of libel/slander, and those laws have strict rules to prevent frivolous lawsuits. We have laws against incitement because people should be held responsible if they encourage others to commit violence. For what reason do we need laws against “harmful lies” when the standard for what qualifies as a “harmful lie” is so subjective that it could conceivably prevent an entire demographic of people from existing in public?
So here’s my challenge for you: Craft a “harmful lie” regulation with standards so absolute, strict, and objective that the law will pass any First Amendment challenge and won’t have a way to attack trans people. Oh, and to make sure you don’t take the easy way out, I want you to craft that regulation without any explicit mention of trans people, gender identity, or traits such as religious creed or race/ethnicity that can be found in anti-discrimination laws. This is your last chance to prove you have an argument to make other than “I want to silence people I hate and I don’t care who else gets hurt in the process”. Convince me or fuck off—I don’t care which.
Re: Re: Re:6 I guess we must agree to disagree
You’re still doing it.
Notice you made basically the same arguments a 2A person makes. ‘You clearly don’t understand my sacred cow, it is far more complicated than I presume you think it is! It is the lynchpin, that which truly separates freedom from tyranny!’
They are far from perfect; perfect doesn’t and can’t exist, but still: are the European countries that have less-absolute free speech laws than the USA what you would call tyrannies? Are they safer or more dangerous for, say, trans people, than the US?
And who determines what constitutes ‘harm?’
We do, Stephen.
The collective ‘we,’ using what information we take in (which makes that information being as factual and fair as possible super fucking important).
We decide. Yes, we must do so through representatives, but we still do. That’s what non-authoritarian society is about. That’s what democracy is about.
If we (and there are more non-authoritarians) can’t step on the bigoted toes it takes in order to codify egalitarianism, oligarchs and authoritarians will rewrite the rules for themselves. There’s just no better metaphor than the Nazi bar problem. We must bend inclusivity to keep the anti-inclusives out lest they break everything.
It’s not really an option.
As you do recognize, the important question is how to best and most fairly do it.
But. …You think I have The Answer? Demanding a non-expert, non-lawyer rando to craft a single, sweeping, airtight regulation that will satisfy your personal (likely impossible) standards… is quite possibly the most petulant, childish response I think I have ever seen you make.
I don’t always agree with you, obviously. But for the very first time, I’m disappointed.
I’m not even going to try to play your stupid, loaded game. Go ahead and sneer at me for it; call me chicken or whatever for not rising to your disingenuous ‘challenge.’
Yay, you ‘won.’ A+ good job.
Re: Re: Re:7
Take away someone’s right to own a gun and their life can more or less go on without issue. Take away someone’s right to speak without government intrusion, either before or after they speak, and their life becomes that much easier to control. After all, if someone can’t speak out against abuses by the government, those abuses won’t be so easily uncovered, which means they can keep happening. And if the government bans a specific array of speech without argument from the general populace, that same government—albeit run by worse people—will have no problem convincing the populace that more speech has to be banned to “keep order”. Can you really say the same about the Second Amendment and, say, red flag laws or assault weapon bans? Are those really such a lynchpin to modern living that they should be done away with, even though (A) a bunch of right-wing gun nuts support fascism and (B) no amount of civilian firepower can ultimately stand up to a government with a military that has enough ordnance to level New York City?
…but in all fairness, I see your point. I’m a stubborn son of a bitch and I do have blind spots, one of which is “the defense of free speech”. I’m protective of the First Amendment because a bunch of rights that a lot of Americans take for granted—the right to speak, to assemble peacefully, to associate with others, to practice any religion or no religion—are protected by that amendment. Any attempt to fuck with those rights will never sit well with me because a whole bunch of our social and political privileges—e.g., the ability to argue and disagree about controversial political topics—stem from those rights. I’d prefer to keep those rights unabridged and unaffected by the whims of those who think sacrificing a tiny part of those rights won’t fuck over the people they will eventually fuck over.
Given the way defamation law in the UK puts the burden of proof on the defendant instead of the complaining party, I’m not about to say the UK is better about speech than the US. Also, Germany’s laws against Nazi symbols and such ended up censoring the more recent Wolfenstein games (which are about killing Nazis), so there’s another strike for Europe.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” (Agent Kay, Men in Black) You might have a good idea of what constitutes harm. I might have one that differs from yours. Who gets to say whose idea is better, how will they decide which idea is better, and what happens if they have an idea that they think is better than either yours or mine?
The whole point I’m trying to make here is that even if you have the bestest idea ever for trying to clamp down on “harmful lies”, people will still criticize it. You must prepare for criticism—and the questions that come with it—even if you believe, deep down in your heart, that your idea is foolproof and irrefutable.
Then why not just kill them before they can hold power?
I’m not saying that to condone or endorse that idea. I’m saying it because if you believe sacrificing free speech rights to stop fascism is a good idea, believing that sacrificing lives to stop fascism will be a shorter leap than you think.
My opposition to your idea is rooted in the notion that you want to regulate human behavior on a level that is, in no uncertain terms, flat-out insane. People lie all the time—and to reword an old saying, lies can travel around the world before the truth can step out the front door. How do you plan to stop people from lying, and from spreading lies, and from believing lies, with a bunch of words on a sheet of paper that say “we’re gonna punish people for lying in a way I don’t like”?
And in that metaphor, the Nazis aren’t actually prevented from speaking their mind in their own private shitpits—they’re kicked out of places before they turn those places into shitpits. Sure, they’ll go further underground, but that’s a problem for the government, not for the average American who wants to be in public without fucking Nazis around all the time.
I’m well aware of the limits of tolerance. I’ve said multiple times that tolerance is a peace treaty; I’ve also linked to the article from which I got that saying. But I tolerate Nazis and fuckers like the Westboro Baptist Church having their speech rights because censoring them puts my own rights on the line if someone who sympathizes with those pricks ends up in the halls of power. Declare a group unworthy of human rights and stripping that group of their rights becomes easier to do over time. If’n you don’t believe me, look at how that battle is currently going for trans people.
You suggested a law to ban “harmful lies” and suggested, again and again despite repeated criticism, that such a law was a good idea. I don’t expect you to have The Answer to the problem you’re trying to solve, but if you’re pushing that idea, I expect you to at least defend it beyond its “it’ll stop the fascists” surface. I expect you to address the criticisms I raised, even if that means saying “okay, fair point” and conceding said point. No, you shouldn’t have to have the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. Yes, you should have answers for criticisms of your idea if you’re being that adamant about its inherent goodness.
Well, yes, my standards would be high—but that’s because standards for regulating speech in the US are already high. My standards come from adherence to the First Amendment. They also come from knowing that attacking speech of any kind on the basis of “well, I don’t like it” is how we end up with shit like book bans. That is why I questioned you on how your proposed anti–“harmful lies” law could affect trans people: They’re a cultural scapegoat who certain lawmakers would love to push out of public life (and possibly into an open grave) by using your proposed law.
The Devil paves the road to Hell with the best intentions of Man. Maybe you didn’t think through the potential consequences or knock-on effects of that law because you believed the concept alone—crafted with the best of intentions, I’m sure—was enough to carry the day. But now that you know your idea isn’t as bulletproof as you once believed, I’m hoping you take the time to look back at the questions I posed and really think hard about the flaws in your idea.
Believe it or not, I want you to give me the goods. If you can come up with a way to ban fascist speech that can’t be used by fascists to ban speech (and eventually people) they don’t like, by all means, do it. I hate the fuckers as much as the next antifascist. But if you can’t find a way to limit the amount of damage your law could do in the wrong hands, maybe consider that your idea isn’t as good as you think—regardless of your good intentions.
Re: Re: Re:8
Can I say I appreciated your response? I wasn’t even going to come back to see if you’d given one at first because of how bad faith the previous had sounded, but this one is different and thank you for it.
I entirely agree. However it was interesting to then turn around and see this example:
…Is that silly? Yes. Do I want things like that to happen? No. But if that’s the worst to come of what I do want… forgive me, but I am struggling to see how this is some unbearable burden.
This is entirely fair and I agree! But when the person across from you is talking like…
Look, I’m looking for a quantum kind of solution to this. A small step, or two. Germany or even less, if at all possible!
But when you’re over there always immediately leaping to catastrophe, to the apocalypse, treating it not even like a slippery slope but a goddamned trapdoor to oblivion… it’s hard to even want to have a discussion with that.
Believe me, I understand that this is important to you, and please understand that it’s important to me, too!
But I’m very frustrated, because the people who hate us are trying to destroy free speech and you’re saying we can’t do anything about it because… well, if we so much as try, we’ll unavoidably utterly destroy free speech?
I don’t believe that. I don’t accept that we”re damned if we do just as much as we’re damned if we don’t… because I’m fucking looking at what’s happening because we didn’t.
I do know that. That’s why they can be led.
Isn’t that why it’s a good idea to try to create some guardrails? To stop Fox and the like from steering– god, again, you always jump right to catastrophe– don’t you know I want regulations on things like news media, not individuals?
Lol well okay then: you don’t know.
Okay! Apologies.
I dunno about the other guy you were arguing about this with on this board.
I am talking the loudest, most powerful, best funded propaganda machines. A cut off the head and the body dies kinda thing. It’s impossible to stop individuals from being Nazis/MAGA and I understand and agree it’d be counterproductive to try to using the government.
But we know what media businesses are fueling, inflaming, and apologizing for MAGA. The propaganda machines.
We regulate big corporations different to mom and pop stores. And we regulate mom and pop businesses in ways we don’t individuals.
I just don’t see how we somehow can’t do the same here.
And I’m sure your response is that such regulation could be used against us.
Yeah man. It probably could.
I mean… if I owned a media business.
But regardless they’re doing their damnedest to muzzle us anyway so I struggle to see how your argument isn’t merely that we aren’t allowed to fight back.
Look obviously I’m a fucking idiot who’s simply tired of getting punched in the face and I want it to be stopped. I’m a tired old queer who’s gotten punched literally and figuratively for so long and I want to fight back.
They– and I mean not individuals, the small fries, but businesses and institutions— get to stoke the fires of ignorance and hate as much as they want and I can’t fight against that.
I can’t stop a corporation from polluting a river.
But regulation can. That’s what it’s for.
Stephen what else is there. I’m so tired and so angry and so sad. What else is there. Is there a David to slingshot these Goliaths? I can’t. You can’t. You fight kaiju with kaiju.
Messy? Yes. Call it stupid, call it dangerous, but at this point I am willing to take some collateral damage.
God help me, I will accept my video games not being able to display Trump flags.
…
I hope you’re doing alright and having a good day.
Re: Re: Re:9
I’ve seen the depths to which the siren call of censorship leads because the groups I’ve called out as censorship groups—Moms for Liberty and Collective Shout—have both shown their own mission creep. At first it was “pornographic filth”, because porn is an easy target. (How many people want to stand up in public and defend porn?) But they didn’t limit themselves to the “filth” they first targeted. Both groups have widened their net to catch content that a significant amount of people don’t find offensive. In the case of Moms for Liberty, that extends to books with age-appropriate mentions of or allegories to queer people (e.g., And Tango Makes Three). In the case of Collective Shout, that extends to mainstream games that plenty of adults play and don’t cross the line into pure pornography (e.g., the Grand Theft Auto series).
One foot in the door of censorship is enough to cause a generation’s worth of pain. Consider Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court case that brought us the “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” canard: It held that the government could punish people for speech which intended to result in a crime and created a clear and present danger—and the speech in question was a pamphlet urging men to oppose the draft. The “clear and present danger” standard that case set was eventually overturned, but in the years between Schenck and Brandenburg v. Ohio, that standard was used to punish people (including the eponymous Charles Schenck) for speech the government didn’t like. I hesitate to endorse any proposed regulation for speech because we have historical evidence of how such regulations (and any binding court precedents surrounding them) can be used to fuck up people’s lives because they expressed disfavored speech.
It’s not so much that we’ll “unavoidably utterly destroy free speech”, so much that we’ll put it in unnecessary danger. It’s also easy to want to strip a disfavored group of their right to speak ideas that are heinous and distasteful to us. Another point I’ve been making is that if that group gets that power, they’ll use it against groups they disfavor—and as I’ve said, look at how trans people are being treated in the US right now if you want to see the canary in the coal mine that is my argument.
The problem isn’t the guardrails. The problem is who gets to build them and where they’ll build them. You want fascistic speech banned; that’s a fine and noble goal. Fascists, on the other hand, want antifascist speech banned—so how do you stop them from doing that if you give them a law that defines “harmful lies” in a way they can exploit for their own heinous ends?
My hesitance to endorse your idea is rooted in that question. Nothing involving humans can ever truly be objective. (To wit: How you feel about a lion eating a zebra during a nature documentary can depend on whether the documentary is focused on the lion or the zebra.) Crafting a regulation to define speech in an “objective” manner rarely works out that way because we all have biases and blind spots.
No government with the power to censor speech on that level will ever limit itself to news media orgs. Given the state of the US government right now, I would hope you don’t want to fuck around and find out in that regard.
How can you trample those without also setting the stage for the destruction of “leftist” propaganda machines that a conservative government believes is telling “harmful lies”?
As I’ve mentioned before, censorship rarely sticks to its intended targets and scope. And under this environment, believing the Trump administration would use a hypothetical “harmful lies” law to attack individual “disfavored” people (e.g., George Soros, Democrat lawmakers) is more realistic than believing it wouldn’t.
You are allowed to fight back. Alls I’m saying is that you may want to consider the power of the weapon you want to use—and what would happen if that weapon, with all its power intact, fell into the hands of your enemy.
I hate repeating myself this much, but regulating speech is tricky precisely because those regulations (or binding court precedents) can fuck up people’s lives and lead to their rights being violated or revoked without any recourse. One small word or phrase—no matter how innocuous or well-intended—could come back to bite you on the ass and drag you into the Hell your good intentions helped create.
Sometimes, I really do wish I could say “yeah, sure, censor those fuckers, who gives a fuck” and support out-and-out censorship. It’s easier than fighting for the rights of those fuckers, that’s for sure. But defending free speech requires defending the worst people and the worst speech because what constitutes “disfavored” (and therefore punishable) speech shouldn’t be left in the hands of people whose own sociopolitical biases would change that definition to suit their ends. That shit is hard to do because it puts you in the position of defending the right of assholes like the Westboro Baptist Church weirdos to hold up anti-queer signs on street corners and preach anti-queer religious dogma in their church. But it is the right thing to do from a moral and ethical standpoint—and it’s also self-serving, since defending their rights makes defending your own rights easier when the people who think you’re “disfavored” try to take away your rights.
I have made my point clear enough times that I shouldn’t have to repeat myself, so I’ll ask one more question: How much collateral damage to the right of free speech can you live with in exchange for your desire to silence a bunch of motherfuckers who say things you don’t like?
Re: Re: Re:10
I…
…Why do anything, then?
Why have any laws at all?
No law will ever be or could ever be perfect. There will always be ways even innocuous laws and regulations can get twisted and used by bad faith actors.
That’s just fucking life! We already– we’ve always lived with assholes twisting rules to do what they want.
Do you think I don’t know this would also be like that? I do, because that’s life.
Do you think we wouldn’t keep working on it to slowly (and imperfectly) make it better and slowly (and imperfectly) make it more abuse-resistant? Like we do everything else.
…Or did, anyway. But even now some still are.
Look to my mind governance, as far as stuff like this goes, is– should be– about finding the balance point between freedom and safety.
There is no perfect point. There is no objective way to locate anything near ideal. Each situation calls for something a little different anyway, and each person is going to think the ideal point is in a different place.
I no longer think the maximalist point works for speech. Not for businesses based in speech.
Because
Goddamnit.
…Look, I try to keep my life out of arguments like these. It’s not the place for it.
But… for fuck’s sake.
A steady diet of Fox News– and then other sources when Fox wasn’t being extremist enough– led some of my family members to a place so toxic and anti-reality that those of us left on the other side can no longer recognize them.
I’m sure you’ve at least heard about this kind of thing if you haven’t experienced it yourself.
I mean… it’s like losing someone to dementia. And I, my aunt specifically, somebody who supported her queer nephew even from there in Oklahoma… but now I’m full of demons.
Or now, well, now I don’t know exactly, because we no longer talk.
She was thanksgiving and Christmas for us after the grandparents went. She was the last bit of, stepped up and became the core our solar systems orbited. Met at.
Now it’s all broken.
Her and our uncle from Michigan and the other aunt from Tennessee can get together and maga it up while the rest of us just
I don’t know. Grieve.
That didn’t just happen. I got to slowly hear it be done to her over our phonecalls.
Should these media businesses really be able to do that to people and suffer no consequences whatsoever? Really? Poison people’s brains with propaganda? That’s just the fucking price, right? The price like dead kids for guns?
What collateral am I willing to accept??
Look at the collateral you’re accepting.
Okay.
No laws, no rules… that’s anarchy.
Ultimately anarchy doesn’t serve anyone but those willing to be the most ruthless; the absolute worst.
I don’t want to have to argue for this. I wouldn’t be asking for this if the problem wasn’t so serious and so big.
They shouldn’t be able to do all the harm they’re doing. Not without consequences. Society can’t function like this.
But, I’m sure you… ah whatever.
Fucking whatever.
Fine. Everything’s broken and no one will ever pay the price and nothing will ever be done to safeguard it from happening again because god forbid we bend, we change, we rebalance… and that’s just fine. Totally fine. Whatever. I’m done. I don’t even care what you might say this time, you don’t care about any harms but the potential ones. And hey fine. Totally fine. Agree to disagree; different people are different. That’s life.
Re: Re: Re:11
Yes, I’m aware of rules lawyering and such. But if the initial sketching out of any idea on regulating speech doesn’t start with “how could my idea be used to hurt marginalized people and how would I avoid that as best as possible”, your idea likely comes from a seat of privilege where you subconsciously believe, maybe without intending to, that everyone has equal access to (and equal protection for) their rights. Always do the power analysis—including where you are in the picture and how that affects the frame.
I think you initially overlooked the potential for abuse a “harmful lies” law could raise because you were focused on how much pain you wanted to cause your sociopolitical enemies. That’s another trick of censorship: It gives you so much tunnel vision that you don’t see all the people you could be hurting while you’re going after the people you think should be hurting.
That’s why I’m wary as hell of censorship: It often asks for too much freedom in exchange for the allure of more safety. The Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four is an effective example of that principle, for it was created to stop people from expressing ideas and thoughts beyond what the government approved of them saying. For whatever safety from “bad ideas” that Newspeak promised, the cost paid by society was way too high.
Yes, I’m aware of the conservative media bubble and what it does to people who sumberge themselves within it. But that’s what happens to anyone who falls into a specific media bubble. Any such bubble can be dangerous on a long enough timeline—even one that is ostensibly leftist. (You ever hang around left-wing doomers?)
Fox News is already an unofficial propaganda wing of the Trump administration. Would you really want MSNBC and CNN turned into the same thing because Trump decided those networks told “harmful lies” about him and his administration?
My whole point in this argument is that no one who suggests these kinds of laws tends to think about the future. They see the immediate, the here-and-now, and never think about what their laws could do to speech in five, ten, twenty, or even one hundred years. Is making Fox News illegal worth giving the government an opening with which they could eventually turn the Newspeak concept into a reality?
And I know I’m doing the whole “everything is the apocalypse” thing here, but that is also part of my point: Censorship laws don’t tend to stop where their creators want them to stop. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion in Schenck, later dissented from rulings that cited the case in question when he thought the court was departing from the precedent set in Schenck. Even he recognized, regardless of whether he intended to, how overreach was possible with a law or court precedent that was meant to censor/punish speech.
I’m well aware of what I’m accepting. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. Do you really think I want to defend gutter trash like Fox News and the Westboro Baptist freaks? Shit, there were probably people at the ACLU who didn’t want to defend the Nazis in their case against Skokie. But again, the whole point of defending their rights is that you can better defend your rights if and when the time comes. Strip them of their rights because their speech offends you and that same reason could be used to strip you of your rights—which is precisely why I defend the right to speak freely for all people rather than defending it only for the people I happen to like. It’s an unpopular decision; I’m prepared to deal with its consequences.
How would you limit those consequences to only “the bad people” and their speech? How would you prevent the government from altering the definition of “bad people” to include you or me or anyone else even an inch out of lockstep with the government?
Please don’t think I’m trying to be an asshole without a reason. I understand how you feel about Fox News. Deep down, I feel the same way. But I can’t and won’t believe that giving our government the power to shut down Fox News (or MSNBC) is the correct solution to the problem. Once the government has such power, it won’t easily give up that power—especially if the GOP is the party that gets that power first.
Two things, one short and one long.
I’m aware of the harms caused by Fox News and the right-wing mediasphere. But if you want to argue that those harms are real, a Republican government would want to argue that it isn’t Fox News, but MSNBC and other “leftist” media outlets that really cause those harms. You can’t swing the pendulum one way and expect it not to swing the other way unless you’ve got a plan in place to stop that from happening. That, in a nutshell, is my argument: How can you give this government the power to tear down Fox News without giving it the power to tear down MSNBC?
I have sympathy for those who’ve had family members fall into the right-wing media bubble. I know that my position can be unpopular and seen as unreasonable. But my position is rooted in the idea that even the people I despise deserve the right to say “look at that asshole, look at how much of a bitch he is” to my face and walk away with no legal consequences. (Physical consequences, maybe not so much…) The worst people deserve all the same rights as the best; believing otherwise would make me a fucking Republican.
Re: Re:
Maybe. That’s always depended on the mood of the court. There used to be a “fairness” doctrine, and there are still “equal time” rules. SCOTUS upheld the fairness doctrine unanimously in 1969. And courts regularly punish speech lacking in truthfulness, in various contexts.
This is wrong! It’s the increasing number of migrants coming into the US during the summer that gives rise to the increase in shark attacks.
Re:
I thought it was mayors of coastal towns opening beaches during the summer that gave rise to the increase in shark attacks.
At least the Tylenol claims are getting rightly mocked everywhere!
Quite the irony that someone with a name strongly resembling the name of a very contagious disease deals in spreading contagious disinformation herself.
Nobody knows why
Look into the Wakefield-style lawsuits originating 2-3 years ago. Something Kennedy later licked up of the floor.