MJM59: "What am I trying to squash?"
This is what I alluded to before, with the links to the Gramscian threads.
A fellow like MJM59 comes along, ostensibly to stand up for a good thing like free speech. We can all agree on the value of that?
But what does he (or she?) object to? Our expression of free speech. In his subtle way, he undermines our way of communicating freely, by trying to coerce us into repressing some of what is being said...in the name of free speech.
It's a microcosm of campus speech codes. In ostensibly trying to widen debate, there are certain things you can't think or talk freely about, and I mean things beyond derrogatory comments about race groups or women.
Good and decent things like free speech are turned on its head, beyond their intention, by people who, deep down, do not share such values, and wish to take basic freedoms away. Short of sending in the troups and black helicopters, gramscian techniques such as that used by MJM59 are meant to make us jail ourselves.
But to the "fight fire with fire" part, think about the natural limits of free speech. You don't have the right to yell out fire in a crowded theater, just for kicks. People will wind up hurt in a stampede, or at the very least, the police and firefighters will be called in for nothing, wasting public resources. I suggest you also lose your right to free speech if it's your intention to use it to prohibit others' free speech. Isn't that common sense?
If we live in a society that came together throught a social contract, as embodied in the constitution and a bill of rights, fellow citizens won't try to deny others in the same contract to the common rights. And if it does happen, isn't that an attack?
Back when one of the Dixie Chicks expressed her views abou the Iraq war, somehow the mere peasants in America weren't allowed to voice *their* opinions in response. Isn't it dictatorial for just the elite to get their opinions out, but no criticism? Is that equality? No. It's a two-tiered system, and that's exactly what pigs like MJM59 are trying to push on us.
Pigs! All your righteous indignation went down the toilet when you resorted to cowardly name calling. You talk about campus speech codes, when your speech code has failed to leave the playgrounds of elementary school.