No one who has raged at my thinking on the subject has ever been able to point out an actual instead of a pretend down-side to attempting to totally suppress Nazism and fascism or, for that matter, Stalinisim or Maoism in the United States on the basis of their devotion to destroying the lives and rights of entire groups of people and the enslavement of everyone under a dictatorship.
The underlying idea is that if the advocacy to do the things that such ideologues desire is suppressed we will (perhaps under the most idiotic misconception of "fairness" ever to have been dreamt up) have to suppress those who promote equality, democracy, equal rights, economic justice, etc. This is only proof of the idiocy of people who parrot the stupid idea that there is any problem in distinguishing between a Nazi and an egalitarian, a person who advocates the murder of members of minority groups and those who advocate their equal right to a decent life, It is the claim THAT JUDGES AND JUSTICES CAN'T MAKE SUCH GLARINGLY OBVIOUS DISTINCTIONS AS IF THEY DON'T MAKE FAR LESS OBVIOUS AND COME TO FAR MORE DIFFICULT DECISIONS AS THEIR DAILY WORK, DISTINCTIONS WHICH WE HIRE AND TRUST THEM TO MAKE AND WHICH WE ARE SUPPOSED TO REVERE THEM FOR MAKING.
It's almost as if, as we go through the decorous ceremony of entrusting the Supreme Court to act honestly about such things, we really don't trust them to do it, which is probably the only realistic thing to do in the matter considering how the courts have been staffed with Federalist fascists, a result in real life of the regime of "free speech" we have lived under since 1964.
Democracy owes some basic rights to people who hold such ideas, we shouldn't kill them for holding their ideas, we are in little danger of that happening. But allowing them a chance to dupe lots of people and putting their ideologies, fatal to democracy in power is not among those things that democracy owes them. Refusing to make that distinction is a choice to bring about conditions that kill many hundreds and thousands of people, every year, at times, when such people gain political power, hundreds of thousands and tens of millions do die as a result.
It is a preening, affected act of self-centered idiocy among the affluent and comfortable on the one hand and of the entirely unrealistic and often entirely fat-headed on the other that there is some virtue in letting them have "their fair chance" to be heard and try to convince people. It is even stupider to pretend that "it can't happen here" because not only can it happen anywhere. It has, in fact, happened here. In the United States Black People, Native Americans, members of other ethnic groups who have been violently and brutally oppressed, enslaved and exploited and, in fact, murdered in large numbers by white supremacists have a history and personal experience of the kind of thing that affluent, college-credentialed, White, pseudo-liberals advocate letting them have a chance to not only do, again, but to do so with the automatic weapons and other things which their colleagues on the all too real Republican-fascist right have enthusiastically permitted them to amass, as Donald Trump so chillingly reminded us a couple of weeks ago.
The only thing that would happen if all of those dictatorial, oppressive ideologies were totally suppressed would be that there would be not a single bad thing that would come of it. As it is under the regime of "free speech" absolutism, it's the promotion of their opposite, real equality, real democracy, legitimate freedoms, legitimate rights that are under fire in the United States, in Britain, in so many other countries where neo-Nazis and fascists and white supremacists are resurgent, financed by billionaires domestic and foreign (Putin, for sure, the latest Chinese dictator, coming up fast) and all over the media.
And that doesn't even mention the reign of terror that Women in the United States and in virtually every other country live under by habits and attitudes so ingrained in our cultures that the last time I looked an estimated average of 3-4 women a day are murdered in the United States due to their gender and it's an unremarkable, everyday thing as is the resultant terror so many Women don't even notice living under.
English speaking liberals in the United States and Britain, to some lesser in places like Canada which adopted some measures against the spreading of hate speech, have been the most massive suckers, largely suckered through the fashions created in law faculties at elite schools and in the lawyers and judges and, especially, the Supreme Court and High Court "justices" who pushed those advantages for the enemies of egalitarian democracy. The media certainly encouraged that as being free to spread any lie, any audience attractingly violent and sensational and wild rumor, turning indigenous racism and bigotry and sexism and queer-hating into a means of gaining market share and making fortunes, trying to harness it to corrupt democracy to their and their owners' profit in the style that Putin merely copied and, with the help of tech billionaire fascists here, modernized and weaponized more effectively. That wasn't only done through "social media" but in everything from the cabloid and broadcast sewers up to and including the actual "press" on paper.
Sucking it up were the suckers of liberalism who have seen more than a half a century of regress into, first Nixon, then Reagan, then Bush I and Bush II and now Trump even as free-speech became freer as lies were protected speech, growing ever more outrageously evil than it was in the callow, stupid days of 1964 when all of that descent started in earnest for the general population. What White affluent people are now horrified to experience, the destruction of egalitarian democracy, the destruction of decency and even a sense of the true and false is something that Black People experienced when Jim Crow was in effect and in the days when slavery was overt and under law instead of de facto. It is the reality that Native Americans have experienced for the entire period of their destruction. All of that happened under the Constitution with the full intention and blessing of the idols of Federalism, The Founders. That is the thing that had to be overcome to even temporarily advance equality and democracy and equal rights. American liberals, especially those of the secular variety seem to be stupid about that in direct proportion to the level of their educational credentials. You might be forgiven for wondering if being suckered into not seeing that is a part of that credentialing process. None are so stupid as the professional writers and communicators and those credentialed in the law. Though I think it's far more a matter of pretending to not see things because they profit from going along with the ruse.
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Being repeatedly opposed to the ideology of materialism for so long, something which those who troll me have mocked, I was surprised none of them took the opportunity to use Mackinnon's use of the word against me. Maybe because they aren't great readers.
When she said things such as: "Where feminism is based on material reality, liberalism is based on some ideal realm in the head," "Material reality is turned into ideas about reality." I understand what she means, it's one of those instances where a word has more than one meaning. I might say "lived reality" or "real life" or "actual reality". Which points out the difference between the the lofty abstractions of "free speech" absolutists and the all too real results in real life. What happens when, under the regime of "free speech" when FOX spouts hate speech and promotes jealous, envious paranoia 24-7-365 for decades, what happend when Lou Dobbs promoted anti-Latino hate on CNN every night, when the New York Times promoted the quarter of a century of hatred of Hillary Clinton and peddled phony "scandals" which turned out to be lies.
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