I HAVE NEVER yet favored making it a crime to tell lies in the mass media I have favored making it possible for the kinds of people the media lies so flagrantly about to sue the likes of FOX, the New York Post, the New York Times, and all of the rest of the gutter press that lies about private citizens, public people and, yes, politicians with enough consequences for the individuals in the media and their parent companies to stop lying. I favor that those trials be a more equal match in court, the super-rich and corporations not able to swamp their often powerless and poor victims with their stable of high-price lawyer-liars in front of judges who are too frequently all-in on that racket.
I do favor broadcast and cabloid and, now, internet media being shut down as a consequence of them lying seriously or flagrantly. I do not for a second believe the First Amendment myth that companies and corporations have rights, which inhere only to living beings, but privileges and there is nothing wrong with removing an abused privilege and one that endangers democracy should bring with it the ultimate sanction of corporate death.
I have never favored the ability of the rich and connected to bring frivolous lawsuits, THAT IS SOMETHING I DO THINK SHOULD BE A CRIME, to use the legal system and the courts that way, and it should have ruinous financial consequences that would not only prevent them from being tempted to try it but which would make certain they didn't have the means to do it. I favor it being made a serious consequence for lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits of any kind on behalf of their clients. I'd say "on behalf of their RICH clients" because I doubt lawyers on the make do such things on behalf of the destitute a number of times worth making law over.
That said, we can only favor laws we can imagine and imagine consequences for and the never ending industry in lawyer-liars, those in prestigious law school faculties theorizing on behalf of the rich and powerful, those who become judges and, especially, "justices" on supreme courts, looking for every way to corrupt the written laws and constitutions, and it is never safe to assume you can imagine all of what those lawyer-liars will cook up.
I can well imagine that things could get so bad that there are circumstances under which I can imagine limited and seriously watched over forms of criminally administered seditious libel laws for the protection of egalitarian democracy, self-government by an unlied to population encouraged to be of good will. Our media lies and encourages cynical, selfish bad will. Good will is routinely mocked and derided and driven out of power in the United States, comedians have had a huge hand in that, so has entertainment media. Cynicism is a cheap substitute for creativity, it is an even cheaper substitute for humor.
If the choice is between the possibility of continued egalitarian democracy, self-government by a people of good will and whatever dangers that protecting that from lies intended to destroy that, I will go with taking the chance of protecting it against the attempts to destroy it we are seeing conducted by billionaire gangsters who despise equality and democracy and who have nothing like good will. The tiny handful of billionaires of good will, if even that many, are probably more likely to screw things up royally like George Soros seems to have done. I can see no evidence that his efforts to improve things have been anything but a serious miscalculation. Look at his boy in his home country if you want all the evidence you can need that even as smart a billionaire as he can show so little understanding of what is needed. Bill Gates may be another example but he was a little too close to Epstein, his ex-wife would seem to have better instincts in that regard.
The rest of the billionaires, I would doubt you could find one who was even as good in effect as those two. Most of them are thick as thieves with the Republican-fascists and such mobsters as run Russia and China these days. I favor the leveling of billionaires and millionaires to the extent they cannot corrupt government as they do through the mass media. I am a leveler, bringing down the billionaires and bringing up the least among us. At the cost of the billionaires, not those closest to the destitute.
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