I Assume This Guy Has No Womb For Brett Kavanaugh To Nazionalize.

Today, something a little different.  I'm going to forego talking about the hilarity of Steve Simels copying arguments and language I've developed in my last several years of public writing and developing thinking about the idiocy of ACLU, Joel Gora, Warren Court-Robert's-fascist dogma on "free speech" even as he insults me and lies about me.  Though I'd find that fun, it's not the most important thing about what he and others  said at Duncan Black's blog, last night. 

It was in his back and forth with one of the others at that blog that I'm going to take my theme for this post.  That commentator goes by the appropriate name "Less Than Useless" which is what that line of "free speech" absolutism has been.  I'm not going to take it in the complete sequence the exchange happened, you can read that here.

There was this:

Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy  Adam Hominem-hardened Democrat • 11 hours ago
I've said it before, but -- Nazis don't have free speech rights. We already listened to everything they have to say, and then we executed them for crimes against humanity.

Less Than Useless  Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy • 11 hours ago
That's nice and snarky, but we didn't execute them for speaking. ACTING on the Final Solution, there's the difference.

That said, I couldn't care less either way if Bannon gets interviewed or not. I don't like people claiming that articles about these monsters are puff pieces or propaganda for them, when The New Yorker has the best, most accurate journalism in this country right now.

Sy Hersh! Elizabeth Kolbert! Jane Mayer! Jon Lee Anderson! Ryan Lizza! These guys reported the crimes of the people they covered. I have a problem when libs and progressives complain because they just report the facts and let THAT outrage people, instead of painting them as monsters.

Report the facts. Outrage is for readers--not reporters.

First, there is no way to separate what the Nazis said from what they did.  Alfred Rosenberg, after Hitler the second most important theoretician and ideologue of Nazism, did most of what he did and what he was executed for through what he said.  Criminal enterprises are done through and known through the speech of the conspirators and perpetrators.

The claim that words advocating the murder of entire races, entire groups of people are harmless  ignores that they're not even entirely harmless before the time the words convince enough people to kill those people individually, in small numbers, in the hundreds, thousands and millions.  The Nazis rhetoric in the 1920s hadn't killed many people, if any, there was a time before they killed even one person, but their speech led to them convincing more and more people to their thinking.  You can't separate it from what happened in 1933 when they won power and used that power to create a sense of national danger through setting the Reichstag on fire and using the power they had gained THROUGH ELECTIONS to seize power and build to passing the eugenic laws, followed close on by the laws against Jews, their using their position in power to spread their propaganda, to make membership in the Hitler Junger mandatory and everything else that led to their invasion of Czechoslovakia, then Poland which is when their industrial scale mass murder started with their practice genocide of the disabled and the Einsatzgruppen mass murders as they pushed East.

You can't separate the Nazi speech of the 1920s from their winning power through election, their seizure of dictatorial power from that and their mass murder from that.  It all started with their speaking, with their speech and what they said with it. All along the way their speech fueled that, step by step.  One of the things that made the prototypical Nazis groom Hitler for leadership was his speech.  Even while he was still obscure he was chosen by the Nazi leadership because of his ability to sway an audience, a skill which the Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl used her "free speech" to highlight in Triumph of Will, using the magnification of speech through modern technology to bring what was said to millions more people than would have heard it, radio being another tool exploited to its maximum contemporary potential to magnify the power of that speech.

The pretense that speech is unrelated to what that speech advocates is the basic stupidity of the ACLU, Joel Gora, Warren-Roberts court dogma on free speech.  The result of the permission by the Warren Court to allow the media to lie about liberals with impunity has led to the flood of Republican and fascist enabling lies in the media which has produced a series of increasingly bad Republican administrations and a series of appointments to the Supreme Court which have been baldly political, favoring their party and even appointing a Republican as president on 2000.  The evidence of that being a result of the 1964 Sullivan decision enabling the lying with impunity includes that in 1960, before that ruling Nixon lost the election, he won the 1968 election, the first one after the ruling.  Nixon, of course, started appointing the series of increasingly bad Supreme Court nominees which has brought us to the edge of the disaster the Republicans are about to push the country over.  One of his key appointments was the race-baiting, Black and Latino voter intimidator, William Rhenquist, one of the keys of Republican-fascist advancement.

Less Than Useless then got to the basis of the "free speech" absolutist line, which I'll take piece by piece.

Less Than Useless  Sabine • 11 hours ago
So...who gets to determine where the line is?

That is the central idiocy of the free speech absolutist line, that it is impossible to determine what is dangerous speech, speech which does everything from deprive people of their rights to murdering people in the tens of millions.  That is such an idiotic line of irresponsible and dishonest nonsense that it needs to be addressed.

First, speech which advocates depriving people of their rights to life, to the necessities of life, to equal access to education, to an equal vote, to equal participation, to clean drinking water and air and food that isn't poisonous, to dignity is not anything like speech which asserts the right of people to all of those things on an equal basis.  They are not the same, they are opposites and so are their results.

If you want a bright line, that one is there and it is so bright that apparently if you've been to elite law-schools or make money in the media, or get suckered by the speech of jerks like Joel Gora or Nat Hentoff it blinds you to the obvious. 

Anyone who has the intelligence of a toddler as they learn that other people and animals have feelings like theirs and that that matters has the ability to understand that distinction, though so many college-educated free speech absolutists don't have that ability.  It would seem their education had the effect of making them stupider than those toddlers.  Including members of the United States Supreme Court going back more than a century.

Second claiming that we couldn't possibly determine that people who advocate murdering people for who they are, enslaving people, violating their right to their bodily integrity, and everything down to depriving them of their equal dignity* have a potential to make that real and that that is an absolute bright line that makes their speech dangerous, is lying.  Blatantly and obviously lying.  No one is that stupid that they couldn't make that distinction.  Anyone who couldn't determine that is rationally held to be too stupid to trust with making any important decisions, never mind being a Supreme Court justice, a judge or a member of a jury.

The pretense that judges and juries and regulators and politicians and We The People aren't to be trusted to decide that Nazis don't get a chance to try to reproduce here what they did in Europe in the 1930s and 40s is one of the most disgusting poses of the post-war pseudo-liberals.  Their reason that we can't do that because we supposedly can't do it in the best possible way, with mathematical certainty is made disgusting by the tens of millions of corpses produced by the Nazis, the fascists, the Marxists, etc. in the 20th century.

The movement of the 18th and 19th century for the disestablishment of religion was supposedly inspired by the bloodshed of the 30 Years and similar supposedly religious wars.  The estimates of those dead from the 30 Years War is from 4 to 12 million**.  We of the modern period don't seem to learn much but absurdity from a far higher body count.  I can only attribute that to the amorality of Enlightenment scientistic post-Christian orthodoxy, the same kind of thinking that holds those mountains of bodies don't matter nearly as much as their stated plans for the economy in defining their character.  It makes absolutely no logical sense, which is ironic, considering the standard of proof held up as the one required by the free-speech absolutists for making that life-or tens of millions of deaths distinction.

I disagree. Free speech, even insane lying speech, is protected. The real solution is, as one of the Founders said, an educated public.

Considering "The Founders" not only made no provision for public education in The Constitution nor requiring the various states to do so, that is a load of horse shit.  Not to mention that lies have no positive educational value, lies prevent you from being educated in a way that electoral democracy and a decent world requires.  As it says in the Bible, you will know THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU FREE.  Lies enslave, as George Orwell reminded us.  Any "founder" who held that lies deserved the same protection as the truth was either too dishonest or too stupid to trust.  And, beside that, there is no reason for us to not have learned that lesson in the two centuries and counting since they wrote the Constitution.  The conceit of the "originalist" "strict-constructionists" is that we were not to have learned anything by experience and observation in that interval.  It is ironic that form of fundamentalism is so popular among those who scoff at Biblical fundamentalism.

Not to mention The Founders were aristocrats, almost all of them racists and slave owners who not only tolerated a reign of terror against those held in slavery but they were also expansionists who were quite ready to commit genocide to take the entire continent.  Jefferson certainly was, George Washington, held up as the moral, the spiritual authority among them conducted a scorched earth campaign against the Iroquois nation which you can read more about if you search "Washington town destroyer".   Hitler, in Mein Kampf enthusiastically cited the American genocide and land theft as a precedent for what he wanted to do.

We are in an onslaught of ignorant hate speech, and the real reason anyone falls for it is the relentless propaganda of FOX and bankrolling by billionaires using crazy fucks to vote for their tax cuts.

Which they do through sponsored speech magnified in power through de-regulated cabloid TV,  hate-talk radio, movies, and other entertainment and info-tanement methods using the best advice of the social sciences to tell them how to lie and deceive and persuade more people, more effectively.   Science and "science" have made hate-speech funded by billionaires far more dangerous in the age of electronic media than those "Founders" could have imagined in the age of hand printing presses and unamplified human speech.

If the nation goes down because it can't tell the difference between a con man and a real President who happens to be a woman, so be it. But the situation appears to be correcting itself even as we speak.

"SO BE IT?"  WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE UNITED STATES BEING GOVERNED BY A GUY WHO SAID THAT THERE WERE GOOD NAZIS FOR FUCKSAKE, YOU THINK WE HAVE THE LUXURY TO JUST SAY "SO BE IT" AS THEY'RE PUTTING CHILDREN IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS ON THE BASIS OF ETHNICITY OF WHIPPING UP NAZIS TO VOILENCE, AS THEY'RE ABOUT TO NATIONALIZE WOMEN'S BODIES, AS IVY LEAGUE ASSES LIKE THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER TRIES TO NORMALIZE NAZIS?  AND THAT ANYONE WHOSE REACTION TO THAT IS TO PREEN IN THEIR AFFLUENT, BLOG-BASED FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTIST BULL SHIT!   It isn't correcting itself, you shithead, it's getting worse all the time on the power of lies.  If Trump is defeated and Pence doesn't take over the assholes they're putting on the Supreme Court will only make certain they have another chance to try again.  Consider this progression, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Trump . . . relieved only by the center right, Ripon Society Democrats of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  Let me break this to you, bunky, 1964 was fifty-four years ago.  Earl Warren is dead and decayed.  Even that asshole-liberatarian-liberal Nat Hentoff is dead, finally.  Things have moved way, way down that road. 

I wonder how many German "liberals" figured things were going to correct themselves in about 1937.   I wonder what a comment thread at Eschaton in Germany that year would have read like. 

* Dignity is only enhanced, perhaps only really exists when you accept the rights of other people and the moral obligation to respect those rights.  Without that it's not dignity, it's snobbery and fashion and sucking up to people with money.

**  Some include the victims of plague in that number, which, considering they had no real way of treating or preventing that, gets you farther from reality.

Update:

No, I'm not being inconsistent when I advocate both equality and preventing the likes of Nazis and Stalinists from advocating what they advocate.  They have every right to advocate the equal rights of others, including those who, in reality, they want to deprive of all of their rights, including to their lives.  That choice of theirs, to advocate dictatorship, inequality, violence, murder, means that they exercised their equal right to make choice to advocate what no one has a right to advocate.  Their choice isn't different from the choice of those who act on that speech, on what that speech encourages them to do.

Anyone who claims there is a right to lie is wrong and, given the hard lesson of what lying has resulted in in society, in politics, in science and the professions and, yes, in religion, anyone who holds in 2018 that there is a right to lie is mentally deficient.  That it is only the most impotent of those, religion, foremost, that people get in a snit about is instructive of what cowards such people are.

That mental deficiency is so rampant in the United States due to the truncated, inadequate poetic language of the First Amendment that, given that history of what comes of lying, it is one of the most serious mental health challenges we have. Especially when "liberals" like the one above, faced with the very real possibility of Trumpian fascism destroying democracy and wiping out the whole menu of rights on top of those they have already abridged or destroyed, says "so be it". Ignoring that irrationality is grotesquely immoral, itself.

No Hollywood bull shit about the poor Hollywood 10 Stalinists who were unable to get paid the big bucks for their advocacy of Stalinism changes the fact that they favored a dictator and a system which murdered scores of millions of people, many of them on the suspicion that they might support equal rights.  Nothing whatsoever would have been lost if they had never had the opportunity to spread that poisonous message.  That foreign import would never have sold anyway, whereas racist fascism was already indigenous and a horrible habit of the country. Nazism was far more compatible with that bad habit.  The Warren Court might have imagined they were politely, nicely, in the Holmes manner, enabling the free speech of the likes of the Communists to peddle their innocuous insanity.  They were actually enabling the fascists and Nazis, the KKK and the self-interested malignity of billionaires, domestic, after Roberts, foreign, as well.

I'm in favor of learning from the history and mistakes of the past.  Why continue what produced such terrible results?