We Americans have turned freedom into a meaningless word because we have made it both too abstract and rendered it meaningless by trying to consider some non-existent pure entity as the thing itself which only exists in the context of lives lived and lives impacted in contact with other lives and circumstances.
The foremost example of that I've dealt with here is "freedom of speech" which includes some real freedoms of individuals which inhere to them as an endowment of God, to tell the truth or to give their sincere interpretation of reality . But, in Constitutional terms, that is made to include the phony and ineptly called "right" of the corporate entity called "freedom of the press" which is artificial and was made for only one serious purpose, to enhance the legitimate personal right of The People to know what is real, what is true so they can exercise their right to form a government which will serve the good and not corruption, that will serve all instead of the few, that will protect the destitute, the poor, the ordinary against any and all dangers to them and their welfare - the foremost of those dangers being people who want to rob them, imperil them and destroy them for the benefit and gratification of those who by ability or corrupt laws have the power to do so. It was stupid to use the same word to describe both a real right, which only a living being can have and a privilege granted for a specific purpose to enhance the real rights of real people, that verbal elegancy of late 18th century prose has unleashed a lot of the evil that we are swamped with now, our lawyers being trained to twist words divorced from context, in a quote from Edwin Armstrong which opened my eyes about that, "Men like to substitute words for reality and then argue about the words," said after the courts put their stamp of approval on the theft of his life's work, his intellectual achievements by a rich man who didn't even understand it, a mogul of the "free press".
That is only a brief description of "free speech" in the context in which the freedom to say what you think is beneficial, morally, personally but also in so far as it benefits the entirety of the population and preserves the environment in which we live. What it is good to say isn't governed by what you want to say,it's governed by whether or not it is true and whether or not what you say serves the general good of all.
Which it is astounding might need to be said but the words of freedom, the very conception of it has been made so much a mish mosh of vague, non-contextual assertion of the will instead of moral purpose and a spoiled toddler's will, at that, that without really thinking, really considering what freedom, what liberty and what rights are in the contexts in which those become real in the actions of people and the people and animals and other living beings which those actions impinge on for good or evil. That is either sincerely taken into account in a way in which the effects of the speech are what determines its right to continue or malign speech is privileged with a right to exist which any rational person holding morally valid positions will acknowledge is wrong.
Our legal system, judges, "justices" lawyers, have often pretended that that acknowledging moral purpose in the law is wrong, that it has no place in the consideration of whether an assertion of a "right" of a freedom to do something or to say something is valid or invalid. Our legal system has far too consistently been an exercise in which version of let's pretend wins out in the end, not infrequently used by judges, by "justices" by lawyers and juries which privileged or favored criminals are allowed to get away with everything from lying and theft (often through lies) up to and including murder. In the past when the legal system in many places summarily allowed white men, especially rich white men, to lie, steal and murder those not so favored, that made a mockery of the reason that the law is supposedly established and administered, only that past isn't past, it's a perpetual feature of legal and political life.
The law won't ever be perfect, perfection isn't something that is attainable by human beings in human life but trying to do the right thing is attainable, something which it's been shocking to see in things like the Senate Judiciary Committee in recent years is something that lawyers educated and trained in elite universities, who got their educations in Catholic and other allegedly Christian institutions of learning were certainly trained to set aside with verbal gymnastics of a not very impressive kind. As long as the words are applied, the reality behind them is held to be unimportant. That is a practical demonstration of that abstraction from reality that I talked about at the start of this, the kind of thing that a Gorsuch can fucking lie through his teeth to hold a trucker had a legal obligation to freeze to death in order to keep his job and which other, especially Federalist Society fascists regularly spout and, due to the idiocy of our Constitution, is held to be "the law".
Rights, freedoms, liberties exist in a context and when you ignore, summarily dismiss or deny or reject the context in which those will be exercised you turn freedom and liberty into a mockery in which power, money and strength means that the privileged and favored will have "rights" they have no right to and they will be had at the cost of the rights of those without power and money and the favor of the elites or the majority or even the effective margin of the many who they can maipulate to achieve that end. "Democracy" is another word which is divorced from its wider context with stunning frequency as well, not that the Constitution is set up to allow that to happen very often, democracy, that is. As interpreted by most of the Supreme Courts we have been saddled with, the Constitution is anti-democratic. The one we have now will likely do everything they can to make sure self-government by an accurately informed People of good will never happens as long as they hold power. The Republican Party is dedicated to destroying that and setting up as malignant an oligarchy as can be made. Its total adoption of Trumpian degeneracy, of going out of its way to be as malignant as it can manage to think up proves that. And they do it through the language of freedom and liberty and rights.
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