PRESIDENT BIDEN SAID IT, Facebook's libertarian actions allowing Covid-19 liars to say what they want to is getting people killed. As mentioned yesterday in the grim and often vulgar debate over just how many millions Hitler or Stalin or others had murdered, how many hundreds of thousands of those who died under the Trump-Facebook-Twitter-FOX reign of lies, how many deaths those lies were responsible for will be vulgarly argued, those supporting Trump-Facebook etc merely arguing just how many scores or hundreds of millions, not any with any attachment to the truth denying that the lies killed people.
The fact is that lies kill people, lies permitted by the First Amendment, especially as interpreted under the fashion of "free speech-press absolutism" will be responsible for an increasing proportion of the further death tole of Covid-19 in just this one instance of a pandemic of this potential, I'd say that today that percentage is close to if not 100% of those dying in the United States right now. The liberals and libertarians who say that must continue must be held responsible for their part in that carnage. It is that sloppy, generalized language, as made worse by the courts in the last half of the 20th century which has given rise to the insanity that because Madison and the First Congress reluctantly took up a Bill of Rights because he had promised to do so as a condition for Virginia adopting his Constitution and they wished to avoid hard thinking and, no doubt, a protracted debate over it, which has given those who empower Facebook, FOX, Twitter, etc the excuse for not looking at the complexity of this situation as it really is EVEN AS IT IS GETTING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF US KILLED, GOING ON TO A MILLION.
I'll forgo mentioning the position of Hamilton because that's for another day.
That is not sustainable, if we do not learn from this hard experience of these hundreds of thousands, perhaps in the end millions of deaths, things will end far more badly than they need to. We have to the hard work of thinking and working our way out of this, to see that we may be able to have a measure of freedom but not every possible free expression of every possible lie designed (often now with entirely amoral expert advice) for no good purpose. If we fail to change things then we will have the choice between a dictator who has the power to order all people to be vaccinated (as I believe one of Trump's admired thugs, the dictator of the Philippines is moving to) or the reign of death we are just beginning to get a fuller picture of in low-vaccination - REPUBLICAN-FASCIST RULED STATES.
As Einstein is frequently said to have said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. The problem is that the First Amendment is too simple, it doesn't begin to match the complexity of the use of propaganda and lies and their planned use as under the Cambridge Analyitica - billionaire, Mercer - Putin, Koch, Murdoch-FOX, etc. use of a simplistic notion of free-speech, free press to not only destroy equality, not only destroy democracy but to get millions killed so the Republican-fascists can use a pandemic to try to get electoral victory. The idiot judges and sleazy Republican-fascist "justices" on the Supreme Court can rule the remainder of the population and so hand everything over to the billionaires, oligarchs and plutocrats. There's a reason that the Repuiblican-fascists applauded when at their recent gathering the failure to meet vaccination goals was announced, it's because they plan on using that planned, Facebook-FOX fueled failure to win elections. That's their plan, that was Trump's plan, the reason for his use of the pandemic through his lies and his failure to protect the American People by telling the truth about it.
Anyone who doesn't learn from this experience that "free speech" and especially "free press" as it is now practiced cannot be allowed to continue, that while all truth has a right to be told, lies have no right to be and that what we have now is seriously in need of change is too stupid or irresponsibly insouciant to have any say in how the law is going to proceed from the wreckage. But our legal minds and jurists are just that stupid, seemingly trained to be, they have been as bad in addressing other terrible defects in the Constitution from the earliest days when the Supreme Court empowered the Slave Power that most of its members were members of, even as most of them, today, are Republican-fascists. Liberals who don't see the problem with their position are their cowardly prison bitches.
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