02-02-2018, 01:13 PM
(02-02-2018, 07:30 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Yes, but speech can be good and bad, effective or ineffective too. There are diverse world views. There are few places where radically different ones are exchanged. I would like to encourage it. You seem determined to reduce free speech? You seem to shun the community? Your approach is clearly a poor one,
Some countries outlaw Nazi slogans, rhetoric, songs, and gestures -- in countries in which Nazism brought ruin and shame. In such countries such is considered no loss of freedom.
Meetings between extremists on both sides ordinarily degenerate into shouting matches in which political invective degenerates into fighting words such as "Death to the Klan!" or "Kill the Communists before they kill again!" I see a part of what used to be the mainstream of American life becoming increasingly intolerant and angry.
I see no way to tone down the anger of the American right, including people who used to be 'moderates'. The Generational Cycle will either exalt them to crushing power over all else or discredit them completely. Stay tuned to the news. I wish I could be watching this unfold from a civilized country like Switzerland, or at least one in which people know what the denial of freedom means (degradation of all that is human) and would never tolerate dictatorship again. We Americans are too naive to realize with what dangerous forces we toy.
History is an obscene tale written mostly with the blood of innocent people even if those are heroes.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.