Scrutable

Boustrophedon wrote: Sun Sep 14, 2025 10:26 pm But is it OK to shoot Nazis?

It was in the early 1940s... but you know, times change.

Tessa K wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 8:54 am The fact that his partner is trans is making trans Americans very nervous

I don’t think is has actually been confirmed that his partner was trans.

Stranger Mouse wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 10:38 am

Tessa K wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 8:54 am The fact that his partner is trans is making trans Americans very nervous

I don’t think is has actually been confirmed that his partner was trans.

Even if his partner is trans, it wasn’t them who fired the gun was it? Talk about a scapegoat.

I gather it was the Utah state governor who said the flatmate "romantic partner" was trans and was cooperating with investigators. Though over on the other place, JayUtah, a local and whose judgement tends to be pretty reliable, opined that Utah is so rabidly anti-trans that there's room for doubt these are the facts.

If it's correct, then there's still a mountain to climb to get past a kneejerk "trans ally = woke left" view before the right, who are of course clamouring to blame the left, will accept that the shot might have come from behind them.

Martin Y wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 11:42 am I gather it was the Utah state governor who said the flatmate "romantic partner" was trans and was cooperating with investigators. Though over on the other place, JayUtah, a local and whose judgement tends to be pretty reliable, opined that Utah is so rabidly anti-trans that there's room for doubt these are the facts.

If it's correct, then there's still a mountain to climb to get past a kneejerk "trans ally = woke left" view before the right, who are of course clamouring to blame the left, will accept that the shot might have come from behind them.

I believe the story started in the New York Post (a Murdoch rag) and a local Fox News affiliate and the Governor Spencer Cox may be just repeating these.

Grumble wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 11:19 am

Stranger Mouse wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 10:38 am

Tessa K wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 8:54 am The fact that his partner is trans is making trans Americans very nervous

I don’t think is has actually been confirmed that his partner was trans.

Even if his partner is trans, it wasn’t them who fired the gun was it? Talk about a scapegoat.

Well quite

Tessa K wrote: Mon Sep 15, 2025 8:54 am The fact that his partner is trans is making trans Americans very nervous

Interesting video on the relationship between incels, groypers and trans women

https://youtu.be/CJ7RWsbebp0

bjn wrote: Sun Sep 14, 2025 7:19 pm They’ll find a way to turn him into a MAGA Horst Wessel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel

Exactly what I've been thinking!

EFA

There's an XKCD cartoon that's been doing the rounds for years which I always thought was a rare miss for Randall Munroe, which the current situation with people being penalised for criticising Charlie Kirk demonstrates.
Jesse Singal wrote about this in 2019 and I think was quite prescient: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/plea ... al-but-754

Let’s say that overnight, Twitter, Facebook, the company that hosts my personal website, and my book publisher are all taken over by staunchly anti-abortion figures. They see that I have written in favor of abortion rights, and they’re outraged — they have deep, profound beliefs about the wrongness of abortion. They decide, one by one, that because I’m in favor of abortion access, I shouldn’t have a personal website (at least one hosted by their company), or a Facebook account, a Twitter account, or a book deal. I publicly protest and they all respond by sending me the above xkcd comic.

.....

I do think liberals and leftists should have a bit of humility on these issues. We should recognize that while we do, in a very real way, dominate most cultural and educational institutions (even if we’re pathetic at gaining political power), you never know who will control things tomorrow. Even just pragmatically — even if you disagree with me and my boring old-school liberal beliefs about free speech — you should understand that the more we promote norms that saying the wrong thing can get you fired or ostracized, the more we’re playing with fire.

Whether rightly or wrongly, there are more people with cultural and organisational power who, without going as far as violating the strict and limited 1st Amendment interpretation, think those who are criticising Charlie Kirk are a..holes and are showing them the door.

Yes, that cartoon has always rather niggled me too. It's overly simplistic and assumes that the only duty the state has in regard of free speech is the passive one of not actually feeling people's collars for what they say. In reality there are active duties as well, for example preventing the compilation and use of industry wide black lists such as one might have seen in the McCarthy era.

And - as I feel Americans are a bit prone to do - it tries to make a black and white distinction over something that has a fair bit of grey area to it. I think Monroe's general idea is that the right to free speech doesn't include the right to say anything you want, whenever you want, and on whatever platform you want to use. That's correct, but there is a point at which expression of an opinion would become sufficiently difficult to raise free speech concerns, and precisely locating that point is a bit harder than Monroe is suggesting.

Tristan wrote: Tue Sep 16, 2025 2:26 pm There's an XKCD cartoon that's been doing the rounds for years which I always thought was a rare miss for Randall Munroe, which the current situation with people being penalised for criticising Charlie Kirk demonstrates.

free_speech.png
Jesse Singal wrote about this in 2019 and I think was quite prescient: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/plea ... al-but-754

Let’s say that overnight, Twitter, Facebook, the company that hosts my personal website, and my book publisher are all taken over by staunchly anti-abortion figures. They see that I have written in favor of abortion rights, and they’re outraged — they have deep, profound beliefs about the wrongness of abortion. They decide, one by one, that because I’m in favor of abortion access, I shouldn’t have a personal website (at least one hosted by their company), or a Facebook account, a Twitter account, or a book deal. I publicly protest and they all respond by sending me the above xkcd comic.

.....

I do think liberals and leftists should have a bit of humility on these issues. We should recognize that while we do, in a very real way, dominate most cultural and educational institutions (even if we’re pathetic at gaining political power), you never know who will control things tomorrow. Even just pragmatically — even if you disagree with me and my boring old-school liberal beliefs about free speech — you should understand that the more we promote norms that saying the wrong thing can get you fired or ostracized, the more we’re playing with fire.

Whether rightly or wrongly, there are more people with cultural and organisational power who, without going as far as violating the strict and limited 1st Amendment interpretation, think those who are criticising Charlie Kirk are a..holes and are showing them the door.

The first line of the XKCD seems fair enough. I would in general agree that there is no right to a platform of your choice for your opinions, nor to impose upon an audience of your choice to listen to you. For example, I cannot demand to appear on some specific TV show. And of course no one is immune from the consequences of what they say. Some speech acts are crimes like fraud, extortion, threatening behaviour, grooming. More difficult are matters like hate speech, incitement, libel, risk of causing a breach of the peace. And the latter is where the problems lie.

The problems also come to the extent that someone is in the business of offering platforms to the wider public in general, and when they might withdraw that business from specific customers, as mentioned above.

A specific problem we have at the moment is that one person's intolerable hate speech or incitement is another person's opinion they should be allowed to express, and the potential for someone else to be defining that at a future date. For all that MAGA claims the right to say certain things, they have their own definition of intolerable hate speech and clamp down on it, such as deporting students attending pro-Palestine demonstrations for antisemitism. In effect, it is no different from what was before, it has just changed - considerably - the boundaries of what is now intolerable. We would consider these new boundaries an abuse, but they considered the old boundaries an abuse.

Here in Britain we are apparently arresting over 30 people a day on average for things they put on social media, in terms of hate, incitement and liable to breach the peace. Some have been put in prison, and recently one has become a martyr to free speech, in the opinion of some. But actually those people arguing for free speech would have there own different boundaries of the intolerable and we would probably be very upset by those boundaries being imposed on us. We should indeed look to see how the new regime has modified or abused that system in the US, and perhaps have laws that are less capable of such abuse by a government of authoritarian tendency. This all seemed to kick off with the Twitter Bomb Trial, which we don't seem to have learned the lesson of.

I mentioned the Twitter bomb trial to someone recently, in connection with the recent arrest of Graham Linehan.

That XKCD is based on how U.S. freedom of speech works legally under the 1st Amendment, rather than on a broader philosophical view of how freedom of speech "ought to" work. Lots of Americans misunderstand what the 1A actually says. I think that's what he's getting at, not trying to make any point about what "ought to" be.

ETA and yes, Munroe (and I) both understand that freedom of speech works a bit differently elsewhere.

bolo wrote: Tue Sep 16, 2025 6:28 pm Lots of Americans misunderstand what the 1A actually says. I think that's he's getting at, not trying to make any point about what "ought to" be.

Hmm, I’m not sure about that. Certainly I think the way this cartoon is often used as a reference indicates many people think that if enough people are mad at you then you deserve to be shown the door. I’ve certainly seen it used in that context a few times.