Thought for the Day

Just off a phone call with someone who proposed that the modern-day problem with “free speech” as espoused by the likes of JS Mill et al — that speech, even odious speech, should be aired so that falsehood can be shot down and so that truth can be found — the problem apparently is that social media acts as an amplifier, so that falsehood and hate can spread too quickly and prolifically for the truth to catch up.

I’m reasonably certain that this argument was also laid at the feet of the printing press, of pamphlets and newspapers, of the postal service, of telegrams, radios, televisions and fax machines, and so I reflexively dismiss it; but a new thought (to me) also crossed my mind this evening, which was this:

People who complain that the progress of technology has enabled us to utter speech with fewer boundaries and greater speed than ever before, have probably not really considered the equal or greater advancements in censorship, surveillance, and chilling of speech that new technology also affords.

The cheap and easy solution to fulfilling a state mandate for censorship filtering of public discourse, is massive over-blocking, and it is what Mill himself rails against.

But what we can do with tracking and surveillance and chilling of speech — chilling literary as well as physical freedom of association — would be the incomprehensible stuff of Mill’s nightmares.

#censorship #censorship-interception #free-speech #internet-freedom #js-mill

https://alecmuffett.com/article/34184

Is Andrew Tate a product of individualism? - Daily Friend
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2023/01/11/is-andrew-tate-a-product-of-individualism/

(My latest column, defending John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, from a scurrilous smear.)

#AndrewTate #JohnStuartMill #JSMill #HarrietTaylorMill #Individualism #Liberalism

John Stuart Mill on poverty:

"It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements."

-- John Stuart Mill, Chapters on Socialism

https://archive.org/stream/chaptersonsocial00mill#page/264/mode/2up

#JohnStuartMill #JSMill #poverty #inequality

On the role of Universities and Primary Education as Social Indoctrination: John Stuart Mill via Hans Jensen

...[T]he universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of deologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties ... of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse....

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_role_of_universities_and_primary_education/

#dredit #JSMill #education #indoctrination