Ken WhiteI continue to be mystified by the sentiment that being a First Amendment advocate means *socially* tolerating people I find obnoxious or contemptible. I keep getting “what kind of free speech advocate blocks people?” The kind who doesn’t deal with assholes when not professionally compelled to do so. The First Amendment isn’t a hair shirt.
/2 I mean most of these people like to imagine that they’re fuckin Galileo tugging at the hem of my robe asking me to consider their alternative to geocentricity in the name of Science. Guys, that’s just not you. I’ve got plenty of people already yelling at me about how I’m a cuck or wanting to lecture me about whether or not women have penises or about how the incorporation doctrine is wrong. If I need input on those subjects I’m all set, thanks.
/3 Sometimes it seems like some sort of stylized cult of manhood, where to be a Real Man you have to constantly surround yourself with people you find completely insufferable. Leave me out of that one Charles Atlas. And it’s not like they really mean it. The dudes wanting me to sit through their right-wing bullshit are not seeking out dialogue with purple-haired Che-shirt wearers screaming at them that meat is murder. Spare me the pretense.
/4 This kind of goes to my whole quarrel with the “complain to kids about cancel culture” approach. The free speech bargain — leave the government out of your beefs and solve them yourselves with speech and association — relies on me feeling free to say when I think people are assholes and shun them. A society that tries to sell me on “oh assholes have a maximum right to speak but we are going to enact a quasi-Victorian set of social rules about how you react” is unappealing to me.
/5 As long as I’ve been writing in public about “wow this guy’s an asshole but his speech is protected,” I’ve been pestered by people saying “oh but why did you have to say he’s an asshole, you didn’t have to say that.” Yeah, you didn’t have to be a tedious nag, but here we fuckin are. Robustly calling out assholes while accurately limning their rights is supposed to model how the free speech bargain works.
John Infante@Popehat If you don’t point out that you think they’re an asshole, you get people using the logic that because you supported someone’s right to say something, you agree with the content. So damned if you do, damned if you don’t, might as well get criticized for something true.
@johninfante Absolutely! And I routinely also get people who say I didn’t criticize the person ENOUGH.
M.S. Bellows, Jr.@Popehat @johninfante I'm just trying to wrap my head around the idea that there are RWers who even know what the incorporation doctrine is.
@msbellows @Popehat “It’s the legal principle that corporations have greater free speech rights that natural people.”
@msbellows @johninfante That one tends to me more weirdo niche belief systems often very concerned with the Federal Reserve
@Popehat @johninfante So you're saying they're not terribly concerned that failure to incorporate the Seventh Amendment promotes abuses of pre-dispute contractor arbitration clauses in routine transactions, denying consumers access to convenient and affordable state courts?
Michael@Popehat @msbellows @johninfante "fiat currency! Fiat currency! Now, let me talk to you about bitcoin,...."
Michael Wray@MikeyTsi @Popehat @msbellows @johninfante don't you know Bitcoin is just Digital Gold? That's why it has miners!
Patrick Fessenbecker@Popehat @johninfante Easy to get confused about institutional context too — lots of people treat social media like it's a classroom, where the teacher has a professional duty to help students figure out their ideas, when it's actually like walking past a coffee shop and shouting at people sitting outside.
@pfessenbecker @Popehat “Social media is the new town square! Except the exits to the square have been sealed until I’m done speaking.”
ShinigamiDad 死
PeoriaBummer@Popehat @johninfante You must simply ensure that your criticism falls within the Goldilocks Zone*.
*the Goldilocks Zone is at the intersection of two non-overlapping circles
John O’Donnell@Popehat
Why did you have to call him an asshole?
Because he is. Are you trying to curtail my First Amendment rights?
John Dahlquist@Popehat It's maddening that these assholes think that their right to scream whatever mouth-vomit they want into the void includes any sort of right for said vomit to be heard by others.
Seán Fenian@Popehat it always amuses me how often it is that the people screaming the loudest about their First Amendment rights don't actually understand what those rights are. What the First Amendment says about free speech is that the Federal government is barred from telling you what you can and cannot say, as long as you are not actively inciting riot or violence. The part that these people do not understand is that the First Amendment does not in any way compel any private entity to give them a platform to air their bullshit, nor compel any individual or group of individuals to listen to it.
Tirial@Popehat For some reason you just made me think of the climax of "The American President". https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=-__djIQgBJc
The American President - The Final Speech
WaltCorey
ClauClauClaudia
Gojira1000@Popehat Having one of those "people are stupid as mushrooms" days, eh?
Reboot Robotnik@Gojira1000 @Popehat at least mushrooms are useful
sometimes they make you bigger or let you throw fireballs
North Easton 
@Popehat 1. People get to speak.
2. I don't have to listen.
Alka@Popehat chill out dude, you're not that important for people to care whether you block people or not.
paprikapink@AlkaVirus did you make this reply under the wrong post? @Popehat didn't say anything here about blocking people
@paprikapink @Popehat literally read the first post he made. What are you on about?
@AlkaVirus Oh, yes you're right, in the course of multiple posts about calling people out for being assholes, he does initially reference other people complaining about him blocking people. Thank you for pointing that out because it does a better job of contradicting your assertion that no one cares if he blocks people.
@paprikapink you're welcome
mastodon quixote@AlkaVirus there is no one too unimportant for someone, somewhere to care about being blocked by them
@valrus agree to disagree
Warren@Popehat there wasn’t nearly enough RICO in this thread.
anitavondannen@Popehat thank you for calling out the assholes. 🙏
brianshaler@Popehat People really think they believe in the marketplace of ideas until their ideas are soundly rejected by the marketplace.
arceuthobium
sri@Popehat one only has to look to Elon "Free Speech" Musk and make the same argument - why is that guy blocking people if he loves free speech so much?
sparker 🥑@Popehat Extra kudos for using a form of one of my favorite words, "liminal". 😎
John B@Popehat Too bad this platform doesn't have Threadreader. That's great fun!
mav 
@Popehat serious question: do you ever wonder if the absolute freedom to say anything you want isn't worth it?
As somebody who's been in tech since ... Well, not quite birth, but surprisingly close... I can't help but feel that by creating the internet all we did was give evil people a voice so loud they could destroy us, because they've destroyed us.
libraryogre@Popehat "He uses his free speech to be an asshole. I use my free speech to call him an asshole. It's why free speech is important."
Conlan Spangler@Popehat This is the whole issue with the false cultural dichotomy we’ve built for ourselves. (The collective) we want there to be only two types of people: our team and theirs. But there is at least one additional type—the type that says, “A lot of the time, both of you need to fuck off.”
Staid Winnow
@staidwinnow @conlan @Popehat wait, the giant’s not a metaphor? This is as dumb as the South Park argument that criminal conspiracies can never exist because used underpants are worthless.
@theothersimo @staidwinnow I don't want to speak for Sancho, but I think it’s… um, all a metaphor?
@conlan @staidwinnow but if it’s a metaphor then the non-existence of literal giants isn’t relevant
@theothersimo @staidwinnow I hope I’m not tilting at windmills here, but I would suggest the non-existence of evil giants is relevant to this metaphor because the evil giants are a metaphor for things that don't exist.
@conlan @staidwinnow pretty dumb metaphor then isn’t it?
Jargoggles@theothersimo @conlan @staidwinnow
In the story, Don Quixote has read so many fictional, romanticized tales about chivalry and knights that he deluded himself into thinking he's living out those stories.
The metaphor is appropriate because we're being asked to consider a completely delusional imaginary threat as just as viable as something perfectly explainable which requires no action to be taken. We can also assume that the whole debate is taking attention from real problems.
@jargoggles @conlan @staidwinnow I can’t imagine this line of logic ever being used in good faith, but I can remember many, many scenarios when science deniers used similar arguments as part of their Gish gallop. Just like Underpants Gnomes is never used in good faith but only to beg the question. Conspiracy theories can’t be real because conspiracy theories aren’t real.
@theothersimo @conlan @staidwinnow
The entire Republican social platform can be summed up as tilting at windmills. They invent imaginary issues to constantly have something to fight against.
It can also be as simple as something like science denialism. Just because conservatives live in some alternate reality where science is whatever is convenient for them at the time doesn't mean we have to treat it as a valid point of view that's worth debating.
@jargoggles @conlan @staidwinnow or as I already said, it’s a really goddsmn fucking dumb metaphor. Cute cartoon though I guess.
@conlan @staidwinnow “I’ve already drawn you as the ̶S̶o̶y̶ ̶w̶o̶j̶a̶c̶k̶ giant so you ̶L̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶g̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶ are worried about something that doesn’t exist”
Lizard@theothersimo @staidwinnow @conlan @Popehat
I thought the message pf the Underwear Gnomes was that most dotcom startups have no actual business plan.
E.G. Phillips@Popehat It is weird how the free speech warriors tend to forget about freedom of association, which implies a freedom to not associate.
JaySinWA@Popehat The "Cut direct" seems to have gone out of fashion but there were some old time skills in shunning https://uncommon-courtesy.com/2014/10/01/the-cut-direct-the-fiercest-etiquette-punishment/
Peter Milley 🇨🇦@Popehat There was a great article about this years ago on arcdigital but it seems to have evaporated. Basically, "How would you know a bad idea was finally defeated unless large swathes of people vociferously disagreed with it?"
ScottinSoCal 🇺🇦 🕊 🏳🌈I've always told them free speech goes both ways. They can spout their crap at me, then it's my turn to tell them to fuck off and block them. It's all part of the beautiful tapestry of being able to speak your mind.
Michelle (she/her) 
🇵🇷@Popehat I almost knocked over my desk giving this a standing ovation!!!