Value Freedom of Speech with passionate determination — a parable about simulating its loss

© 2021 Peter Free

 

30 September 2021

 

 

Today's theme

 

A lot of Americans seem to take Freedom of Speech for granted. Even down to suggesting that we should lose it because it spreads so much misinformation.

 

Yesterday, a coincidental SSL encryption certificate happening (on the website that you are now reading) made me think that I had lost mine.

 

Was 'The Man' out to get me?

 

 

'The Man' might (indeed) have had me on his list

 

I write a lot of provocative stuff, despite being a blandly mild person. (It's all that meditation, you know.)

 

Much of what I post in this blog is what lawyers think of as trial balloons that present honed versions of one point of view.

 

In sending my flaming sallies up, I know (perfectly well) that persuasive counter-arguments can easily be constructed by someone who disagrees with what I present.

 

 

Provocation, as a prod to thinking, is exactly my website's point

 

It would be nice if more people were prodded into thinking about issues, rather than blindly accepting whatever influential airheads have to say.

 

Ergo, my frequently inflammatory writings are intended to set a fire under Compacency's brain-blind behind.

 

And given the 'Powers that Be' are often my targets, I tend toward expecting that Government, Big Tech — or just partisanly-minded hackers — will shut my pissant platform down.

 

 

Yesterday, what could have been exactly 'that' result — appeared to happen

 

A few hours after I posted an appreciation for (and defense of) USMC Lt Colonel Stuart Scheller — and a verbal attack against the Four Stars and Secretary of Defense who had, presumably, been the ones to figuratively cart Scheller off to Marine Jail — Google and FireFox began telling me that my website (the one that you are reading now) was unsafe to visit.

 

Those of you who have had this happen to you, will know that getting Google to let you into an allegedly culprit website becomes a multi-step and purportedly danger-inviting process.

 

Given the impossible-to-skirt ways that Internet protocols have set these Unsafe Site bars up, no one of right mind will continue on to the presumably dangerous URLs.

 

Therefore, for practical purposes, once one's website is slapped with an Unsafe SSL status warning, a domain-holder is essentially shut down.

 

When exactly this happened to me yesterday, I wondered whether my blog had ruffled a Someone's powerful feathers:

 

 

Coming from law enforcement — and having been peripherally associated with the American military for almost three decades — I have a pretty good idea of just how powerfully capable (and often situationally competent) these entities are, when they are riled up.

 

 

Never underestimate a well-connected person or institution's ability to create havoc in our lives.

 

 

Enter the value of Law-protected freedom of speech

 

These last couple of years, Big Tech has come under fire for its willingness to censor and obliterate alleged misinformation.

 

As private entities, this trend is not unconstitutional. Even though, in my estimation — as large and monopolistic as Big Tech is — it probably should be made similarly so, as a matter of statutory regulation.

 

Worse, the Biden Administration has been fine with Big Tech's incursions on people's freedom to talk, even going so far as to encourage Corporatism's suppression of talk and ideas.

 

If Government and Corporatism are allowed to get together to suppress Speech — which essentially means squashing Thought — Americans will be living in a very dark 'homeland'.

 

 

Cultural perspective

 

'We the People' treasure our Speech too cursorily and with far too little passion.

 

Indeed, supposed 'Progressives' these days have been at the forefront of Stalinesque speech suppression.

 

On that topic, see — intelligently and eloquently delivered:

 

 

Vinay Prasad, Progressivism is dead, COVID19 killed it — one doctor reflects, YouTube (29 September 2021)

 

 

Consider, as a thought experiment, being silenced

 

Big Tech and Government can shut electronic communication down with virtually no effort and whenever they want.

 

For them, repressing and 'disappearing' electron-based messaging is much easier and less costly than producing and disseminating the propaganda that both spew every hour of every day.

 

Imagine an America in which nobody gets to say anything that Elites and 'The Powerful' disagree with.

 

How would that be different than living in the communist China that so many Americans love to revile?

 

Speech suppression in the United States would be even worse than in the People's Republic. That so, simply because we can credit China's government (on the basis of its recent history) with actually caring a bit about the Chinese public's overall well-being.

 

We cannot say the same for the United States, where the American Public exists solely as fodder and prey with which to fill Elites' and Corporatism's wallets.

 

With that cultural contrast firmly in mind, imagine what Free Speech's absence in this country would mean to you personally.

 

 

The moral? — What sets the United States apart from every other place that I have been . . .

 

. . . is its willingness to tolerate mouthy disagreements, asinine points of view, and a generalized free-for-all in the realm of provocative and inane ideas.

 

This is a major part of the reason that the United States remains a good place to be.

 

Don't let Speech Squashers wreck our most basic of freedoms.

 

And many of our more concrete-minded ilk should remind ourselves that the Second Amendment will not be worth a pee-dribble — when pens and electrons have been silenced.

 

Civilization is fragile.

 

Protecting it takes unrelenting attention and never-ending effort.