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I lived and attended school in Austin, Texas for well over 2-3 years. I have always considered Austin an exciting, forward-thinking, all-American city, in the heart of Texas. I never witnessed any paranoia or even fear of persecution. The police force was always on the sidelines. Anyone who has spent enough time on sixth street can attest thist apathy towards extreme vigilance.Well, Think again.
| quote: | In free countries such as the United States, one is permitted to be a fool. The keystone of our virtuous departure from the damnable norms of human history is the axiom, so memorably put by Chesterton, that “to have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” Americans may scream racial epithets, attack others’ deeply held beliefs, and communicate whatever vile and cretinous things pop into their heads. And they may do this not because they are “allowed to” by a state that grants privilege but because the state has never been granted the permission to intervene. The heirs to the constitutional settlement of the late eighteenth century are as entitled to its bounties as were its architects — idiot boys included.
In explaining to hostile parties the consequences of their positions, many of my fellow First Amendment absolutists stress that the price of maintaining the rights of those who deserve them is that silly or undesirable people will be protected by the Constitution, too. I object to this line of thinking, not only because it presumes to judge virtue, awarding our betters a claim to exclusive truth, but also because, as John Stuart Mill argued, free men must not be stripped of their right to hear what others have to say — however offensive. |
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...arles-c-w-cooke
At the core, I believe Americans have become frightened. They represent the rotting culture that accommodates our increasingly violent, extralegal form of government, the one now almost entirely unchained from the Constitution.
The sheer apathy; the willingness to hand over fundamental liberties with little to no fight; the willingness to defend perpetual war; the willingness to suffer any indignity (eg molestation at the airport) just so long as one can go home at night to the couch and watch The Kardashians.
People joke endlessly about America's expanding waistline, mismanagement of personal and national finances, abuse of prescription drugs, and terrible education scores. It's all part of the same sickness, that goes hand in hand with the governmental abuses: it's a populace that has willingly become numb, and is ready for an iron boot to its neck, and no coincidence that's exactly what it's getting.
| quote: | Things aren’t getting any better for a 19-year-old video gamer who has been locked up since March for the remarks he made over Facebook. The father of the teen now says his son is being beaten up while he waits to stand trial.
Prisoner abuse isn’t anything new, but the so-called crime that’s left Justin Carter facing potentially eight years in prison could be unprecedented. He’s been locked up without trial since late March after authorities were alerted to a Facebook message that Carter says he made in jest.
Only 18 at the time, Carter had just wrapped up session on the online role-playing game “League of Legends” when he got into a spat with a friend over Facebook. Speaking to KVUE news last month, his father explained how what was supposed to be a sarcastic remark posted publically ended up with an unexpected jail stint.
Adding to NPR this week, the defendant’s father said his son has been “suffering quite a bit of abuse” and is “really sorry” for making what they say was a sarcastic comment.
“He just got caught up in the moment of the game and didn't think about the implications," Jack Carter told NPR.
A petition demanding Texas release Justin Carter from custody on the website Change.org has so far accumulated more than 45,000 signatures. |
http://rt.com/usa/teen-facebook-arrested-prison-628/
What most people fail to grasp is the entire concept of protecting speech, why it's so essential to a functioning democracy, and why your personal opinion of a paragraph of text being 'violent' or 'disturbing' is completely irrelevant and subjective.
We're talking about locking up a young man behind bars. Taking away his liberty, possibly taking away his ability to earn a living. It's not a stretch to say that his life is on the line, because of how a paragraph of text made you feel.
All this is further compounded by the highly political decision about what type of speech may be 'too violent' or 'too disturbing' to be legal. I can't fathom how an informed American can honestly argue that we should criminalize the act of typing a few words on your keyboard, and posting them on Facebook, when those words don't constitute an intentional and imminent threat to a specifically identified individual. |
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