alextheraven:

simonalkenmayer:

philosophy-and-coffee:

simonalkenmayer:

karama9:

simonalkenmayer:

Allow me to connect this to my argument of a few days ago regarding Nazis and what to do with their faces if you are so inclined.

The Government can’t arrest you… can the Government make conscious effort to hurt you and your livelihood? Like, say, by consistently attacking your reputation and making baseless accusation on your honesty and integrity?

Eh? What exactly do you mean? The federal government is prohibited in violating free speech. The Supreme Court exists to apply law so that this does not happen. If you feel the federal government has violated your rights, outside the constraints determined by the Supreme Court, then you can sue. It’s your right.

They can’t legally but they certainly will. The US government is so crooked it’s hilarious.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” – former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
But the comic’s point still stands that free speech does not extend to societal approval. If you decide to be a Nazi, you’ve decided (in my book) that you deserve to have the shit beat out of you.

Point being, that while the government carries on in a specific way, it’s not allowed to. The freedom of speech and so forth do not protect you from me, if I should decide to accept consequences. If I hit you in the face, there is no civil rights issue. There is an assault issue. Different things.

The news media is not part of the government (except for that trump news thingy), which means that if that’s who you’re referring to when you say, “…by consistently attacking your reputation and making baseless accusation[s] on your honesty and integrity” (Karama9), well they actually aren’t under any impetus to be factual at all anymore, and their actions could probably be considered social or societal approval

Yes. They have the freedom of speech. Which means you have to sue them for libel, but the government cannot legislate them.