Censorship is great as long as its someone else's "bad" ideas that are suppressed. The question to ask is, would you want the same power to censor in the hands of the worst actor on the other side?
I wonder how much of the support for censorship is driven by social herding; that is, not wanting to be shunned by an in-group due to "heterodox" opinions.
Before we start on Who's to Censor, stop and consider that the bulk of American citizenry are already under the heel of the purveyors of the NYT, WaPo, NPR et al. Most of our 'news' consciousness comes from the steady deluge of carefully edited, carefully selected stories with the censorship of 'wrong' viewpoints already filtered out, or identified as wicked and immoral by highly-educated inkslingers.
Agreed that there's no ideal savant to perform Lord High Censor in Washington DC, but hundreds of eager contenders for that office are already installed as 'influencers' in the pay of those 'news' agencies. How to root them out? Or how to give screen/microphone time to an equal number of Barons of the Loyal Opposition? Even that rough fix is insufficient to return us to a genuine guarantee of free speech. There's no other reasonable path available.
Just say: "I'll go along with whatever government restrictions on speech you propose, just as long as I'm the one who gets to decide what everyone else can and can't say." You'll have no takers for that bargain.
Is it possible for AI to be watermarked , to indicate what speech has been generated by AI? I could consider this in many areas where it would be used such as in the arts. Not to censor but to alert.
"Who decides" is also the reason that I am not enamored of an Article V convention. I am hard put to come up with the names of 50 people whom I would trust to convene for the sole, dedicated purpose of amending the Constitution.
Censorship is great as long as its someone else's "bad" ideas that are suppressed. The question to ask is, would you want the same power to censor in the hands of the worst actor on the other side?
I wonder how much of the support for censorship is driven by social herding; that is, not wanting to be shunned by an in-group due to "heterodox" opinions.
Before we start on Who's to Censor, stop and consider that the bulk of American citizenry are already under the heel of the purveyors of the NYT, WaPo, NPR et al. Most of our 'news' consciousness comes from the steady deluge of carefully edited, carefully selected stories with the censorship of 'wrong' viewpoints already filtered out, or identified as wicked and immoral by highly-educated inkslingers.
Agreed that there's no ideal savant to perform Lord High Censor in Washington DC, but hundreds of eager contenders for that office are already installed as 'influencers' in the pay of those 'news' agencies. How to root them out? Or how to give screen/microphone time to an equal number of Barons of the Loyal Opposition? Even that rough fix is insufficient to return us to a genuine guarantee of free speech. There's no other reasonable path available.
Just say: "I'll go along with whatever government restrictions on speech you propose, just as long as I'm the one who gets to decide what everyone else can and can't say." You'll have no takers for that bargain.
Is it possible for AI to be watermarked , to indicate what speech has been generated by AI? I could consider this in many areas where it would be used such as in the arts. Not to censor but to alert.
As Mark Steyn is fond of saying, only very weak ideas require the support of censorship.
"Who decides" is also the reason that I am not enamored of an Article V convention. I am hard put to come up with the names of 50 people whom I would trust to convene for the sole, dedicated purpose of amending the Constitution.