Free speech wouldn’t confuse people so much if they thought a bit more about this term of art in the context of “freedom of the press. ”
Like freedom of speech, everyone — not just “journalists” — has free press rights. But that doesn’t mean that you get to go into the pressroom of your local newspaper and print out your favorite recipes, rants or porn. Your free press rights relate to your owned technology that can be used for transmitting ideas.
If you have a camera, printer, xerox, mimeograph, web press, Internet server, whatever, your free press rights pertain to what you own and may legally control. If the bank comes in and confiscates your press because you have defaulted on the loan, it’s not abridging your free press rights. Though such an act would hinder your press workings, by freedom of contract the bank is OK to do affect your ability “to speak” via the press.
Arguably, though, if the local mafia barges in and steals it, it does abridge those rights — the mafiosi’s theft is more than mere theft if done to squelch your printing about the mafia’s workings. And, by convention, this applies even more to governments, the traditional enemy of freedom of the press.
Freedom of the press is merely freedom of speech translated into the realm of transmitting speech beyond the reach of your vocalizations.
And, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press is not a fundamental right, no matter how primary a concern it be.
Both are terms of art, and one must have some knowledge of the social world to make sense of them. Not all speech is free speech, and not all press activities are free press actions — but the people who make this point most vociferously usually do so to suppress free speech and press. Which is why the issue is difficult.
twv
Summary Postscript: Both rights depend on property and custom. They are both instances of the basic human right to liberty, which includes the right to acquire, maintain, and divest property on whatever terms you may negotiate.
The Twitter-Pepe image, above, is by Who Knows found on the You Know What.
A conspiracy is a group of people working in secret to commit a crime.
But is an attempt to change the rules to redefine what a crime is itself a crime? And would a secret attempt, then, be a conspiracy?
Hold on . . .
Right now, the biggest political movement underway is “Build Back Better” or “The Great Reset.” It is an attempt to revise society from the top down in nearly every domain of life. It has been closely associated with the “climate justice” movement because climate alarmists think everything must be changed to “save the planet,” though their data and reasoning do not strike me as very good at all. Those who hold these beliefs are much exasperated by the sheer fact that most Americans do not regard climate as the even in the Top Ten of reasonable political priorities. But there is hope for the radicals on this issue, for whom democracy is getting in the way of political action: in the last two years a much better way of instituting radical reforms (political revolution from the top) has been found: the pandemic. Making us all wear masks, deciding who can work and where, forcing people to take experimental therapeutics and calling them “vaccines” — these are all beyond merely radical. They are quite tyrannical controls, and are part of The Great Reset.
I consider it all quite criminal — and in America, the pressure government and politicians have placed upon social media platforms constitutes a clear violation of the First Amendment, and is thus unconstitutional and (in the old, broad sense) un-American.
But is it a conspiracy?
Well, it’s been out in the open. So: no.
But then notice something: the people who have brought up the alarm about this “open” policy advocacy and planning have repeatedly been called “conspiracy theorists.” And, therefore, are regarded commonly as fringe, as nutty. Examples include Glenn Beck (with a new book out on the subject, I hear) and the indefatigable Alex Jones.
This calumny marginalizes opposition to the policy (The Great Reset), insulating it from criticism — or even open discussion. It means that people generally can ignore the process of fascification.*
So, I’d call the Davos-devised, globalist Great Reset a “quasi-conspiracy.” Its openness is obscured by psy-op. Thus the elites and academics who have been pushing it are, indeed, quasi-conspirators.
twv
Novel Terms:
To fascify is to unite people politically in an alarmingly totalitarian manner, “to make fascistic.”
A quasi-conspiracy is a public effort to change the scope and definition of crime or government that is protected from public criticism by accusing the effort’s critics of being “conspiracy theorists” — gaining the secretive element of a conspiracy by the psychological operation of accusation of “conspiracy theory.”
While these are my coinages, quick searches of the Internet show previous uses. Uses of the former term are close to my definition, above, while previous uses of the latter are less interesting than mine, for my specific use has, shall we say, a special character.
Universal and mandatory “vaccination” with an experimental set of gene-therapy-based concoctions that sport very limited utility in the cause of developing immunity strikes me as crazy. I mean, not even worth considering beyond the first brush with the notion. Yet most of the cultural elite and masses of their dutiful sheep have fallen for it, and now push it with alarming force.
And some of my favorite libertarian writers and leaders are so “pro-vaxx” that they spend most of their time ridiculing those of us who are beyond skeptical of the whole government-business alliance. This makes them, I hazard, instruments of totalitarianism. They have assumed the position of useful (pseudo-)opposition and thereby help the cause of statism, as academic libertarians tend to, and have done so for decades.
Be that as it may, the terminological question remains: what do we call this push? The struggle to find the right words continues. But Dr. Bryam W. Bridle, of the University of Guelph, has offered one useful term: herd vaccination. That is the goal. “Herd immunity” is not the goal, for it cannot be achieved by the method chosen. Yet it is strenuously and tyrannically pushed.
They push herd vaccination. A great term. And they push herd vaccination for reasons other than what they state.
This includes the “pro-vaxx libertarians.” But I will leave the dissection of their motives for another occasion.
One way to designate someone as a communist despite their protests could be to define any leftist as a communist if he or she supports the psy-op subversion planks as explained by Yuri Bezmenov.
You may say you are, for example, a mere social democrat. But you also are obsessed with the issues that the Soviets materially and operationally advanced explicitly within their ranks as a means to export to the West to destroy your own country. So, despite any protest on your part, I’ll call you a commie.
Unless “Soviet” is accepted as fascistic and not commie.
But I think we should cede to extremists their own preferred terms, at least sometimes. Bear with me.
For example: I cede to anarchists of the anti-authoritarian violent-revolt variety — those who breed chaos and civil unrest, murder and mayhem and propaganda by the deed — with the term “anarchism,” and do not accept it as a term of peace. So, no matter how fascistic socialism and communism tend to become, I think we should give them their term, but with the pejorative twist: commie.
Commie is better than “communist,” actually, since communism has something to do with communes and communities, while “commie” is explicitly associated with the advance of subversion of liberal order.
I am a liberal, politically, above all else, I guess. And commies hate liberals. And liberals should hate commies.
It is not “privilege” to possess “justice.” If some people are treated justly and others aren’t, calling the former “privileged” corrupts the meaning of the terms.
And when the language becomes corrupt, the corrupt triumph while the innocent are abused — or are themselves corrupted.
Master Kung was right. Words matter. Whether through slovenliness or guile, when the meanings change of key words, we are endangered.
Semantic drift is like inflation: meaning shifts are like newly created money, the new meanings benefit early adopters at the expense of those late to the change.
If some are not treated justly, the proper response is not to attack the just as “privileged.” The proper response is to extend the reach of justice.
Word of caution, though: justice in society depends upon reciprocity.
Now, those who are indeed privileged at the expense of innocent victims, the abused, they should be subject to criticism, and their privileges taken away. Just do not pretend that privileges are justice. That is an excuse for injustice.
Liberty is the freedom that can be had by all, provided each reciprocally abandons predation and parasitism (initiated force) and does not arrogate self over others, or allow others to tyrannize self.
Liberty — depending, as it does, upon the civilized stance, which is the cautious attitude of curiosity and the reserved expectation of peacefulness on the part of individuals, and which moderates the polarizing natural instincts of fight or flight — is the ideal compromise between dominance and submission, between tyranny and servility.
Or, to switch to the group level:
Liberty is a regulatory solution to the problems caused by in-group/out-group (inclusionary/exclusionary) antagonisms. It does this by regulating the ill treatment of the outsider, requiring a public test for applying coercion, based on the notions of rights/obligations and the suppression of crime and trespass. It applies the same sort of basic rule to all people, as individuals — regardless of group affiliation or institutional alliance.
Further formulationsfrom alternative contexts:
Liberty is the replacement of militant coöperation with voluntary coöperation, understanding that peaceful non-coöperation is not a threat.
Liberty is the honing of threat systems down to a bare minimum by
focusing on the prohibition of the initiation of force as well as by
regarding as bedrock to social order self-defense, and by
regulating retaliation by a rule of law —
all of which allows the flourishing of “enticement systems” (and the spontaneous systemization of flourishing).
Liberty, wrote Voltaire, is “independence backed by force.” While freedom is the absence of initiated opposing force, liberty is that absence grounded throughout society upon the justice of limiting “opposing force” to the defensive.
Liberty is reciprocity universalized, the Silver Rule scaled to all levels of organized society.
Liberty is a limit to government — with government understood in the broadest of social terms.
Liberty is a widespread and baseline personal freedom understood in the context of a distributed division of responsibility.
Dennis Pratt broke down the key concepts, above, into a nifty bullet-point list:
The plural of ‘medium’ is ‘media’ — except, I think, for a plurality of table-tappers. It would be absurd to refer, say, to a convention of spiritualists as a ‘media event.’
Most of the answers given so far concentrate on the terms liberalism and libertarianism. I discuss these two terms, and the two main varieties of anarchism, too, on a blog post I recently wrote, “Grand Theft L-Word.”
So I will summarize: Classical liberalism is today’s term for 18th and 19th century liberalism. Most scholarly people, and most who call themselves libertarians, understand this. But many people today, perhaps not so well read, think “classical liberalism” is FDR’s ideology. This is an error. But carelessness and ignorance are the leading causes of lexical drift, so maybe that will become an accepted truth some day. But, as of now, the truth is, “liberal” was taken away from individualists by collectivists, and the remnant started using the designator “libertarian.” It, however, had already been taken up by anarchists of a variety of stripes, so things get complicated.
Anarchism is the term for a variety of anti-statist philosophies all of which oppose political governance through The State. But those on the ideological Left think that the reason to oppose the State is because it props up private property and trade, and does so with its laws and institutions. But individualist anarchists opposed the State because they see monopoly political governance as a chief opponent of private property, and a perverter of trade — and they want a rule of law, and think such a thing can emerge without the institutions of defense and adjudication to claim or practice any kind of territorial sovereignty. Individualist anarchists insist that all alliances among individuals and institutions be built on explicit contract, not fake “social contracts” that are nothing more than the result of bluster, duress.
The modern terms for individualist anarchism are “anarcho-capitalism” and (more confusingly) “libertarian anarchism.”
None of these terms are incontestible. It is worth noting that the first coherent exponent of the individualist anarchist position, Gustave de Molinari, a Belgian economist of the French Harmony School, never referred to his system of “competitive government” (see “The Production of Security,” 1849) as anarchistic. He considered himself a liberal, and argued extensively with socialists of all varieties, including those many incoherent advocates of “anarchism.” A better term for the Molinarian proposal was devised a bit later in the century: panarchism. But it has never caught on.
In the late 19th century, many of the more radical classical liberals had abandoned Liberalism for “individualism.” See the writings of Auberon Herbert (who coined a term for his variant, “voluntaryism”), J. H. Levy, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe. A mere generation later H. L. Mencken used that term to defend a simple market-based republicanism in Men versus the Man. More radical forms of individualism were revived by Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand in the decades after, and at mid-century this group in America took “libertarian” from the anarchists. And then these anarchists manqué reinvented the Molinarian idea, and things got even more confusing.
In the 1960s, a simple newsletter called Innovator had begun its life as Liberal Innovator. Other samizdat journals abounded in this decade, and by 1972, the Libertarian Party had been formed by Ayn Rand fans who had given up on Nixon’s heavily statist Republican administration.
The Libertarian Party has always harbored both so-called anarchists and “minarchists” — advocates of a strictly limited minimal (“nightwatchman”) state — and, increasingly in recent years, hordes of vague “constitutional republicans.”
Amidst this confusion, I sometimes clarify by recalling an 1830s political movement, Loco-Focoism. Since I am agnostic about the ultimate legal and political status of an ideal free society, I often call myself a “LocoFoco agnarchist,” the latter term a droll coinage of an erstwhile colleague of mine, the Reason writer and editor Jesse Walker.
“Neoliberalism,” an ugly term for libertarianism, classical liberalism, or just pro-market conservatism and crony-capitalistglobalism, is a pejorative often used by Europeans and leftists. I know of no libertarian who can stand the term. The fact that it is used by witless leftists of the Naomi Klein variety helps explain that.
It is worth noting that Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce coined a simpler term for the anti-fascist, anti-statist liberal revival: liberism.
It has not yet caught on. It seems that Croce was not a supporter of laissez-faire, though, so the propriety of appropriating it for modern individualist liberalism is open to question.
And now you should be able to see the rationale for my preferred term for all these terms for private property, rule of law, free trade individualists: “individualist liberalism.”
It hasn’t exactly caught on either.
An ebook published by Laissez Faire Book Club a few years ago.
It has become commonplace: the hallmark of today’s self-identified Left is to play encomiast* to diversity while brooking scant diversity of opinion. Indeed, difference of opinion now fills them with scorn and rage.
What do we call their error here?
They have ready terms for people who hate or discriminate against others on the basis of race or sex: racism and sexism, respectively.
They have ready terms for people who hate or discriminate against gays, trans people or foreigners: homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia.
So, what do we call their hatred for people with different philosophies, who diverge on matters of facts and values?
Shall we dub them with an “ism” or a “phobia”?
If it is to be the latter, may I suggest xenologophobia?**
I have many ideas for the ism variant, but I suspect I should merely ask others for the exact term that has been fixed upon by professionals. (Call this a bleg.)
Nevertheless, I proceed. And I note that it would be especially satisfactory to base the epithet on the philosophical nature of the error.
How? Well . . . racism and sexism, for example, are not just about hatred or “discrimination.” The error in these attitudes, if we drill down to principle, limns the nature of the prejudice: racism is the “making too much of race” by imputing some generalizations about a race to individuals of that race regardless of merit.
Even were the modal Swede socialist-minded, it would be an error to assume that every Swede you meet is a socialist, no matter how statistically relevant the identification with Swedes and socialism. This would be racism, were Swedes considered a race. (Otherwise we could call the error Swedism? I mean, ethnism?)
Similarly with sexism. “Sexism is judging people by their sex,” wrote the coiner of the term, “when sex doesn’t matter.”
Leftist ideologues who will not debate their opponents respectfully, who exclude non-leftists from the community of scholars on criterion of lockstep ideological agreement, put too much stock in their ideas, and have abandoned liberality, tolerance. We could simply and rightly call them illiberals. But that doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter.
They negatively judge people by their ideas when ideas don’t really matter . . . by ideologies when ideologies shouldn’t matter. But we can’t call these illiberals “ideaists” (“idealism” already having been nabbed for other purposes). Too clumsy.
But hey: we do not need the -ism or -ist, really; there are other suffix options: think of Christianity. Isn’t there an -ity suffix, or something similar?
How about idiots?
twv
* Encomiast, remember, was defined by Ambrose Bierce as “a special, but not particular kind of liar.”
** If they fear even going halfway to meet people they disagree with, for fear of endlessly parsing disagreement, we could call them Zenologophobes.
Wirkman Comment 