Twitter, Facebook, Others, Take a Note: Offending Someone is a Fundamental Right

Being offensive for the sake of it is not healthy. But can someone show me a time in history in which humanity learned something new without conflict?

The “woke” crowd is being used by those who would prefer that we not be able to consider alternative viewpoints that run counter to the mainstream narrative. The tool of choice for social compliance is the idea that we cannot say things that might “offend” someone.

At its base, discourse requires the exchange of information. And learning specifically means moving from a less informed, or less “correct” place to a more informed, more correct place.

In other words, every time anyone has learned something new, they have previously been wrong.

This recent trend of shutting down conversations on race, gender, politics, and medical rights over the idea that unless you have lived someone else’s life, you are not entitled to have any view on facets of those dynamics of human existence uses surprisingly effective tools - but they suffer badly from intellectual poverty, and, in the end, are baseless.

Unearned guilt, for example - the idea that you’ve engaged in bad things if you have things - is patently absurd. There are those among us who happen to be white who have had to scrap for every dollar we’ve ever earned. And some had to do so against a wave of affirmative action bias - specifically a bias based on race or gender - designed to someone level the playing field - rather than allow the search for people for whom a position is the best fit. Some press the ploy of guilt - that you will be a bad person if you live according to your means - without any regard for whether you achieved your goals in life via a mixture of hard work, dedicated focus, sustained effort, defining a goal, risk-taking, or creating your own opportunities.

You would think that people of color who have been discriminated against would rise against discrimination against hiring or promotion of other people based on their skin color or gender. And many have, and many do. But the simple truth is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Racism exists in all races, but only in the hearts and minds of bigots. Bigotry is founded on ignorance

Twisting reality by appealing to one’s “lived experience” as proof of their specific belief about facts is equally absurd. This is not to dismiss the grounding that life experience brings to understanding reality. Instead, it is to say that our limited lived experiences only provide us with a sample of reality. The beauty in the message of plurality is that we can improve ourselves by learning that the world IS different for other people. But that does not mean that every subjective opinion is equivalent to fact. We learn facts via objective learning, which is not complex. It does, however, require one to have an understanding that their mind is just one of the billions. The “lived experience” justification for twisting reality means everyone’s claim to truth is equally valid “Speak Your Truth”; in reality, each one is a competing MODEL of reality subject to being checked against evidence and data.

Importantly, and this is key: That does not mean that you do not have the right to propose your model. The position I take is that in defending my right to speak my mind, I’m also defending, and respecting, your right to speak yours.

Combining these factors on any given issue and it’s literally impossible to have a public conversation without taking on the risk of offending someone. The logical conclusion under the “wokeist” mentality is that we should all then just shut up. When Twitter “permanently suspended” our accounts, they essential told me, Dr. Peter McCullough, and many others to “shut up”, and that we do not have the right to propose the model of reality that we see, using logic and reason, best fits the evidence and the data.

Because it is impossible to speak in 2022 without the risk of offending someone, and the first amendment guarantees our right to free speech, offending someone is a fundamental right. Here are other fundamental rights on the path toward learning and understanding:

Making mistakes

Misspeaking

Being wrong

Changing one’s mind

Learning from others

Hearing what someone has to say

Reading what someone has to write

Making up one’s mind

Having an opinion that differs from the crowd

At stake here is nothing less than the future of whether we live in a closed or open society. So you have to ask yourself: Who benefits from top-down control over speech, thought, understanding, and knowing? Who risks losing something if people continue to be allowed to report adverse reactions to drugs, or abuse of patients’ rights by physicians?

Remember “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?”

Wikipedia cites the following as examples of restricted speech:

“Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech.”

Who defines what is obscene? If I find lies about the perfect safety profile of vaccines “obscene” (which I do, by the way), does that make Pharma and CDC’s false messaging illegal?

No, but the “fraud” category certainly would seem to apply.

“Vaccines Are Safe” is patently false: It’s a gross generalization that does not apply to everyone.

“Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism” on the CDC website - cannot be true, because not all vaccines have been studied, and the research done is insufficient.

CHOP’s webpage about aluminum - is also false, demonstrably so via the scientific literature.

These examples of speech are allowed, but they are clearly illegal, given they defraud the public on the actual state of knowledge in science.

In the pharmatopia in which we now live, false messaging about other medical procedures has been thrown about, with no consequences for fraud and obscenity. Masks. Early treatments against COVID-19 do not work. Hiding information in Pfizer’s clinical trials about adverse events. All false. All “speech integral to illegal conduct”.

Stating incorrect information with the consequences that Fauci and his clan have had should not go unpunished. How many lives could have been saved if the actual safety profile of the vaccines - and their inability to stop transmission - were allowed to be widely known, not kept secret by those hiding or twisting the information to dupe the public into a state of ignorance?

A Modest Proposal

The best way you can defend the freedom of speech is to use it. If freedom of speech is to survive these days, a clear demarcation between protest speech and regular speech might prove useful.

If someone identifies their speech as a protest against the consensus, and the machinery of censorship shuts them down, the machinery is in the wrong (I mean the moral wrong here). They don’t have to say “I hereby designate my comment as a protest”, but rather we can merely say “There are other views on this”, or “My view is different…”, or “An opposing view is…”. No one should caveat with “It’s just my opinion…” because maybe it’s not! Maybe your thought model is the right one, and “common sense” or “scientific consensus” IS wrong.

I don’t mean this to be a requirement for comments and posts here on Popular Rationalism. In another large (private) forum I started, when people disagree, and someone appeals to me to police or to moderate the back-and-forth, I refuse. “I have two sons, and I’m no one else’s Daddy” seems to get the message across.

We don’t need our discourse, debates, disagreements, and arguments about science to be police. We’re all adults (although sometimes we don’t act it), and, more importantly, we have fundamental rights.

It’s up to us whether big media corporations will continue to be a de facto agency of the United States Government.

If so, pro-censorship liberals beware: what’s considered “allowed speech” on Twitter and Facebook will change, and you might be banned if and when the conservatives gain a supermajority and the White House.

What do you think?