What's the Biggest Threat to Free Speech?

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What's the Biggest Threat to Free Speech?

What's the biggest threat to free speech? Reason.tv asks a cavalcade of politicians, journalists, filmmakers and content creators ranging from former Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) to Fox News' Greg Gutfeld to The Atlantic's Megan McArdle to adult filmmaker John Stagliano to new media magnate Andrew Breitbart to call their shot.

Featured (in order of appearance):

Andy Levy, Fox News' Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld

Gov. Gary Johnson, Our America Initiative

Roger Stone, Political Strategist, Blogger, The StoneZone

John Stagliano, Evil Angel Productions

Cyan Banister, CEO, Zivity.com

Robert Corn-Revere, Davis Wright Tremaine

Kevin D. Williamson, Deputy Managing Editor, National Review

John Tierney, Science Columnist, The New York Times

Robert A. George, Editorial Writer, The New York Post

Kristin Davis, "Manhattan Madam" and NY Gubernatorial Candidate

Andrew Breitbart, Big Hollywood/Big Government/Big Journalism

Tunku Varadarajan, Editor, Newsweek International & NYU Professor

Rob Kampia, Executive Director, Marijuana Policy Project

Scott Ross, Editor, NBC's PopcornBiz

S.E. Cupp, New York Daily News and The Daily Caller

Bob Bowdon, Director, The Cartel

Tony Ortega, Editor in Chief, The Village Voice

Fred Smith, President, Competitive Enterprise Institute

Joe Garden, Features Editor, The Onion

John Papola, Producer-Director, "Fear the Boom and Bust"

Megan McArdle, Business and Economics Editor, The Atlantic

Greg Gutfeld, Fox News' Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld

The interviews were conducted on December 9, 2010, at The Box, a nightclub on Manhattan's Lower East Side. They took place during a Reason event designed to celebrate our work - and those of others across the political and ideological spectrum - in defense of free expression.

Interviews conducted by Michael C. Moynihan and filmed and edited by Jim Epstein. Approximately 3.30 minutes.

Scroll down for downloadable version of this video and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

Comments

[Jerryskids]

What's the biggest threat to free speech? I would say "Hitler", but we all know the answer is "Kooooooocccchhhh!!!" Koch is, of course, eleventy-billion times worse than Hitler.

[masitna]

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[Suthenboy]

Demoralization.

Scrambling people's brains to the point where 'free speech isn't hate speech' (freedom is slavery) makes sense to them.

[Rich]

What's the Biggest Threat to Free Speech?

Free speech itself?

[See Double You]

That image of S.E. Cupp...mmm.

[Slammer]

Ha! Buttman is on that list...one can dream, I guess.

[Dweebston]

S.E. Cupp does the leg chair right.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

1 girl, 1 cupp.

[Porque Pig]

I prefer One Squirrel, One Cup

[Fist of Etiquette]

This is from 2010? Hell, so long ago, who would they have said? Hitler? I'll bet it was Hitler back then.

[hpearce]

Perhaps the biggest threat to freedom of speech is not recognizing that speech is oral communication and press is printed communication to go along with internet communication.

And all can be grouped under the concept of freedom of communication !

An attack on on form communication like Net Neutrality will probably mean an eventual attack on the others.

[Limpee Wiltstock]

Big deal. It's just a bunch of fucking words.

[Limpee Wiltstock]

And it all goes back to Marduk and that nonsense about saying a word makes the thing magically come into being.

[Episiarch]

What's the Biggest Threat to Free Speech?

NutraSweet.

[Old Man With Candy]

I can see one of his stories being read by a disgusted-looking witness at a Congressional hearing to determine what speech shouldn't be protected because it is inherently offensive. Then a few choice selections from Agile Cyborg.

Yeah, I can totally see this.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

We all know that Agile Cyborg will be the one presiding over the hearing.

[Quincy, 12D]

And all the sexy vortices swirl to a hush as the gavel drops and the republic is restored.

[Francisco d'Anconia]

+1 Cyborgese

[np]

Really Reason? Recycling posts from 2010 now?

[Slammer]

It's when The Future started.

[Dweebston]

But I was told that history has already ended.

[Quincy, 12D]

The Future starts when the Present can no longer stand the blame.

[Corning]

Probably not the biggest threat but a bomb threat last night given to a bar hosting a gamergate meetup in DC at which Cathy Young was at attendance is a threat to free speech.

The self imposed MSM blackout of the event is a threat as well.

[Dweebston]

Please tell me they ignored the "threat". Please tell me nobody takes politically-motivated twitter hoaxes seriously.

[Corning]

From what I read it appears that the whole fiasco lasted 15 min and everyone went back into the bar and got free shots.

So yes, happily the meet-up participants took it like champs.

[Dweebston]

MSM coverage: "Bomb threat tied to "GamerGate" hate group, investigators report."

[Beautiful Bean Footage]

STOP SUMMONING BOTARD THE HOTARD

[Slammer]

GODDAMIT!

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

Bomb threats=free shots?

Hmmmm, lesson learned.

[Dweebston]

You play a dangerous game... er, Playa.

[Dweebston]

And while you're whispering sweet lies into my ear tell me... you love me.

[Corning]

Also It wasn't a twitter hoax. It was a phone hoax. Someone called the bar and made the threat that brought the cops. There were twitter hoax threat('s) made as well but I don't think those were what brought the cops bomb squad.

[Corning]

Opps i guess it might have been a twitter threat only. At least according to this:

http://techraptor.net/content/.....omb-threat

[Dweebston]

The internet hivemind can identify two men at a tech conference from a hastily snapped photograph and get them fired within the hour, but somehow figuring out who's issuing bomb threats to disrupt gatherings is beyond its capacity.

[PapayaSF]

True.

[Porque Pig]

Uh, because the bomb threat people were taking steps to remain anonymous while the guys at the tech conference weren't?

[Dweebston]

No shit.

[Dweebston]

Low-hanging fruit was my point, dingleberry. Much like the point you thought you were making. I mean, for Christ's sake, did you really think you'd come up with something novel? "Oh, what's the most obvious difference between this set of two things? Oh, the fact that one is obviously different from the other!" Congratulation, you contributed nothing whatsoever.

THE POINT IS THAT OUR FRIENDS THE INTERNET SLEUTHS PRIORITIZE DUMB SHIT LIKE THE LOW-HANGING FRUITS IN THE EXAMPLE I GAVE. And, much like your comments, it offers nothing that advances anyone whatsoever. It's a way of ruining the lives of feckless people.

[Carl ?s the level]

It was probably a false flag by a GamerGate supporter (as opposed to a false flag by a feminist, which is impossible, you paranoid neckbeard).

[Carl ?s the level]

#offendedwhitemanbrigade

[Corning]

If we are arbitrarily claiming false flags I am pointed at Bo "The Blue Tulpa"

[Bo Cara Esq.]

Goldstein is everywhere!

[MarkLastname]

So, people with common interests meeting in a bar are analogous to totalitarian dictators, and the people phoning in the bomb threat are victims of totalitarianism fighting for their freedom? What, merely existing makes wrong-thinkers oppressors or something?

Seriously, you're head must be on all the way backwards pretty badly for you to even try to force that analogy.

[Viscount Irish, Slayer of Huns]

It's Bo. He's the idiot who claimed the GAMURGATE PSYCHOPATH attack which he continuously directs towards people in no way related to Gamergate.

[Private FUQ]

Seriously, the fact that a few commenters here still give him the benefit of the doubt amazes me. He's a concern troll who, when concern trolling doesn't work, just destroys threads. He is the champion of bad analogies, goal post moving, and seeming inability to understand an argument. He makes some very good points until someone challenges his assumptions then he acts like a child, throwing a temper tantrum for week.

[MarkLastname]

Personally, I love conflict, that's my excuse. I can't stand tranquility and agreement. If I were a fish I would be the one that goes out of its way to bite the hook. I can't help it. It's a disease.

[Dweebston]

Also, is this GamerGate bullshit the second dumbest conflict in mankind's shared history, or what?

[Dweebston]

(Not that I don't lap it up anyway, but I'm entitled to my guilty pleasures. I mean, it's not like I watch Honey Boo Boo or Toddlers and Tiaras.)

[Corning]

The main difference between gamergate and say the Charlie Hebdo PEN thing and the Baltimore riots (two things reason seems really interested in right now) is the lack of bodies.

For better or worse all three touch on similar issues in regards to media and politics. I think you relegating gamergate to trivial status has more to do with blood lust (If it bleeds it leads) then with importance.

[Dweebston]

It's a fair point, and to be honest I'm more steeped in the controversy than I've let on (I read the original Zoe Quinn post before, or maybe around the time, "gamergate" was coined). I've found the issue an interesting study not only in group dynamics, as battle lines were drawn and armies began marshaling, but also in the way the seemingly inexorable march of PC culture could be halted for a time. I figured their movement would render every little internet fiefdom into vassals to the progressives ethos for which social justice dweebs act as a vanguard. It's been heartening to see some pushback against their crowd. But it's still a retarded squabble to spectate.

[Limpee Wiltstock]

I don't know... The great schism is pretty close.

[See Double You]

Writers, reporters, and pundits,* whom we may call collectively "intellectuals," are the biggest threat to freedom of speech.

*Excepting our fav Reason characters, of course!

[Bo Cara Esq.]

Latest Iowa poll shows Paul, along with Rubio and Huckabee doing best v Clinton; Walker, Perry and Carson doing worst of GOP

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/

[See Double You]

I'm curious, Bo: would you prefer Walker over Huckabee or Rubio?

[Porque Pig]

What's the Biggest Threat to Free Speech?

If your answer is "145 people who publicly disagreed with giving someone an award", you're being foolish and are serving only to help the real enemies of speech by crying wolf.

[Migrant Log Picker]

TUUUUULLLLLLLPAAAAAA

[Slammer]

Jonah Goldberg on the word "thug"

Whatever the case, I'm not an absolutist here. If it's really true that a significant share of blacks hear "ni**er" when someone says "thug," I'm totally open to the idea of using a different word. But here's the real problem, even after we expunge this now-hateful word: We will still need a negative word for people (of any race!) who riot, rob, torch and act like [insert non-racially loaded term to replace "?thug"? here].

I don't want to be racist. So, please, give me the shaming word for people who behave horribly that lets me condemn the content of their character without referencing the color of their skin.

[Bo Cara Esq.]

I like 'hooligan'

[Quincy, 12D]

Racist.

[Zeb]

Racist against whom? English football fans?

"Hooligan" is probably a good one. It has been applied to white people at least as much as anyone else and very few white people give a fuck.

[Porque Pig]

That's a very weird and pusilanimous-looking excerpt from what is otherwise a good article. Maybe he intended it as sarcasm?

[Old Man With Candy]

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, every time I read some eructation of yours, I think, "Could he possibly write something stupider?" And I ponder, yes I do, what stupider thing there could be to say, how could he possibly manage it?

In physics, there's a zero point energy, below which no states exist. I guess I always thought of stupidity analogously, that there would be some half-a-Plank's-constant limit below which one couldn't descend, a Third Law of Stupidity. But Tulpa keeps proving this wrong. I need to develop some new Grand Theory of Stupidity; perhaps there's an NIH grant in there somewhere?

[Francisco d'Anconia]

Tulpa has no absolute zero.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

Picture the real number line. He's waaaaay to the left. On the horizon.

[Porque Pig]

Wait, are we talking golf scores or bowling scores?

[MarkLastname]

Darts scores maybe? So a number circle then.

[Porque Pig]

Sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.

[Francisco d'Anconia]

Sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.

How is sufficiently advanced intelligence with spelling?

pusilanimous
Misspelling of pusillanimous
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pusilanimous

[Porque Pig]

Suficiently advanced inteligence doesn't waste keystrokes on unescesary double consonants.

[Sevo]

Engaging the assholes who troll here only encourages them.

[Monty Crisco]

That is literally the stupidest thing I have ever read in defense of stupidity.

[Porque Pig]

We have always perceived that the maximum stupidity of the blog was a function of derp. But I know now, there are no limits. We will explore new absurdities that we could never before have conceived of in our own lifetime. I will take us to them.

[Sevo]

Porque Pig|5.2.15 @ 10:22PM|#
"We have always perceived that the maximum stupidity of the blog was a function of derp."

Tulpa doesn't yet accept that his or Bo's appearance in any thread lowers the average intelligence of that thread by some huge amount.

[Zeb]

Must be some false minimum that he manages to tunnel out of.

Perhaps we need an inflationary model of stupidity.

[Old Man With Candy]

I've been playing with a theory that has virtual tardons.

[Corning]

We will still need a negative word for people (of any race!) who riot, rob, torch

Rioters? Robbers? arsonists?

I don't like thug being used for Rioters because when I think of a thug I think of person in a crime organization like the mob or the yakuza or the Democrat party

Interesting enough the word "Thug" comes from the Thugi who were a criminal organization in India what would befriend travellers then strangle them in their sleep and rob them.

[Corning]

I spelled Thuggee wrong:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee

[Corning]

Oh wow:

According to some sources,[which?] especially old colonial sources, Thuggee believed they had a positive role, saving humans' lives. Without Thuggee's sacred service, Kali might destroy all of humankind:

"It is God who kills, but Bhowanee has name for it."
"God is all in all, for good and evil."
"God has appointed blood for her (Bhowanee) food, saying 'khoon tum khao', feed thou upon blood. In my opinion it is very bad, but what she can do, being ordered to subsist upon blood!"
"Bhowanee is happy and more so in proportion to the blood that is shed."[15]

I wonder if GRRM modelled the faceless men after them.

[Episiarch]

I highly doubt it; the Faceless Men are extremely efficient and professional assassins who can be hired for a variety of purposes but who do not otherwise kill unless paid. Thuggees were nothing but highway robbers with the twist that they would infiltrate their targets and travel with them for a while before strangling/murdering them in their sleep and taking their shit.

Big difference.

[Corning]

I was speaking more to their religious beliefs and less to their methods. Thuggee had both Hindu and Muslims in their ranks which seems to mirror The Faceless Men's death god which was also multi-devotional. Also they both saw their killings as a service to mankind and their god.

[Porque Pig]

Or unless somebody saves them from a fire.

Jaqen appears to have pulled quite a bait and switch on Arya, doesn't he though?

[Corning]

Could be Jaqen is off the reservation and kills who he wants. Also Arya doesn't seem to be following the rules. She killed that nights watch deserter and in a released chapter for the winds of winter she kills Raff the Sweetling.

[Porque Pig]

"Thug" does imply a person who, at a minimum, commits or threatens violent acts, so it isn't justifiable for mere vandals and looters. But it's not racist in the slightest -- indeed, one finds cops of unknown/unstated race called "thug" on the pages of Reason quite a bit (often justifiably).

[Heroic Mulatto]

"Thug" actually refers to this.

[Limpee Wiltstock]

We could just call them "blackguards". And what about the self-respecting, law-biding, h?gstaaende exponents of the cultus of Kali? I'd think it's pretty offensive to them to overhear "thug" and have to hear some adjacent Negro hearing "nigger" instead. Or we could just say man up and act like a white man. Or, "What you doing? Acting white?" And why in tarnation does everybody in the US has to call all the people of European ancestry "white", regardless whether they be pink drab or brownish or what have you, with half the "non-white" folk out there being more or less the same range of colours? And then there's the way that criollos from la Hispanidad that come to the US are somehow not white, despite being more Europeanblooded than most of the English there. Don't listen to me. I don't know what I'm talking about.

[MarkLastname]

"blackguards"
Um, I think that'd be interpreted as even worse. Especially by people who don't know what the word 'niggardly' means.

[Zeb]

I don't want to be racist.

Using a word can't be, in and of itself, be racist. This is something I have noticed happens a lot in all the talk about "hate speech". People act as if simply using certain words is a racist act. Which is absurd.

I agree with his point that if a word upsets a lot of people you might as well use a different word. But it's not because using the word means you are being racist. It's just common tactfulness.

[Cyto]

I think the analysis you are looking for is the notion that people are not crying "hate speech" because of the content of the speech, but rather as a rhetorical technique to move the conversation to their advantage. By crying "racism" or "sexism" over word choices, people are able to move from a conversation about ideas to an ad-hominem attack. To the extent that those who already agree with them give credence to such attacks, they are able to win the day with such spurious techniques.

[SamJoHan88]

Sounds like a cranky ole braod to me dude.

http://www.AnonGO.tk

[Francisco d'Anconia]

Anonbot, where ya been man? You were missed.

[Monty Crisco]

I missed him too...

[Fist of Etiquette]

Forget this post; I'm curious to know what Kurt Loder has to say about Tron: Legacy.

[Corning]

So what happened to the 2010 comments?

I wrote my magnum opus back then under this article and now it is lost like tears in the rain.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

The scrubs get playing time on the weekends, when nobody cares about the outcome. As it should be.

[Porque Pig]

Hey I was playing volleyball on your beach last week. You should have joined us and tried to back up that talk.

[Sevo]

Playa,
Here a pile of shit was active on a beach near you: I'll bet the stench was obvious for blocks around!

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

Dude, if you were, I totally would have walked down. You understand that most people from my town are really really good at beach Vball, right?

[Porque Pig]

Yeah, but I'm really tall and really good at pretending I didn't touch the net.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

To clarify, you were in CA? Most people think I'm in New York for some reason.

[Vampire]

"What's the Biggest Threat to Free Speech?"

My

3========D

In your throat. Cause you really can't have free speech while you're choking.