“Seriously, I’m beginning to question the value of completely free speech. I’ve spent my entire life so far in support of it, and the free marketplace, but I’m finding more and more, that both are a fiction and always have been!
The “free” marketplace isn’t free, it’s a highly unstable situation that’s carefully protected by a government that’s surprisingly willing to impose on the “freedome” of the marketplace. Until the 1980s, government stepped in many times, repeatedly, over the years, to limit the power of the monopolies in the United States. But after about 1981 or so, we simply stopped caring. And the result has decimated our marketplace! In becoming more “free”, we’ve simply become more monopolistic, where Wal-Mart now delivers some 30% to 50% of the consumed goods in the USA.
This was unheard of before then, but only because the gubbmint stepped in repeatedly to limit the power of (among others) A&P, the mid-20th century equivalent of Wal-Mart. As a percentage of population, Wal-Mart is now at least 5x as big as A&P ever was at its height. Yet Wal-Mart is just one of many vertical monopolies now rearing, to the deafening roar of untrained people who rally and cry for speech and marketplaces free from the controls of the government that was otherwise busy serving their own interests. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs.
In a similar vein, I’m finding that “free speech” never existed. For over a century, there were strict controls on news organizations and reporting agencies - strict policies on libel and a general expectation of truth. This was easily enforced, because there were so few news agencies with the ability to reach a significant percentage of the population. And the result was filtered news and information of generally high-quality.
But the Internet has changed all that. Even if strict news reporting standards were still in effect, the news organizations would have to compete with the deafening roar of blogs and other “almost news” sites (Slashdot being one of them!) and so the standards would lose all their teeth anyway.
What journalistic standards is my completely private post written from my armchair going to be held to?
But the end result is that any whining idiot with an opinion that sounds nice gets lots of play, and real information gets lost in the din of noise and misinformation. Without any expectation of accountability, idiots like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are free to spread their bile and intellectual filth to unwashed masses who haven’t developed the means to filter them out, partly due to the falling standards and expectations from our public school system, which has gotten so bad that no schooling at all [unschooling.com] is often an improvement.
Free speech is just noise without a bullshit filter. Look in your spam box for 99.97% “free speech”. If society is to save itself, it will need to learn the difference between speech and honest-to-god information.
Right now, it’s not looking so good.”
-mcrbids
