Western Rifle Shooters Association

Do not give in to Evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Sultan Knish: Freedom Of Speech On The Run


Gun rights and free speech are brother and sister in the hierarchy of fundamental human rights.

Give the Bad People credit: they understand that fact, and are doing their damnedest - both here and elsewhere in the West - to restrict, constrict, and punish anyone who dares to question the collective received wisdom of the elites.

Sultan Knish provides a detailed discussion that's worth your time, which opens:

Freedom of speech is governed by legal restrictions and public mores. And what most of us have discovered is that a multicultural society means more 'mores' and more people to offend. That has taken us from one general set of social speech codes that governed such things as obscenity and public abuse, to a thousand fiefdoms of speech in which every group strives to impose its own speech codes in public forums. The Constitution still protects some forms of political speech for now, but it is a weak and fitful defense in a society where it is not the content of speech that matters, but who is offended by it.

In Postmodern America, censorship has become one form of political clout. The ability to suppress a word, is bona fide power. Municipalities, corporations and public figures are constantly pressured to neuter their vocabulary. The groups that do the pressuring count coup for each successful act of linguistic castration. This battlefield of the dictionary leads to a colonization of grammar. The group that can force a word substitution claims credit for controlling how people think. And there is a certain amount of truth to that, but not a great deal of it. Neutering language only spreads euphemisms. The more we try to stamp out a meaning, the more it slithers into new words, subverting the meanings of even words specifically constructed to be inoffensive.

The Bill of Rights tried to protect freedom of speech from the government, and accordingly today it is the government that directly threatens freedom of speech the least. Indirectly is another matter. The government cannot clap you in irons for saying the wrong thing, unless you're standing in an airport, but it can mandate that companies fire you for saying the wrong thing, or be held accountable for failing to do so. Such indirectly direct censorship is repressive, but not actionable. When government controls the business environment, it also controls the speech of the workers.

In such an environment, the less you say, the safer you are. When you need to speak, it's best to use meaningless words. Corporate language has already achieved a high water mark of emptiness with pages and pages that mean nothing. And that language is spreading to the general public, as students learn from a young age to use the appropriate words to express the hollow phrases that are mandatory in a politically correct society. The formal pieties of political correctness lead to hollow sloganeering, an elite that knows the right answer for every question, but doesn't understand the question itself...
***


Read the rest.

Salman Rushdie understands:

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

-- Salman Rushdie, quoted in Mark Steyn's Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West

8 Comments:

Anonymous Jimmy the Saint said...

Rights have always been illusory. The only people who can credibly claim to have them are the ultra rich (those who rule) and the dirt poor (those who are ignored). The simple fact of the matter is that if those of us in the middle do something that the elites don't much like, we'll be punished accordingly.

April 27, 2011 at 5:43 AM  
Blogger Sean said...

If it's punishment they want, they had better make damn sure I am dead.

April 27, 2011 at 3:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jimmy, not quite true. The only rights you have are the rights you take/keep. They may be Creator-given, but you only "keep" what you take.

April 27, 2011 at 4:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The point about censorship leading to new words and definitions is oh-so-true.

I once had a long and frank discussion with a realtor about the censorship imposed on their field.

It seems they're prohibited from even answering direct questions as to the - ahem - "demographics" of a given neighborhood. Put bluntly, if someone wishes to live in a place with a certain ethic "demographic", it will do them no good to ask their realtor directly!

UNLESS they learn to parse the "newspeak"... For example: seeing the phrase "Very quiet neigborhood" in a given listing is pretty much guaranteed to answer the questions the realtor cannot...

how apropos that the word below is "tablate"!

April 27, 2011 at 8:50 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Liberty and Freedom are so very precious that you do not fight and win them once and stop. They are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them".

Sgt. Alvin Cullum York

Nuff said

April 27, 2011 at 8:54 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Liberty and freedom are so very precious that you do not fight and win them once and stop. They are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them".

Sgt. Alvin Cullum York
Wikipedia

April 27, 2011 at 9:05 PM  
Blogger Pat H. said...

I agree with the gist of the essay.

Unfortunately, Sultan Knish is a Zionist who favors silencing those who state the truth about the Zionist state.

It's the height of hypocracy to expound on freedom of speech and then support unequivocably the position of the Anti-Defamation League, i.e. Abe Foxman.

Knish/Greenfield needs to decide whether or not he's an Ameerican or an Israeli; if the latter, he knows full well where he needs to go.

April 28, 2011 at 12:25 AM  
Anonymous aughtsix said...

Pat H. said...

I agree with the gist of the essay.

No, you don't.

Unfortunately, Sultan Knish is a Zionist who favors silencing those who state the truth about the Zionist state.

Because you say so?

It's the height of hypocracy (sic) to expound on freedom of speech and then support unequivocably(sic) the position of the Anti-Defamation League, i.e. Abe Foxman.

Again, because you like to argue from your personal authority? That is, because you say so?

Knish/Greenfield needs to decide whether or not he's an Ameerican(sic) or an Israeli; if the latter, he knows full well where he needs to go.

April 28, 2011 12:25 AM

And Pat H. needs to decide whether or not he is an American or a NAZI....

If he's not an American.... Ooops! Nowhere to go! Maybe Argentina....

Real Americans crushed the fargin' NAZI's back in the last millennium.

Unfortunately, we have our very own brand of national socialists here and now.

And, no, Pat, I don't mean you. Your just a one trick pony.

I'm talkin' about....

Bambi and the Gang!

You know, the REAL threat.

Or do you think that O'
bumble's obvious hatred and betrayal of Israel, and his equally obvious affinity for Islam somehow comports with your Elders of Zion World Domination theory?

F.O.A.D Pat H.

Jon III

May 1, 2011 at 8:04 AM  

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