[somenameforme]

The only thing that's particularly unique about Elon is that he voices his actual opinions on topics instead of what he thinks will be most well received. It's a throw back to times long since past, where you will find highly visible individuals often had views starkly different than those of the government. It's not that that's changed - if anything I expect there's far less support for government decisions than in the past.

But what has changed is that the government has grown absolutely massive. This growth has created a dependency relationship from many major companies, as falling out of favor with an oft retaliatory government could be ruinous to their margins. Vice versa, the government is not only excessively generous with companies that play ball, but also often turns a blind eye to their offenses. This has driven a culture of widespread self censorship and feigned never-ending approval.

If anything I think Elon voicing his genuine opinions on matters, right or wrong, is one of the most patriotic things he could be doing, because loyalty to a country does not mean loyalty to a government - and often it's the exact opposite. Even in military oaths, for instance, this reality is observed. Officers swear oaths of loyalty not to the government, the President, or even their chain of command, but to the US Constitution. [1] There's endless great quotes from the Founding Fathers on this topic. A few random ones:

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- "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison

- "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." - Thomas Jefferson

- "If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams

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I think the world, and especially our democracy, would work vastly better if everybody just spoke honestly. Right or wrong, smart or stupid. People freely and openly expressing themselves is the only way a democracy can really function. There is a reason that the 1st Amendment is at the top of the Bill of Rights. And right now we live in a time where this is probably more true than ever. Opposing never-ending wars, rapidly trending towards WW3, and the grossly out of touch and seemingly delusional politicians driving us there, does not demonstrate disloyalty. If anything, the path we're currently on could very well lead to ruin, yet so few are willing to observe that the Emperor has no clothes.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Uniformed_Servic...

[fch42]

I think it's fine for Elon to voice his opinion, even if direct or hurtful.

He should though have a mirror held in front of him in public occasionally. It works for you alright, but have you considered the consequences of everyone else acting the same way ? What actions do you think will derive from creating an agenda of "do as I do or f** you" ?

It's the categorical imperative of ethics. In the sense that a good (ethical) agenda doesn't derive from "eff all others".

Commentary on, and the questioning of other's opinions is as much a necessary part of free speech as is the right to voice your opinions.

I think we need more commentary, and more questions.

[pjc50]

> grossly out of touch and seemingly delusional politicians

This has completely taken over the GOP, and yet you can't see that reflected in Elon's tweets.

[mschuster91]

> People freely and openly expressing themselves is the only way a democracy can really function. There is a reason that the 1st Amendment is at the top of the Bill of Rights.

The problem is, if you don't make sure that there is at least a common baseline of decency, eventually the one willing to fight the dirtiest will win out. "Anything goes, no repercussions" will always lead to a destructive death spiral as politicians and candidates will appeal to lower and lower emotions to score votes, and the ones who feel it most are usually those in a lower position of society: LGBT, migrants, even pregnant women.

We've seen that in Germany in the events running up to 1933, we're seeing it across Europe now with the rise of the far-right willing to do literally anything including running on complete and utter lies (worst example: Brexit and the infamous NHS bus), we're seeing it in the US with the transformation of the GOP into MAGA and the unholy crusade of Evangelicals/White Christian Nationalists ("Project 2025") against everyone who is not like them. And on top of that you got the threat of "stochastic terrorism" - basically, speech that is legal in most jurisdictions, but powerful enough in its message to convince deranged people to act and kill [1].

The US and the UK are the only developed countries in the world which still run on their original constitutions and their principles from centuries ago: a time in which it was completely infeasible to even think about a technology that would allow literally all the village idiots from all over the world to communicate with - and radicalize! - each other, and it was generally assumed that institutions of a government could reasonably rely on other institutions of the government to follow the written and unwritten rules. Everyone else has updated their constitutions in the meantime, mostly due to acts of war, and used the chance to update their systems to learn from the past and its deficiencies.

> - "If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams

Well, we'll see how that one works out in November this year. The people behind "Project 2025" [2] have made it very, very clear on where they want to take the US - first, purge everyone they deem to be a threat to them from the bureaucracy, and then transition the US into a Christian theocratic dictatorship.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/stochastic-terrorism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

[fch42]

I disagree with you on the UK running according to a "constitution". It definitely has none.

It runs ancient law / legal precedence; As example, the current government has used "Henry VIIIth powers" (basically ... sovereign edicts) more than once in the last decade. But the UK body of law doesn't denote anything specifically as "constitutional".

That said, it has a strong (legal) history on somewhat-free speech, more recent libel laws notwithstanding, more recent "hate speech" laws notwithstanding.

Free speech alone though only helps public discourse if there is no attempt to "balance" differing views. Trying that has the opposite effect; instead of pointing out flaws and lies in any argument, the mediator simply "gives equal airtime" to conflicting views. That's the perfect way to polarize - choose whom you're with, and whom you're against. Political commentary is rather important, if it's missing, people miss out.

Don't _think_ about what they say. Don't look for common ground. Don't look for lunacies in any side. Just ... pick, ok ? We've shown you both, so ...

[mschuster91]

> I disagree with you on the UK running according to a "constitution". It definitely has none.

Germany doesn't have a "constitution" either, and so doesn't Israel, we run on "basic laws" instead which are functionally equivalent. And the UK instead runs on the entire body of its truly ancient laws, court decisions and international treaties. But no one would argue that either of the three nations is not a democracy or a constitutional state (i.e. a state where individuals and legal entities enjoy a reasonably common set of protections).

> Free speech alone though only helps public discourse if there is no attempt to "balance" differing views. Trying that has the opposite effect; instead of pointing out flaws and lies in any argument, the mediator simply "gives equal airtime" to conflicting views. That's the perfect way to polarize - choose whom you're with, and whom you're against.

There is another bad aspect in "balancing" itself, perfectly illustrated by "flat earth" believers. We don't go and give people who believe that the earth is flat equal airtime to those believing we're on a globe, in fact we don't give them any airtime (except when we need to fill some airtime by laughing about ridiculously dumb people) - but there are enough reckless / profit-addicted media that give airtime to COVID deniers, antivaxxers, "great replacement" and other conspiracy spreaders.

Democracy itself can only work on a common set of core beliefs and truths. Once lies are allowed to be part of democratic discourse, the defenders of democracy will have to spend way more of their share of airtime to refute the lies instead of presenting their point of view - a phenomenon/rhetoric tactic known as "firehose of falsehoods", basically flooding the argument with lies (which stick with your followers thanks to repetition as an additional bonus) and making it impossible for the opponent to present their ideas. And sadly, there are more than enough media, politicians and people accepting this tactic.

[_heimdall]

We can't have free speech if anyone has the authority and power to identify and silence what they consider lies.

Flat earthers are an easy example as a vast majority of people understand that the earth is in fact not flat. You seem to take that as an example of why we can't allow people to share such ideas, of given air time you worry that more would believe it. There's an easier answer though, people know the earth is a sphere despite the flat earth idea being out there. The idea gets little air time because so few people think its possible or true.

Silencing an idea gives a certain air of feasibility to it, one in charge does need to bother silencing something that is obviously false and easily disproven.

Moving your argument to anything more widely considered than flat earth and the line between lies and truths is much less clear, and therefore the line of where speech should be silenced is much trickier. Covid should have made this clear, health officials and governments have walked back on almost all of the ideas that they claimed to be dangerous lies during the pandemic response. Something unclear can easily be branded as a lie by one with power and a microphone, that doesn't mean it is a lie though and definitely doesn't mean that we all still have free speech rights if the people in charge can silence us.

[mschuster91]

> Silencing an idea gives a certain air of feasibility to it, one in charge does need to bother silencing something that is obviously false and easily disproven.

Allowing an idea or a viewpoint to be part of legitimate media discourse gives an even larger air of legitimacy - the so-called "Overton window" [1]. The far-right across virtually all Western countries has been very successful in expanding that window and shifting the idea of where the "center" lies very far to the right.

An example here from Germany is Beatrix von Storch, who called for allowing the police to shoot even at refugee children attempting to cross the borders back in 2016 [2], leading to major national outrage. Nowadays, articles of border police actually shooting on refugees don't even make the headlines any more, it's just a "this also happened" line.

> Covid should have made this clear, health officials and governments have walked back on almost all of the ideas that they claimed to be dangerous lies during the pandemic response.

There are only two major things that turned out to be actually wrong: that "ordinary" cloth masks protect against covid (which indeed was a lie, to prevent people from hoarding masks needed for healthcare and some sorts of employment) and that vaccines provide sterile immunity (they didn't in the end, but early data from when these statements were made suggested that this were the case and many people didn't realize that science can and does improve over time).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/fluechtlingskrise/beatri...

[3] https://www.profil.at/ausland/eu-migrationspolitik-die-bruta...

[_heimdall]

> Allowing an idea or a viewpoint to be part of legitimate media discourse gives an even larger air of legitimacy

When you say "allow", what do you mean exactly? I'm not sure why a legitimate media outlet would give air time to the idea of the earth being flat, for example. No one has to allow or disallow this, other than those working for the news outlet and deciding what they want to present.

> There are only two major things that turned out to be actually wrong: that "ordinary" cloth masks protect against covid (which indeed was a lie, to prevent people from hoarding masks needed for healthcare and some sorts of employment) and that vaccines provide sterile immunity (they didn't in the end, but early data from when these statements were made suggested that this were the case and many people didn't realize that science can and does improve over time).

There were plenty of other examples. Corona viruses mutate frequently, this was known well before Covid but the lie was repeated to explain why vaccines would work. Two weeks was never going to stop the spread, another lie that would have been clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of novel pathogenic spread. Herd immunity was not a realistic goal, Fauci admitted later that his targets for vaccine uptake were kept lower than realistic because he didn't think people would find the real numbers feasible. Ivermectin is not just a horse dewormer, though reasonable to think it wouldn't help with Covid it has human uses and saves countless people from river blindness. The lab leak hypothesis is, and was, a real possibility despite the campaign to brand it as dangerous and xenophobic.

I could go on but you get the point. There were much more than 2 lies pushed from the highest levels during Covid. Often they may have had good intentions, but that doesn't really matter in the context of free speech or lies in my opinion.

[somenameforme]

It's Norway, not the UK (which doesn't even have a formal constitution), with the 2nd oldest active constitution. [1] And they also have ingrained and well supported freedom of speech dating back to 1814. In fact many regular parts of Norwegian discourse would never be allowed in the US, and would be framed as some sort of ultra radical far whatever blah blah end of the world type stuff.

For instance Hjernevask [2] was an extremely popular series aired on the primary state owned broadcasting channel. It was a documentary that was highly critical of gender studies and a variety of other topics related to identity politics. The title translates to "brainwashing." And in 2011, after the documentary aired, Norway did choose to cease funding Nordic Gender Institute, leading to its closure - though they stated that the documentary was not directly why. Yet, lo and behold, Norway remains one the single most egalitarian and gender equal societies in the world.

Open dialogue is not a threat to anything except bad ideas and bad actors. And it's critical to help ensure everybody has a voice in society, even if what's coming out of their mouth is not what you might want to hear. That said I do agree with you the the US constitution could use some updates, but that would be largely to further these aims. So, for instance, I think proportional representation (as Norway swapped to in 1919) is just objectively better than this district based first past the post nonsense.

But the reason for that change is again precisely to make sure everybody has some representation. For instance, rolling with the Norway theme, here is a list of their political parties currently with representation in Parliament. [3] You've got your religious types, your socialists, your right wing populists, an agrarian party, liberal conservatives, and more. In the US we get to choose between pack of idiots #1, pack of idiots #2, and throwing away your vote.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Norway

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_N...

[pjc50]

> But the reason for that change is again precisely to make sure everybody has some representation. For instance, rolling with the Norway theme, here is a list of their political parties currently with representation in Parliament.

I put it to you that the different voting system of PR for the Storting is far more important in ensuring that outcome rather than speech.

As do a few other things; the state broadcaster rather than a set of increasingly weird private clickbait conspiracy broadcasters as in the US; the monarchy; and having Vikrund Quisling taken out and shot.