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Last Topic: 12:33:57pm, 08/16/2025
Last Post: 11:27:03pm, 09/17/2025
adjl posted...
Largely a technicality. Whatever legal definitions you want to invoke, it remains a matter of a government entity choosing to harm somebody based on the things they said, which clearly is not in the spirit of mandating that the government permit free speech.
I don't think you're a free speech absolutist any more than I am, but that's the argument you're making. In principle this is no different from firing teachers for calling their coworkers racial slurs. You wouldn't defend that, which means you're bending the principle of the argument to fit your politics rather than apply that principle evenly.
adjl posted...
Firing teachers for being Klan members would be a response to them advocating for violence against people based on who they intrinsically and unavoidably are. That's notably different from advocating for violence against people based on the voluntary decisions they made to hurt people.
Religion is generally considered part of that intrinsic identity and is constitutionally protected as such. With that in mind, if one teacher believes gay marriage is an affront to God and another is posting "death to homophobes", which one is the school district legally obligated to fire?
adjl posted...
To invoke Godwin's law, I doubt you'd ever see a teacher fired for saying that they're glad Hitler is dead, so clearly there's some middle ground there. So where is it?
I think we may see that at some point. If you have the entire media class constantly calling Trump and various other Republican figures Hitler, then something happens to those figures, are they really talking about the actual Hitler or "literally Hitler"? Is the left even capable of seeing a difference?
adjl posted...
The answer, of course, is that you're dancing around the question of what actually constitutes an act of violence, clinging to an easy example to avoid genuinely confronting it. Why do you think that is?
I recognize obvious bait? It's clear you're not looking for any sort of honest debate as to the difference between violence and incitement to violence. Neither is good, but there is an obvious difference between the two. Violence requires nothing else to cause physical harm; incitement to violence (even self-violence) requires someone else to act upon that incitement. If I say someone should hit you with a brick, and no one does as I ask, have you in fact been hit with a brick?
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