U.S. Politics: There's Identity Politics, On Many Sides

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

20 minutes ago, Lew Theobald said:

Who cares?  The point is, they speak (or actually, their people speak).  You don't have to trust them.  You don't have to listen to them if you don't want to.  But it should be your own decision whether to trust them, not the government's decision whether you should get to hear it.

It matters because corporations are not "people" as you and I are.  If people want to pool their funds to engage in political speech there is nothing that says they should have the protections of the corporate form when they engage in such speech.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

23 minutes ago, Sword of Doom said:

Show Milo has history of being a piece of shit that outs marginalized people and planned on doing it again, people still ask for proof and stick up for him. Christ on a cross some of you are obtuse. 

Show that Milo has a propensity for turning these protests against his appearances into PR victories that result in the inflation of his platform, and people still continue to believe that protesting these appearances is somehow a viable strategy. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Lew,

Because that issue was not before them.  Regardless of the 1st amendment corporations exist only at the sufferance of the State.  The State has the power to ban the existence of all corporations as such they also have the power to limit what those corporations they allow to exist may and may not do via their agents.

[OldGimletEye]

The pre Citizens United rules (Austin I believe) were pretty damn mild though. The rules didn’t ban people in corporations from making political statements. And in fact it didn’t even ban corporations from raising special funds to engage in political speech.

What it did do, was to put some restrictions on the use of general funds for political purposes by corporations.

But the Supreme Court swept these restrictions away completely in Citizens. And it did this by saying all corporations are “persons” as in they are real people. With respect to at least for profit corporations, this is a complete ass pull.  There is no good reason to presume that a few high ranking officers of a for profit corporation speak for everyone (as in all the share holders, employees, etc.). That’s just nonsense. 

And up to and after Austin, the court had seemingly recognized that for quite a while that the government had a compelling interest in regulating corporate spending to some extent. I believe this was pointed out by Stevens in his dissent.

[GAROVORKIN]

5 hours ago, Sword of Doom said:

Show Milo has history of being a piece of shit that outs marginalized people and planned on doing it again, people still ask for proof and stick up for him. Christ on a cross some of you are obtuse. 

Your missing the point . If you let him speak , people will see him for what he is and most will tune him out. If enough people tune him out, he'll fade away.

[maarsen]

Does not common on sense limit the right of free speech to those entities that can actually speak or write? A corporation  does not have the power of speech. Only its agents do. Corporations don't have the power of thought either. Only its agents do.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, Lew Theobald said:

Of course, it is actually the "agents" who are speaking.  So what?  The agents are people, and they are speaking.

It seems the bright idea is "Let's pretend that the people speaking are not people, then their rights will not be violated, if we suppress their speech."

Not for themselves.  Why does only the right to free speech flow through to corporations?  If the individual shareholders rights flow through why don't individual responsibilities flow through like taxes and Jury duty?  This random holding that says shareholders right of free speech flow through to the corporations they own... is random.

[Zorral]

Since the antifa movement keeps coming up on this forum, argued as the most evil disgusting, and its opposite, it might good for us to learn what it really is.  A book has recently been published that does this:

https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/antifa/

WaPo (and many others including in the UK) reviewed it or have written about it.

One thing it does is make clear why every so-called centerist as well as the alt right screams in horror and puts up the cross against antifa -- it does dare to employ terms like socialist, communist and anarchist -- all words that strike terror into the what passes for hearts in any mad materialist. Coming out of the Occupy Movement, It really is utterly anti-USian, in the sense that the Founding Fathers like Hamilton and Jefferson were more concerned with property remaining in the hands of the propertied and social order maintained to ensure that than anything else.  The WaPo reviews the same arguments we have been having back and forth here about free speech vs shutting up the fascists.   In the end it comes down on the side of property and speech, because if there's violence asks the reviewer there's nothing worth fighting for.  Which was a glib ending and conclusion and leaves as many questions for the thoughtful reader as that reader begins with, and which the reviewer just glides over.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/09/01/the-history-theory-and-contradictions-of-antifa/?utm_term=.8d796a3084a4

This one is pretty entertaining as it's about an alt right jerkoff making a fool of himself again with his lack of knowledge and facts:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/far-right-antifa-george-orwell-paul-joseph-watson-historian-alt-right-left-wing-novelist-mike-a7924491.html

[maarsen]

39 minutes ago, Lew Theobald said:

Of course, it is actually the "agents" who are speaking.  So what?  The agents are people, and they are speaking.

It seems the bright idea is "Let's pretend that the people speaking are not people, then their rights will not be violated, if we suppress their speech."

When someone tells me they are speaking for a mute, unintelligent entity, telling me this is what it is saying, I have the suspicion I am being told  a load of horseshit. I suspect the agent speaks for him/herself. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, maarsen said:

When someone tells me they are speaking for a mute, unintelligent entity, telling me this is what it is saying, I have the suspicion I am being told  a load of horseshit. I suspect the agent speaks for him/herself. 

Well said.

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

One thing it does is make clear why every so-called centerist as well as the alt right screams in horror and puts up the cross against antifa -- it does dare to employ terms like socialist, communist and anarchist -- all words that strike terror into the what passes for hearts in any mad materialist.

Not quite. Any one of those words is potentially scary to those who benefit from the current system, but all three of them together are indicative of an incoherent ideological mess that is unlikely to be a threat to the existing order. Of course, the antifa are scary in the same way as any other set of masked thugs is scary, but they lack material support from any broad class of people and they have no means of mobilizing such support.

Thus, in and of themselves, the antifa would be minor pests that occasionally violate the rights of some American citizens, but are easily dealt with by the police. However, they do not exist in a vacuum: if you've studied history, you should recognize how such thugs can be used by a more ideologically coherent foe. Fortunately, there is no such entity in the present context, but it is entirely possible that the violence of the antifa is currently helping to forge and temper one.

[Mexal]

Trump ending DACA with a 6 month delay.  This benefits no one.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/03/trump-dreamers-immigration-daca-immigrants-242301

[Yukle]

1 hour ago, Lew Theobald said:

Well then, it follows that you suspect his utterances are protected by the First Amendment, which protects precisely such rights.

Something awkward about the First Amendment is that it does have limitations.

I keep thinking about the Russian dossier made up about Trump by his enemies in the Republican Party (which was later co-opted by the Democrats once he was their candidate). I am wondering why the people who compiled the dossier on Trump haven't come forward. There's the obvious reason that they've professions as private detectives which would be completely ruined if their faces were recognisable, but still, the First Amendment has been tested to prove that if what you publish is truthful then it is protected.

There's also the issue, though, that it does not protect you if the information was not collected from means available to the general public or anything illegal. So I can, if I so choose, publish information that I heard in a court testimony (or I could if I was American). But I couldn't publish the conversation I overheard because I sat outside the window and secretly recorded while trespassing on somebody's property.

So whoever wrote the dossier isn't testing their findings in court because they either collected it illicitly (which seems likely) or it really is a fabrication.

Then there's the also likely situation that no tapes or photos will be released until Vladmir Putin wants them to be.

In all of the leaks against Trump, the leakers seem keen to protect themselves against reprisals. It's not surprising they can't always come forward, though, as much of it is classified. Trump's casual and stupid revelation of classified information to Russians is one such example. They're protected by publishing in a newspaper, since it was true and Trump himself verified it happened, but they cannot escape the fact that disclosing anything about the conversation was illegal.

All this is moot, anyway, since Trump has done such a good job of discrediting news organisations as "Fake News" that the general public seems to have forgotten that his main beef with CNN is that they were the first news agency to start live-fact-checking his statements, and kept interviewing people about how unfit for office he is. Which is, to a non-American, true.

[James Arryn]

The whole 'corporations are people' thing really ought to be reserved for satire. I was halfway convinced that's what it was when it first entered the conversation. I have yet to hear anything approaching a reasonable argument in support of excepting those which would qualify for almost any other humanity-sourced endeavour. Silliness.

[James Arryn]

-duplicate-

[Rippounet]

15 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

The whole 'corporations are people' thing really ought to be reserved for satire.

Don't say that, you might hurt their feelings!

[James Arryn]

12 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Don't say that, you might hurt their feelings!

Here's hoping.

[Altherion]

25 minutes ago, Yukle said:

All this is moot, anyway, since Trump has done such a good job of discrediting news organisations as "Fake News" that the general public seems to have forgotten that his main beef with CNN is that they were the first news agency to start live-fact-checking his statements, and kept interviewing people about how unfit for office he is. Which is, to a non-American, true.

Trump ran a better campaign than most people gave him credit for, but there's no way he managed to discredit the mainstream media -- he did as much as he could, but for the most part, they did it to themselves. You can verify this by looking at the extent to which Americans trust the media. It started declining long, long before Trump.

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Lew Theobald said:

But no such purely-speculative issues were implicated in Citizen's United.  What was at stake was an attempt to prevent the wrong people from saying the wrong things during the last 30 days of an election (when the public starts to pay attention).

The issue with Citizen's United is not, ultimately, whether corporations have the same rights as people or even necessarily that money equals speech.  It is allowing unlimited corporate expenditures in "issue advocacy" or "electioneering communication" on the premises that (1) such "films" as Hillary: The Movie are political speech rather than fundamentally similar to campaign advertising and (2) this constitutes an independent expenditure rather than a campaign expenditure.

Both of these premises are absolute bullshit to any honest observer.  The FEC already places limits on hard money contributions and expenditures of both corporations and individuals - something the Court does not have a problem with.  What BCRA attempted to do was limit the vast loophole that soft money provided by defining electioneering communication as functionally similar to a direct contribution and attempt to influence the election as a hard money contribution, and thus subject to similar regulations.  Anyone familiar with the Hillary movie, or the conduct of Super PACs that have arisen since the decision, knows any argument that these do not influence campaigns in the exact same way as hard money is unequivocally groundless.

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

 If the individual shareholders rights flow through why don't individual responsibilities flow through like taxes and Jury duty?  This random holding that says shareholders right of free speech flow through to the corporations they own... is random.

The objection to corporations' expenditures being defined as speech is worse than this - it's that corporations can use their treasury funds to engage in "political" speech without the consent, and indeed at times anathema to the views, of its shareholders.

[James Arryn]

10 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Trump ran a better campaign than most people gave him credit for, but there's no way he managed to discredit the mainstream media -- he did as much as he could, but for the most part, they did it to themselves. You can verify this by looking at the extent to which Americans trust the media. It started declining long, long before Trump.

People used to distrust other skin colours. Something occurring is not an indication of merit.