Some commenter whose identity I am protecting asked if I have been writing Jonah Goldberg's recent columns. I don't think so. While he is on my list of "yeah, I should get around to reading what he is saying," he's not on the top of that list, so I mostly don't know what he's writing. But this one I definitely agree with, and he mentions Chesterton's Fence, so I pass it along to you.
Radicalism is the purest expression of ingratitude, because it starts from the premise that nothing that currently exists is worth saving; everything is corrupted by the evils of the past.
He goes on to chastise those who say that the media or the intrusion on rights "has never been this bad." He is spot on. Can you buy Playboy in your town? Will you go to jail for a couple of joints in your pocket? Can Jews or (gasp!) women join the country club? Can you put your ideas out before the whole world for years for the price of a computer and an internet connection? Goldberg is concerned with the new media powers and what they might do, as am I. But lots of newspapers in the 70s refused to give Nixon the opportunity to reply to criticisms - and this was in an age when there were mostly lock-step newspapers, 3 networks, and a few popular magazines. Reagan did a lot to break the back of that by buying time to speak to the American people on network TV.
4 comments:
If I ever have a son, that’s a great name for him.
Can you put your ideas out before the whole world for years for the price of a computer and an internet connection?
so long as the company hosting them doesn't object.
In a statement shared with Politico, Twitter says it won't allow the National Archives to make tweets Donald Trump sent from his @realDonaldTrump account as president available for people to see and interact with on its platform. The company permanently suspended the former president following the January 6th US Capitol insurrection, a ban Trump has tried and failed to bypass. The decision comes as the National Archives works to create an online record of Trump's Twitter missives, something it has already done with the accounts of other officials from the previous administration. Those archives allow you to like and share those tweets.
That is unfair and unwise, and is part of my suspicion of new media. But Donald Trump can still get ideas out to the people more easily than Cal Coolidge or Harry Truman could after they were no longer president. It's an unfair political restriction because of the competitive nature of politics, but it doesn't result in an overall freedom restriction.
One big difference: Whatever may be the absolute values, the *rate of change* toward more free expression has been *positive* throughout most of America's existence. Some time in the last 10 years or so, that rate turned negative, and the second derivative (the rate of change in the rate of change) seems to be negative as well.
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