A Requiem For A Dream

Fuck Liberals (and Conservatives get it too)

The thing I love about free speech is that it is so fucking easy to use it as a quick cop-out for anything.

Before feminism, before civil rights, before affirmative action, liberal speech was being repressed left and right by the conservatives in power. No, you couldn't post that Black Panther poster on the wall, no graffiti advocatin gender equality, and desegregation, forget about it. Liberals cried foul to high heaven, and I agree with them. After all, we do have the First Amendment, and that says in no unclear terms that freedom of speech is freedom of speech.

Fast-forward to today, with previously "liberal" and "radical" ideology like gender and racial equality, affirmative action accepted ideas, it is now the liberals in power who are now repressing what they deem as "inappropriate" and "unacceptable" speech and ideas. Suddenly all the universities, which used to be the center of student activism and radicalism, pass speech codes banning racial slurs, offensive language, hate speech, etc. And nowadays you can't so anything not PC and get away with it. Instead, you are called a racist, a sexist, or *gasp*, dare I say it, a conservative?!?!?

I love how the tables have turned, how the hypocrisy rises to the clouds. The First Amendment is there for a fucking reason: it is to allow free speech. Just because some people say shit that is really offensive to the liberal ideology is not grounds to ban them. Just like saying something offensive to the dominant conservative ideology back in the days wasn't enough grounds for banning those ideas. I just can't see how anyone can reconcile it. How could someone who has experienced firsthand the effect of repressing radical speech then turn around and repress speech that do not conform with their idea of what is right?

Don't get me wrong, I support gender and racial equality, I support the civil right movement, I support affirmative action. What I don't support and can't stand is how, once those ideas have become entrenched in our public discourse, that it is then no longer acceptable to let people who disagree speak their mind. I may not agree with what they say, but they should have the right to say it. Freedom of speech doesn't work that way. If it is okay for you to march on Washington D.C. for the civil rights movement, then it should be okay for a bunch of Klansmen to organize their own rally. You can't have it only your way, that is not how the fucking constitution works.

It's like what Voltaire said man: I may not agree with a single thing that you say, but I will defend your right to say it to the death. It seems to me that people have forgotten, or deliberaly looked the other way, when they think that other people's opinions are worthless or offensive. Nothing's changed really, except who is power and what the norms have become. If the norm was conservative, then it's okay to repress liberal speech; if the norm is liberal, then it's okay to repress conservative speech. What a bunch of bullshit we are all wading in. I may hate, just absolutely fucking hate from the deepest bowels of my body, what you have to say. But unless you actually do something that is against the law, I have no fucking right to stop you from saying it.

So fuck the liberals and fuck the conservatives; all that interests them is power, not ideas. All the liberals that cried "help help, my freedom of speech is repressed" are now repressing other people's freedom of speech. And the conservatives, whose ideas right now are being repressed, also cries out "help help". But you know what will happen, don't you? Once the power changes hands, it goes back to where it started. So fuck all the self-righteous people who say they are all for rights and equality and then turn around to repress the right of others. And fuck the repressed because they deliberately construct an aura of victimization and then once they get power, they turn around and repress the former repressors. It's just an ugly cycle of power changing hands, nothing more. There is no principle behind this, no noble truth, no ideology, just pure, simple power. Who has it, who doesn't; everything depends on it.

I guess I'm just sick and tired of the bullshit coming from the extreme wings of both the left and right. Please, for fuck's sake, stop the bullshit and actually use reason.

Posted by humanflyz at October 11, 2005 12:25 AM | TrackBack