What Are We Allowed To Say?
01/16/2011
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At Your Lying Eyes, Ziel elegantly states the central paradox of contemporary political discourse:

What Can the Right Say?...

And so this is the quandary the right finds itself in - it cannot communicate its message to voters since the message itself is verboten. And so it must rely on proxy arguments that don't necessarily make a lot of sense. For example, proclaiming loudly and forcefully to be against illegal immigration, but all for legal immigration. But when the left counters with "Then why not just declare them legal - problem solved" - the conservative is left sputtering about rule-of-law. His real argument - that the Hispanic population is simply [growing] too large and we can't afford as a nation to allow it to continue to grow rapidly - must be muted, as making this argument will lead to his banishment from public discourse. Why? Because any venue that hosts this argument will be immediately subject not just to a withering public flogging, but to boycott by sponsors and anyone associated with the host. ...

Similarly, in his attempt to be civil in his latest column "A Tale of Two Moralities," Paul Krugman states that "the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences - something that won't happen any time soon - but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds." He then goes on to frame the yawning gulf between right-and-left as an unbridgeable dispute over tax policy! Taxation is about the only topic on which the right gets to argue with some passion - perhaps because everyone hates paying taxes. Republicans are routinely lambasted as the "party of greed" as a result, but again who isn't greedy? Unfortunately, that results in the Republican party being essentially focused with near single-mindedness on cutting taxes, since that's about the only issue they can really promote with gusto.

The general idea behind freedom of speech is that more speech is, on the whole, better than less speech. That's not a very popular notion these days.

Read the whole thing here

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