Episode 15: Decoding DC, Romney’s Taxes, and Some Speech is More Free Than Others

2 Comments

1. adam onymous says:

   October 30, 2012 at 7:08 pm

   I stumbled across your podcast searching for Decode DC and other info about it.
   I mostly enjoyed the episode, found some of it interesting — I think it’s laudable to criticize Ban Ki-Moon’s assertion that free speech shouldn’t be protected when it’s “humiliating.” I was glad I listened to that bit, as it was not a piece of news I was aware of.
    
   I found the arguments you used completely unsound, though.
    
   The most off-the-wall was when you asserted that because you are not aware of any time Ban Ki-Moon has criticized speech meant to humiliate or provoke Jews or Christians, he therefore has contempt for Jews and Christians.
   There are multiple logical problems with that, not the least of which is just because you are not aware of something existing, that does not mean it does not exist… Also, as you say yourself, Jews and Christians would (likely) never riot over the free speech of some Muslim national. Then there would never be an equivalent situation where we would expect Ban Ki-Moon to make a similar statement. So your argument isn’t just groundless, it’s unverifiable…
    
   (I was a little shocked when you said he would never criticize Muslim hate-speech; when you said, “I’m not just guessing at that either,” I was sure you would have an example, which I wanted to hear. But no, you were…)
    
   You were right about Harry Reid just provoking Mitt, of course.
    
   I was also disappointed in your argument against the idea that members of a demographic might best represent their own.
    
   I think you’re making a fair point that it’s an unacknowledged assumption in Andrea’s comment well open to criticism, but it would take a much better criticism for me to begin to refute it adequately. (I know you’ve limited yourself to ten minutes total.)
    
   But the idea that you cite Brown v. Board of Education to defend yr argument is painful — and the way you coo it was white people who handed that decision down. If black people had been able to assert their due democratic power sooner and elect their own representatives, they wouldn’t need the Supreme Court to side with them — only because they lived in a broken, antagonistic Southern white society that didn’t give them representation did they need to appeal to the good will of 9 powerful old white men.
    
   I think it’s self-evident that women understand women’s issues better than you or I, etc.
   You mention you wouldn’t vote for the first white software engineer that comes along — I would if I were you! Look at the mess the government has made of software patent law, the lack of net neutrality, the proposals in Congress to assert government power over DNS etc., how they deregulated telecoms because they thought there was enough competition in 2002/2003, without the foresight to see dialup and DSL would inevitably wither away… I think it’s undeniable we need more representatives who understand technology.
    
   I’ve typed for way longer than I meant to — I don’t mean to troll you or start a fight, but I did want to explain why I won’t be sticking around. I am a pretty progressive-leaning person, so we would never agree on everything, but I do love to find news and opinion sources I can disagree with and respect. For example, I think there’s a lot of common ground super-lefties and libertarians could find to shrink government and make it more efficient — I’ve read lots of things I liked on the CATO blog recently.
    
   I don’t know, maybe you have a lot of smart things to say but haven’t given yourself the time to express that. I hope you do; I wish you luck with your podcast in the future

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   • dpayton says:

     October 30, 2012 at 11:29 pm

     @adam onymous Thanks for taking the time to respond, and I appreciate the thoughtful criticism. 
      
     You are correct that not being aware of something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and hence my not knowing of a time when Ban Ki Moon decried Muslim hate speech doesn’t mean it never happened. You’re absolutely right to call me on that. I’ll correct that in an upcoming episode. I did a few searches to see if I could find an example, but the closest I got was his rejecting Holocaust denial by Iran. But even with that, he did not go so far as to suggest that such hateful speech should not be covered by freedom of expression protections. Still, I was wrong to say “I’m not guessing”, and I’ll issue a retraction in the podcast. In fact, I will probably use portions of this entire comment and make a full episode out of it.
      
     However, since you won’t apparently be listening, just a few notes on your other points.
      
     I wasn’t saying that members of a demographic would best represent their own; that’s true in a general sense. What I was putting forth was that members of a demographic can still represent those not like themselves. There’s a key difference there. It seemed to me that, by ticking off the demographic characteristics of the House, during a show about misrepresentation, Seabrook was suggesting that someone from demographic A could not properly represent demographic B. Likewise, I wasn’t saying that black Supreme Court justices could represent black properly; yes they can. I was saying that white justices could properly represent then as well. If our representatives must match our demographic, we’d never have black senators or a black President, since on the whole, whites in those roles would (according to this thought) better represent their group, which is mostly white. I reject this thought. Racial law didn’t change when we got the proper mix of skin color on the Supreme Court. It changed when we got the proper mix of ideas there. And, similarly, we could not have ever had blacks on the court until whites changed their thought patterns. So the way it happened is the only way it could have happened, and it was also the better way. Better to have the powerful relinquish their power rather than it be stripped from them. It made the transition easier than it otherwise would have been. (Not that it was completely smooth anyway, but this is a matter of degrees.)
      
     Thanks again for stopping by and letting me know what you thought.

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