Well, it is a new year in pretty much all of the world now, with even the Westernmost Americans bringing everything other than their political science into the year 2013.
It recently came to my attention, through one of my Fudgebook friends, that there is another petition in the works trying to motivate Fudgebook to properly enforce its own stated policy against hate speech. Of course, Fudgebook’s stated policies in just about anything other than selling people out in the name of making another dollar are only gossip and things between them and the userbase should not be so solid, but that is a matter for elsewhere. The named target of the petition in question is one John Best, a dickhead who has been associated with hate speech against the autistic for just as long as, if not longer than, I have known myself to be autistic.
Inevitably, when one tries to induce a given commercial entity that is providing a forum to tell a customer to knock it off with hate speech, one always gets a particular response from somewhere. Namely, the old saw about what happened to what they refer to as freedom of speech. Or funnier still, the proclamation that the disturbing, often libellous, and generally offensive speech in question is protected by the First Amendment of the American constitution.
To understand why this proclamation often induces laughter from those who properly understand the law, it is important to understand a little about the aims of a good society. In a good society, everyone from the lowliest street rat to the richest tycoon must enjoy certain protections and freedoms from external forces. But not only does this mean there is a certain complex interplay between one’s own freedoms and the freedoms of others, it also means that certain of a singular individual’s freedoms might conflict with one another. For instance, the right to reproduce freely is now coming into such conflict with with future generations’ right to as much freedom as can be provided from starvation and disease that either we will repeal one or nature will repeal the others for us.
Bear in mind that I am only going with the executive summaries that I have heard of what John Best has said. My first encounters with John Best were on my YouChoob channel during the years just after diagnosis. Reading what John Best says is like availing oneself of a storm of untruths, half-truths, goalpost-shifting, and flat-out refusals to even play by one’s own rules if another person can back him into a corner using said rules. So when I read the executive summary saying that Best had issued “calls to arms” (the petition’s words) for activist Ari Ne’eman (who spoke in the defense of all autistic individuals at that dog shit Congressional hearing) to be killed, I was not even remotely skeptical. Nor am I skeptical about the claim that Best has made statements to the effect that people on the spectrum should be “cured” in order to prevent further shootings. Of course, trying to explain to Best that people claiming the shooter was autistic are doing so retroactively, without meeting a fraction of the burden of proof, or even at the behest solely of people like him, always falls on deaf ears. Facts do not inform a single word that Best ever says, only a hateful agenda that he will twist and mangle anything in order to fit. You could show John Best a picture of a blue wall and he would tell you it was of a pile of shit if that suited him.
So when I tell you that if someone told me they had read a page on which John Best proclaimed that all women who have given birth to autistic children should be raped to death, I would take their word for it. He is just that kind of guy. Which brings me to the point I was making when I started dissecting proclamations about free speech laws.
Let us say for a moment that you are in a crowded public venue. A park, a shopping mall, a theatre, it does not really matter what the purpose of the venue is. For the purpose of this example, just assume two things. It is a public place, and it is crowded enough that people frequently run the risk of running into or tramping one another. Now, just picture for a second that you yell out that there is a fire in an unseen part of this venue. You yell it loud, hard, and in just the right way to convince people that you are not bullshitting. What do people generally do in a situation like that? They panic. So when the police come to your door and ask you to come to the station to answer a few questions concerning the people who got trampled or compressed to death in the rush that you have caused, your lawyer is likely to tell you one thing right off the bat.
No matter what you do, the lawyer will say to you, do not try to tell those friendly policemen that your yelling of “fire!” in this crowded venue was free speech and protected by laws pertaining to that. At best, they will not care. At worst, they will be so outraged by what you have just said that they might just take you out the back and shoot you on principle (admittedly, this is more likely in places like South Africa or Brazil, but work with me here).
Even when things are “free”, as most things are in a truly democratic society, they still need to be regulated in order to ensure the greatest degree of freedom amongst the greatest share of people. Even the simple fact that John Best is allowed to speak without restriction or legal repercussion demonstrates that the freedom of autistic individuals to go about their daily business without fear or even mistreatment on the basis of being autistic has been quite severely compromised. Imagine for a second that John Best had made public statements to the effect that black youths should be cured of being black in order to prevent the gangland shootings that occur in parts of America on a regular basis and involve poor youths of multiple racial origins. Even if he were not prosecuted for hate crimes for this, his ability to go outside without fear of reprisal would be virtually non-existent in this world where anyone can find out enough about anyone when they know where and how to look.
Normies are presently in a very unique situation, and have been for some time. If not since the very dawn of the Human species. Namely, they can publicly make up any crap they like about any person or group of persons that they happen to sufficiently dislike, and repeat it without even the slightest fear of challenge.
The biggest problem that the concept of freedom of speech faces today is that we seem to have an entire generation who confuse this concept with the absence of consequence. It is difficult to imagine what the so-called Founding Fathers thought when they enshrined the concept of freedom of speech into political folklore. In the early 1990s, when a pack of idiots attempted to essentially destroy the right of the musician to express themselves as they saw fit by suing Ozzy Osbourne for what a bunch of fundies thought he had put into one song, the concept was vindicated when the courts refused to become a bully on the basis of what ignoramuses might think a musician is saying on a recording. But in the age of the Internet, the concept of freedom of speech has gone too far in the wrong direction.
People like John Best, when censured for their hate speech, will cry and moan that their freedom of speech is somehow being infringed upon. The autistic civil rights movement, on the other hand, has a fear that the litany of ludicrous and demonstrably false things that John Best has apparently elected to make his life’s work will have real consequences for autistic individuals of all walks, shapes, and sizes. Who is right here can be easily seen in the fact that a murderous parent can essentially plead Not Guilty Because The Child Was Autistic and not spend a day in prison.
This, of course, cuts right to the heart of why we have a concept of limits to the freedom of speech. It is all well and good to proclaim yourself to have freedom of speech and that you can say whatever you please. But only in a world where your speech has absolutely no consequences to others can this proclamation ever really work. That is why the concept of freedom of speech has legal limits placed upon it. The dissemination of government secrets, for example, can place the lives of persons engaged in the defense of your government in great danger. Hence, this act is forbidden to such a degree that engaging in it can result in your being disappeared for a very long time, if not permanently. Lying about facts that have the potential to get others killed, although one of the most badly under-prosecuted crimes in the modern age, has already cost many people their lives on the basis of only being different to the social majority. I do not need to tell any intelligent person that this act should be prosecuted to the fullest possible extent.
John Best cannot possibly be unaware that the monstrous lies he continually comes out with have real and demonstrable consequences. Indeed, it is a wonder with all of the ridiculousness that comes out of his mouth, he is even able to go out of his front door without fear of violence. Indeed, it is a testament to how badly passives and pleaders are damaging our cause that Best is able to call for a positive advocate like Ari Ne’eman to be murdered by persons who share his blindness to our humanity and not even expect to be slapped on the wrist. In the days when white supremacists were calling for Doctor Martin Luther King junior to be murdered, they were not only much quieter about it (usually only issuing the call amongst themselves or people they expect to get a sympathetic hearing from), they knew damned well to expect retribution from parts of the black community. Passives seem to think that second-class citizenry ends with sufficient pleading and whining. They ought to try to tell that to such groups as the Black Panthers.
Consequences come for us all in the end. Even the process by which we wither and die is a consequence of the same process that allows us to live in the first place. But the Human animal is also unique in its ability to manipulate and divert the consequences of his actions. Instead of simply allowing enraged families to murder the murderer, for example, civilised man appoints a neutral third party to determine what the consequences of wronging another person should be. Of course, this process depends a great deal upon the education of both the arbiters and the people the process serves. A justice system run by sexist bloodthirsty savages will only seem fair to sexist bloodthirsty savages.
Unfortunately, the Human tendency towards laziness and fixing problems only when the problems have become intolerable means that passively begging and pleading for understanding or acceptance is not an option. People like John Best have to be, to quote the Anthrax song, kicked back in place along with their fathers. Events like the Congressional hearings of 2012 and the Everyone On The Spectrum Is A Mass Murderer In Waiting hysteria of the mass media weeks ago will happen, and happen again ad nauseum, until someone on the spectrum rams home the message that this is not acceptable, and does so in a way that will not be forgotten anytime soon. That story I published in which a young couple’s future grown-up son comes to warn them that their child will start murdering people unless laws with titles like the Combating Autism Act are struck down as the modern version of racism? That is going to happen, passives, and when it does, it is not going to be in spite of your simpering and whining for the normies to pleeease accept us for what we are.
It is going to be because of it.
I Still Find It So Hard... 