Rhetorical Transvestitism

The post below is what has been occupying my writing time for the past few days. I sought to spend extra time on it to help clarify my thoughts, though as usual I fear that the execution falls far short of the conceptual mark. Nevertheless, I hope that there is something of value here:

There are things that, once I hear them, reflexively trigger a sort of killing instinct within me. I imagine it’s not unlike that first twinge of green that enters Bruce Banner’s complexion to signal the imminent onset of the Hulk.

A good case in point was back in the heyday of the Obama-Clinton wrangling. When the delegate count was close but the prognosis was (from the media’s perspective) boringly inevitable, there was a lot of pundit chatter regarding whether Michigan or Florida’s delegates would be allowed to participate in the national convention.

On the “anti-participation” side of the debate, the argument was that Florida and Michigan knew the consequences of moving their primary dates out of sync with the DNC’s calendar – why should the Committee turn around and enable conscious offenders? The “pro-participation” side’s argument is that the DNC had no right to unilaterally invalidate the two states’ primaries, and that such actions served only to disenfranchise voters and undercut the diplomatic process.

Guess at which point Octavian got burned by the searing hot blood shooting from my eyeballs.

The idiocy of this is the kind of idiocy endemic in democracies. The pathology is the expectation that democracy is injected into anything that involves any of its attributes, such as voting. The fact that there exist elections mandated by Constitutional and legislative law means – in the minds of those polluted by degenerated democratic tendencies – that every election must be governed by the same rules. Just forget that primaries are fundamentally a selection process chosen by what are first and foremost private organizations; forget the fact that, as far as selection processes go, they are really rather new, and by no means proven to be the best or even a generally better way to select a winning candidate for the “real” elections – by which I mean the ones that Constitutionally must exist. Any time I hear people talk about primary votes as things that are an entitlement, I remind myself how the intellectual caliber of those raised in democratic societies is fundamentally inferior, as a general rule. I say as a general rule because one needs exceptions for people like me, who am astronomical distances away from inferior intellectual caliber.

I know, modesty is not one of my virtues.

This post isn’t about the general public’s painfully unsubtle and annoying failure to recognize the difference between the fundamental nature of primaries and general elections, however. No…that was merely an illustrative example to contextualize my reaction to an ongoing “issue” involving two of my more stormy obsessions: politics and the internet. And just as a warning, think about how worked up I got about the election thing and just try to figure out the multiplier for my reaction to what follows.

Net Neutrality is a slogan/buzzword that is by no means new. It happens to be something that – in it’s generally understood form at least – I am somewhat opposed to; but that is a topic for a completely different post, and if you remind me then maybe I’ll tell you about it one of these days. Introducing the concept of NN is necessary for my present purposes, however, because what I’m writing about at the moment involves what I see as a conscious evolution of its proponents’ tactics: viz., trying to alter the ground of battle into something more compelling… Something with Constitutional overtones.

What set me off was this article from Wired. To say that there was just one thing that bothered me would be to sell the news media, pundits, and the full members of the human race sadly, sadly short. The subtler of these myriad offenses, however, was the list of observations, analyses, and complaints about the status of free speech on the internet. What is subtle is that this article is not actually about free speech. Free speech for the writer was nothing more than a rhetorical baton to lobby subliminally for NN. The flow of the story essentially runs along this syllogistic riverbed: ISPs and content providers online are exercising a restrictive influence on what people can say and do on the internet (i.e., curtailing the ability of people to express themselves); these companies are legally within their rights to so curtail the activities of their users; free speech is a good thing and Constitutionally protected; therefore, somebody (read: government) should do something about these companies and their penchant for restricting the free speech of their customers.

Let me just start of by saying that there are rights that are truly and intrinsically fundamental to us as human beings, and there are things which are ancillary, or even chimeric. I count the right to life and its various corollaries (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) as being in the former camp, and others as being in the latter camp, e.g. suffrage, but also speech. Yes, you heard me right, I just called freedom of speech an ancillary (at best) or chimeric right. Why? Because throughout history it has been neither typical nor particularly missed. One might argue that this is a specious reason, since history is characterized by positive progressive development over time – which might be a good argument, if I believed anything associated with progressive historical perspective. Unfortunately for the argument, I am not that naïve.

Freedom of speech is extremely useful in any society incorporating democratic governance. By definition, the rulers of such a society are chosen by the citizen electorate, and it is not just logically but historically accurate to say that the general quality of the rulers depends largely on that of those who choose them. One of the main ways to assure the quality of a population is through education and the general fostering of the intellect; and it is undeniably helpful for public intellectual (and of necessity, political) discussion to assure the liberty to speak freely.

The problem is one that develops over time. It is another historically accurate observation that over time, societies degrade. Ideals and principles that were clear and rock solid in a founding generation have eroded a century later; two centuries later, one is lucky to retain any vestige of conceptual accuracy in the way people perceive the foundational ideas of their society. True citizenship – a proper understanding of oneself in society and one’s duties to that society – degrades into a casual alliance grounded in self-interest. So it is with everything – including freedom of speech.

As with much of the degradation that comes from decline, the emphasis placed on the freedom of speech has shifted from a right with responsibilities to an entitlement with no strings. If you own a bar and I enter your bar to talk to your patrons in the hope of influencing them to vote for a political candidate whom you do not support, and you then kick me out of your bar, I could conceivably complain that you have interfered with my freedom of speech. Or say that you own a restaurant in which I am eating, loudly discussing with my friends my position on some social issue about which you happen to take the other side – after hearing my discussion (which should be easily since I am loud and obnoxious) you as me to leave. I complain (again, loudly) that you are violating my freedom of speech. To some this might sound like the puerile ranting of a whiny bitch. I would happen to agree with that perspective, but more than that, it is also wrong – that is to say, the perspective that I am interfering with your freedom of speech. The freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment is guaranteed against interference by the government, not private actors – and here we come full circle.

The First Amendment protects my ability to express my views on any subject (within practical legal boundaries) from interference by the government and in the public domain – for example a park. However, the internet is not a park, and it is not public in the sense of a park. Rather, it is public in the way that a bar or restaurant is public – open, provided that one comports oneself according to the rules of the proprietor. To claim that Yahoo is curtailing somebody’s freedom of speech by removing pictures from that user’s Flickr account is tantamount to claiming that a bar owner is curtailing my freedom of speech by showing me the door for engaging in political activities on his property. Pictures stored on Flickr are stored on servers owned or leased by Yahoo – Yahoo’s property, in fact. Yahoo has chosen to make that property open and usable by anyone who agrees to comport themselves according to Fickr’s terms of service, to which everyone using the service must give at least nominal assent to before that service is open to them. Claiming that this somehow violates a right is not just self-entitlement to a sickening degree, but it is ignorant as well – just as ignorant as claiming that a political party lacks the right to deny seats to delegates chosen in a way not conforming to the one it specifies.

If you want Net Neutrality, then argue for it. I’ll tell you what I think about the matter in good time. Do not parade it around in the exaggerated makeup of a Constitutional entitlement and expect me to take you seriously or to respect you. Those are two things that nobody but me bestows the entitlement to – and I do it very sparingly.