Gregory's Server
@nycta And why the hell would I do that?
I'm not a philosophical idealist. I don't believe in "pure abstractions", sorry. Freedom of speech is an idea. Ideas are tools. Tools are only as good as they are applicable to certain context.
We have a societal context where we have a power imbalance between the people and the overarching entity we call the state. Freedom of speech is a tool made to balance the scale, in order to prevent tyranny. That's it. If there was no such imbalance, there would have been no need to protect such idea. It would have been just the state of things. Or, as one famous Alternian thinker once said - "HUMANS HAVE A WORD FOR THAT?"
Pure abstractions, if they even do exist, have no consequence, and they gain those only applied to a context, therefore losing their purity and becoming leaky. So...
@drq You could do that because of postmodernity, because there are a lot more ways of silencing people, other than legal imprisonment or execution, as well as a lot more agents, other than the state, actively implementing silencing.
This isn't a pure abstraction, this could be, if you'd wish so, a faithful representation of state of affairs, true not just today but the entire time language exists. Apply this optics wherever you wish and you're going to find it there — evolution and survival of the fittest among multi-memeular structures, constantly duking it out. Or don't, because as you have noted, it's farther away from actual life, not closer to it.
@drq You could do that because of postmodernity, because there are a lot more ways of silencing people, other than legal imprisonment or execution, as well as a lot more agents, other than the state, actively implementing silencing.
This isn't a pure abstraction, this could be, if you'd wish so, a faithful representation of state of affairs, true not just today but the entire time language exists. Apply this optics wherever you wish and you're going to find it there — evolution and survival of the...