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Showing posts from March, 2016

The Air We Breathe

Broadcast speech is a public good. Like air. You don't really see it, but it's there; permeating every aspect of your life. You silently feed off of it. You pollute it, and you mess it up for everyone else around you. You know it's dirty. You know it's toxic, and you try to avoid the malicious part of it, but it's always there, a nagging background noise that drones and drones incessantly, chipping away at your sanity. No one really wants to be in charge of keeping it clean, because it's next to impossible to do it. Yes, some high-level, clumsily written rules exist, but nothing that really prevents you or anyone else from spoiling it for everybody else. Oh, yes. The slippery slope argument. You can't contain free speech in any form because then you have to forbid all  speech under this magically simplistic view. And no one wants to live in an oppressive society, right? God forbid someone is forced to use some basic common sense to avoid mocking the