{"id":80504,"date":"2022-04-28T14:18:51","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T19:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80504"},"modified":"2022-04-28T14:18:59","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T19:18:59","slug":"80504","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80504","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

You Can\u2019t Have a Functioning Nation without Free Speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A dozen of us were seated on either side of the long dining table.\u00a0\u00a0Present were writers gathered from across the nation and around the world.\u00a0\u00a0Beside me was a lady from Nigeria.\u00a0\u00a0Facing me was a Romanian.\u00a0\u00a0The woman next to her had flown in from Sydney, Australia.\u00a0\u00a0This was a celebratory supper after a long day of book signings at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival \u2014 a major literary event.<\/p>\n

The conversation among this group of lively intellects was a sparkling delight \u2014 light-hearted and witty.\u00a0\u00a0Only for a brief while did it turn to the fashionable liberal topic of the moment: the benefits of censoring free speech.\u00a0\u00a0I said nothing.\u00a0\u00a0Why spoil the celebration?<\/p>\n

It is odd that the notion that speech must be censored is the current fashion of people who call themselves liberal.\u00a0\u00a0Liberalism is supposed to be the philosophy of individual freedom and free speech.\u00a0\u00a0Well, language evolves, and true liberals are much more likely to be found in the ranks of conservatives than those left of center.<\/p>\n

There really are true liberals on the left.\u00a0\u00a0The people seated around me certainly were.\u00a0\u00a0Unfortunately, they live in an almost impenetrable fortress of specious certainty.\u00a0\u00a0Conservatives swim in a sea of progressivism, so they are well aware of the thinking of the left.\u00a0\u00a0The converse is not the case.\u00a0\u00a0In my experience, people left of center have a fantastically distorted concept of conservative ideas.\u00a0\u00a0I suppose this is because they mostly listen to one another, to the progressive media, and to their thought masters, not to real conservatives.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps, too, they fear they might like conservative ideas and so become outcasts.<\/p>\n

The current leading thought master is Barack Obama.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0Despite his pretensions of being a liberal, he is not \u2014 he is something dangerously different.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he so famously said in the last days of his presidential campaign.\u00a0\u00a0You do not fundamentally transform something you love; you fundamentally change what you despise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Obama later realized that he had given the game away.\u00a0\u00a0In a subsequent interview with Bill O’Reilly, he said, “I don’t think we have to fundamentally transform the nation.”\u00a0\u00a0But then he immediately changed the subject.\u00a0\u00a0Now, once again, he is at it.<\/div>\n
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In his April 21, 2022 keynote address at Stanford University, he called for Big Tech censorship of speech, in cooperation with the U.S. government.\u00a0\u00a0He complained about online “disinformation,” “conspiracy theories,”\u00a0\u00a0“raw sewage,” and “deepfake technology.”About deepfake I agree.\u00a0\u00a0Quoting speech out of context is a time-honored way of smearing a political opponent.\u00a0\u00a0The courts recognize that, for a public figure, you are just going to have to grin and bear it \u2014 and watch what you say.\u00a0\u00a0Deepfake is very much worse.\u00a0\u00a0It is quite possible with modern technology to\u00a0create<\/em>\u00a0compelling images of someone saying something he never said, in a place he never was, doing things he never would do.\u00a0\u00a0That is a level of fraud that becomes criminal.\u00a0\u00a0Deceptive advertising is illegal and punishable by the federal government and the states.\u00a0\u00a0Deepfake deception is likely to be much worse and properly should be similarly outlawed.<\/p>\n

Obama proposes a solution to what he claims is pernicious speech: “while content moderation can limit the distribution of clearly dangerous content, it doesn’t go far enough.\u00a0\u00a0Users who want to spread disinformation have become experts at pushing right up to the line of what at least published company policies allow.”\u00a0\u00a0Those companies are Big Tech.\u00a0\u00a0And, the dangerous disinformation he refers to is mostly conservative commentary.<\/p>\n

Obama argues for formalizing the recently developed casual partnership between government and Big Tech to control speech.\u00a0\u00a0He is saying, correctly, that you are dangerous to this newly allied establishment when you think for yourself.\u00a0\u00a0Your thinking must be done for you.<\/p>\n

The recent COVID misbehavior of the CDC, supported by Big Tech’s censorship, gives us a chilling example of what such a formalized partnership would entail: government\/corporate fully regulated speech and thought and servitude.\u00a0\u00a0Without free speech, we would no longer be free citizens of a free nation.<\/p>\n

Free speech has long been the foundation of our nation and culture.\u00a0\u00a0This isn’t just a matter of hundreds of years of practical experience; it is also a matter of hard science.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about the mathematical science of servo control mechanisms.\u00a0\u00a0Servos are ubiquitous in modern society.\u00a0\u00a0Your car is full of them.\u00a0\u00a0So is the cell phone in your pocket.\u00a0\u00a0We can’t live without them.<\/p>\n

Servos are designed to give desired results in a continuously changing environment.\u00a0\u00a0It is their ability to properly respond to these changes that makes these devices so valuable.<\/p>\n

Servo mechanisms work with\u00a0negative<\/em>\u00a0feedback. Through this feedback, deviations from the desired result are detected and fed back to the “steersman” to correct the error.\u00a0\u00a0With proper design, a servo achieves the desired objective no matter how the outside world changes.<\/p>\n

Signals flowing through a servo are both positive\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0negative.\u00a0\u00a0Negative signals are essential for error correction.\u00a0\u00a0In some situations, the signals being delivered to the device from outside are entirely positive.\u00a0\u00a0The servo strips off their average value, or bias, and thereby converts them into both positive and negative values.<\/p>\n

Society itself is a type of very complex servo mechanism.\u00a0\u00a0Negative feedback is where free speech comes in.\u00a0\u00a0Without the ideas of the opposition, we cannot detect errors and make corrections.\u00a0\u00a0It is the contrast of conflicting ideas that provides the error-correcting signals needed for a democratically controlled society to be stable.<\/p>\n

The mathematics of servos tells us why.\u00a0\u00a0Suppose the signal in the servo is biased so that it is only one-sided.\u00a0\u00a0What happens is runaway positive feedback oscillation.\u00a0\u00a0That is what we find on the left.\u00a0\u00a0Think of what happens when a microphone is placed too close to a speaker \u2014 the squeal is unbearable.\u00a0\u00a0That is what will happen if free speech becomes regulated as one-sided speech.\u00a0\u00a0Society will inevitably crash!<\/p>\n

Servo mathematics tells us even more.\u00a0\u00a0It tells us how fast the system needs to respond to changes if it is to remain stable.\u00a0\u00a0If the received signal changes faster than the system can respond, then negative feedback can switch to positive, and a runaway crash results.\u00a0\u00a0That is why a free market, and rapid local decision-making, is vastly superior to a slow, centralized, over-regulated economy.<\/p>\n

Governments always react slowly to events.\u00a0\u00a0In a rapidly changing environment, that slowness often produces instability.\u00a0\u00a0The Soviet Union fell primarily because of the slow response of its centralized economy to the changes in the outside world and its inability to respond to changing demands of its citizenry.\u00a0\u00a0After all, its citizens did find out what was going on in the free world and wanted the same.<\/p>\n

Statistics is another branch of mathematics that illuminates the issue of free speech and democracy.\u00a0\u00a0Consider a jar of jelly beans.\u00a0\u00a0At a county fair, fill a jar with colorful jelly beans, and ask people passing by how many are in the jar.\u00a0\u00a0You will usually get answers ranging from a few dozen to many thousands.\u00a0\u00a0The truth will lie somewhere in between.\u00a0\u00a0Average the guesses.\u00a0\u00a0The more people guessing, the more accurate the average.\u00a0\u00a0This experiment has been done many times, and the average always comes out to be amazingly close to the real number.<\/p>\n

This experiment demonstrates why a representative republic works so well as a system of government.\u00a0\u00a0A fair vote (and it must be fair) distills the life experience of the multitude.\u00a0\u00a0It is a surprisingly accurate measure of the normal expectations of society.\u00a0\u00a0Democracy follows the mathematical laws of statistically governed control servos.\u00a0\u00a0To work and provide stability, democracy requires free speech so that, in the collective, any errors will be detected and corrected.<\/p>\n

Sitting at that dinner table, I was thinking these thoughts.\u00a0\u00a0I only wished that the left side of the political spectrum were open to the reality of real science instead of “political” science.\u00a0\u00a0For the time being, that is not possible.\u00a0\u00a0Nonetheless, I fully trust that the statistics of democracy will detect the current error signals and make the necessary corrections \u2014 come November and 2024.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You Can\u2019t Have a Functioning Nation without Free Speech. A dozen of us were seated on either side of the long dining table.\u00a0\u00a0Present were writers gathered from across the nation and around the world.\u00a0\u00a0Beside me was a lady from Nigeria.\u00a0\u00a0Facing me was a Romanian.\u00a0\u00a0The woman next to her had flown in from Sydney, Australia.\u00a0\u00a0This was … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80504"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80506,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80504\/revisions\/80506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}