Jellyblob56 wrote:
silmarilen wrote:
Luckily the world isn't so black and white as you make it out to be b1rd.
But it is one of right or wrong. Do or don't. True and false.
Then there are theories
well d'uh free speech is already restricted in many places and nobody would even think of suggesting something else. He's acting as if only the liberal party has an interest in respecting free speech, but actually.. every single party known to me does.
If you have cancer and you go to the hospital, the leading surgeon can't just go: "Hey man guess what you don't have cancer after all now go home to your kids and don't worry about it anymore!"
That's illegal. He is not allowed to lie to you because that would have horrible consequences. It's a restriction of free speech.
Freedom of speech isn't always something positive, but people get indoctrinated to a point where they just go against everyone who claims otherwise, without second thought. I bet B1rd internalized the equation freedom = good so much, he will just discard my comment without reading it a second time.
(on a side note, a "theory" is often an immensely well supported fact, in scientific lingo. Like the theory of gravity, or the theory of evolution)
B1rd wrote:
Just because you think someone is true doesn't make it a fact. And just because a bunch of scientists think something is true doesn't make it true either. They have been wrong before and will be wrong again. There is no 'balance' on this issue. You have free speech or you don't. You dictate what other people are allowed to say or teach, or you don't.
You don't have a 100% guarantee for anything in life. If your standards for what constitutes a fact are so high that you think it is valid to ignore decades of well-founded research, then facts might as well not exist in your world.
That's what people mean by "post-fact-era". When you say "hey, only because scientists talk about it doesn't mean it's true", as if that's a valid excuse for believing something that is completely unsupported instead of acting as if the vastly more likely option is true, then every rational discussion becomes completely useless.
News anchors have an obligation to the public, just like doctors or teachers do. It is their duty to inform the public. News HAVE to be factual, otherwise they aren't news.
If someone is casting a talkshow, that's a different issue, but news channels? Just look at fox news, or even CNN recently. The public forgot what makes facts facts, and more importantly, they forgot to care about facts. I accredit this partially to the criminal neglect of the media outlets. This is what we get when we don't have an authority putting its foot down to hold people to a set standard. You'll get a country with lots of dishonest, biased and simply
stupid people. I can't stress this enough: Holding the media to a standard is immensely important. Restricting free speech is important.