Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Please present your resume to prove you are qualified to comment on what is or isn’t slang. We can’t have just any casual incompetence running wild on the marketplace of ideas, good sir!
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Definitely not... What does or doesn't count as slang is obviously
crucially important. I retract my skepticism about whether it was or wasn't slang and substitute agnosticism in its place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
I'm no big-city philosopher, but "marketplace of ideas" is just a bad, strained metaphor. It seems to dovetail well with the assumption that everything can be understood through the lens of commerce, which is a distressingly popular and worryingly naive position held by gibbertarians and other simpletons, and which likely explains its popularity despite its manifest inadequacy.
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Read its original context, the metaphor doesn't seem all that strained, but YMMV I guess.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises.
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
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... To be fair the line of cases that this comes from are not exactly on solid ground with the sentiment being expressed there given that they were about prosecuting people for making statements that would undermine the war effort, so it's not exactly
squeaky clean in its original context.