That describes most self-described liberals/progressives I’ve ever known, some more than others.
I believe common sense includes honesty so my earlier statement about the left lacking common sense stands.
What was common sense has become un-common sense.
Yes, first it was religion and now it is Marxism/postmodern critical theory (the new religion) that has done this.
I appreciate that, and I apologize if I’ve been less than respectful in any of my responses. I too assume our disagreement is sincere, and I mean to respond to your points fully and in good faith.
Your comments here are fair and I don’t see anything to disagree with. But isn’t it reasonable to interpret the play as being anti-assassination? You’re probably right that no small moral lesson will accurately capture the play, and I think it’s likely that Shakespeare was primarily concerned with making an entertaining play rather than communicating a specific moral position. But can we agree that the play at least does not celebrate assassination, and leaves the door open to anti-assassination interpretations?
The reasonable interpretation of the play goes to intent and effectiveness of communication. A play that can reasonably be interpreted to condemn assassination is an objectively poor way to communicate a call to assassination. The play’s ambiguity undermines the claim of intent, and moreover, even if the players were secretly thinking, “I hope someone sees this play, interprets it as I interpret it, and kills the president because of it”, their chosen means of communication are so unclear as to break the necessary connection between act, intent, and likely outcome.
I agree it’s not necessary, but it’s also not unheard of. Caesar was made to resemble Obama in 2012, and the play has been placed in other then-contemporary settings (this article mentions Mussolini and a mash-up of African dictators as other living people who had been placed in Caesar’s role). And placing a living person there is undeniably potent as well, as the heat of this discussion shows.
But even if it’s across the line of decency to put a real-life, modern Caesar into the play, even if it’s sickening, it isn’t incitement. To quote a First Amendment case that came down just today: “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”
Sorry, rather than “immediately”, I should have said “imminently”. The requirement of imminence is part of the test for incitement articulated in Brandenburg v. Ohio (a case about a KKK member whose stated intentions and encouragement were much clearer than the present case). So inspiring someone to plan an attack two months later would most likely not be sufficient, that would not pass the test.
But that isn’t the question here as I understand it. Of course they could have done things differently, and it is likely that they didn’t for many of the reasons we’ve considered here. But the question is whether they can express themselves as they did without fear of prosecution, whether their speech is protected (and though we haven’t gotten much into it: whether their speech should be protected). They may have crossed the line, and they may have done it for a number of disrespectful and malicious reasons, up to and including the desire to see Donald Trump assassinated. But their speech is still protected under out current jurisprudence. First Amendment precedent is very, very protective of speech, especially speech around artistic and political matters like those involved in this case (even if we concede that they are bad are and bad politics).
Related to that last paragraph, a question: how much are you talking about what speech is protected, and how much about what should be protected? I would say most of my responses have been about what is protected, and it occurs to me that that’s the less interesting question.
[EDIT: a quote from Void_X_Zero was misattributed to Fixed Cross. My apologies to you both. – Carleas]
My point is simply that the play can reasonably be interpreted as inciting violence against a real living person, especially taking into consideration the audience responses and the general context in society, and especially considering that despite these things the play has persisted with its imagery of killing a real living person. To me and many others the intent is very clear. If the intent were different then why not pull the Trump lookalike after all this controversy started?
My understanding is that inciting to violence is still illegal. If this situation went to court it is not clear-cut that the “it’s just free speech” angle would hold. At minimum the secret service needs to be investigation the intentions and consequences of this play.
I am a strong defender of free speech, even for unpopular and vile speech. But staging the killing of someone currently alive, amid a climate that feeds on that brutality and desires it openly, crosses the line.
You acknowledge that putting Trump in the play isn’t necessary to modernize it, so that argument falls away. What other possible defenses? Well your point that the play is advocating against assassination doesn’t hold for me, the history of Ceasar being killed and the play as such isn’t about how assassinating a tyrant is wrong, rather if any morale can be drawn it is the opposite, that a duty exists to overthrow a tyrannical despot. That message resonates far more in the play than the opposite message. So I don’t think this argument holds either.
At best the play can claim to be doing harmless political satire with no ill intentions. But as soon as it becomes obvious that there are reasonable expectations for negative consequences from the play (such as crowds cheering the death of the president, or blasting “kill Trump” music at the performance) then any responsible producer would pull that aspect of the play with is feeding into that. I’m sure you would agree.
The fact they haven’t done so indicates they are fine with the image of incitement and being complicit in this kill-rage going on. Maybe the play isn’t responsible for how crowds react, at first, but once the reaction is known then the play becomes responsible if it persists unchanged.
I’m not familiar with the case you cite on imminence of threat for incitement, but I can’t see how the time table matters. You said that it’s not incitement because Trump isn’t in the audience, implying you would consider it incitement if he were in the audience; if that is the case then I really don’t see there being a clear legal distinction.
Carleas, you misattributed this to me.
“The “theory” is what you haven’t addressed yet, my point that there is literally no need to figure a real living person like this. It adds nothing except feeding existing sentiments of either hate or pity against/for that person who is figured. It makes it personal against that person. Why do that, if you don’t want to make it personal like that?”
what I actually wrote and you predictably did not address:
Please be a man and address the reality of the situation. A lot of lives and all our futures are at stake here. It’s not a game in any way. Be exact, be real, this is that moment where everything we do and say matters.
First, my apologies to you both for the misattribution in my last post, I’ve corrected it an made a note of my correction. Thanks for pointing it out, FC.
Moving on:
Void, you note that the play can be reasonably interpreted as inciting violence. But it also seems clear that the play can also be reasonably interpreted as condemning the violence it depicts. It permits of multiple reasonable interpretations. Isn’t it a problem if we’re going to prohibit any speech which it is possible to interpret as “inciting violence against a real living person”? It would have to be illegal, then, to suggest that it might ever be justified to assassinate a president, as that could reasonably be interpreted as inciting violence, and the current sitting president will always be a real, living person. What’s more, if someone put on a production of Julius Caesar in its original period, and someone reasonably interpreted the play as speaking to our current political climate, that too could incite some violence against real living persons who resemble Julius Caesar (and we have several data points that suggest that Julius Casear represents the sitting president). Hell, Trump himself can reasonably be interpreted as having suggested that some “second amendment people” should assassinate Clinton.
My point being that, if we restrict the freedom of speech in cases where the meaning of an expressive act is ambiguous, where it isn’t clearly and directly communicating a message, with the clear and unambiguous intent to cause the listeners to act on that message, we open the door to a lot of cases, and we chill a lot of socially valuable speech. Moreover, the prohibition would invite politically motivated speech suppression. That’s why such speech restrictions aren’t permitted under current precedent, and should not be in a free society.
You offer a narrower description of what should be prohibited, i.e. “staging the killing of someone currently alive, amid a climate that feeds on that brutality and desires it openly”. This has several problems. The first is that it is clearly ad hoc. In formulating a rationale for prohibiting speech, we are caught between competing desires: 1) to restrict the speech and hand, 2) to avoid restricting too much other speech, and 3) to base the exception in some general principle. Your narrower description tries to split the difference, but I think it fails.
First, the play never says, “This is Donald Trump and we’re killing him”. I agree the audience is supposed to see this character as Trump, but it is significant that the character is not named Trump, is in a play that was written well before Trump’s birth, and the story is not about Trump’s life but about Julius Caesar’s. That’s significant because, in order to satisfy (1), we need to allow for symbolic representations of living people, thus threatening the goal of (2) by lowering the standard for what will be captured.
Second, the narrower description is still too broad. How about the movies The Interview (Kim Jong Un), Team America World Police (Multiple actors, Hans Blix, Kin Jong Il), and Zombieland (Bill Murray)? Those are the few I can think of off the top of my head in which a real named individual is killed, I’m sure there are many others. In particular Team America, which depicts malicious violence against celebrities, many of whom are actually hated and threatened with assassination by some parts of society. Many political dramas should also be expected to have characters who intentionally bear resemblance to sitting politicians, and in case half the country dislikes the politician (true for virtually every politician), those political dramas too will be produced “amid a climate that feeds on that brutality.”
And yet, third, this narrower description does not seem justified by the principles. If someone write a general tract on the role of assassination in politics, without naming any names and making the argument that assassination is merely “not always wrong”, I might well convince someone to exercise political violence. Why should that general tract, which by assumption is as dangerous in practice as a play which depicts a literal killing of a named individual – why should that not also be expressly excluded from the freedom of speech? Why shouldn’t it also ban Catcher in the Rye, since we know that it incited at least one actual assassination attempt (much more than can be said of the play as yet)? What is the principle that justifies this oddly specific speech restriction without justifying anything broader?
Again, the general point is that the principle you are articulating is not contained. The power to prosecute speech has always been abused, even the narrow exceptions that are currently allowed are read as broadly as possible by prosecutors and abused for political reasons. You are looking at this speech and thinking “this speech is bad, has no value, we should prohibit it”, but a general, principled prohibition that targets this speech will target a lot of other speech as well.
The time table matters because the incitement to violence exception is designed to be extremely narrow, solely to allow prosecutions for people who stir up mob violence in the moment (e.g., shouting to a lynch mob, “There’s the bastard, let’s kill him!”). Where someone merely plants an idea that later leads to a killing, that idea-planting is fully protected. Justifications for this include 1) that more time means more intervening causes, and so certainty about the causal chain is decreased (and the potential for abusive use is increased); and 2) where bad ideas are thought to plant the seed of violence, good ideas can pull it up at the root – the best solution for bad speech is more speech, not suppression.
Granted. What does this have to do with the case at hand? I don’t think anything I’ve said is contradicted by this fact.
This is in regards to the safety of the current President of the United States whose name does not need to be spoken when his likeness is being represented and not generally confused with some other likeness who would be less relevant.
Never has such a tasteless and dangerous spectacle been allowed before concerning a sitting president. I guess Kathy Griffin, the comedian, gets the last laugh since her enactment of killing Trump was taken more seriously, but the treacherous always find a despicable way to operate around the law.
Really.
Maybe read the context you lifted it from as well.
Youre someone one has to correct so many times it gets too tiring. I dont even know what your point is in the end, other than that we shouldnt have positions, as one can always misquote these positions and cause irrelevant nuisance.
I am confident you understand the points youre trying to omit extremely well. One reason is that whenever you do have a response, you tend to produce it swiftly at length, and whenever a difficult point is presented to you, you invariably ‘miss it’ and do things like misquoting the one that presented it.
First decent thing would be to respond to the entirety of what youre being presented with. Really, it is so very easy to isolate a sentence and pretend you have no idea that it had a context, even if you brought up that context in the first place.
Or did you simply forget what I responded to?
Be diligent.
White nationalists and identity supporters rallying around zionist Trump, too funny! 
The exact same “tasteless and dangerous spectacle” was allowed for the immediately preceding president.
You’re giving me too much credit, Fixed Cross: I honestly don’t understand how your point is relevant. Caesar was dead. Trump is alive. The case at hand is and should be protected by the First Amendment. There is no tension between these statements.
Where was Obama murdered before a cheering crowd?
Minneapolis. Same play. 2012.
The scope and context are very different. This play you mention was performance in a theater, not in public to cheering crowds blasting “kill him” music. There was no media and pop culture sanctioned calls to violence against Obama either. These differences make the two situations very different. But I still oppose the decision to figure an Obama-ish Caesar in the 2012 play, for the same reason I oppose them doing it to Trump. But even more so we must oppose it now with the Trump lookalike, again because of the surrounding context. And did the 2012 play change the original Shakespeare to add a direct mention that they were taking about Obama himself, literally? I don’t know, but I can’t seem to find anything saying they did.
So the scope and context are very different. But both depictions are still wrong.
"Nunes: It’s a horrible situation, but it was almost predictable. I mean, you just saw as more and more activity in terms of, almost, the fake news and fake media continuing to not accept the results of this election, and continuing to incite these so-called protests, and die-ins, and the cutting off of Trump’s head by Kathy Gifford.
Appleton: Really? You thought it would get to this point?
Nunez: Yeah, oh yeah. We could tell by the amount of visceral types of emails and phone calls that we were receiving — and still receive to this day, I mean, they haven’t stopped. And as you know, I’ve been on the news a lot, I’ve been castigated pretty well by the mainstream Democratic media. And so, it’s a daily thing. We’re getting daily threats.”
Appleton: Are you personally worried?
Nunes: I am worried for the country. I am worried about the level of civil discourse in this country, I’ve never seen anything like it.
Appleton: Nor have I.
Nunes: And the curtains have come down off of the, this whole — I always say that 90% of the news media is left-wing. But, you know, a lot of times they could disguise it. But now they don’t even disguise it anymore. You have 90% of the media who is essentially an arm of the Democratic Party and the far-left. You have 5% of the media who I think are legitimate journalists, life the folks you have at the KMJ news stood …not you, of course, but you’re a talk show host — and then there’s five percent that I would consider right, you know, right-wing media. When we’re outnumbered like that, 90% of the media is out spewing what George Soros and the extreme left wants them to spew, bad things will happen."
Context matters.
This is why philosophy is necessary foremost: to counter the degeneracy that the slogan ‘art for its own sake’ can produce in artists.
Art without responsibility for its consequences is absurdly ugly. Art is only ever justified if it is produced with an idea of the world, and if it tries to disavow its having an idea, it is just degenerate [what happened to the Wire in the last season], and if the idea it tries to disavow is murderous treason, then that ugliness becomes astounding, and hard to discuss even.
An artist that goes onto stage and afterwards says ‘I just perform. It means nothing’ is some feverish infection of mankind.
But this is what turns out to be the case for most American, if not most western artists.
Anyway, it’s not possible to seriously claim that that play has nothing to do with a context of increasing violence against the government when in the same period someone opens fire on politicians. The worst thing about this is that people are so scared of it that they use all their intelligence to pretend to be too stupid to see it. This is what slave morality can also be taken to mean.
Visual and/or auditory evidence is definitely needed. Where can I find that?
With all the fake news, I have to see this evidence. It’s very easy to add evidence that never actually happened and present it as an actual event that occurred. The one article looks bogus. A bald O’bama…ha.
Brilliant explanation of ‘slave morality’. These people are indeed using their intelligence to become stupid, intellect against itself. Damn. This is exactly what is happening.
Why are they doing this, why has this become the single most important method of liberals/leftists? Maybe they are simply afraid. A lot of them have gotten so used to following the herd that the thought of standing out really terrifies them.
Yeah it just occurred naturally in the discussion. I agree it’s a good way of seeing it.
Yes, the cause is fear.
But a true, existential terror of the old styled humanist moralist: a profound horror before political reality.
It’s structurally undermined the Dutch intellect as well: some realities were too ugly or hard for their world-view, to accept them would psychologically seem to them like jumping on a bed of nails. They refuse and quickly develop ingenious defense mechanisms to ward off logic and reality, and on this path they lose all capacity for compassion, as to be compassionate requires an eye for reality.