Is Speech "Free" Without Dissent?

Vince Kern  
Welcome to another episode of Friends in wonder, a place where we invite you to explore meaningful topics without judgment or limits.

Joe Luther  
Brought to you by two lifelong friends sharing their insights, while wondering, how can this help? I'm Joe Luthor.

Vince Kern  
And I'm Vince Kern, and we've got great topics lined up for you each week. So be sure to subscribe, like and even share with your friends.

Joe Luther  
Now let's wander and wander together.

Vince Kern  
Hey, Joe, it's Friday. So you know what that means? 

Joe Luther  
Another episode of Friends in wonder? 

Vince Kern  
Yes, it is. This time we're doing something a little different. We're actually recording this episode via zoom, because Al is repainting the studios this week.

Joe Luther  
Yeah, well, we actually wanted to give ourselves a little freedom instead of having to drive to various places to do this. Together. We thought we might embrace this concept of doing things remotely.

Vince Kern  
Yeah. Yeah. So we're looking at each other through the computer screens. How do I look?

Joe Luther  
 There's one advantage right there. I'm seeing you through the lens of the computer screen gives you the person so to transact gives you the option to wear whatever you want. Below below where I can see right now.

Vince Kern  
All right, Mr. Toobin. 

Joe Luther  
Yeah, didn't so yeah, that was the guy he got in trouble for that. Yeah, he didn't have a lot of common sense. I thought that was hysterical. And I thought that was that was appropriate, given the way everyone went from, you know, meeting in person to meeting in zoom. And now we're finally embracing that.

Vince Kern  
Yeah. So hey, got some good news. Get a lot of really solid feedback on our podcast last week. Yeah. Local news, deserts and people seem to enjoy. And that sort of dovetails into our topic today, doesn't it?

Joe Luther  
Well, yeah, because it kind of ties along the same theme, but in a different, you know, way of casting a light on it. And what I'm talking about is how we were talking about how important it is not just what kind of news you get, but what kind of news you don't get. And in the local news desert. That is obvious enough. If you if you don't have news, you're not getting anything about your local news. But today's topic is more about censorship, censorship. And so how, yeah, well, well, when you censor something, it's usually some form of dissent. But yeah, I mean, but the point is, if you're censoring something in general, then you don't know what you're, you're not getting right. If if there's information out there that isn't being delivered. That's as powerful sometimes even more powerful than how the information you're getting is delivered.

Vince Kern  
And that's kind of timely, because recently, and it was a conservative court, but they the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, ruled in favor of a law stopping social media companies like Twitter and Facebook, from censoring their users.

Joe Luther  
Yeah, yeah, I remember reading that headline. And, you know, I tend to lean a little bit more conservative, and but I'm certainly in favor of free speech. So I think the the argument down there, though, is that these platforms are have gotten to the point with their censorship, that it's become political. And and I don't know, I'm, I'm not here, I don't know anything about that case. All I know, is that it does kind of highlight the topic that we want to talk about today, and, and show why it's so timely, in fact, to talk about it. And that's this whole idea of free speech, but particularly the need and in the right, really, to be able to dissent. And I know it's kind of it's almost like Captain Obvious, when you talk about free speech, through the through the lens, if you will, of dissent. But it is something that I think we have to remind ourselves, because if you allow dissent to be censored, but in your mind, you're still thinking, well, that's okay. There's still plenty of free speech out there. You just what you're really saying is, it's okay to have free speech, as long as we all agree with what free speech is, or as long as it all agrees with whatever narrative there isn't. And I know again, it sounds like Captain Obvious, but what we want to focus on today is this idea of dissent and the need for dissent. So,

Vince Kern  
okay, well, so as a, as a journalist, three speeches obviously been at the forefront of one of the missions that I had in my full career. But, you know, we I think we kind of got to go back a little bit and ask why is it so important? I mean, let's talk about, you know, the First Amendment and some of the things our founding fathers tried to do, because there was no dissent is something that's been with us for a long time. Right.

Joe Luther  
Yeah. I mean, I think that really is a is a perfect place to start. Historically. We know that the first amendment I guess there's some debate over what was the first amendment but the first amendment that was ratified, or the first amendment that everyone agreed do

Vince Kern  
we have now? Yeah, as

Joe Luther  
the one that basically prohibits government from making any law that in any way, affects the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the freedom to peaceably assemble, if I remember it correctly from law school, but but the whole idea being that it was the first amendment, because it was such a fundamental part of what the Founding Fathers believed was necessary for our experiment of a government to work. And that is this idea to be able to speak your mind freely, which they weren't able to do, you know, in the monarchy you that they came from.

Vince Kern  
And many, plenty of governments throughout civilization, and even today, right,

Joe Luther  
so yeah, so they knew they knew the fundamental importance of yeah,

Vince Kern  
they had some interesting things to say about it, too. Oh, yeah. Well, we

Joe Luther  
actually, our research has given us a few quotes. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, he said, freedom of speech, is the great bulwark of liberty, they prosper and die together. And is the terror of traders and oppressors and a barrier against them. So I mean, there's Ben Franklin, who many consider to be one of the smartest of the founding fathers, but saying that, you know, liberty, and freedom of speech, live and die together. And I think it's fundamentally true. And, you know, we've got some other quotes, too, I think you might

Vince Kern  
want? Well, I know that James Madison said, for people to rule wisely, they must be free to think and speak without fear of reprisal.

Joe Luther  
Yeah, I mean, it's, again, it's the same thing. And, you know, I in the last one is that we, that we found is from George Washington, which I think is a little bit more popular. It's this idea that, I think he says, If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent, we must be led, like sheep to the slaughter. And so, again, it just it shows there's Madison, George Washington, Ben Franklin, it really fundamental concern.

Vince Kern  
Yeah, George Washington's quote, really speaks to the notion of, if you don't have the information, then you can be led in any different direction,

Joe Luther  
right. And if you don't have the right to speak up against something as well, then you can be letting any, you know, it's, it's this whole idea of being sheep or being, I guess, lions, as they say. But you've got to be able to dissent. Because freedom of speech, I know, we're going to be saying this a lot today, but it's this whole idea of driving home the importance of dissent, when we're talking about freedom of speech, freedom of speech is not agreeing with whatever orthodoxy or narrative there is, freedom of speech is being able to dissent. And now, that doesn't mean freedom of speech is absolute. In fact, one of the things we wanted to talk about is that there are times when you need to limit speech, I think that's where the slippery slope starts is that we know, there are times that it is okay, for government to, to abridge, or to, you know, limit free speech.

Vince Kern  
Like, for instance, you think of war war time or you're, you're in the military and you're

Joe Luther  
brave to orders. Yeah, the chain of command, right, and it's the man, right, right. You don't want to debate in the middle of a war, or really, for that matter, and probably most any kind of law enforcement when you're in the throes of an emergency. That involves giving orders and taking orders. The last thing you need is to be having a debate right in the middle of it. All right. I mean, I guess,

Vince Kern  
along the lines of I don't like that idea. So we need to stop, right you

Joe Luther  
have chain of command. So rather than having a debate, you can have the debate later. But perfect example, I guess would be, would be in a circumstance like that. Now, obviously, there may be times when your commanding officer is telling you to do something that is a crime against humanity. And we know that happened in, you know, in Nazi Germany, and it could happen in any circumstance, right, where, where there's, you know, public uprisings or whatever. And the police are faced with a decision or law enforcement in general, or even an army are faced with the decision of, you know, whether they, you know, their moral compass, you know, permits them to follow orders, but for the most part, freedom of speech does not flow, in a circumstance where the chain of command is telling you to follow an order. That's a perfect example. And those

Vince Kern  
those examples sound to me more organizational. Yeah. And then you've got, you know, like, you know, I think, you know, you're going to be swimming with the fish if you if you don't follow the, the, you know, the I think of the organization and think of the mafia. It's just a little Oh, right. Right, right now in my head, but, but you know, I mean, it happens, it's an organizational thing where you, you know, and, and I suppose even in wartime and in law enforcement, activities, there's plenty of time to debate. Yeah, right. Exactly. So the goal is, is, you know, you've got to follow the orders, but public policy is a little bit different, right? I think you're talking about things like public safety or, or thing? Oh,

Joe Luther  
yeah. In law school. You know, I think the very first example we give in law school where it's okay to limit free speech is, is the, you know, the famous example of you can't yell fire in a theater, or, you know, now today, you can't yell bomb, during air travel, any part of air travel, you know, and then the other perfect example of where we've accepted, like you said, as a public policy, the limitation of free speech is, is, you know, pornography or vulgarity, right. So as a matter of public policy, or whatever our our moral values of this society, we don't want to have certain things on billboards for little kids to see or we don't want to have certain things on airwaves that are accessible to people who we just don't think need to be bombarded with that. I'm reminded

Vince Kern  
of the law that they passed along the county in the Sabo river River in Michigan. I'm not familiar with that. Yeah, you could get arrested or ticketed for tubing down the river and shouting vulgarities.

Joe Luther  
Oh, wow, that makes sense. Yeah, exactly. So again, there's public policy. So we know that the idea of you know, the speech is not an a freedom of speech is not absolute. But I think is especially timely today. And it goes back to that Fifth Circuit decision that just came out that you alluded to, is this idea of censorship, and when is it okay to be able to censor, and, you know, given the recent pandemic that we went through, and, and this whole idea of misinformation, and even some of the political things that have happened recently, that don't have to do with a pandemic, I know that, you know, there's been whistleblowers coming forward now from the FBI that, you know, maybe certain things were known or not known about laptops and that kind of thing. So, um, you know, this idea of, of social media, censoring the amount of information that is disseminated is a really, really interesting topic now. And some might say that it's important to limit speech because too many people have too much access to a platform that can mislead and in disrupt matters of important government concern. But watch,

Vince Kern  
and you mentioned whistleblowers, and I think whistleblowers, you know, are are very important for a lot of reasons. And

Joe Luther  
you, oh, they're important because we've always as a nation, celebrated them whether there's laws, there's federal laws and state laws that protect whistleblowers because it's a perfect example. have a situation where you want to encourage dissenting point of views. Because in most whistleblower situations, it's usually employer employee. And the employee is seeing something that he doesn't like he or she doesn't like and wants to say something but is afraid of reprisal. So we have these laws that that really encourage dissent in that kind of way.

Vince Kern  
You get these postings? I mean, you have postings in every workplace that well, yeah, certain

Joe Luther  
workplaces with certain amounts of employees, certain numbers of employees must post whistleblower laws and just notices that it's okay to whistle blow. And what that does is it encourages dissent. And sure, I'm sure there's a number of whistleblowers that are out there that say things that turn out to be, you know, worthy of a grievance. But on the other hand, it's so important as, as a public policy, that it's a good example, like you said, whistleblowers are a good example of how, as a public policy, we want to encourage dissent. Okay, and

Vince Kern  
I want to stick to that for a minute, because you've got some area of expertise in the judicial framework of this, you were a clerk for circuit court judge. And one of the things that I always hear about, especially like, lately with, you know, dissenting opinions from from judiciary.

Joe Luther  
Oh, yeah, we have a divided court. Well, we always have divided courts in the Supreme Court anyhow.

Vince Kern  
Yeah. And so talk a little bit about, you know, because people hear all that, you know, so and so, in his or her dissenting opinion, noted this. So if the, if the judges have already voted, or, you know, what is the value of dissenting opinions? And to explain a little bit about how they work?

Joe Luther  
Well, yeah, exactly. Another important example of why dissent is so important, you know, we could have just regular opinions where it's five for and all, you know, is five judges voted for and four judges voted against. But to have, you know, a robust legal system, there is an opinion that is expressed by the court, not always, Supreme Court doesn't always issue opinions. But most of the time, a court and appellate court will issue an opinion, both for the majority, and sometimes there's the option of the dissenting judges to write an opinion. I know, just recently when they overturned, Roe vs. Wade, I think there were multiple dissenting opinions. And the reason for that the reason we have that is because that becomes the framework of future decisions. I'm sure there's a lot of passionate people out there that want that decision change. And in the way you build upon momentum, for that to change from a judicial standpoint is by encouraging dissenting opinions to be written in not only that, you want to know, as you know, as a citizenry, when these judges voted five to four, what were they thinking? Were they only talking about one side of the argument, or were they talking about both? And so when you have a dissenting opinion, it actually acts as an opportunity for both the public and the legal world to know that all these other arguments were considered. So in future cases, you can say, Well, no, that was specifically addressed in the dissenting opinion. And it was rejected by the majority opinion. But 10 years later, you might say, Yeah, but the dissenting opinion in this, you know, was right on because the facts circumstance. So in other words, the need for for dissent in the judicial system is the same as the need for dissent in general, that our founding fathers were so concerned about in that is that you want to be able to test the narrative, you always want to be able to test the orthodoxy that's out there or the prevailing opinion. And the way to do that is through dissent.

Vince Kern  
That's a, you know, and that's really important because I didn't really give a lot of thought to dissent opinions over the years. You just kind of hear about them, but when you start reading them, it really is upholding the importance of open debate. And and

Joe Luther  
it's a seed. It's a kernel for the future.

Vince Kern  
Really. Yeah, today Yeah, and it's a dialogue that is, is based on, you know, relatively I wouldn't say factual, but these are intelligent dissent opinions, right? They're not. Oh, I just don't agree. Because, you know,

Joe Luther  
you know what? Maybe you would you would like to think that, that all of our justices give intelligent I guess its beauties in the eye of the beholder? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, they're they are, they have some basis, and you can look at it and say, well, that guy was, you know, or that judge was, was off his rocker, it was an eight to one decision, and this one dissenting opinion. But you know, 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, people might look at it differently, because circumstances change. And in, in the whole, the whole point, though, is, if you're really confident in the majority decision, then you should be okay, with allowing a dissenting opinion, because it helps test or it helps, in a way affirm what it is that, that everyone's agreeing that, you know, yeah, we saw that argument, and we rejected it. Now. So that's what I think is so important about this whole idea of accepting censorship, because we just came through a pandemic, where people were okay with it, because they thought at the time that, you know, public policy was so important that we couldn't have dissenting points of view. And, and now, this whole idea of censorship has almost become commonplace. And that's what's interesting. Now, as I said, I'm all about free speech, if you can't get me more excited about a topic than free speech. I don't know if I necessarily agree with what happened in the Fifth Circuit, because it's, no, you're talking about social media platforms that are private entities. And if they weren't a limit, to just one point of view, I guess, eventually the market is going to get encouraged another platform to come forward to, to allow Express other points of view. And I know that's happened. You know, we've got new platforms that are challenging all the big social media platforms out there right now. So I think rumble or whatever is the challenge to YouTube. And, and we've got getter that's challenging Twitter and, and that kind of thing. So there's always an opportunity for new platforms. But this whole idea, though, of of, of being okay, with censorship, is what I think is the point of this discussion today. And that is that you have got a permit dissent when you don't, it's a very scary, slippery slope.

Vince Kern  
Well, let's let's talk about dissent a little bit, because it was interesting. I, as I was researching some of the, the founding fathers and the way that the, you know, the Bill of Rights came about and their negotiations. I didn't know this, but they negotiated they did everything in private. And in the reason when he isn't it? Yeah, well, they did. And they were concerned. Now think about this. This is back in, you know, we want

Joe Luther  
to encourage dissent, as long as you don't dissent with us while we're encouraging it,

Vince Kern  
right? So they didn't want the Philadelphia newspapers to publish what they were talking about every day. Or if they didn't write letters back to home to their wives and family. And I remember there was no social media back then. So newspapers and letters were the only way people could learn about anything, because they wanted to do their work. And they didn't want to have all of these opinions and dissents. And then believe me, there are plenty of farmers and people out in the plains that didn't think that these velvety pants Philadelphian highfalutin politicians knew what was best for them. So but what's interesting to me though, is is and this is my rabbit hole of technology that I get fired up about is, is house free speech has somewhat been eroded. And I think social media has played a great role in that. And we are now you know, engaged on these platforms in labeling and gaslighting calling, you know, every people who don't agree conspiracy theorists are extremists. And, you know, this whole fire hose of information thing makes me wonder if say retreating somebody is really an act of personal dissension or just supporting a viewpoint or what it is. And the difference between now everybody being a self publisher and being able to just sit behind a keyboard without attaching a name to it unnecessarily or without, you know, any responsibility for what you're saying. And again, this is Captain Obvious stuff. But But before social media, you know, you had to you had to sort of work to, to get your ideas out there. Yeah, you had to go, you know, you had to go and carry signs and march and do different things.

Joe Luther  
Well, I'm not sure I know what you're getting at here, though. Because, you know, you started this off talking about how the Founding Fathers needed peace and quiet, to articulate what it is they wanted to do. And maybe what your I think I hear you saying is that that might be a justification for kind of denying the noise that's out there. But it scares me a little bit. When did I get that wrong? Is that what they were trying to say?

Vince Kern  
I think there's a personal responsibility for how we dissent. And and I don't think name calling is dissent.

Joe Luther  
Oh, exactly. Oh, I get it and 100% agree with you.

Vince Kern  
I think name calling is name calling and bullying and all kinds of things.

Joe Luther  
Yeah. Good. So when we're talking about dissent, we're talking about content. We're not talking about just, you know, flipping each other the bird,

Vince Kern  
right, exactly. I'm saying, have an opinion, express it, express it, write freely express ideas, write civilly. I will not argue that at a certain point, oppressed groups who need to dissent may need to dissent in ways that are very attention getting, if they've been oppressed for so long. You know, I hate violence. But I you know, I'm not going to say that people, you know, rioting in the streets for freedom is necessarily a bad thing. I think it there's so much complexity in dissent now. Yeah, that, yeah, you know, I mean, I think you're right,

Joe Luther  
and you're right, with, with the rise of the Internet, and everybody having a platform, it is sometimes unmanageable to handle all this information. And I get it, if you are a public authority, and you're trying to for, you know, all the other good hearted reasons in the world, trying to get your opinion, or your your ideas out there in a way that you think is, is for the public good, then you're going to have a knee jerk reaction against dissenting points of view. And certainly, there's ample opportunity today, for people to express dissenting points of view. And you're right. The problem is, if we kind of broad brush, just this angry dissent, as part of what we need to call from the discussion, again, that becomes that slippery slope of, well, how do you decide what is, you know, worthy of censorship and what isn't? Well, for a while, I thought they were doing a pretty good job of it. They were just saying, you know, if you start using profanities, or if, or if it's just argumentative, or what, whatever, I don't know how they did it at first. But I remember, at first, it was more censorship for the style in which you were dissenting than the content of what you were dissenting about.

Vince Kern  
Yeah. Yeah. And I think you go from a situation where, you know, I remember in third grade, Mrs. Hap key, I think, was my teacher. And, you know, if I stood up in third grade, and yelled across the room at poor little Amy, and said, in front of everybody, Hey, Amy, you're, you know, no, I would never do this. But hey, Amy, you know, you're you're fat, you're ugly. Well, Mrs. hotkey would have would have intervened and, and, and done something on social media now, you can basically do all of that. Yeah. So my, you know, my question is, where does the responsibility weigh? And unfortunately, I think the erosion of, of the norms on social media are causing people to, in some cases, go along with censorship. Yeah, go along with it. Sure. Or, or be afraid to say anything. So

Joe Luther  
Oh, then they're self censorship. Yeah. Well, no, that's a completely I think that's a different thing. I think in the right in the in the example you gave of insulting people. You know, that's an obvious example of when it may be okay for a platform to say, No, we don't tolerate that. That's just like vulgarity. We don't tolerate that. That's that I think is a different conversation. Then, then saying We don't like what you're saying or we disagree with If what you're saying, or that goes against, you know, the narrative and we don't want that that's, that's content. And and that's what I think the challenge that we're having in this discussion is kind of sifting through what is legitimate dissent. And but the bigger overriding issue is that it's such a slippery slope when you say, Oh, it's okay to censor this, but not that. And that's what the Fifth Circuit is talking about. And their decision again, I don't know, the content of that, and I have no opinion on it. My knee jerk reaction, you know, is that it sounds like the Supreme Court is going to need to decide this one, eventually, because I don't I don't know how they came out in favor of the decision they did. But I again,

Vince Kern  
yeah, I think this was just remanded for further proceedings. But that's not

Joe Luther  
the point of what we're trying to discuss. What we're trying to discuss here is that there's become this general acceptance of censoring dissent. And that's a scary thing. It's a very scary thing. And, and like you just said, Not only that, what about this concept of self censorship, and people who now are afraid to even say what they think or, you know, for instance, when the pandemic first happened? You know, it was only Dr. Fauci who was able to talk and then, you know, you started hearing scientists around different countries or even within our country saying, wait a minute, you know, and before long, you know, at first, those were censored, and, and now, some of these things that were censored as misinformation in the past, are now becoming commonplace knowledge as truth today. So it's a it's a scary thing to say it's okay. to censor dissent in when it's when we're talking about content. And, you know, now doctors, I don't even know I, to me, I think we've got a lot of healing to do. Because there's still this concept of, of people being afraid, doctors being free, other people being afraid of what they can and cannot say, heck, I'm being very careful about the way I'm discussing this topic right now. Because I don't want us to get flagged as misinformation.

Vince Kern  
Right. And there I have been, I mean, this is a very real thing that have happened to people when they bucked the mainstream narrative. And this is this is not a political silo or bent here, because it could happen to anybody, regardless of politics. So you know, fear of hope you ridiculed, you lose your job, your fear of people just abandoning you, because they don't share your opinion or they that, you know, that's your you've not been labeled a well, yeah,

Joe Luther  
right. It's all too easy to go along with censorship, when the thing being censored is against your point of view. But the problem is, you know, what, about the time when you've got a very strong point of view that is against the current nor, you know, we've got to allow that at all times. You can't pick and choose when it's okay to censor?

Vince Kern  
I, I agree, and I think there's a real complexity of civilization that has evolved now. So you have the vest. And again, I'll say it, I use the term fire hose because it's a firehose of information. I'm not just talking about social media here, I'm talking about everything. So yeah, the internet in a government has to somehow do its job in the midst of dissent. And it should address dissent in a transparent and, and meaningful way. I mean, if you think about organizations, as running a newspaper, I always, you know, always backed our journalists, because they were the experts. And if somebody told them how to do their jobs or something, they would say, oh, you know, they're the experts and leave them alone. The same thing happens. I'm sure. In the CDC, there was a recent study that know most of the people who were were doing the work during that time when they were saying masks, you know, prevent and, and all the things that they came up with. They believe they were doing the right thing. Even later on, some of the stuff may have been proved not valuable. So how do we adjust how do we how do we balance that? You know, we don't want people dissenting because we're the experts. versus you know, we

Joe Luther  
got I don't know, I don't think I think when we're talking about content, I don't think there should ever be a time when government saying, Yeah, that's okay to say, but that's not okay. I mean, yeah, we we identified sometimes when that's okay fire in a theater bomb in a in an airport. You know, perhaps when taking orders in emergency situations chain of command, there are times vulgarity, and there are times when it's okay. But when you start getting into quelling dissenting points of view that, that go against a narrative. I think that's, that's a time when we have to, like we're doing right now regroup and say, Wait a minute, is this something we really are all knowingly agreeing to? And what are the unintended consequences of going along with this? And as you said, it's gotten to the point now, where, where people are afraid to express their point of view. So they're self censoring. Now, they call that in law school, we call that the chilling effect of of free free speech, where were you? You know, and why, why do people self censor? It's because they don't want to be ridiculed. They don't want to lose their job. We're social animals, we don't we, we fear being abandoned or being left out in the cold. And, you know, we don't want to be raised for crying out loud. So it's, it's a natural tendency to, to not want to buck the narrative. And that's why we do have these laws. And that's why it was important to to shine a light on, you know, the whistleblower laws and the idea that we encourage dissenting opinion, opinions and legal decisions, because it's important to have and encourage dissent at all times.

Vince Kern  
And here's another thought I had is if, if, first of all, if, if any, is anything ever really settled, you know, information theory, wisdom. Okay. So I think we could all agree that everything evolves, and that, you know, things change from, they've changed so fast in the last, you know, 50 years. But my point is, is if we don't assent, then that means that something is settled, because the conversation stops, where it's where it's been judged. And so and so really, we're saying it's a it's that circular argument, if if nothing is ever fully settled, and we're constantly looking for better ways to solve problems. If we don't have dissent, then we just stop in our tracks,

Joe Luther  
right? There's never in my opinion, there is never anything that is fully centered, settled. Hey, I want to when you said that it reminded me who, who is Vince, the most famous dissenter in human history.

Vince Kern  
I guess this is Marcel Marceau, because the word he said in silent movie was No,

Joe Luther  
no, that's a good, that's a good answer. That's not the right answer. There was dissent, wasn't it? No, no, it's a matter of opinion. But I would, I would submit Galileo, here he was, at a time when, you know, really religion was was running the world. And this idea of, of God and in the, in everything revolving around us, and steps out this man who's got a completely different view of, of what the universe looks like. He, I mean, that was a dissenting point of view. Like Like you said, he, he had to buck a narrative out there. That was

Vince Kern  
pretty big. About his

Joe Luther  
Yeah, but uh, scary. And you know what, it's no different today, these doctors that were standing up and saying, No, I think, you know, I see a different point of view here. That was to them probably just as scary as it was for Galileo back then.

Vince Kern  
Yeah, you're talking about life and death situations. And Wasn't there a Supreme Court justice also who was known as like the the Mr. dissent, or

Joe Luther  
Oh, the great dissenter? Yeah, yeah, I can't think of I know he had a he had a son. I can't think of his name. But yeah, the the great dissenter. But again, that's I guess it's just another I think maybe we're getting to the point where maybe we're beating a dead horse here. But yes, the whole idea of the freedom of speech is not freedom to agree it's freedom to dissent freedom to have a differing point of view and and I know again, it may have seemed like Captain Obvious here, but I I thought today's discussion was a good way of maybe refocusing the spotlight on freedom of speech because too many times now I think people are thinking, sure, you can have freedom of speech as long as you agree with me. And like you said, the big problem with social media now is this idea of, of discord, and name calling being what people see as dissenting. And that's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about content,

Vince Kern  
right? And if we don't have that content, or we allow people to dissent is excluded. It sounds it seems like it's basically the equivalent to tyranny.

Joe Luther  
Right? Well, that's exactly what the founding fathers were. So they were, they were declaring independence against tyranny. And one of the fundamental ways they thought to, you know, to preserve that liberty is through free speech. And that free speech means, you know, both sides of the coin, you need to be able to speak on both sides of the coin. And so it'll be interesting to see how it evolves. In social media. I still, you know, I don't know if it's right for her, for the courts to be saying, You got to allow this, or you got to have, you know, equal access and that kind of thing. I, I'm not sure I've ever really agreed with that. I like the idea of alternate platforms. But again, I think the government's got to keep their nose out of it. They can't be saying what is, you know, legitimate free speech and what isn't? There's the the censorship idea, and I just think people in general, what we're trying to do here in our podcast is, is help people understand better topics that are important. And this idea of free speech and dissent, especially today, I think, is very important to think about.

Vince Kern  
Well, you'll get no dissent dissenting opinion from me on that one, sir. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make one final observation, which is to say that, as far as technology is concerned, and even our culture, you know, take the technology, the tools that we have, right now have really only the internet specifically has only been around now for, you know, 3040 years. And in the timeline of human existence, that is a minut, miniscule amount. And let's just hope that we learn to use all of this technology in the most valuable way. Encouraging, more personal, personal civility. Yeah, rather, and solving problems rather than using it to throw doubt, throw darts. And that's my, that's my rant.

Joe Luther  
Well, I agree with that no dissent here. We'll see that we can, we can make our points of view without having dissent to

Vince Kern  
indeed, and I make a motion now to adjourn the court and take the friends and wonder discussion, to perhaps go have a beer?

Joe Luther  
Well, listen, I do think though, you know, we're really trying to encourage our listeners to give us their point of view. And I think this is one where it could almost been a fun opportunity to have, you know, live call ends to get people's points of view on it. And we've been getting some good feedback. And we sure like to hear what you have to say about this, because it really becomes this question of content and civility and, and, you know, this whole idea of how we express our points of view, and I would love to hear what our listeners think about this topic as well.

Vince Kern  
I would too, because there's a lot of tentacles to this discussion. And we could go on and on and on.

Joe Luther  
Oh, there are a lot of rabbit holes when it comes to this one.

Vince Kern  
Let's push the stop button for this week. And we thank you all for listening. And as Joe said, please do send us your input because we'd love to hear what you have to say about this topic or any topic. It was fun. Zoom in with you this time, Vince. Indeed time to put our pants back on.

Joe Luther  
Oh, yeah, go back out there. All right. Bye. Bye. Bye. How about if we try that one again.

Vince Kern  
So ends another episode of Friends in wonder. We want to thank you for listening. If you'd like to hear more episodes, provide feedback, ask questions or suggest topics you'd like us to wonder about in future episodes. Be sure to check us out at friends in wonder.com. You can even leave an audio comment with a click of a button and we might use it in an upcoming episode. So please, we'd be grateful if you subscribe, like or share this podcast. Until next time, I'm Joe. And I'm Vince and we're friends in wonder