No, it isn't and that's possibly where your confusion comes from.
Maybe it's my age, and the fact that I was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but growing up in the Cold War (notice the word 'war' in that phrase) helped me understand that conflict is a continuum rather than a binary condition.
Thank you for your measured response.
Yes, conflict is a continuum.
Conflict is not war. As you seem to agree in the first sentence of the next quote: Not a state of war, but still conflict.
War has a meaning.
In the context I have been discussing this here, the meaning is that it is a state of emergency due to a violent conflict with some other country or group that - and here comes my rub -
can be taken by the government to restrict rights, civil liberties, bypass legislature, etc..
If we allow the government to do all that merely on a heightened state of alert, while stopping short of actually somehow declaring a state of war, we invite trouble. Lots of trouble! For when will they ever admit the situation no longer is bad enough to rule by decree?
The West was not in a state of war with the Comintern, but damned if we didn't execute their spies. The Rosenbergs were sent to the chair in the 1950s, for example.
See? Was not in a state of war. But conflict.
Spying is a quite a bit different from lying, isn't it?
I'd consider wilful propagation of a foreign government's propaganda, intended to undermine my country's security and democratic system, as seditious or treasonous, as others have suggested.
Could be.
If the law says so. A court would have the authority to decide this.
There are many exceptions to free speech, ranging from commercial fraud to others, and I'd include distributing lies for the goal of long term elimination of the constitutional right to free speech to be one of them.
Absolutely! Those exceptions are on the books, can and do get prosecuted and litigated - in court.
Those exceptions that are not on the books on the other hand... No one should be jailed or executed for those, don't you think?
We had a good run for a couple of decades, where we let things get slack, and now we're paying the price. A democracy is not only built on having free speech, but on defending its long term viability. The opposition's goals to undermine democracy are in and of themselves a threat to these constitutional freedoms and need to be handled accordingly.
Yes - and constitutionally, unless a true state of emergency, i.e. a "war" has been declared - by parliament.
It's sort of like those people who defend commercial fraud as 'free speech' because they have a black and white, short term, simplistic view. Having seen what it's like to try to operate an honest business in a very deregulated environment in the early post-Soviet breakup, it's precisely this experience that leads me to appreciate the danger in binary thinking about conflicts with intermediate conditions. It's the intermediate conditions that provide plausible deniability and give time for enemies to accumulate resources beyond tipping points, at which time it will be too late.
Many of us had a rude awakening barely a week ago.
Many of us probably understood that things like conspiracy theories, trolling and shilling are bad for society - but few would have advocated for repression by the state to address these problems. I mean, that seems to be the central point of this forum: That it's better to debunk and convince with rational arguments based on true or at least defensible and consistent premises than to bully the other side into line.
Many of us probably imagined from time to time how good it would be if we could simply shut down and ban the trolls and shills - only to remember that this runs counter to our convictions.
And Skeptics are almost certainly aware of the moral hierarchy. "But is it Legal?" is not the final word on what is morally right.
True - but it is the foundation of state action in countries where there is the Rule of Law based on a liberal constitution.
If you find that the law is immoral, there is a process to change it. It mostly works in our democratic societies.
What's the alternative, really?
It is, in fact, considered a lower and more juvenile level of morality. The Holocaust was 100% legal. And that was very influenced by the American segregation and anti miscegenation laws, which were perfectly legal. But both were morally wrong. We're in the same situation with foreign interference propaganda unfortunately.
I think the underlying assumption very dubious that there is no such thing as domestic interference propaganda. To be blunt: Politicians lie. Should we shut them off therefore?
Western politicians may be dragging their feet on managing foreign interference because they're receiving truckloads of donations from the social media platforms and Russian billionaires, but the public opinion has been shifting, and my hope is that they will update our protection sooner rather than later.
I want to cut back to my initial premise: That there is a claim that we are at war and therefore restrictions to freedoms legitimately apply to things that otherwise would not be so restricted.
Anybody making or implying such a claim then has the burden to define the criteria by which to decide when we are at war and when we are not at war (and, if you like, criteria for levels of "being at war"). If the argument then shifts to "well, we are essentially always at war, because there is always some dictator somewhere risking the peace", then the argument is really that the liberties that are to be restricted because we are at war should never have been granted in the first place, for we have always been at war with Eurasia and always will be. In which case "being at war" becomes a meaningless term, for there is no "not being at war".
So: Should we never have allowed RT to be available on any medium?
What about Fox News? In my opinion, Fox News is absolutely toxic and undermines the social fabric of the West far more effectively and disastrously than RT ever could.
