Blog Post #3: Eight Values of Free Expression

Eight total values of free expression are utilized in our lives today, them being the Marketplace of Ideas, Participation in Self-Government, Stable Change, Individual Self-Fulfillment, Check on Governmental Power, Promote Tolerance, Promote Innovation, and Protect Dissent. 

1. The Marketplace of Ideas: This promotes the idea of not requiring a license to print or publish any piece of ideation. This follows with not needing governmental approval to publish the piece either. This was originally promoted by John Milton, an English poet, and pamphleteer, who wanted to speak out against the need for governments to approve the publishing of most works. He spoke out against this in his pamphlet, Areopagitica, which protested against Parliament's awful requirement of approving and licensing any and all published works, mainly books.

This resonates with me the most due to it being one of, if not the most prevalent value of free expression that is seen everywhere, through media like TikTok and Instagram, newspapers, online articles, video sources, and many more. The way I garner and learn further information in my day-to-day life is through this online media, which is so prominent in everyone's lives. This is how I learned about things like the election results, and inauguration recordings, especially with a specific moment with Elon Musk recently. We need this to function as a society, and when it's disturbed and taken, as can be seen in some places, like North Korea, the overall livelihoods of people are diminished heavily and sustain huge blows not only things like their morale and understanding of the world, but continue getting hit with more restrictions once the government realizes they're able to do it.

2. Participation in Self-Government: The practice of providing everyone with participation in the governmental structure by allowing free speech to take place properly by all individuals, especially politicians. Politicians cannot be allowed to be restricted in their communication since that will be a means of an unfair election. For example, if a platform like Twitter attempted to silence a current running politician for speaking about their plans or ideas on what they want to further explore, so their followers and people voting for them gain a deeper understanding of their campaign, Twitter wouldn't be allowed to silence them for this reason. 

A platform is unable to ban or fully restrict a politician from their platform, especially for an opinion on said politician. They must be able to provide their stance and points without harm to their social media from the companies or government attempting to silence them. 

3. Stable Change: A value that showcases how upset citizens can express themselves through venting or speaking their minds to others. This is thought to make these disgruntled citizens less likely to resort to violence against others than if they kept quiet, a more pessimistic view of the world, but definitely not wrong. This value brings out a lot of bad in others and has caused some apps, like Instagram, to be overrun with people spewing garbage and hate-filled messages but is definitely vital to the good of the people. Others can monitor and find out the types of people to ignore and what to watch out for in others, which is a big plus, but definitely makes some areas of the internet rampant with negativity. 

The government not attempting to suppress this value is always a better option since when people keep themselves suppressed with their emotions or struggles, a non-changeable outcome usually occurs. This has been quite recently seen in the Nashville sixteen-year-old school shooter, with the student keeping his struggles bottled up without letting others know, only posting some harrowing messages to his little screwed-up and disgusting corner of the internet before enacting an awful plan of attack.

 

4. Individual Self-Fulfillment: A value that is vital to creativity and expression, advocating for people to express themselves, create their own identity for others, and find others like them. The leading activist for this was none other than C. Edwin Baker with his book Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech. Throughout this book, he primarily argued about how we need the protection of human liberty, utilizing that as the justification for the freedom of expression.

This is very important to me because, without this, creativity wouldn't thrive, and people wouldn't create more, think more, or act more in exclusive and fun ways that others can get behind. Whether that being in smaller groups or larger, it benefits everyone equally and gives places for people to call home.

5. Check on Governmental Power: This value is essential to the working elements of the government through the society they listen to. It creates a sense of understanding on both sides and keeps the government in check so they're not able to abuse their power against us. 

The public is able to keep the governing in check, so society is able to continue on their path of progression, rather than degrading due to incompetence. 

6. Promote Tolerance: Promoting tolerance is an interesting value, an expressive action of acceptance that is intertwined with hatred. We learn to be a more advanced society by becoming accepting and tolerant towards aspects of life we don't enjoy. This blatantly encourages further hate speech from anyone and everyone, but I can definitely agree that society develops better as a whole if it becomes tolerant. 

This is mainly due in fact to me working that way, I become tolerant very fast as a person to basically anything new to me, hurtful or not, and it's actually helped me become a much more patient and understanding person as a whole. 

7. Promote Innovation: This value strikes me as an offshoot of Individual Self-Fulfillment, creating a bigger avenue for creativity to blossom in people and showcasing multitudes of ways that people can become interesting in their own ways. This becomes just as important to me because of that, since I believe that creativity is one of the most vital things to being human. It's the thing I look for the most in people and in myself especially, and plants fertile seeds of ideation in people's brains the more it's realized. 

8. Protect Dissent: One of, if not the most important value to our human rights. All citizens can criticize and disagree with a governing body, and we're able to voice our opinions against their choices. The First Amendment protects all views against anything, and this is no different even if it's a governing body. 

This is another value that springs forth an earlier connection, this time being with the Check on Governmental Power, where we're able to check in on the government and
explain our viewpoint as a society so they aren't able to abuse their power. 

Blog Post #2: The U.S. Supreme Court

 Both Supreme Court videos were very helpful in helping me to further understand the nuances of the Supreme Court. I knew the most basic information regarding how the court functioned, like how the entire process begins through a petition so they're able to pass their judgment on whatever case is given to them to look over. There is a total of nine Supreme Court justices that look over the case, whether it's as a team or on their own near the start of the case, to come up with their own ideas and opinions over it.

The first video took an in-depth look at the court's starting grounds and explained some further information about the nine justices, like how they serve an average of sixteen years or longer. 

One of the most fascinating areas of this video was how they almost immediately jumped into the case of Marbury v. Madison. This was the first time in history that this newly established court struck down Congress as unconstitutional. This was present under John Marshall, a young lawyer from Virginia who was recently appointed Chief Justice by President John Adams, to step in and fill the role of not only Chief Justice but also to take on this specific case. This mainly served to establish judicial review through the court and show their ability to hold their ground to the people. 

"We must never forget it a constitution we are expounding.", this being a message that serves all people to understand the priorities and challenges that come with utilizing the Supreme Court to maintain the government. This leads to another interesting part of the video I forgot about the peculiar case of the infamous Dred Scott decision. This case resulted in the weakening of the court's authority overall, and especially with the people, mainly through Dred Scott claiming his freedom under an act of Congress twenty years later. 

After twenty years of waiting, Dred Scott, a slave from Missouri, tried to gain his freedom back after feeling wrongly imprisoned in slavery and attempted to bring the case to the Supreme Court, but got a ruling where the Supreme Court stated that Congress didn't have the power to ban slavery, furthermore that slaves wouldn't be allowed to be actual citizens. This ended up being one of the biggest thorns on the Supreme Court's side in the history of it due to the horrendous climax of the case as a whole. This self-inflicted wound provided immense backlash and a serious amount of time to do better as a Supreme Court and gain their full authority back. 

Another point of interest after Dred Scott's abysmal ruling was the way the Constitution started to evolve after this point, mainly through the Civil War's efforts and the amendments it brought. This is most specifically shown in the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to all people born into the United States. This is most important after the Dred Scott decision, especially, which definitely helped to bring back some authority with the Supreme Court and had the Constitution become a living guide to resolving modern issues.

Part two of the video dove into looking through the intricacies of the courts when they take on cases. I genuinely had no clue about most of this, especially when I learned that the Justice on the majority side of the opinionated decision is required to immediately write their own opinion explaining the whole legality of the decision. The appointed Justice can also write their own complete opinion separate from the court's majority decision if they didn't agree, and the length of these pages written can become absurd. They can easily exceed eighty pages when on a split opinion but are sometimes only a few pages long when dealing with a unanimous decision.

After learning about the Supreme Court's intricacies, I now understand much about them that I originally had no clue about in the first place. Especially through how the Supreme Court's decision led to a loss in authority due to the unpopularity with the people, displaying how the people's opinion and acceptance of their rulings can make or break their power dynamic, giving more emphasis on the display of accountability with them. This is my biggest takeaway since I never thought that they'd be forced to adhere to the people's opinions of them, which blew my mind and is one of the most important things I've ever known about the government. The most surprising thing that I learned about the Supreme Court is that they receive over seven thousand cases per year but only accept one hundred of them. This baffles me but does make sense after thinking over it since the cases are usually big-ticket ones that have to have loads of time spent on each one. I think the thing I really took away was how much the Supreme Court is for the people, working to eliminate their issues while putting a hold on the government's benefits to hold them responsible in their own place of ruling so there isn't anything that goes awry.  

The Current Supreme Court Justices

Blog Post #1: Top Five Sources of News or Information

The first source of information that I'd like to provide is MSN. This is a browser in the simplest terms and an add-on to Microsoft's implementation of news sources to the web, but the information you can garner is vast. 

I found this corner of the internet just by utilizing my preset search engine on my newly acquired laptop for college, deviating to it almost immediately for the blocks of news that it provides every time you open the search engine up. It's also mostly neutral politically, having articles scattered from any side of politics and showing what each side thinks, providing an avenue to understand the other side better, which usually isn't done very much, but is very appreciated by myself. It shows hundreds of these little blocks of news articles that can go to literally any type of information and give a nice, vast showing of the world just through a simple opening of it, which is why it's my first, and favorite, source of new information. 

My second source of information is through TED Talks. These snippets of any ideation that can be imagined and brought up are vital to my day. I listen to these almost every day, usually in the background while I'm working. The videos are quite informational and genuinely helpful on many broad topics and can be varied to literally anything. Every talk is produced by a global leader or intellectual thinker in the specific field being presented and is very trustworthy as a source of information. It provides a very neutral political stance on everything, mostly focusing on the ideation side of things rather than politics, which is greatly appreciated by me. 

The next source of information or news is sadly, TikTok. TikTok has been a vital source of information for the weirdest reasons. I have somehow never missed a major event or update on what's happening in the world due to the random videos I'll scroll past on TikTok. 

When I'm doom-scrolling, I'm mainly doing it to pass the time and cause I'm just bored but will constantly get roped into a rabbit hole that provides me with a new major story, news, and plenty of information to occupy me for the next hour. Many times, this has been because of the SpongeBob news fish. Some accounts will utilize the news fish from SpongeBob and craft whatever they want him to say, utilizing AI to explain world events. It's been a weirdly good source of news in my life. 

Another form of good information is none other than Instagram. Instagram, just like TikTok, has kept me updated through basically everything that's happened in the world in the last 3 years. This app is much more just utilized by me to talk with my friends and keep up with sports, like football or rugby, but I do purposefully follow some specific news accounts to always see the next big updates in the world. 

Instagram provides many avenues to figure out tons of information on a whim and is the second app that I constantly use as an informational stepping stone to further knowledge. This app also provides the rabbit hole function of my brain where once I get interested in something I come across, I start a wild search for further information on the topic through the app. This app keeps me informed on current events and knowledgeable on current events that are happening throughout the world.

Lastly, one of my reliable and most used sources of information is The New York Times. The New York Times provides accurate and relevant information aimed at updating you on the world's condition at a moment's notice, citing and forwarding the most important details of what's happening as quickly as they can. 

I've personally been looking back at The New York Times from time to time for years, mainly because a lot of the things they show are quite interesting to me. I've utilized their stories for papers, information, citations, and a lot more over the years since they show it understandably and easily while keeping it very professional. As an added bonus, they have Wordle and the games as well.