If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated, then the logical conclusion of that belief is that adversarial foreign governments have the right to propagandize in America and to Americans. If you abandon your principles the moment someone invokes the foreign menace then you don’t really have principles.
People like to think of themselves as being pro-freedom because it’s hip and cool and they are brainwashed from a young age to be proud to live in “the land of the free” but the moments you interrogate those beliefs a little they start to fall apart. It’s more of a political aesthetic than a true belief system.
If you believe that the constitution protects inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government then how can those rights be denied to non citizens? The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen, which would mean they can decide who is or isn’t eligible for so-called “inalienable” rights.
The goal is to hire efficiently, not hire every single qualified candidate. If 10% of MIT graduates are qualified but only 1% of graduates from a no-name school are qualified, why spend 10x the effort to try to recruit from the latter?
If the only people who trade AAPL plan on holding it for 10 years then by the time they want to sell it there will be no one to buy it from them, since the probability that someone else will want to make their once-every-10-years trade at the exact same time is zero. In order for long term investors to function they need liquidity to enter and exit positions.
That's really not true at all and I don't know why you've convinced yourself that it is. Obviously having connections can give you a leg up but most successful people in these industries don't have family in high places and it's not a prerequisite to ascend through the ranks. Why would so many people enter finance and consulting if they thought it was a dead end? Are you arrogant enough to believe that it's because they are dumber and less enlightened than you, and unlike you they don't know what they are doing with their lives?
One of the central principles of western democracy is that freedom of speech is a good thing and everyone should have the right to advocate for ideas even if they are bad. The opposite philosophy, which is fairly prevalent in many parts of the world, is that it is the role of the government and societal elites to control the flow of information so that bad ideas (as defined by the people in power, of course) don’t gain traction. It’s pretty hilarious that you are adopting the latter perspective and arguing for more government censorship to “defend democracy”. Are you sure you really understand democracy?
If you support free speech so much then you should respect Cloudflare’s right to exercise their free speech right to decide what content they want to serve on their privately owned servers.
The idea that the government should force companies to host extremist content against their will is anti-free speech, not pro-free speech. It’s equivalent to forcing people to put up political yard signs on their lawn without their consent.
That’s a very ahistoric perspective. Many of the longest-lived and most successful empires throughput history have been monarchies and dictatorships. The current popularity of broadly democratic regimes is a very recent development in human history.
Even the US was very undemocratic for most of its history (remember when only white male landowners could vote?), and that didn’t stop its ascendancy to world superpower.