Neither does yours? This is a nonsense claim.

> Anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) speech has been a feature of American discourse since before the Revolution.

You're just cherry-picking which ideas you like from the founders or early America. Slavery was also a feature of the United States. Whether we had something in the past or not isn't necessarily a good enough argument to keep doing it.

> Without anonymity, you lose whistleblowers,

We can figure out other ways to have whistleblowers without social media.

> effective criticism of the powerful from the weak, and “public interest” leaks like the Snowden revelations.

Snowden, who is living in Russia.

> You lose outlets where the abused can ask for help and advice in escaping bad situations.

The only way to do this is on social media, anonymously? If so, we have a much bigger problem. An emergency, even.

> You lose any/all criticism of employers current and past; who wants to hire a complainer?

I complain about past employers all the time. I don't think you lose this.

> You silence people who are afraid to give their opinion because of their employer or parent.

I don't think so. And both left and right political blocks have gotten plenty of people fired, even those who post anonymously.

Now why the disable wifi option isn't available on the TV when it appears in the user manual is another matter...

> The problem is that we'd all blocklist advertisers and then they'd all cry.

I don’t have any problem with old-timey “Dishsoap Brand Dishsoap sponsored this content. They want you to know that a dish isn’t clean unless it’s Dishsoap clean!” Type ads. Much beyond that should no longer be tolerated.

Both Ds and Rs have been attacking Section 230; Mark Kelly wants to strip those protections when sites “amplify content that caused harm.” KOSA is a looming bipartisan threat.

Left radicals are as virulently against free speech as those on the right, often calling for allies to “shut down” or even physically harm opponents.

Schools are a particularly difficult battleground for free speech, with actions against scholars from both left and right: https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire

If you are left wing, you probably don’t think some of these are censorship, others do, that’s why I said it was a good thing that left and right disagree with each other here. In many ways they cancel each other out, although they do a lot of damage to free speech along the way.

It’s also true that currently in the US the primary threat comes from the right, as a consequence of the right being in power. Internationally it is reversed.

It is certainly a bold choice to use this wildly misleading framing when you link to a news article that directly contradicts it. A more accurate framing would be "when a guy returned fire against a gang of thugs who were firing on random passerby from an unmarked van".

  Court documents and transcripts reveal a far different story than the one officers told investigators, as well as the tales police and prosecutors offered up to the media.

    Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great! Fuck ’em up, gas ’em, fuck ’em up.”

  At 17th Avenue and Lake Street, around 10 p.m., the SWAT team saw a group of people outside the Stop-N-Shop gas station. Bittell told the driver to head toward the station and said, “Let ’em have it boys!”

  They later learned they were shooting at the gas station owner, neighbors and relatives guarding the station from more looting, as well as bystanders, including a Vice News reporter who had his hands up and was yelling, “Press!”

  About an hour later, three blocks to the west, they opened the sliding door of the van and began firing plastic rounds at people in a parking lot.

  They hit Jaleel K. Stallings, 29, a St. Paul truck driver, who says he didn’t know they were cops because they were inside an unmarked white cargo van with the police lights off. [...] Stallings, an Army veteran, returned fire with his mini Draco pistol, for which he had a permit.

---

> Everything I've said is factually accurate. Hilarious how some commenters are saying I am "lying" or assume I disagree with the verdict when it could not be further from the truth. I'm only pointing out that armed fire upon police might be legal in Minnesota, and there is recent case example of that.

This is a silly way to have a conversation, but as for your response: every single word you picked was as misleading as possible. "AK" implies an assault rifle but it was a pistol. "Lit up on cops" implies that he started the conflict by attacking cops, rather than it being one of self-defense against people indistinguishable from thugs. You invoke "BLM riots", but there is no evidence he was involved in that at all. Your words are clearly chosen in such a way as to prime people towards a certain belief about the event. With the most charitable interpretation of your words possible, they might factually describe the events, but I think it crosses the line to the point where you would have to be so charitable as to actively misinterpret what words mean in order for them to remain factually accurate. At any rate, that level of charity is absolutely unwarranted given how intentionally uncharitable the selection of those words was in the first place.