Concerning Gay Billionare TechBros and Hulk Hogan

There’s a lot of dumb, bad discussion on the internet. A big part of what makes said discussion dumb and bad is the confidence with which one or both parties to the conversation state their claims. In the bowels of the gargantuan, rage-filled paragraphs with which these digital combatants typically bludgeon one another, it is often difficult to find a single sentence inflected with self-doubt. Everyone is an expert, and everyone’s opponents are drooling idiots.

And in American internet discourse, on no topic are Americans more confident than – well, aside from sports and movies – and television and video games, I suppose, and religion, and parenting, and specialty diets, and jet contrails, and vaccines…

Well, this rhetorical framing isn’t working at all.

*tape rewinding sound effect*

…And in American internet discourse, We the People are confident about many things, but particular, we are very, very confident about What Our Constitutional Rights Are. This, taken as a whole, is a very, very good thing. A free people should think about their liberties often, and be rightfully skeptical of policies which would infringe them. Fierce debate over where to draw lines when rights conflict is an essential element of good governance in a system of government like ours.

But the unfortunate side effect of this laudable hashtag fierceness is that people and pundits will often frame assertions about their Constitutional rights in the following, overly simplistic way: