No, there are countries that do not agree with the moral evaluation of freedom of speech that the US constitution and the Supreme Court made and make.
There is nothing to live up to. It’s not an issue of progress, it’s on issue of a different moral worldview.
Americans taking freedom of speech on top of everything else as axiomatic are ridiculous and arrogant. I think freedom of speech is important and I do think what happens in the UK is overreach, but I personally prefer putting human dignity above freedom of speech.
No, there are countries that do not agree with the moral evaluation of freedom of speech that the US constitution and the Supreme Court made and make.
That's not quite the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it is to understand that the authors of the US constitution didn't believe that any state-sanctioned approval of its citizens' speech was "moral." (Whether their intent has been faithfully upheld by later jurists and legislators is a different question.)
I think freedom of speech is important and I do think what happens in the UK is overreach, but I personally prefer putting human dignity above freedom of speech.
Keep thinking the issue through. You will eventually find yourself wondering how it can be moral for you (to say nothing of "dignified") to use violence to keep your fellow citizens or subjects from saying original but forbidden things.
I think my statement is quite correct and your reframing doesn’t change anything about that. It is and remains a moral evaluation.
Plus the believe of the axiomatic nature of freedom of speech just drips out of you. We just have different perspectives, I guess. No, I don’t think using violence to prevent speech always has to take away dignity. It does in the vast majority of cases, not every case, though.
Yep, that’s exactly the arrogance I’m talking about. You are completely blind to alternative moral worldviews. You cannot even conceive of them.
I suppose your thinking on this is parallel to mine on the death penalty. I cannot conceive of a worldview that includes the death penalty. I’m arrogant about that.
Sounds like we've found common ground, then. I'm opposed to the death penalty for the same reason I'm opposed to restrictions on speech: because governments sometimes get it wrong.
to use violence to keep your fellow citizens or subjects from saying original but forbidden things.
You're rather begging the question there. What constitutes originality - is it meant to be a proxy for innovative? What if I say something obnoxious but unoriginal, such as advocating genocide or harm of some group or other who have been systematically discriminated against in the past?
well that's why in good old America we've discovered how to innovate in the area of making free speech useless.
when you have a small but fervent religious population that takes any criticism as 'an attack on free speech' it marginalizes whatever the actual issue may be; when any issue can be trumped up to a philosophical issue instead of a pragmatic and factual one.
This is exactly my issue. It's not acceptable to say you want to infringe upon speech, but it's perfectly OK to advocate torture, death, imprisonment or suchlike for people you don't like. Of course, such actions are also restrictive of speech in two ways - directly, since being dead or incommunicado is an insurmountable barrier to expression, and indirectly, since members of the group in question are intimidated from speaking up - but since the deleterious effects on free speech are incidental to the proposed harm, constitutional modesty is preserved.
You're rather begging the question there. What constitutes originality - is it meant to be a proxy for innovative?
It's almost certain that someone would have tried to derail my point by citing the Skylarov case and other instances where we've sold free speech down the river in the name of preserving someone's business model. I used the qualifier "original" to avoid debates about the conflict between free speech and IP rights. It was sort of cowardly for me to do that, but there are only so many hours in the day.
What if I say something obnoxious but unoriginal, such as advocating genocide or harm of some group or other who have been systematically discriminated against in the past?
I think we have a pretty good standard in place now, which is that your words have to carry a more-or-less direct threat to a specific party in order to lose their First Amendment protection. Apart from that, and apart from cases where your speech constitutes someone else's IP or is the product of a crime such as espionage or child pornography, it's rare that the US government will be able to censor you. (Although they can certainly try.)
It's my position that no one can point to any lasting, demonstrable harm caused by the exercise of First Amendment rights. Even the much-loathed Citizens United decision turned out to be a nonissue in the last election. First Amendment libertarians say that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. We're right, and the countries that believe otherwise are wrong. If that's "arrogance," well, so be it.
"to use violence to keep your fellow citizens or subjects from saying original but forbidden things"
Imagine the scenario. A man is standing outside a gay bar shouting "I hate all you shit-stabbers, I'm going to kill you all" over and over.
My initial thought isn't "I'm so glad we don't infringe on his originality. I sure do hope that the police don't throw him in a cell overnight for a few hours until he's calmed down."
I'm not saying freedom of speech is bad, I'm saying that the moral intuition that someone being offensive with a plausible threat of violence isn't deserving of protection as free speech is quite a reasonable one.
Not supporting freedom of speech has a lot of consequences, so I think a moral case could be made. Also, not everybody living in a particular country necessarily agrees with government actions. For starters, the UK citizens who went to jail for twittering probably don't agree with their government on this issue.
You could - and should - definitely make a case that free speech is a good thing to have. But there are many other things that are good things to have and free speech is not going to help you one bit if you do what these twitter users did.
It's that old adage about yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. It's technically possible for you to do so, and likely you'll suffer the consequences afterwards if you are positively identified. For an encore try shouting 'bomb!' at JFK airport. There is nothing strawmannish about this, that's exactly the sort of thing these twitter users were doing. When you're active on a public medium you have to stand up for the consequences of your actions, that has nothing to do with free (political) speech.
It's not the same thing. One man was ranting about the airport. It's ok to investigate him, but it seems rather obvious it was just ranting.
The other two apparently made negative comments about british soldiers. That is nothing like yelling fire in a theatre.
And that was in the US, where he was supposedly exercising his right to free speech.
Calling for people to die will get you in trouble, no matter what the medium. For the record, the full text of the 'negative comments' post about British Soldiers read in its entirety:
"People gassin about the deaths of Soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed.. The women who have.been raped.. The children who have been sliced up..! Your enemy's were the Taliban not innocent harmful familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE FOKKIN SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soldiers grave & wish him hell because thats where is going.."
Not exactly a text for which you should go to jail, but then neither was the one about killing the president. Neither one of them is an example of responsible online behaviour either and I'm not one bit surprised that trouble came of it. The world we live in today is hair trigger about stuff like this and it has nothing to do with free speech. It's simply because a lot of people are very nervous and would rather err on the side of caution and jail a few innocents than they would take a chance and be left holding the bag if things turned out bad.
If you don't take that into account when you act then you can go around and blame the system, but that's like blaming the weather for being rained upon.
Personally I think the authorities (on both sides of the pond) should just investigate to send the message that there is some oversight but it should never make it to prosecution. Unfortunately fear & politics seem to go hand in hand this decade (and probably a few to come) so over-reaction will be the norm.
The one about the soldiers is almost the most worrying, because it doesn't even make any threats.
The one about Obama seems to make a much more detailed threat than the one about "burning the airport", too.
Anyway, this can't be resolved in a HN thread...
I must admit, I always wonder what is the better strategy: keeping your mouth shut and trying to make the best out of circumstances, or becoming vocal and trying to change things. In theory I think remaining silent is much better, but it is hard to fight those urges of talking too much.
Just saying this because obviously free speech is not working out online.
Actually I am not an expert on the free speech issue as practiced in the US, but doesn't it apply to opinions, mostly? You can't say "1000$ to the person who first kills person X" and then expect to get away because it was just free speech. I suppose the difference could be that expressing a death warrant is not an opinion, it is a call to action. But maybe if you phrased it differently ("soldiers should die"), you could get off the hook? Tricky subject...
That's the crux right there. Free Speech does not mean at all what the OP was referring to, and I tried to make that clear using a number of examples.
Yes, the United States has free speech enshrined in their basic legal concepts. But there are other countries where speech is freer than it is in the United States and there are ways to envision systems much freer still.
It all goes back to that sticks and stones rhyme, words really shouldn't matter, but actions do. Because words are powerful we tend to place some limits on what combinations of words are ok and which are not. Usually the ones that are not fall under the header 'incitement', and even in those cases I'd put the bigger part of the burden on the ones that let themselves be incited than on the speaker. In your $1000 example the speaker should probably be counted as someone who contracts someone else, that's beyond mere incitement.
Libel laws are funny in that way, the turn of phrase there is very subtle and can change (depending on the country and context, for instance satire) an innocent sentence into one that will get you into a lot of trouble. And it takes a lawyer and a judge to see the difference. 'You are a criminal' versus 'I think you are a criminal' can be all it takes.
There is nothing to live up to. It’s not an issue of progress, it’s on issue of a different moral worldview.
Americans taking freedom of speech on top of everything else as axiomatic are ridiculous and arrogant. I think freedom of speech is important and I do think what happens in the UK is overreach, but I personally prefer putting human dignity above freedom of speech.