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That's where the distinction between "hate" and "violence" comes in. (at least in the USA) "Let's kill all the $X" is a call for violence. "I hate $X" isn't.

That's where the distinction between "hate" and "violence" comes in. (at least in the USA) "Let's kill all the $X" is a call for violence. "I hate $X" isn't. It's hateful, but observably some values of $X are currently acceptable while others aren't, depending on what direction the popular outrage trends are heading. Should "I hate the rich/politicians/corporations/nazis/capitalists/white males/etc" be illegal speech? That's quite a can of worms. These free speech arguments are sort of like the government wanting secure encryption, except that the they should still be able to break it. Encryption is either secure for both legal and illegal uses, or it isn't. In the same way, it's semantically unresolvable to have legally-protected free speech for acceptable speech only. Any argument for free speech necessarily empowers unacceptable speech, and any argument against free speech necessarily criminalizes acceptable speech.

didibus 9y ago
Or you know, we could setup a powerful system of laws and judges, with multiple recourse to overrule and get decisions reevaluated, where details of a particular case could be thoroughly analysed, and debated, with a professional representative on either side, and we could eventually rule what seems to be the most reasonable given the concrete case. Honestly, this isn't a computer algorithm. We have the capacity to judge different speech in different contexts.
- kirillkh 9y ago
  I'd rather have a specific system of rules governing what I can and cannot say than discover post factum that what I said was illegal based on lawyers' consensus. While realistically such consensus is required in some cases anyway due to the imprecise nature of lawmaking, we should still strive for clear ruleset as a baseline, precisely so that the little guy is as informed of his rights as he reasonably can be.
  - didibus 9y ago
    Sure, there could be common guidelines. I'm also talking civil, bad speech could maybe get you fined, or banned from certain public speaking facilities, if proven by court of law that you acted inappropriately. I mean we have these already, and we manage just fine. Defamation and public indecency for example. And it doesn't need go very far. Inciting violence, threats to ones well being or insults towards a group, spoken to a crowd, say 10+ people, either verbally, or written, or gestured. That would include any medium which assumed an audience of more then 10 people. Yes, I'd include online forums, tweets, etc in that. Like, I can't think of any socially relevent commentary that needs you say things of that sort, unless its because you're basically rebuting against someone else doing the same. And again, don't need to jail people, a fine would be a good start. You can even express very inappropriate ideas without resorting to these. For example: "If X were truly less intelligent, it could be that this alone would explain why they are poorer overall, and so, no amount of extra care would help, because their intelligence is an innate limitation." No insults, no threats, no violence. Yet still incredibly controversial. Now the people you'd say this to might be tempted to insult you back, but if they did, they'd be fined, so instead they'd also have to be civil. For example: "That's true, but there's no proof that X are innately less intelligent, and there's known examples of Xs which have demonstrated higher then average intelligence, so its a moot argument, and one that seems to imply a certain innate bias against X from Y. If it were true, and this shows it, that Y had an innate racism against X, then its possible Y wants to keep X poor." Please prove me otherwise, but I don't see what's so hard about enforcing some civility in speech when expressed to a sizable audience.
    - kirillkh 9y ago
      Other people gave you enough arguments against censorship above. I'll just add that "Inciting violence, threats to ones well being or insults towards a group" are all quite vague and thus contradict the goal of having a clear ruleset.
      - didibus 9y ago
        I understand your point, and others point. But I'm not seing real arguments that aren't just: "believe it! the government will use this to censor and oppress the people, and we'll all end up in a dystopian authoritarian regime with our freedoms gone, and everyone afraid to speak up." Maybe, but probably more likely we'll just end up where media and public discourse just becomes slightly more civil, tones down insults and focueses a little more on substance to make its claims. I similarly don't have a way to prove this would be the outcome, I admit. I rely on a different premise, that we're a reasonable democracy, and that just as we work to fight collusion and corruption, we'd manage to control abuse of such laws in cases where they'd be used to oppress and control in a non democratic way. I feel if you don't believe our society can do this, then we're doomed to lose our freedoms to an authoritative regime anyways.
- white-flame 9y ago
  In theory, yes, but we are also a system of due process. It's not reasonable to expect that if the law says something is illegal, and a person is shown to have done it, that the good judgment of the system will understand and not prosecute. Things like self-defense and fair use are specifically encoded into the law, not just unspoken common sense. And that's not even getting into legal/political careers, lobbying, etc, that entrench the system to introduce and over-enforce technicalities. The judgment of most of the court activity is focused on whether or not someone broke the law, not whether the law is "reasonable". That's a much bigger battle that can't be reasonably expected to be fought in any individual case, and ideally should be done before signing into law, not after. The law, as written, should apply to all cases and all sides equally. Justice being blind and all. The history of free speech in the USA has had it pretty wide open, and these issues are about whether and how much to constrain it. That means criminalizing or penalizing in some way speech that used to be free, bringing up all the issues above and in my last post.
  - didibus 9y ago
    Is that so of civil law? It was my understanding civil law is specifically designed for this, that is, promoting civility amongst people. Courteous debate and disagreement is possible, even if one argues the other is a monkey. Such speech promotes arguments and content over appeals to hateful emotions, ridicule, and fear. The latter type of speech, to me, are actually psychological weapon of anti-free speech. They target someones else thoughts and speech, by inciting fear and blocking out reason. Insulting someone, calling them names, threatening their well being, shouting at them, and inciting others to do the same, those are all tactics to shut out the targeted individuals. Make their voices irrelevant, ignored, and their will to speak smaller in fear of retribution. Now I think we're smart enough to find regulation that are smart enough to restrict only that kind of speech, and if it's non obvious, I'm okay sitting on the side of allowing it. But some of today's speech is just blatantly the latter, and thats true in all political spheres, and even in most apolitical spheres.
    - white-flame 9y ago
      "Civil" law (person vs person) is for damages which aren't "Criminal" (government vs person), usually disagreements that leave one party burdened with countable damages and seeking restitution from the other. Sure, if somebody uses manipulative speech to instigate damage that might go to civil court, but that's because of the damage, not because of the speech. I have no idea why you think those things you list should be legally actionable in and of themselves. The fact that people are petty and appeal to lesser things like this are really cultural failings, not legal failings. You can't legislate people into being (subjectively) well-tempered and reasonable in their beliefs and daily interactions. We have restrictions on Commercial Speech such that commercial exchange and competition is to be around truthfully presented products, which is pretty objective. Stuff like libel also hinges on the truth of what's being said which again can usually be tested. The issues you list are far more nebulous and subjective. Anybody could claim that they felt threatened by another's ideas, claiming a conspiracy to silence them exists, etc. These exact tactics are currently in use to silence and manipulate others in the same way. It's simply a war of propaganda on both sides of these "tools". I think the legal notion of none of this stuff mattering unless actual damage is incurred, or actionable threats of real damage have been made, is reasonable. Otherwise, you're falling into pre-crime fallacies. And besides, let's not continue to expand the litigiousness of our society by making every nitpick and disagreement a legal issue.

didibus 9y ago

Or you know, we could setup a powerful system of laws and judges, with multiple recourse to overrule and get decisions reevaluated, where details of a particular case could be thoroughly analysed, and debated, with a professional representative on either side, and we could eventually rule what seems to be the most reasonable given the concrete case. Honestly, this isn't a computer algorithm. We have the capacity to judge different speech in different contexts.

kirillkh 9y ago
I'd rather have a specific system of rules governing what I can and cannot say than discover post factum that what I said was illegal based on lawyers' consensus. While realistically such consensus is required in some cases anyway due to the imprecise nature of lawmaking, we should still strive for clear ruleset as a baseline, precisely so that the little guy is as informed of his rights as he reasonably can be.
- didibus 9y ago
  Sure, there could be common guidelines. I'm also talking civil, bad speech could maybe get you fined, or banned from certain public speaking facilities, if proven by court of law that you acted inappropriately. I mean we have these already, and we manage just fine. Defamation and public indecency for example. And it doesn't need go very far. Inciting violence, threats to ones well being or insults towards a group, spoken to a crowd, say 10+ people, either verbally, or written, or gestured. That would include any medium which assumed an audience of more then 10 people. Yes, I'd include online forums, tweets, etc in that. Like, I can't think of any socially relevent commentary that needs you say things of that sort, unless its because you're basically rebuting against someone else doing the same. And again, don't need to jail people, a fine would be a good start. You can even express very inappropriate ideas without resorting to these. For example: "If X were truly less intelligent, it could be that this alone would explain why they are poorer overall, and so, no amount of extra care would help, because their intelligence is an innate limitation." No insults, no threats, no violence. Yet still incredibly controversial. Now the people you'd say this to might be tempted to insult you back, but if they did, they'd be fined, so instead they'd also have to be civil. For example: "That's true, but there's no proof that X are innately less intelligent, and there's known examples of Xs which have demonstrated higher then average intelligence, so its a moot argument, and one that seems to imply a certain innate bias against X from Y. If it were true, and this shows it, that Y had an innate racism against X, then its possible Y wants to keep X poor." Please prove me otherwise, but I don't see what's so hard about enforcing some civility in speech when expressed to a sizable audience.
  - kirillkh 9y ago
    Other people gave you enough arguments against censorship above. I'll just add that "Inciting violence, threats to ones well being or insults towards a group" are all quite vague and thus contradict the goal of having a clear ruleset.
    - didibus 9y ago
      I understand your point, and others point. But I'm not seing real arguments that aren't just: "believe it! the government will use this to censor and oppress the people, and we'll all end up in a dystopian authoritarian regime with our freedoms gone, and everyone afraid to speak up." Maybe, but probably more likely we'll just end up where media and public discourse just becomes slightly more civil, tones down insults and focueses a little more on substance to make its claims. I similarly don't have a way to prove this would be the outcome, I admit. I rely on a different premise, that we're a reasonable democracy, and that just as we work to fight collusion and corruption, we'd manage to control abuse of such laws in cases where they'd be used to oppress and control in a non democratic way. I feel if you don't believe our society can do this, then we're doomed to lose our freedoms to an authoritative regime anyways.
white-flame 9y ago
In theory, yes, but we are also a system of due process. It's not reasonable to expect that if the law says something is illegal, and a person is shown to have done it, that the good judgment of the system will understand and not prosecute. Things like self-defense and fair use are specifically encoded into the law, not just unspoken common sense. And that's not even getting into legal/political careers, lobbying, etc, that entrench the system to introduce and over-enforce technicalities. The judgment of most of the court activity is focused on whether or not someone broke the law, not whether the law is "reasonable". That's a much bigger battle that can't be reasonably expected to be fought in any individual case, and ideally should be done before signing into law, not after. The law, as written, should apply to all cases and all sides equally. Justice being blind and all. The history of free speech in the USA has had it pretty wide open, and these issues are about whether and how much to constrain it. That means criminalizing or penalizing in some way speech that used to be free, bringing up all the issues above and in my last post.
- didibus 9y ago
  Is that so of civil law? It was my understanding civil law is specifically designed for this, that is, promoting civility amongst people. Courteous debate and disagreement is possible, even if one argues the other is a monkey. Such speech promotes arguments and content over appeals to hateful emotions, ridicule, and fear. The latter type of speech, to me, are actually psychological weapon of anti-free speech. They target someones else thoughts and speech, by inciting fear and blocking out reason. Insulting someone, calling them names, threatening their well being, shouting at them, and inciting others to do the same, those are all tactics to shut out the targeted individuals. Make their voices irrelevant, ignored, and their will to speak smaller in fear of retribution. Now I think we're smart enough to find regulation that are smart enough to restrict only that kind of speech, and if it's non obvious, I'm okay sitting on the side of allowing it. But some of today's speech is just blatantly the latter, and thats true in all political spheres, and even in most apolitical spheres.
  - white-flame 9y ago
    "Civil" law (person vs person) is for damages which aren't "Criminal" (government vs person), usually disagreements that leave one party burdened with countable damages and seeking restitution from the other. Sure, if somebody uses manipulative speech to instigate damage that might go to civil court, but that's because of the damage, not because of the speech. I have no idea why you think those things you list should be legally actionable in and of themselves. The fact that people are petty and appeal to lesser things like this are really cultural failings, not legal failings. You can't legislate people into being (subjectively) well-tempered and reasonable in their beliefs and daily interactions. We have restrictions on Commercial Speech such that commercial exchange and competition is to be around truthfully presented products, which is pretty objective. Stuff like libel also hinges on the truth of what's being said which again can usually be tested. The issues you list are far more nebulous and subjective. Anybody could claim that they felt threatened by another's ideas, claiming a conspiracy to silence them exists, etc. These exact tactics are currently in use to silence and manipulate others in the same way. It's simply a war of propaganda on both sides of these "tools". I think the legal notion of none of this stuff mattering unless actual damage is incurred, or actionable threats of real damage have been made, is reasonable. Otherwise, you're falling into pre-crime fallacies. And besides, let's not continue to expand the litigiousness of our society by making every nitpick and disagreement a legal issue.