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Could you briefly outline how you think the USA has benefitted from this freedom, in a way that other rich Western countries haven’t? I guess I’m specifically t

Could you briefly outline how you think the USA has benefitted from this freedom, in a way that other rich Western countries haven’t? I guess I’m specifically thinking of Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, as all have broadly similar legal systems and robust judiciaries / policing, but not the singular focus on free speech.

exolymph 7y ago
How about a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions? The UK has gotten positively absurd. You can be forced to talk to cops about un-PC tweets. Example: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated-police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated... I'm against transphobia, but not being able to vocally dissent on a certain politically loaded topic... that shit is bad.
- peteretep 7y ago
  > a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions To be absolutely clear, "their opinions" here (in the example you gave, and presumably what you're referring to) is hate speech, which the US allows[0]. What advantages have accrued to the US through hate speech being protected, in your opinion? You say "a lot fewer people being jailed", but a quick scan of, say, UK cases prosecuted as hate speech[1] don't show examples of people being jailed for it. Do you have some statistics for "a lot [of] people being jailed or otherwise punished" for hate speech? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
  - brigandish 7y ago
    From The Times[1]: > More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums 13 forces declined to give the information which means it is very likely to be far higher. That was a couple of years ago and it appears to be increasing. As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. Even the anomolies would support it, like China, by using a historical chart. Are hate speech laws making Europe safer? Maybe it would be better if you tried to show that with some statistics. [1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day-in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...
    - peteretep 7y ago
      > As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. I suspect you have not done your research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... But, the question I originally asked remains, although I'll restate it to make it even easier to answer. You are tasked with convincing a newly formed republic to add a constitutional right to free speech like the USA, rather than free-ish speech like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. What are your arguments, based on these countries? What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?
      - serf 7y ago
        >What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly? I think it's non-trivial to try to quantify the effects of free speech. Freeform opinions off the top of my head: the definitions of 'hate speech' are too fluid, allowing argument opposition to massage the definition until your protest against them is considered to be hateful -- which then allows legal options to silence the opinion. The United States has been the culture leader of the Western world for some time, and the position seems to be ever-increasing. The United States is , and has been, the largest media producer ever . This allows the United States to own the most effective propaganda engine the world has ever seen. New branches of media genre and topic since the 1900s are almost entirely US-centric (Pop art, Beatniks, Flower power, hip-hop and rap culture, jazz, blues, etc) -- many of them included topics like public dissent and negative opinion of government that would've been entirely illegal in the majority of the rest of the world. They are all now ubiquitous throughout the world, spreading US-centric culture to all reaches. I think that freedom of speech helped to facilitate the role the United States now holds within 'Western Civilization', related to the above mentioned points. In my opinion, in our world, owning the world's biggest propaganda engine seems to be the most dominating weapon yet. Some questions : If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? The United States is that example, at the moment. At what point is a parity reached between damages of false-imprisonment, and actual damage accrued from the results of hate speech? What are the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with? Why do we attack social problems with less communication, and enforced communication, rather than with care for the ill individuals who display behavior outside the social healthy norm? Will macro actions help problems that stem from individual issues? And most importantly : Who gets to define our speech? Who holds the keys to the kingdom? Who deserves that trust?
  - Simple_Guy 7y ago
    hate speech is a recent invention by the leftists to suppress opposing political viewpoints.
- foldr 7y ago
  > Citing 30 potentially offensive tweets, the PC singled out a limerick Mr Miller had retweeted which questioned whether transgender women are biological women. It included the lines: "Your breasts are made of silicone, your vagina goes nowhere." The most disturbing aspect of this is that there is no possible limerick including those lines! As a Brit who's lived in the USA and UK, I'd say that people outside the UK probably get a misleading impression from new stories like this. I'd say that political discussion in the UK is actually freer in practice than in the US. There's certainly a wider range of opinion in the mainstream press, and Prime Ministers are more effectively held to account by Parliament than Presidents are held to account by congress and the judiciary. What the article describes is obviously an absurd waste of police time. However, no-one was even arrested, so it's hard to get excited about it as an example of someone's free speech rights being violated. I would happily take this kind of police harassment over the kind that leads to unarmed people being shot. It at least targets people who vaguely deserve it.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    In the US, there's this notion of a chilling effect. Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, police harassment has the effect of convincing people to stay silent. This is not exactly a win, and definitely the kind of tool that the less kind sort of government has used to suppress ideas they dislike.
    - foldr 7y ago
      Yes, sure, but this particular example of police harassment isn’t especially disturbing. Do you not think that, for example, routinely shooting unarmed black men probably has a bit more of a “chilling effect” than this does? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-... As I said, I’d be wary of forming your opinion of what political discourse is like in the UK from reading news stories. How much time have you actually spent in the UK?
      - Kalium 7y ago
- DanBC 7y ago
  You don't have to talk to police. If you're arrested it's probably a good idea to talk to police, with your lawyer (state funded or privately funded, you have the choice) at your side. Was anyone arrested in this case?
alkibiades 7y ago
are you really asking someone to justify how people benefit from freedom?
- peteretep 7y ago
  Yes. I think most people would strongly argue against "more freedom" when it came to their neighbors being "free" to store large quantities of explosives in their house, for example.
Kalium 7y ago
English defamation law makes it very easy to use libel to silence critics. In the US, by contrast, standards are much higher and silencing people much more difficult. The UK has not profited in any way, shape, form, or manner by this. It clogs up courts to no productive use and serves mainly to intimidate people into silence in the face of money. A free society is better without this.
- peteretep 7y ago
  Sure, that's a valid criticism. However -- and as far as I'm aware -- this isn't an issue in any of the other countries, suggesting that this is more a peculiarity of the British system, rather than an inherent feature of not allowing free speech?
  - Kalium 7y ago
    This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech. I would say that once you have free-ish speech, you have incentives for people to find ways to characterize speech they dislike for any reason as on the wrong side of the "ish" lines. The more flexible and privately actionable the enforcement is the more people will seek to find ways to use it for their own gain. To put it another way, how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens or the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons? Before any protests that this can be countered by clear legal drafting, perhaps consider how readily criticism of Israeli policies is cast as anti-Semitic hate speech.
    - peteretep 7y ago
      > This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech. Sure, but the Americans are innovative yo! (cf: Peter Thiel and Gawker) > how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens [...] to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons I do not want this, but I feel the press in the UK counter-balance that pretty effectively. Rich people seem to love bringing down other rich people > how easy do you want it to be for [...] the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons I feel like Americans hold a uniquely strong distrust of their government. If you're British you just have to suck up the fact that Parliament can pass any bill they like to do whatever the hell they like with a simple majority, but it's been _working ok_ for a few centuries now.
Simple_Guy 7y ago
Freedom is an end in and of itself. You don't have to show that a freedom will benefit a person in another way for it to have value.
- exolymph 7y ago
  No idea why this comment would be flagged, so I vouched for it.
Grue3 7y ago
Cultural domination. There used to be a time when countries such as UK, France, Germany were incredibly influential in areas such as music and film. Now they're barely a blip on the radar. All the famous movies and music artists come from the US. I'd argue that stronger protections of free speech is a major advantage that led to this happening.
- DanBC 7y ago
  I don't get it. If we outside the US lack freedom of speech how does that help US media companies, who'll have to obey our laws to sell in our territories?
  - Grue3 7y ago
    The part that gets exported, the pop culture so to speak, is as uncontroversial as it can be. But it's just the end product of a creative process. And this creative process works best in a free society. Moreover, pop culture is the tip of the iceberg standing atop all sorts of cultures and counter-cultures that make up the free society. It wouldn't have been created if free thought wasn't allowed to flourish.

exolymph 7y ago

How about a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions? The UK has gotten positively absurd. You can be forced to talk to cops about un-PC tweets. Example: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated-police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated... I'm against transphobia, but not being able to vocally dissent on a certain politically loaded topic... that shit is bad.

peteretep 7y ago
> a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions To be absolutely clear, "their opinions" here (in the example you gave, and presumably what you're referring to) is hate speech, which the US allows[0]. What advantages have accrued to the US through hate speech being protected, in your opinion? You say "a lot fewer people being jailed", but a quick scan of, say, UK cases prosecuted as hate speech[1] don't show examples of people being jailed for it. Do you have some statistics for "a lot [of] people being jailed or otherwise punished" for hate speech? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
- brigandish 7y ago
  From The Times[1]: > More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums 13 forces declined to give the information which means it is very likely to be far higher. That was a couple of years ago and it appears to be increasing. As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. Even the anomolies would support it, like China, by using a historical chart. Are hate speech laws making Europe safer? Maybe it would be better if you tried to show that with some statistics. [1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day-in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...
  - peteretep 7y ago
    > As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. I suspect you have not done your research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... But, the question I originally asked remains, although I'll restate it to make it even easier to answer. You are tasked with convincing a newly formed republic to add a constitutional right to free speech like the USA, rather than free-ish speech like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. What are your arguments, based on these countries? What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?
    - serf 7y ago
      >What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly? I think it's non-trivial to try to quantify the effects of free speech. Freeform opinions off the top of my head: the definitions of 'hate speech' are too fluid, allowing argument opposition to massage the definition until your protest against them is considered to be hateful -- which then allows legal options to silence the opinion. The United States has been the culture leader of the Western world for some time, and the position seems to be ever-increasing. The United States is , and has been, the largest media producer ever . This allows the United States to own the most effective propaganda engine the world has ever seen. New branches of media genre and topic since the 1900s are almost entirely US-centric (Pop art, Beatniks, Flower power, hip-hop and rap culture, jazz, blues, etc) -- many of them included topics like public dissent and negative opinion of government that would've been entirely illegal in the majority of the rest of the world. They are all now ubiquitous throughout the world, spreading US-centric culture to all reaches. I think that freedom of speech helped to facilitate the role the United States now holds within 'Western Civilization', related to the above mentioned points. In my opinion, in our world, owning the world's biggest propaganda engine seems to be the most dominating weapon yet. Some questions : If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? The United States is that example, at the moment. At what point is a parity reached between damages of false-imprisonment, and actual damage accrued from the results of hate speech? What are the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with? Why do we attack social problems with less communication, and enforced communication, rather than with care for the ill individuals who display behavior outside the social healthy norm? Will macro actions help problems that stem from individual issues? And most importantly : Who gets to define our speech? Who holds the keys to the kingdom? Who deserves that trust?
- Simple_Guy 7y ago
  hate speech is a recent invention by the leftists to suppress opposing political viewpoints.
foldr 7y ago
> Citing 30 potentially offensive tweets, the PC singled out a limerick Mr Miller had retweeted which questioned whether transgender women are biological women. It included the lines: "Your breasts are made of silicone, your vagina goes nowhere." The most disturbing aspect of this is that there is no possible limerick including those lines! As a Brit who's lived in the USA and UK, I'd say that people outside the UK probably get a misleading impression from new stories like this. I'd say that political discussion in the UK is actually freer in practice than in the US. There's certainly a wider range of opinion in the mainstream press, and Prime Ministers are more effectively held to account by Parliament than Presidents are held to account by congress and the judiciary. What the article describes is obviously an absurd waste of police time. However, no-one was even arrested, so it's hard to get excited about it as an example of someone's free speech rights being violated. I would happily take this kind of police harassment over the kind that leads to unarmed people being shot. It at least targets people who vaguely deserve it.
- Kalium 7y ago
  In the US, there's this notion of a chilling effect. Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, police harassment has the effect of convincing people to stay silent. This is not exactly a win, and definitely the kind of tool that the less kind sort of government has used to suppress ideas they dislike.
  - foldr 7y ago
    Yes, sure, but this particular example of police harassment isn’t especially disturbing. Do you not think that, for example, routinely shooting unarmed black men probably has a bit more of a “chilling effect” than this does? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-... As I said, I’d be wary of forming your opinion of what political discourse is like in the UK from reading news stories. How much time have you actually spent in the UK?
    - Kalium 7y ago
DanBC 7y ago
You don't have to talk to police. If you're arrested it's probably a good idea to talk to police, with your lawyer (state funded or privately funded, you have the choice) at your side. Was anyone arrested in this case?

alkibiades 7y ago

are you really asking someone to justify how people benefit from freedom?

peteretep 7y ago
Yes. I think most people would strongly argue against "more freedom" when it came to their neighbors being "free" to store large quantities of explosives in their house, for example.

Kalium 7y ago

English defamation law makes it very easy to use libel to silence critics. In the US, by contrast, standards are much higher and silencing people much more difficult. The UK has not profited in any way, shape, form, or manner by this. It clogs up courts to no productive use and serves mainly to intimidate people into silence in the face of money. A free society is better without this.

peteretep 7y ago
Sure, that's a valid criticism. However -- and as far as I'm aware -- this isn't an issue in any of the other countries, suggesting that this is more a peculiarity of the British system, rather than an inherent feature of not allowing free speech?
- Kalium 7y ago
  This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech. I would say that once you have free-ish speech, you have incentives for people to find ways to characterize speech they dislike for any reason as on the wrong side of the "ish" lines. The more flexible and privately actionable the enforcement is the more people will seek to find ways to use it for their own gain. To put it another way, how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens or the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons? Before any protests that this can be countered by clear legal drafting, perhaps consider how readily criticism of Israeli policies is cast as anti-Semitic hate speech.
  - peteretep 7y ago
    > This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech. Sure, but the Americans are innovative yo! (cf: Peter Thiel and Gawker) > how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens [...] to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons I do not want this, but I feel the press in the UK counter-balance that pretty effectively. Rich people seem to love bringing down other rich people > how easy do you want it to be for [...] the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons I feel like Americans hold a uniquely strong distrust of their government. If you're British you just have to suck up the fact that Parliament can pass any bill they like to do whatever the hell they like with a simple majority, but it's been _working ok_ for a few centuries now.

Simple_Guy 7y ago

Freedom is an end in and of itself. You don't have to show that a freedom will benefit a person in another way for it to have value.

exolymph 7y ago
No idea why this comment would be flagged, so I vouched for it.

Grue3 7y ago

Cultural domination. There used to be a time when countries such as UK, France, Germany were incredibly influential in areas such as music and film. Now they're barely a blip on the radar. All the famous movies and music artists come from the US. I'd argue that stronger protections of free speech is a major advantage that led to this happening.

DanBC 7y ago
I don't get it. If we outside the US lack freedom of speech how does that help US media companies, who'll have to obey our laws to sell in our territories?
- Grue3 7y ago
  The part that gets exported, the pop culture so to speak, is as uncontroversial as it can be. But it's just the end product of a creative process. And this creative process works best in a free society. Moreover, pop culture is the tip of the iceberg standing atop all sorts of cultures and counter-cultures that make up the free society. It wouldn't have been created if free thought wasn't allowed to flourish.