8 ms·

Results this are why I vigorously defend even the outer fringes of free speech. "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first

Results this are why I vigorously defend even the outer fringes of free speech. "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."

matt321 4y ago
This law has good intentions but will be used to imprison political rivals and online gamers. The first link in the chain is forged, captain, get ready for a wild ride.
- ceres 4y ago
  Wait why would they go specifically after gamers?
  - showdeadtest111 4y ago
    Because gamers are the most oppressed minority.
    - theplumber 4y ago
      Note to myself: Remember to tick underrepresented minority on job aplications.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      we live in a society
  - cyberlurker 4y ago
    I don't think the reasons are good, but gamers often trash talk and bully each other in game. For example, Riot needed to ban people from typing “kys” in League of Legends because it means “kill your self” and they were worried about it. (Whether that is because they care about the players or their liability or both is not for me to decide)
    - TulliusCicero 4y ago
      That's a very strange way of phrasing this. Obviously if you're telling random other people to go kill themselves in a game, you should be banned, same as if you start hurting racial slurs or making threats or other asshole behavior.
      - showdeadtest111 4y ago
        Maybe in some other games like animal crossing or stardew valley multiplayer. If you haven't played league before you wouldn't understand.
        TulliusCicero 4y ago
        I have, in fact, played League before. And many other competitive online multiplayer games. Being an asshole online is unfortunately normalized among many players, which we can see from your comment.
      - cyberlurker 4y ago
        I think it’s hard to police this stuff. I could see someone sarcastically saying “kys” for forgetting to buy an item or something. Is it often used for bullying? Yea. I’m not going to draw the line at “kys”, but i don’t think it is as obvious as you make it out to be.
        TulliusCicero 4y ago
        I don't think it should be an autoban type of scenario, where if you type it you just get banned instantly. It should be a situation where you can report it, and then an employee can see what the context is, if there's proper logging in the game.
  - stuu99 4y ago
    Because the big media and tech companies hate computers that don't obey them. Microsoft, ibm, hp, intel and the like have been working on removing software ownership from the public purposely. They want a future where all bytes and instructions are encrypted. From 1960's to roughly the early 2000's, all computers you bought ran local software exe's in plain text , aka you could open up the .exe, .com or .dll file and reverse engineer it and restore missing functions to get older software running on newer systems. Valve, ms and the rest have been attacking us owning our own shit for over 2 decades now and they are trying to criminalize owning a general computer. MMO's were rebranded PC rpg's, so that the game industry could steal pc games and not give us the complete files for the game we were paying for to prevent piracy but they really want monopoly profits. You can find countless games who had their multiplayer networking code ripped out so game companies could disable their games remotely, that can't happen with gmaes in the 90's (quake, warcraft 1-3, starcraft 1 and diablo 1-2) because they were local applications. You got all the files and code to run the entire game locally. They want to take us back to vendor locked devices of the 60's with IBM mainsframe, the internet is one giant Personal planet sized computer toa software company and our old non hardware drm'd pc's are malfunctioning chips in their desire for monopoly profits. https://games.slashdot.org/story/22/03/25/0457243/owners-of-gran-turismo-7-locked-out-of-single-player-game-when-online-drm-servers-go-down#comments https://games.slashdot.org/story/22/03/25/0457243/owners-of-... What microsoft+ big media companies want the future to be: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html Piracy is just a scapegoat the corproate world is mass dispossessing the stupid and ignoring mmo/drm loving masses. https://torrentfreak.com/esa-reports-game-piracy-file-hosting-and-cheating-sites-to-us-government-211013/ https://torrentfreak.com/esa-reports-game-piracy-file-hostin... These "pirate" claims are just pro corporate propaganda, they want to eliminate software ownership. https://torrentfreak.com/major-persistent-video-game-pirates-investigated-by-esa-220430/ https://torrentfreak.com/major-persistent-video-game-pirates... Then see down here where tifca (intel, microsoft and the rest) is them cheering the public being so stupid. AKA they know they got it in the bag from the days of ultima online and everquest in 1999, then we got steam in 2003, all those "software as a service" apps are 100% proof our species are idiots. None of these programs need to be split into two exe's and run over a network, so we're losing our privacy and control of our pc's and computing devices. So the army of lobbyists is being paid big money to ban regular pc's as they lock down the internet with new 'trusted' hardware that hardware companies in co-operating with intel and microsoft have been working on for over 20 years. https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf
  - boredumb 4y ago
    It's probably just a joke. But after some thinking, it could be because it's a large congregation of """unsupervised""" teenagers (that are actually being surveilled) and when/if the courts were to read a transcript from your average group of 15 year old boys competing among each other out loud, then most of western societies perpetual pearl clutchers would have an aneurism despite it being mostly harmless and only do more harm in prosecuting then protecting as far as effect on peoples lives go.
labster 4y ago
That link has already sailed. Libel and slander are already illegal speech, as is inciting violence, as is yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, as is saying curse words on broadcast TV and radio.
- cronix 4y ago
  > as is yelling “fire” in a crowded theater You really should stop spreading that falsehood. It was overturned over 50 years ago. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    It's still valuable for finding people who are arguing in bad faith. Here's another one: make sure that the person you're arguing with about taxes understands how marginal tax rates work. People feel confident repeating things they've heard often, with a sarcastic smirk, because the ubiquity of the thing they're repeating gives them some security that if they're called on to defend those things, someone more knowledgeable will probably show up and help. The most depressing and ironic thing is when a self-proclaimed socialist cites the "crowded theater" thing, which was used to jail socialists speaking out against a war.
- canjobear 4y ago
  If you’re referring to US law, then yelling “fire” in a theater is indeed permitted under the Brandenburg v. Ohio standard.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    It was never really prohibited, Holmes was just being "cute" and making an analogy to justify locking up a guy for protesting the draft.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  > “fire” in a crowded theater, This is simply not correct. This was a dum analogy by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a case about a draft protest. He later overturned his own opinion in that case expanding free speech. > Libel and slander are already illegal speech, as is inciting violence Libel and slander mean the same thing. You're thinking of libel and defamation. All of these are extremely narrowly defined in American law.
lijogdfljk 4y ago
What are your thoughts on free speech televised? Which is a sister to the blurring line between old ramifications of free speech and new ramifications. Thoughts?
fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
Curious which jurisdiction you operate-from. If it’s within the United States, you probably haven’t done much else but “vigorously defend” the ideology for most of your life. There’s never been an absolute right to freedom of speech, and each jurisdiction takes a different approach; this is even more pronounced internationally.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  The United States has more freedom of speech than just about anywhere else, although it was a recent development, only coming into its full modern form after a hard fight the 1970s.
  - lovich 4y ago
    It does, while noticeably not being 100% free
  - cromulent 4y ago
    Hmmm. I was reminded of the "free speech zones" when I read your comment. It's hard to judge, of course, but the USA is 42nd in freedom of speech from one press/media perspective. https://rsf.org/en/index https://rsf.org/en/index
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      The RSF index includes a lot of things that are beyond the freedom of speech in terms of no law being passed to infringe it, like "economic constraints linked to non-state actors (advertisers and commercial partners)," or "cultural constraints, including pressure on journalists to not question certain bastions of power or influence or not cover certain issues because it would run counter to the prevailing culture in the country or territory."
yifanl 4y ago
Define speech
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
How does forcing a person to defend their harassing behavior in court do anything to curtail free speech?
- ryanbytes 4y ago
  How much do you have to spend on court costs?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    In the US possibly $0. This is a criticism of court systems rather than the actual bullying penalty code being discussed though.
chrisfosterelli 4y ago
Is there any practical evidence of this slippery slope? Here in Canada hate speech, defamation, and obscenity have been illegal for a while. The idea is that you have freedom of expression, but it only extends as far as it doesn't infringe on another person's entitlement to a life free from discrimination & harassment. I don't feel like this has been a slippery slope for us, only a different place to draw the lines between your rights and mine than where America does. But I'd be curious if there's any practical examples of this happening in other countries.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  The problem with successfully silencing people is that you tend not to hear about it. Still, some examples can be found[0]. Take one where France used their hate speech laws to ban dissent from their foreign policy: >In 2015, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for violating restrictions against hate speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts that advocated a boycott of Israel — “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,” the shirts read — which, the court ruled, violated French law that “prescribes imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000 for parties that ‘provoke discrimination, hatred or violence toward a person or group of people on grounds of their origin, their belonging or their not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race or a certain religion.'” Or in the United Kingdom, >In 2010, a militant atheist was given a six-month suspended sentence for leaving anti-Christian and anti-Islam fliers in a religious room of the Liverpool airport; according to the BBC, “jurors found him guilty of causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment.” [0] https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-laws-are-often-used-to-suppress-and-punish-left-wing-viewpoints/ https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    The US has their "matter of national security" bs for that. The Occupy movement was repeatedly referred to as a terrorist thread by the FBI and DHS to justify the brutal crackdowns. And if that doesn't work to silence someone, just declare your victim insane and have them mangled by one psychiatrist after the other for the rest of their life. That even works pretty much everywhere. There's a thousand ways to achieve this that don't involve limiting freedom of speech. The cases you cited are pretty much the opposite of that. They were public trials for everyone to follow. The whole "freedom of speech" story in the US is the most successful brain washing story on this planet. You hammer this into children's brains from young age on, to make sure it becomes the knee jerk reaction to everything that the government does to fuck you over. Having only two political parties with candidates from the elite, detached from reality. Political decisions don't get made on the basis of what's best for the people, just do the opposite of what the other party would do. Working two jobs at minimum wage to feed your family. No health insurance, if you get sick just chew pain killers all day and keep working. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. US Life expectancy on the decline for several years in a row. "At least I can complain about it, so everything is fine. Just imagine I'd live in a country where I couldn't insult and verbally abuse others!"
minsc_and_boo 4y ago
Free speech was never about consequent-free speech. The philosophers behind Free Speech even concluded that expression which harms individuals should be prevented, aka harm principle: > That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Tommyrot and Poppycock! That is more or less the precise opposite reading of "The Harm Principle" that Mill intended. You're missing the nuance of what these words meant: > the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Mill then set out extremely limited definition of harm that excluded more or less all the incidental, implied and perceived harms that are problematic and open to abuse. In this (Mill's) context harm means harm, like as assault, robbery, imprisonment and so on. If ever you want to find the canonical example of a "slippery slope" it's the perpetual reinterpretation of this principle to move the goalposts and extend the definition of "harm". In many ways I think Mill did moral philsophy a disservice by so loosely stating something that, on face value, is so open to misinterpretation.
  - minsc_and_boo 4y ago
    >That is more or less the precise opposite reading of "The Harm Principle" that Mill intended. JSM separated the Harm Principle from the Offense Principle, but still said that free speech should be curtailed when the expression harms individuals. Nowhere does JSM say freedom of speech is freedom from all consequences.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      Is it just me or is: "freedom of speech is freedom from all consequences" a straw man that literally no philosopher or reasonable thinker ever said? Where does that even come from?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
"Hard problems" in the social realm are nearly always the result of two independent entities, where each entity should be entitled to their full rights, but those rights are in conflict. Think the abortion debate (right of a woman's bodily autonomy vs. right of the fetus/child), gun debate (right to bear arms vs right to not get shot in school or the grocery store), transgender people in sports debate (right of individuals to compete in sports vs. right of other competitors to have a fair playing field). Thus, when it comes to free speech, while I used to be more of a "free speech absolutist", I think the past 10-20 years have shown real dangers of unlimited free speech, especially that enabled by technology and anonymity. I'm not necessarily arguing one way or the other on any particular case, only emphasizing that I don't think an "absolutist" position makes sense - there have always been limits on free speech, even in the US. It's a hard problem precisely because words can have such serious consequences. I mean, look at the mobs that were whipped up against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Where do you draw the line there on free speech and inciting murder?
shadowgovt 4y ago
In context, this speech is given on the subject of trampling the civil rights of an individual suspected of a crime. That has nothing to do with criminalizing certain behavior, especially behaviors with evidence linking them to increased suicides among young people. And the risk of witch-hunts is much rarer in this context, where the possibly illegal behavior is often auto-transcribed due to the text or audiovisual media that was used to transmit it.

matt321 4y ago

This law has good intentions but will be used to imprison political rivals and online gamers. The first link in the chain is forged, captain, get ready for a wild ride.

ceres 4y ago
Wait why would they go specifically after gamers?
- showdeadtest111 4y ago
  Because gamers are the most oppressed minority.
  - theplumber 4y ago
    Note to myself: Remember to tick underrepresented minority on job aplications.
  - bobkazamakis 4y ago
    we live in a society
- cyberlurker 4y ago
  I don't think the reasons are good, but gamers often trash talk and bully each other in game. For example, Riot needed to ban people from typing “kys” in League of Legends because it means “kill your self” and they were worried about it. (Whether that is because they care about the players or their liability or both is not for me to decide)
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    That's a very strange way of phrasing this. Obviously if you're telling random other people to go kill themselves in a game, you should be banned, same as if you start hurting racial slurs or making threats or other asshole behavior.
    - showdeadtest111 4y ago
      Maybe in some other games like animal crossing or stardew valley multiplayer. If you haven't played league before you wouldn't understand.
      - TulliusCicero 4y ago
        I have, in fact, played League before. And many other competitive online multiplayer games. Being an asshole online is unfortunately normalized among many players, which we can see from your comment.
    - cyberlurker 4y ago
      I think it’s hard to police this stuff. I could see someone sarcastically saying “kys” for forgetting to buy an item or something. Is it often used for bullying? Yea. I’m not going to draw the line at “kys”, but i don’t think it is as obvious as you make it out to be.
      - TulliusCicero 4y ago
        I don't think it should be an autoban type of scenario, where if you type it you just get banned instantly. It should be a situation where you can report it, and then an employee can see what the context is, if there's proper logging in the game.
- stuu99 4y ago
  Because the big media and tech companies hate computers that don't obey them. Microsoft, ibm, hp, intel and the like have been working on removing software ownership from the public purposely. They want a future where all bytes and instructions are encrypted. From 1960's to roughly the early 2000's, all computers you bought ran local software exe's in plain text , aka you could open up the .exe, .com or .dll file and reverse engineer it and restore missing functions to get older software running on newer systems. Valve, ms and the rest have been attacking us owning our own shit for over 2 decades now and they are trying to criminalize owning a general computer. MMO's were rebranded PC rpg's, so that the game industry could steal pc games and not give us the complete files for the game we were paying for to prevent piracy but they really want monopoly profits. You can find countless games who had their multiplayer networking code ripped out so game companies could disable their games remotely, that can't happen with gmaes in the 90's (quake, warcraft 1-3, starcraft 1 and diablo 1-2) because they were local applications. You got all the files and code to run the entire game locally. They want to take us back to vendor locked devices of the 60's with IBM mainsframe, the internet is one giant Personal planet sized computer toa software company and our old non hardware drm'd pc's are malfunctioning chips in their desire for monopoly profits. https://games.slashdot.org/story/22/03/25/0457243/owners-of-gran-turismo-7-locked-out-of-single-player-game-when-online-drm-servers-go-down#comments https://games.slashdot.org/story/22/03/25/0457243/owners-of-... What microsoft+ big media companies want the future to be: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html Piracy is just a scapegoat the corproate world is mass dispossessing the stupid and ignoring mmo/drm loving masses. https://torrentfreak.com/esa-reports-game-piracy-file-hosting-and-cheating-sites-to-us-government-211013/ https://torrentfreak.com/esa-reports-game-piracy-file-hostin... These "pirate" claims are just pro corporate propaganda, they want to eliminate software ownership. https://torrentfreak.com/major-persistent-video-game-pirates-investigated-by-esa-220430/ https://torrentfreak.com/major-persistent-video-game-pirates... Then see down here where tifca (intel, microsoft and the rest) is them cheering the public being so stupid. AKA they know they got it in the bag from the days of ultima online and everquest in 1999, then we got steam in 2003, all those "software as a service" apps are 100% proof our species are idiots. None of these programs need to be split into two exe's and run over a network, so we're losing our privacy and control of our pc's and computing devices. So the army of lobbyists is being paid big money to ban regular pc's as they lock down the internet with new 'trusted' hardware that hardware companies in co-operating with intel and microsoft have been working on for over 20 years. https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf
- boredumb 4y ago
  It's probably just a joke. But after some thinking, it could be because it's a large congregation of """unsupervised""" teenagers (that are actually being surveilled) and when/if the courts were to read a transcript from your average group of 15 year old boys competing among each other out loud, then most of western societies perpetual pearl clutchers would have an aneurism despite it being mostly harmless and only do more harm in prosecuting then protecting as far as effect on peoples lives go.

labster 4y ago

That link has already sailed. Libel and slander are already illegal speech, as is inciting violence, as is yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, as is saying curse words on broadcast TV and radio.

cronix 4y ago
> as is yelling “fire” in a crowded theater You really should stop spreading that falsehood. It was overturned over 50 years ago. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
- pessimizer 4y ago
  It's still valuable for finding people who are arguing in bad faith. Here's another one: make sure that the person you're arguing with about taxes understands how marginal tax rates work. People feel confident repeating things they've heard often, with a sarcastic smirk, because the ubiquity of the thing they're repeating gives them some security that if they're called on to defend those things, someone more knowledgeable will probably show up and help. The most depressing and ironic thing is when a self-proclaimed socialist cites the "crowded theater" thing, which was used to jail socialists speaking out against a war.
canjobear 4y ago
If you’re referring to US law, then yelling “fire” in a theater is indeed permitted under the Brandenburg v. Ohio standard.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  It was never really prohibited, Holmes was just being "cute" and making an analogy to justify locking up a guy for protesting the draft.
ch4s3 4y ago
> “fire” in a crowded theater, This is simply not correct. This was a dum analogy by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a case about a draft protest. He later overturned his own opinion in that case expanding free speech. > Libel and slander are already illegal speech, as is inciting violence Libel and slander mean the same thing. You're thinking of libel and defamation. All of these are extremely narrowly defined in American law.

lijogdfljk 4y ago

What are your thoughts on free speech televised? Which is a sister to the blurring line between old ramifications of free speech and new ramifications. Thoughts?

fleetwoodsnack 4y ago

Curious which jurisdiction you operate-from. If it’s within the United States, you probably haven’t done much else but “vigorously defend” the ideology for most of your life. There’s never been an absolute right to freedom of speech, and each jurisdiction takes a different approach; this is even more pronounced internationally.

whatshisface 4y ago
The United States has more freedom of speech than just about anywhere else, although it was a recent development, only coming into its full modern form after a hard fight the 1970s.
- lovich 4y ago
  It does, while noticeably not being 100% free
- cromulent 4y ago
  Hmmm. I was reminded of the "free speech zones" when I read your comment. It's hard to judge, of course, but the USA is 42nd in freedom of speech from one press/media perspective. https://rsf.org/en/index https://rsf.org/en/index
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    The RSF index includes a lot of things that are beyond the freedom of speech in terms of no law being passed to infringe it, like "economic constraints linked to non-state actors (advertisers and commercial partners)," or "cultural constraints, including pressure on journalists to not question certain bastions of power or influence or not cover certain issues because it would run counter to the prevailing culture in the country or territory."

yifanl 4y ago

Define speech

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

How does forcing a person to defend their harassing behavior in court do anything to curtail free speech?

ryanbytes 4y ago
How much do you have to spend on court costs?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  In the US possibly $0. This is a criticism of court systems rather than the actual bullying penalty code being discussed though.

chrisfosterelli 4y ago

Is there any practical evidence of this slippery slope? Here in Canada hate speech, defamation, and obscenity have been illegal for a while. The idea is that you have freedom of expression, but it only extends as far as it doesn't infringe on another person's entitlement to a life free from discrimination & harassment. I don't feel like this has been a slippery slope for us, only a different place to draw the lines between your rights and mine than where America does. But I'd be curious if there's any practical examples of this happening in other countries.

whatshisface 4y ago
The problem with successfully silencing people is that you tend not to hear about it. Still, some examples can be found[0]. Take one where France used their hate speech laws to ban dissent from their foreign policy: >In 2015, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for violating restrictions against hate speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts that advocated a boycott of Israel — “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,” the shirts read — which, the court ruled, violated French law that “prescribes imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000 for parties that ‘provoke discrimination, hatred or violence toward a person or group of people on grounds of their origin, their belonging or their not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race or a certain religion.'” Or in the United Kingdom, >In 2010, a militant atheist was given a six-month suspended sentence for leaving anti-Christian and anti-Islam fliers in a religious room of the Liverpool airport; according to the BBC, “jurors found him guilty of causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment.” [0] https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-laws-are-often-used-to-suppress-and-punish-left-wing-viewpoints/ https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  The US has their "matter of national security" bs for that. The Occupy movement was repeatedly referred to as a terrorist thread by the FBI and DHS to justify the brutal crackdowns. And if that doesn't work to silence someone, just declare your victim insane and have them mangled by one psychiatrist after the other for the rest of their life. That even works pretty much everywhere. There's a thousand ways to achieve this that don't involve limiting freedom of speech. The cases you cited are pretty much the opposite of that. They were public trials for everyone to follow. The whole "freedom of speech" story in the US is the most successful brain washing story on this planet. You hammer this into children's brains from young age on, to make sure it becomes the knee jerk reaction to everything that the government does to fuck you over. Having only two political parties with candidates from the elite, detached from reality. Political decisions don't get made on the basis of what's best for the people, just do the opposite of what the other party would do. Working two jobs at minimum wage to feed your family. No health insurance, if you get sick just chew pain killers all day and keep working. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. US Life expectancy on the decline for several years in a row. "At least I can complain about it, so everything is fine. Just imagine I'd live in a country where I couldn't insult and verbally abuse others!"

minsc_and_boo 4y ago

Free speech was never about consequent-free speech. The philosophers behind Free Speech even concluded that expression which harms individuals should be prevented, aka harm principle: > That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Tommyrot and Poppycock! That is more or less the precise opposite reading of "The Harm Principle" that Mill intended. You're missing the nuance of what these words meant: > the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Mill then set out extremely limited definition of harm that excluded more or less all the incidental, implied and perceived harms that are problematic and open to abuse. In this (Mill's) context harm means harm, like as assault, robbery, imprisonment and so on. If ever you want to find the canonical example of a "slippery slope" it's the perpetual reinterpretation of this principle to move the goalposts and extend the definition of "harm". In many ways I think Mill did moral philsophy a disservice by so loosely stating something that, on face value, is so open to misinterpretation.
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  >That is more or less the precise opposite reading of "The Harm Principle" that Mill intended. JSM separated the Harm Principle from the Offense Principle, but still said that free speech should be curtailed when the expression harms individuals. Nowhere does JSM say freedom of speech is freedom from all consequences.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Is it just me or is: "freedom of speech is freedom from all consequences" a straw man that literally no philosopher or reasonable thinker ever said? Where does that even come from?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

"Hard problems" in the social realm are nearly always the result of two independent entities, where each entity should be entitled to their full rights, but those rights are in conflict. Think the abortion debate (right of a woman's bodily autonomy vs. right of the fetus/child), gun debate (right to bear arms vs right to not get shot in school or the grocery store), transgender people in sports debate (right of individuals to compete in sports vs. right of other competitors to have a fair playing field). Thus, when it comes to free speech, while I used to be more of a "free speech absolutist", I think the past 10-20 years have shown real dangers of unlimited free speech, especially that enabled by technology and anonymity. I'm not necessarily arguing one way or the other on any particular case, only emphasizing that I don't think an "absolutist" position makes sense - there have always been limits on free speech, even in the US. It's a hard problem precisely because words can have such serious consequences. I mean, look at the mobs that were whipped up against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Where do you draw the line there on free speech and inciting murder?

shadowgovt 4y ago

In context, this speech is given on the subject of trampling the civil rights of an individual suspected of a crime. That has nothing to do with criminalizing certain behavior, especially behaviors with evidence linking them to increased suicides among young people. And the risk of witch-hunts is much rarer in this context, where the possibly illegal behavior is often auto-transcribed due to the text or audiovisual media that was used to transmit it.