4 ms·

Free speech has absolutely been a central value, since the time of founding, as evidenced by its prominent spot in the 'Bill of Rights'. It hasn't always been f

by gojomo 4y ago

Free speech has absolutely been a central value, since the time of founding, as evidenced by its prominent spot in the 'Bill of Rights'. It hasn't always been fully respected, but for the most part the trends have been good. Only in a few narrow places & times might someone be "thrown in jail for vaguely insulting a man in blue's honor", and those are typically undone when the full process runs. The anecdote you share, with the important details filed-off, is that a woman was prosecuted not for merely "laughing at Jeff Sessions" but the more specific charge of disruptive behavior during a government hearing. Opinions differ as to whether he behavior rose to the level of prosecutable disruption, but an actual criminal jury of 12 citizens was somehow convinced to unanimously rule her behavior merited conviction. But then when the full legal process ran, an appelate judge called the conviction 'absurd', throwing out the jury's conviction. Ultimately, that demonstrates that like in other countries, officials in the US can misuse their powers-in-the-moment to attempt some amount of speech punishment, sure. But further that in the US, you can appeal to 'free speech' as a defense, and thus escape punishment for things that might keep you punished in the UK & other somewhat-liberal democracies with lesser speech protections.

fzeroracer 4y ago
The entire legal system is designed to punish people from the moment of arrest through conviction. Just because a rational judge realized that the case was absurd does not make the hoops she had to go through any less arduous. For example officer writing you a bogus speeding ticket that you can successfully challenge in court still requires time and effort to challenge, moreso than the officer did issuing it and that's very frequently done to poorer individuals. Which again, you ignore that we had (and in many places still have) an amount of people which simply did not have the same free speech rights that you say America was founded upon.
- gojomo 4y ago
  > The entire legal system is designed to punish people from the moment of arrest through conviction. This is indeed true, and a problem, and if you have ideas for how it can be improved, I'd be all ears. But, I've not found any country/region/system that doesn't have some level of this problem. The US's system, of required public formalities for certain charges to proceed, & certain guarantees of time limits, & avenues for release/acquittal, is pretty strong compared to anywhere else. (In the Netherlands, a software developer has been in custody for a couple months now without any specific charges/case being revealed to him or the public.) And, it's kind of inherent to any system for there to be some margins-of-abusive-discretion that are hard to eliminate, and time-limited steps-in-a-judicial-process where unavoidable "punishment" comes even from a process that hasn't decided yet. So mentioning the mere existence of such unevenness doesn't really say anything, either way, about the relative value the US culture, or legal system, puts on free speech. What does shed light on the value the US puts on free speech is whether such irreducible annoyances are larger or smaller, with respect to speech, than other countries and other eras. And at every step of US history, even dark days like say Wilson's persecution of WW1 draft-resisters, or Hoover's mid-20thC persecution of civil rights movements, the US had more space for speech, more defenses for those accused of speech-related offenses, and larger cultural/social support (in both legal/political action and the commercial 'blocking-and-tackling' of actually publishing & disseminating speech without outsider veto) than almost anywhere else. That's where people should be able to see the real, high, & enduring value the US has always put on free speech, if not neurotically obsessed on only negative examples, & scattered hypocrisies, blinding them to relative-magnitudes. If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech – but even in such inequality, almost all Americans had far more free speech than they'd have had anywhere else – then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality, while confirming its leading value of free speech.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    Well put in the first few paras. All systems need discretion, which can be abused. Also it's important not to fixate on the bad, there's plenty of good. The last 2, gets a bit self-congratulatory. Jim crow laws (until 1965). Emmet Till didn't get much rights to free wolf-whistling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till And plenty more. "If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech [...] then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality" If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop.
    - gojomo 4y ago
      > If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop. Not at all. Free speech is not binary. More is better, & the cultures that have consistently had more speech tolerance than elsewhere - like the US, in its formal documents & actual practices – are showing that free speech is a more central value to them.
      - fzeroracer 4y ago
        This seems a bit nonsensical to be because you cannot simply just put a gauge on free speech and say that the higher the gauge is the better. If you had a country where 95% of individuals had absolute freedom of speech but 5% did not, is that more or less free than a country where 100% of people had near-absolute freedom of speech? What about when those percentages collide? When the free speech of the haves results in the suppression of the have nots? And historically the freedom in US has been in theory and not in practice what with how it's been used to hunt down perceived communists, minorities and dissidents. The best possible evidence against the idea that more == better is played out in the various sites that try to have absolute freedom of speech. The end result is that you get a large amount of people that others either do not want to associate with or get chased out by the rabid angry mass. Websites and forums form a sort of microculture that prove you need some guardrails to prevent the bus from going off the edge.
        4y ago

by gojomo 4y ago

fzeroracer 4y ago

The entire legal system is designed to punish people from the moment of arrest through conviction. Just because a rational judge realized that the case was absurd does not make the hoops she had to go through any less arduous. For example officer writing you a bogus speeding ticket that you can successfully challenge in court still requires time and effort to challenge, moreso than the officer did issuing it and that's very frequently done to poorer individuals. Which again, you ignore that we had (and in many places still have) an amount of people which simply did not have the same free speech rights that you say America was founded upon.

gojomo 4y ago
> The entire legal system is designed to punish people from the moment of arrest through conviction. This is indeed true, and a problem, and if you have ideas for how it can be improved, I'd be all ears. But, I've not found any country/region/system that doesn't have some level of this problem. The US's system, of required public formalities for certain charges to proceed, & certain guarantees of time limits, & avenues for release/acquittal, is pretty strong compared to anywhere else. (In the Netherlands, a software developer has been in custody for a couple months now without any specific charges/case being revealed to him or the public.) And, it's kind of inherent to any system for there to be some margins-of-abusive-discretion that are hard to eliminate, and time-limited steps-in-a-judicial-process where unavoidable "punishment" comes even from a process that hasn't decided yet. So mentioning the mere existence of such unevenness doesn't really say anything, either way, about the relative value the US culture, or legal system, puts on free speech. What does shed light on the value the US puts on free speech is whether such irreducible annoyances are larger or smaller, with respect to speech, than other countries and other eras. And at every step of US history, even dark days like say Wilson's persecution of WW1 draft-resisters, or Hoover's mid-20thC persecution of civil rights movements, the US had more space for speech, more defenses for those accused of speech-related offenses, and larger cultural/social support (in both legal/political action and the commercial 'blocking-and-tackling' of actually publishing & disseminating speech without outsider veto) than almost anywhere else. That's where people should be able to see the real, high, & enduring value the US has always put on free speech, if not neurotically obsessed on only negative examples, & scattered hypocrisies, blinding them to relative-magnitudes. If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech – but even in such inequality, almost all Americans had far more free speech than they'd have had anywhere else – then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality, while confirming its leading value of free speech.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  Well put in the first few paras. All systems need discretion, which can be abused. Also it's important not to fixate on the bad, there's plenty of good. The last 2, gets a bit self-congratulatory. Jim crow laws (until 1965). Emmet Till didn't get much rights to free wolf-whistling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till And plenty more. "If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech [...] then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality" If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop.
  - gojomo 4y ago
    > If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop. Not at all. Free speech is not binary. More is better, & the cultures that have consistently had more speech tolerance than elsewhere - like the US, in its formal documents & actual practices – are showing that free speech is a more central value to them.
    - fzeroracer 4y ago
      This seems a bit nonsensical to be because you cannot simply just put a gauge on free speech and say that the higher the gauge is the better. If you had a country where 95% of individuals had absolute freedom of speech but 5% did not, is that more or less free than a country where 100% of people had near-absolute freedom of speech? What about when those percentages collide? When the free speech of the haves results in the suppression of the have nots? And historically the freedom in US has been in theory and not in practice what with how it's been used to hunt down perceived communists, minorities and dissidents. The best possible evidence against the idea that more == better is played out in the various sites that try to have absolute freedom of speech. The end result is that you get a large amount of people that others either do not want to associate with or get chased out by the rabid angry mass. Websites and forums form a sort of microculture that prove you need some guardrails to prevent the bus from going off the edge.
      - 4y ago