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Rowan Atkinson on free speech (2012) [video]

108 points by graderjs 3y ago

Symbiote 3y ago
It's from 2012, it's a reposting of https://youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU https://youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU
diego_moita 3y ago
I believe that an intelligent person should be able to hold two conflicting perceptions at the same time. Therefore, I understand and accept that free speech is a foundation for a civilized life, that there should be no restraints on free speech. But, I also acknowledge that free speech isn't so free at all. For a long time and in many places in the world there are minorities without the right to speech. And the barriers aren't just authoritarianism. In many places, even in democratic countries, there are non-formal mechanisms to restrain the speech of women, ethnic and sexual minorities. When an European soccer fan shouts "monkey" to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play (e.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr Valencia"). There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open. The same thing goes for, say, women in South Korea, Christians in Muslim countries, Muslims in India, native American people in Latin-America, etc. Wanting "free speech" to justify oppression of a minority that is already constrained in their speech is not exactly advocating freedom. A lot of times it is advocating hypocrisy.
- ghusto 3y ago
  > There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open Admittedly, I haven't lived in every European country, but I've lived in enough for an eyebrow to be raised nearly off my face at this. Even with what's happening in Italy right now, I couldn't say "the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained".
  - hamax 3y ago
    Who owns all the media organizations in Italy? Black people? If not, their power to respond and argue is severely constrained
    - ghusto 3y ago
      What you've just said also says: 1. White people as a whole wish to suppress the speech of black people 2. The speech of anybody else who isn't also white is suppressed It also presumes, instead of knowing something. Do you know any black people in Italy? Have you heard of any of them complaining that they have no "power to respond"? EDIT: Case in point; I'm not white, (nearly) all my representatives are white, I don't feel like I have no power to respond. Stop making non-whites victims.
- redeeman 3y ago
  > When an European soccer fan shouts "monkey" to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play are you saying the african soccer player is lower in rank than some idiot fan? im also sure barack obama was much in a bad power dynamic to people that call him monkey president? those guys have all the institutional power, ey?
  - diego_moita 3y ago
    What I am saying is "this is a complex issue that should be deeply understood before rushing to easy ideological solutions". The problem is that, like my children doing math, no one wants to understand problems. Ideological solutions that fit in memes are much easier.
    - Towaway69 3y ago
      I do wonder how humans made it this far. 60000 years and speech seemed to work fine. Now it becomes a complex issue needing complicated laws that restrict instead of allowing more speech. One is constantly checking which terminology one is now allowed to use for minorities without offending. Humans have inbuilt biases that we won't be able to get rid off with more laws. Ironically if we look closely at AIs, they are amplifying those biases - remember Facebooks face recognition software that incorrectly identified some minorities as primates? It wasn't AI at fault, it was the bias in the training set.
      - diego_moita 3y ago
        Bullshit. For most of those 60000 years speech didn't work "fine" at all. The majority of people that lived in those times where ruled by empires that had nothing resembling free speech or the rule of the law. You wouldn't even think of bad things against the King or Church in Europe before the 19th century. Same goes to Middle Eastern Empires, Chinese dynasties, the Japanese emperors or Shoguns, etc. Even less than think you'd say anything to offend established powers. Yes, even the Roman Republic was not democratic or free for all. And your "inbuilt biases" are just a justification for sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination created by specific historic circumstances. There is no "inbuilt" basis for discrimination.
- MrDrDr 3y ago
  I agree with the sentiment of what you are saying. I agree with Mr Atkinson (and Obama apparently) that the solution to speech that causes offence is more speech. The problems as I see it are twofold. The first is that 'more speech' presumably means better speech, better rhetoric, better arguments, and I don't see many people in society these days with these skills. If anything universities have taken backwards step in providing students with these skills. If more speech is just more insults in the other direction... then I'm not sure it helps. The second is that our speakers are often anonymous. I think its much easier to be angry with those who are one step removed (e.g road rage) than one to one. So in a world where people were better equipped to argue their points and where everyone involved was identifiable, online or off - the 'more speech' idea could work.
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    If everyone is identifiable all the time then you have a totalitarian state. Free speech is the first thing that flys out the window. And what about whistle blowers or rape victims - should they be identifiable to those they accuse? Edit: What about walking along the street, I bump into someone and say sorry. Should I be identifiable to the other person? If not, Where's the limit/cut-off for identifiable? If yes, what is the difference to Chinese social scoring where literal everyone is identifiable?
    - MrDrDr 3y ago
      I agree - but I also think the opposite does not make a good society - a society where everyone can act with anonymity. I was quite impressed with Matt Ridley's book 'The Origins of Virtue' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Virtue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Virtue) it makes the argument that we evolved the capacity for altruism from the evolutionary benefits of reciprocity. IMO there is a marked difference between city culture - where the chances of meeting a random person in the street again is virtually zero, and village/rural culture where if you don't know the person you bump into you are almost certainly going to be separated by a single degree. The former culture being less 'polite' that the latter. My point is that, while we should have the freedom to speak, we should expect our speech to have some social consequences that should at least cause us to pause and consider those consequences. And I accept that there should be a balance here. I would not want to live in a society that banned anonymous social media accounts, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment to have a civic social space where everyone was identifiable.
- bufio 3y ago
  How are they constrained in their speech?
  - diego_moita 3y ago
    When they speak but no one listens. Mr. Atkinson is a famous white and male comedian. How many famous comedians do you know belonging to minorities? Who would give these minorities a voice? E.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr. Valencia". He is a Brazilian player that was continuously harassed and threatened in Spain, spoke a lot about it, filled complaints but nothing happened. Then in a game where he was harassed his teammates escalated it and stopped the match, his coach made an interview denouncing the racism, the Brazilian government issued a formal protest and the Spanish prime-minister condemned the racism. Only then the Spanish league reacted. There are thousands of black people living in Spain that don't have the power to escalate aggression that Vinicius had. These are people without free speech because no one listens their speaches.
- jwalton 3y ago
  By way of counter argument, I would point out that in almost any country on earth where free speech is not enshrined as it is in western democracies, minorities fare far worse. I don’t want free speech to help justify oppression, I want free speech so that the oppressed can have a voice. > even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties If you give the government the power to regulate speech, and one of those right wing parties comes to power, what do you think they’ll use that power for? The only way to guard against this is not not give them that power in the first place.
  - diego_moita 3y ago
    Your first point is very good, thank you. I acknowledge and respect it. The second one is way more complex. There is a big discussion on classic liberal circles about that. Karl Popper, the very own champion of open societies, was strongly against giving free speech to the enemies of freedom.
  - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
    The first thing the right wing party does is to roll back such rights. In the US they did it by installing authoritarian Supreme Court justices. You're worried about speech? Women no longer have control over their own bodies! Meanwhile books the right don't like are banned. At the time of this video, the UK supposedly had free speech rights as it was still part of the EU, but of course, the EU's version of "free speech rights" is actually "you have free speech except when we don't want you to". And in any case, as demonstrated in the video, it doesn't matter if you have the right to free speech or to protest, if the government can simply arrest you for something else. For example, if anyone causes property damage during a protest, the police can and will arrest you for it. People in the UK don't realize that their life can be truly fucked by such a charge. You go out for a nice peaceful protest with your teenage kid, and a few months later you have to sell your house because insurance companies will not insure it because of your criminal record, and your mortgage company can and will foreclose since you don't have insurance. Authoritarians (be they on the left or the right) are incredibly good at procedural totalitarianism. You may have a nice piece of paper explaining your free speech rights, and you may eventually win when you get your day in court, but guess what? The courts are underfunded, the lawyers are over-priced, the pro-bono liberal lawyers are stretched too thin, and you got denied bail. Who is going to gofundme your legal fees when all your friends are in jail too? A government is simply the application of force. The enemies of freedom have done a fantastic job at using "free speech" to get voters to elect authoritarians. When trump talks about being friends with Russia, that is not hypothetical, it's not bemusing. Russia is literally an ally of the the confederacy 2.0, and this time they aren't going to lose. Your pretty first amendment isn't stopping them now and we have a "democrat" president.
- mcv 3y ago
  > there should be no restraints on free speech. There are always restraints on speech, and it's silly to pretend there aren't. The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, but threats, blackmail, and slander are all forms of speech with serious restrictions on them. Forms of speech that endanger or coerce other people are not free. The same could be argued about hate speech: speech that creates a hostile environment for vulnerable groups, and often ends up silencing them (thereby effectively restricting their speech).
vonzepp 3y ago
Sometimes missing in these debates is that right to free speech isn't the right to be listened to.
- Old_Thrashbarg 3y ago
  Or "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach"
  - jl6 3y ago
    Who gets to decide which ideas are allowed reach? That’s the current frontier in this debate.
  - smitty1e 3y ago
    As Orwellian as things are becoming, one envisions a return to being 18th century pamphleteers spreading hard copy in order to preserve free speech. Technology has no awareness of whether it's used to liberate or enslave.
- awesome_dude 3y ago
  There's also the shutting down of protests that are loud because they are against one thing being heard. It is hard to determine whose free speech prevail there.
  - ggreer 3y ago
    If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, it's actually quite easy to determine who should prevail. Back in 1644, John Milton argued in favor of allowing bad ideas to be published for the following reason[1]: > Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Thomas Paine said something similar in his introduction to The Age of Reason[2]: > You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. As did John Stuart Mill in On Liberty[3]: > But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. In short, freedom of speech isn't some deontological argument about the rights of the speaker or writer. It's a consequentialist argument about the rights of people to read or listen. Every time you silence someone, you are denying others the right to read what they want to read or hear what they want to hear. If some protesters are disrupting a talk, they are the ones who are in the wrong, as they are denying others the chance to get the information they want. Many in the audience might not agree with the views expressed, but they want to understand the ideas so they can strengthen arguments for their own views. If you don't think people are rational or intelligent enough to consume certain ideas safely, well then you might as well get rid of the entire idea of democracy, as you shouldn't trust them to vote either. 1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Areopagitica_(1644) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Areopagitica_(1644) 2. https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm 3. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
mnd999 3y ago
Old man ranting into the abyss. Perhaps that worked in his day but in these days of bot farms, ai generated bullshit, deepfakes and state sponsored trolling it’s unworkable.
- slushh 3y ago
  ... unworkable, maybe for now. We have to build the infrastructure to handle it, soon. Otherwise, there will be a day where the AI will be so good that there are no moderators left who are good enough to make the right decisions.
indy 3y ago
There seems to be a generational divide on this topic. A lot of younger people seem to be fine with restrictions on free speech, often under the guise of various progressive causes
- fugalfervor 3y ago
  The book banning and restrictions on content in classrooms in Florida are further examples of people being fine with restrictions on speech. At this point it's pretty disingenuous to lay the blame entirely on the left, or the young.
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    No, the overwhelming dominance in cancel culture over the last few years has been from the left. Sure, the right has also been up to its old tricks in tired corners (it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era), but lets be realistic about who the modern problem is mainly with in the West or we won't solve it.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      What books were banned by "the left"?
      - mellosouls 3y ago
        I was commenting on "restrictions on speech", of which book banning is a historically symbolic example but less relevant in the modern age. In the West the left has dominated restricting speech.
        _a_a_a_ 3y ago
        Like the famously left-wing Nazi's bookburning?
        throw0101b 3y ago
cubefox 3y ago
This is a great speech, and I recommend anyone to listen to the whole thing. An aspect it doesn't touch on is that today, free speech is often legally constrained by social networking sites, when they are, all too quickly, label certain things as "misinformation" or "hate speech", censor it, and ban the author. Facebook is particularly brutal in this regard. The problem with saying that something is "misinformation" is that it must mean "something we believe is false". If I claim that it's raining, and you that the sun shines, then we both just say what we believe. Unless we express our mental states ("I'm cold") we never express facts, just our more-or-less justified beliefs about states of affairs. You can't "ban misinformation", you can only ban information you believe to be false. When an authority controls "misinformation", they are necessarily forcing their beliefs upon others. Second, "hate speech" is an insidious concept. It ascribes a motivating emotion to some speaker where it is unobservable from the outside whether that emotion even exists. Claiming that something was done out of (unobservable) hate serves as a convenient excuse to ban things where the observable evidence isn't sufficient. Of course many of those pieces of alleged hate speech and misinformation aren't illegal in many countries, but that's of little help when they are banned on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Allowing speech only where it is hardly audible is not much better than banning speech outright.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Defending free speech without going at all into the nuances of the matter is intellectually extremely lazy at best and virtue signalling to the alt right crowd at worst. And the real bummer is that it's basically never interesting.
- hulitu 3y ago
  Don't worry. The time will come when you won't be able to defend free speech. It already started.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    Please do elaborate.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Maybe it is a worrying symptom that you associate free speech advocacy with the 'alt right'?
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    I don't see how it would be worrying. The alt right are basically the only major suppressed group in the Western world at the moment, and I have no problem with that. Even they are not silenced by the government, so even their free speech is being protected. However, people generally don't like what they say, and want to silence or ignore them - without government involvement. Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries. Perhaps you have a different view?
    - bondarchuk 3y ago
      >Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries. So you think countries without free speech would benefit from free speech, but you don't think countries with free speech would be harmed by reducing free speech? That seems quite shortsighted to me.
hirundo 3y ago
"The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying." -- Alfred North Whitehead This effect only works if we let the ideas joust with each other as our champions. If we try to bury the ideas instead people tend to joust less metaphorically. When we stop talking we find much worse ways to express ourselves. That turns the areas we won't talk about into danger zones.
interlinked 3y ago
He can talk?
karaterobot 3y ago
A couple years ago, somebody remarked to me, "oh, you're one of those free speech guys, aren't you?" and I realized it was meant as an insult. Yes, I guess so! I'm not sure what changed, but I doubt that would ever have happened a few decades ago. You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it. You wouldn't accuse someone of "being a free speech guy" because everybody was expected to be one. I really hope that's not in the process of getting thrown out with the bath water.
- jopython 3y ago
  - shouting fire in a theater Its a myth. https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/ https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-cro...
- nsajko 3y ago
  A few months ago I was discussing due-process-related rights and principles with some twenty-something university student (mostly CS) acquaintances. Apart from the frightening fact that I was the only one strongly defending these rights, at one point someone associated my rhetoric with "Jordan Peterson's free speech arguments" in an attempt to dismiss my points. Apparently democracy and a free judiciary are now an alt-right topic?
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    That was sort of the impression I got as well. Hating anything your opponent supports, regardless of its merits, feels like a bad strategy to follow.
    - jl6 3y ago
      It’s a symptom of the bipartisan mindrot that is polarization. “You’re either with us or against us”. Thus disagreement is escalated to opposition, opposition is escalated to vilification. The culture warriors no longer hold viewpoints, they have identities, and identities are inviolable[0]. Challenge is thus perceived as an existential attack that must be defeated at all costs. Words are labelled as violence. Pushback is labelled as genocide. Suddenly everyone is either a Nazi or a pedophile. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
zac23or 3y ago
Censorship is not about free speech. It's about political warfare. In my country, 85% of the press is from the left. if a leftist comedian makes a joke, nothing happens. If a right-wing comedian makes the same joke, he could be sued. This happened several times. Someone relatively famous on the left came out as a pedophile, he confessed in an audio. The left was very worried that he was going to commit suicide... The same does not happen when some famous pedophile is from the extreme right... The left is against any arrest of homeless drug addicts. They don't try to treat these people, I saw a video on the left teaching how to use crack, taking care of your health, not using soda cans, because the paint on the can (!) is bad for you. Of course the solution for homeless addicts is to kill everyone, for the alt-right. Our former president is right-wing. "An anti-scientific and anti-ecological president" The current president is leftist. With the same anti-scientific and anti-ecological ideas, BUT NOW he is right. And between these two idiotic views, nothing is fixed. My country has many basic problems such as hunger, security and basic health. But people in power are arguing about pronouns and shit. Yeah, you can argue about anything, but for me, with decades of watching this shit, it's not about arguing about pronouns, or... it's about doing nothing about real issues. Nothing about this is new, it's just weirder than in the past.
mcv 3y ago
Although I agree with much of what he says, it seems like Rowan Atkinson is unfamiliar with Popper's Paradox of Intolerance. He easily brushes it away as if it can't stand up to 5 seconds of thought, but I'm pretty sure Karl Popper (undeniably a smart guy) put more than 5 minutes of thought into it.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  yeah I thought the subject deserved more consideration on his part - I mean Popper's got a point. For him to just be like "oh that's obviously wrong moving right along" really doesn't deal with it seriously. Because the real underlying question here, at least as far as I'm concerned, is - is Free Speech good to a fault? Like you can easily think of ways to use free speech to harass, and to hurt, and to threaten, to manipulate - the more clever you are about it, the less straightforward it is for others to identify it when you're doing it. Is free speech really so important that abusers and trolls are given a free pass to continue their work, so long as they constrain it to the realm of speech?
  - kaba0 3y ago
    > Is free speech really so important that abusers and trolls are given a free pass to continue their work, so long as they constrain it to the realm of speech? Especially when said speech is often followed up by action by someone else.
    - mcv 3y ago
      Exactly. Free speech has always had limits. Threats are speech, yet illegal, for good reason. Same goes for blackmail, slander, and probably more. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat speech that riles people up against a specific, vulnerable demographic, in a similar way. Because we've seen what it can lead to, and we still occasionally see people act on it today. To claim that they were acting on their own and not at all influenced by the environment of hate speech around them, would be dishonest and blind. Unfortunately the edges between such hate speech and legitimate insult can be blurry, and maybe we should make that distinction more clear.
mock-possum 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RickJWagner 3y ago
Gotta love Mr. Bean. It's hard to take him seriously, though. I'm so conditioned to laugh at his antics that it's difficult to not be looking for funny moments.

108 points by graderjs 3y ago

It's from 2012, it's a reposting of https://youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU https://youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU

I believe that an intelligent person should be able to hold two conflicting perceptions at the same time. Therefore, I understand and accept that free speech is a foundation for a civilized life, that there should be no restraints on free speech. But, I also acknowledge that free speech isn't so free at all. For a long time and in many places in the world there are minorities without the right to speech. And the barriers aren't just authoritarianism. In many places, even in democratic countries, there are non-formal mechanisms to restrain the speech of women, ethnic and sexual minorities. When an European soccer fan shouts "monkey" to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play (e.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr Valencia"). There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open. The same thing goes for, say, women in South Korea, Christians in Muslim countries, Muslims in India, native American people in Latin-America, etc. Wanting "free speech" to justify oppression of a minority that is already constrained in their speech is not exactly advocating freedom. A lot of times it is advocating hypocrisy.

ghusto 3y ago
> There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open Admittedly, I haven't lived in every European country, but I've lived in enough for an eyebrow to be raised nearly off my face at this. Even with what's happening in Italy right now, I couldn't say "the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained".
- hamax 3y ago
  Who owns all the media organizations in Italy? Black people? If not, their power to respond and argue is severely constrained
  - ghusto 3y ago
    What you've just said also says: 1. White people as a whole wish to suppress the speech of black people 2. The speech of anybody else who isn't also white is suppressed It also presumes, instead of knowing something. Do you know any black people in Italy? Have you heard of any of them complaining that they have no "power to respond"? EDIT: Case in point; I'm not white, (nearly) all my representatives are white, I don't feel like I have no power to respond. Stop making non-whites victims.
redeeman 3y ago
> When an European soccer fan shouts "monkey" to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play are you saying the african soccer player is lower in rank than some idiot fan? im also sure barack obama was much in a bad power dynamic to people that call him monkey president? those guys have all the institutional power, ey?
- diego_moita 3y ago
  What I am saying is "this is a complex issue that should be deeply understood before rushing to easy ideological solutions". The problem is that, like my children doing math, no one wants to understand problems. Ideological solutions that fit in memes are much easier.
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    I do wonder how humans made it this far. 60000 years and speech seemed to work fine. Now it becomes a complex issue needing complicated laws that restrict instead of allowing more speech. One is constantly checking which terminology one is now allowed to use for minorities without offending. Humans have inbuilt biases that we won't be able to get rid off with more laws. Ironically if we look closely at AIs, they are amplifying those biases - remember Facebooks face recognition software that incorrectly identified some minorities as primates? It wasn't AI at fault, it was the bias in the training set.
    - diego_moita 3y ago
      Bullshit. For most of those 60000 years speech didn't work "fine" at all. The majority of people that lived in those times where ruled by empires that had nothing resembling free speech or the rule of the law. You wouldn't even think of bad things against the King or Church in Europe before the 19th century. Same goes to Middle Eastern Empires, Chinese dynasties, the Japanese emperors or Shoguns, etc. Even less than think you'd say anything to offend established powers. Yes, even the Roman Republic was not democratic or free for all. And your "inbuilt biases" are just a justification for sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination created by specific historic circumstances. There is no "inbuilt" basis for discrimination.
MrDrDr 3y ago
I agree with the sentiment of what you are saying. I agree with Mr Atkinson (and Obama apparently) that the solution to speech that causes offence is more speech. The problems as I see it are twofold. The first is that 'more speech' presumably means better speech, better rhetoric, better arguments, and I don't see many people in society these days with these skills. If anything universities have taken backwards step in providing students with these skills. If more speech is just more insults in the other direction... then I'm not sure it helps. The second is that our speakers are often anonymous. I think its much easier to be angry with those who are one step removed (e.g road rage) than one to one. So in a world where people were better equipped to argue their points and where everyone involved was identifiable, online or off - the 'more speech' idea could work.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  If everyone is identifiable all the time then you have a totalitarian state. Free speech is the first thing that flys out the window. And what about whistle blowers or rape victims - should they be identifiable to those they accuse? Edit: What about walking along the street, I bump into someone and say sorry. Should I be identifiable to the other person? If not, Where's the limit/cut-off for identifiable? If yes, what is the difference to Chinese social scoring where literal everyone is identifiable?
  - MrDrDr 3y ago
    I agree - but I also think the opposite does not make a good society - a society where everyone can act with anonymity. I was quite impressed with Matt Ridley's book 'The Origins of Virtue' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Virtue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Virtue) it makes the argument that we evolved the capacity for altruism from the evolutionary benefits of reciprocity. IMO there is a marked difference between city culture - where the chances of meeting a random person in the street again is virtually zero, and village/rural culture where if you don't know the person you bump into you are almost certainly going to be separated by a single degree. The former culture being less 'polite' that the latter. My point is that, while we should have the freedom to speak, we should expect our speech to have some social consequences that should at least cause us to pause and consider those consequences. And I accept that there should be a balance here. I would not want to live in a society that banned anonymous social media accounts, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment to have a civic social space where everyone was identifiable.
bufio 3y ago
How are they constrained in their speech?
- diego_moita 3y ago
  When they speak but no one listens. Mr. Atkinson is a famous white and male comedian. How many famous comedians do you know belonging to minorities? Who would give these minorities a voice? E.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr. Valencia". He is a Brazilian player that was continuously harassed and threatened in Spain, spoke a lot about it, filled complaints but nothing happened. Then in a game where he was harassed his teammates escalated it and stopped the match, his coach made an interview denouncing the racism, the Brazilian government issued a formal protest and the Spanish prime-minister condemned the racism. Only then the Spanish league reacted. There are thousands of black people living in Spain that don't have the power to escalate aggression that Vinicius had. These are people without free speech because no one listens their speaches.
jwalton 3y ago
By way of counter argument, I would point out that in almost any country on earth where free speech is not enshrined as it is in western democracies, minorities fare far worse. I don’t want free speech to help justify oppression, I want free speech so that the oppressed can have a voice. > even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties If you give the government the power to regulate speech, and one of those right wing parties comes to power, what do you think they’ll use that power for? The only way to guard against this is not not give them that power in the first place.
- diego_moita 3y ago
  Your first point is very good, thank you. I acknowledge and respect it. The second one is way more complex. There is a big discussion on classic liberal circles about that. Karl Popper, the very own champion of open societies, was strongly against giving free speech to the enemies of freedom.
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  The first thing the right wing party does is to roll back such rights. In the US they did it by installing authoritarian Supreme Court justices. You're worried about speech? Women no longer have control over their own bodies! Meanwhile books the right don't like are banned. At the time of this video, the UK supposedly had free speech rights as it was still part of the EU, but of course, the EU's version of "free speech rights" is actually "you have free speech except when we don't want you to". And in any case, as demonstrated in the video, it doesn't matter if you have the right to free speech or to protest, if the government can simply arrest you for something else. For example, if anyone causes property damage during a protest, the police can and will arrest you for it. People in the UK don't realize that their life can be truly fucked by such a charge. You go out for a nice peaceful protest with your teenage kid, and a few months later you have to sell your house because insurance companies will not insure it because of your criminal record, and your mortgage company can and will foreclose since you don't have insurance. Authoritarians (be they on the left or the right) are incredibly good at procedural totalitarianism. You may have a nice piece of paper explaining your free speech rights, and you may eventually win when you get your day in court, but guess what? The courts are underfunded, the lawyers are over-priced, the pro-bono liberal lawyers are stretched too thin, and you got denied bail. Who is going to gofundme your legal fees when all your friends are in jail too? A government is simply the application of force. The enemies of freedom have done a fantastic job at using "free speech" to get voters to elect authoritarians. When trump talks about being friends with Russia, that is not hypothetical, it's not bemusing. Russia is literally an ally of the the confederacy 2.0, and this time they aren't going to lose. Your pretty first amendment isn't stopping them now and we have a "democrat" president.
mcv 3y ago
> there should be no restraints on free speech. There are always restraints on speech, and it's silly to pretend there aren't. The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, but threats, blackmail, and slander are all forms of speech with serious restrictions on them. Forms of speech that endanger or coerce other people are not free. The same could be argued about hate speech: speech that creates a hostile environment for vulnerable groups, and often ends up silencing them (thereby effectively restricting their speech).

vonzepp 3y ago

Sometimes missing in these debates is that right to free speech isn't the right to be listened to.

Old_Thrashbarg 3y ago
Or "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach"
- jl6 3y ago
  Who gets to decide which ideas are allowed reach? That’s the current frontier in this debate.
- smitty1e 3y ago
  As Orwellian as things are becoming, one envisions a return to being 18th century pamphleteers spreading hard copy in order to preserve free speech. Technology has no awareness of whether it's used to liberate or enslave.
awesome_dude 3y ago
There's also the shutting down of protests that are loud because they are against one thing being heard. It is hard to determine whose free speech prevail there.
- ggreer 3y ago
  If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, it's actually quite easy to determine who should prevail. Back in 1644, John Milton argued in favor of allowing bad ideas to be published for the following reason[1]: > Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Thomas Paine said something similar in his introduction to The Age of Reason[2]: > You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. As did John Stuart Mill in On Liberty[3]: > But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. In short, freedom of speech isn't some deontological argument about the rights of the speaker or writer. It's a consequentialist argument about the rights of people to read or listen. Every time you silence someone, you are denying others the right to read what they want to read or hear what they want to hear. If some protesters are disrupting a talk, they are the ones who are in the wrong, as they are denying others the chance to get the information they want. Many in the audience might not agree with the views expressed, but they want to understand the ideas so they can strengthen arguments for their own views. If you don't think people are rational or intelligent enough to consume certain ideas safely, well then you might as well get rid of the entire idea of democracy, as you shouldn't trust them to vote either. 1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Areopagitica_(1644) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Areopagitica_(1644) 2. https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm 3. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

mnd999 3y ago

Old man ranting into the abyss. Perhaps that worked in his day but in these days of bot farms, ai generated bullshit, deepfakes and state sponsored trolling it’s unworkable.

slushh 3y ago
... unworkable, maybe for now. We have to build the infrastructure to handle it, soon. Otherwise, there will be a day where the AI will be so good that there are no moderators left who are good enough to make the right decisions.

indy 3y ago

There seems to be a generational divide on this topic. A lot of younger people seem to be fine with restrictions on free speech, often under the guise of various progressive causes

fugalfervor 3y ago
The book banning and restrictions on content in classrooms in Florida are further examples of people being fine with restrictions on speech. At this point it's pretty disingenuous to lay the blame entirely on the left, or the young.
- mellosouls 3y ago
  No, the overwhelming dominance in cancel culture over the last few years has been from the left. Sure, the right has also been up to its old tricks in tired corners (it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era), but lets be realistic about who the modern problem is mainly with in the West or we won't solve it.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    What books were banned by "the left"?
    - mellosouls 3y ago
      I was commenting on "restrictions on speech", of which book banning is a historically symbolic example but less relevant in the modern age. In the West the left has dominated restricting speech.
      - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
        Like the famously left-wing Nazi's bookburning?
        throw0101b 3y ago

cubefox 3y ago

This is a great speech, and I recommend anyone to listen to the whole thing. An aspect it doesn't touch on is that today, free speech is often legally constrained by social networking sites, when they are, all too quickly, label certain things as "misinformation" or "hate speech", censor it, and ban the author. Facebook is particularly brutal in this regard. The problem with saying that something is "misinformation" is that it must mean "something we believe is false". If I claim that it's raining, and you that the sun shines, then we both just say what we believe. Unless we express our mental states ("I'm cold") we never express facts, just our more-or-less justified beliefs about states of affairs. You can't "ban misinformation", you can only ban information you believe to be false. When an authority controls "misinformation", they are necessarily forcing their beliefs upon others. Second, "hate speech" is an insidious concept. It ascribes a motivating emotion to some speaker where it is unobservable from the outside whether that emotion even exists. Claiming that something was done out of (unobservable) hate serves as a convenient excuse to ban things where the observable evidence isn't sufficient. Of course many of those pieces of alleged hate speech and misinformation aren't illegal in many countries, but that's of little help when they are banned on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Allowing speech only where it is hardly audible is not much better than banning speech outright.

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karmakurtisaani 3y ago

Defending free speech without going at all into the nuances of the matter is intellectually extremely lazy at best and virtue signalling to the alt right crowd at worst. And the real bummer is that it's basically never interesting.

hulitu 3y ago
Don't worry. The time will come when you won't be able to defend free speech. It already started.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Please do elaborate.
rightbyte 3y ago
Maybe it is a worrying symptom that you associate free speech advocacy with the 'alt right'?
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  I don't see how it would be worrying. The alt right are basically the only major suppressed group in the Western world at the moment, and I have no problem with that. Even they are not silenced by the government, so even their free speech is being protected. However, people generally don't like what they say, and want to silence or ignore them - without government involvement. Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries. Perhaps you have a different view?
  - bondarchuk 3y ago
    >Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries. So you think countries without free speech would benefit from free speech, but you don't think countries with free speech would be harmed by reducing free speech? That seems quite shortsighted to me.

hirundo 3y ago

"The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying." -- Alfred North Whitehead This effect only works if we let the ideas joust with each other as our champions. If we try to bury the ideas instead people tend to joust less metaphorically. When we stop talking we find much worse ways to express ourselves. That turns the areas we won't talk about into danger zones.

interlinked 3y ago

He can talk?

karaterobot 3y ago

A couple years ago, somebody remarked to me, "oh, you're one of those free speech guys, aren't you?" and I realized it was meant as an insult. Yes, I guess so! I'm not sure what changed, but I doubt that would ever have happened a few decades ago. You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it. You wouldn't accuse someone of "being a free speech guy" because everybody was expected to be one. I really hope that's not in the process of getting thrown out with the bath water.

jopython 3y ago
- shouting fire in a theater Its a myth. https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/ https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-cro...
nsajko 3y ago
A few months ago I was discussing due-process-related rights and principles with some twenty-something university student (mostly CS) acquaintances. Apart from the frightening fact that I was the only one strongly defending these rights, at one point someone associated my rhetoric with "Jordan Peterson's free speech arguments" in an attempt to dismiss my points. Apparently democracy and a free judiciary are now an alt-right topic?
- karaterobot 3y ago
  That was sort of the impression I got as well. Hating anything your opponent supports, regardless of its merits, feels like a bad strategy to follow.
  - jl6 3y ago
    It’s a symptom of the bipartisan mindrot that is polarization. “You’re either with us or against us”. Thus disagreement is escalated to opposition, opposition is escalated to vilification. The culture warriors no longer hold viewpoints, they have identities, and identities are inviolable[0]. Challenge is thus perceived as an existential attack that must be defeated at all costs. Words are labelled as violence. Pushback is labelled as genocide. Suddenly everyone is either a Nazi or a pedophile. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

zac23or 3y ago

Censorship is not about free speech. It's about political warfare. In my country, 85% of the press is from the left. if a leftist comedian makes a joke, nothing happens. If a right-wing comedian makes the same joke, he could be sued. This happened several times. Someone relatively famous on the left came out as a pedophile, he confessed in an audio. The left was very worried that he was going to commit suicide... The same does not happen when some famous pedophile is from the extreme right... The left is against any arrest of homeless drug addicts. They don't try to treat these people, I saw a video on the left teaching how to use crack, taking care of your health, not using soda cans, because the paint on the can (!) is bad for you. Of course the solution for homeless addicts is to kill everyone, for the alt-right. Our former president is right-wing. "An anti-scientific and anti-ecological president" The current president is leftist. With the same anti-scientific and anti-ecological ideas, BUT NOW he is right. And between these two idiotic views, nothing is fixed. My country has many basic problems such as hunger, security and basic health. But people in power are arguing about pronouns and shit. Yeah, you can argue about anything, but for me, with decades of watching this shit, it's not about arguing about pronouns, or... it's about doing nothing about real issues. Nothing about this is new, it's just weirder than in the past.

mcv 3y ago

Although I agree with much of what he says, it seems like Rowan Atkinson is unfamiliar with Popper's Paradox of Intolerance. He easily brushes it away as if it can't stand up to 5 seconds of thought, but I'm pretty sure Karl Popper (undeniably a smart guy) put more than 5 minutes of thought into it.

mock-possum 3y ago
yeah I thought the subject deserved more consideration on his part - I mean Popper's got a point. For him to just be like "oh that's obviously wrong moving right along" really doesn't deal with it seriously. Because the real underlying question here, at least as far as I'm concerned, is - is Free Speech good to a fault? Like you can easily think of ways to use free speech to harass, and to hurt, and to threaten, to manipulate - the more clever you are about it, the less straightforward it is for others to identify it when you're doing it. Is free speech really so important that abusers and trolls are given a free pass to continue their work, so long as they constrain it to the realm of speech?
- kaba0 3y ago
  > Is free speech really so important that abusers and trolls are given a free pass to continue their work, so long as they constrain it to the realm of speech? Especially when said speech is often followed up by action by someone else.
  - mcv 3y ago
    Exactly. Free speech has always had limits. Threats are speech, yet illegal, for good reason. Same goes for blackmail, slander, and probably more. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat speech that riles people up against a specific, vulnerable demographic, in a similar way. Because we've seen what it can lead to, and we still occasionally see people act on it today. To claim that they were acting on their own and not at all influenced by the environment of hate speech around them, would be dishonest and blind. Unfortunately the edges between such hate speech and legitimate insult can be blurry, and maybe we should make that distinction more clear.

mock-possum 3y ago

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RickJWagner 3y ago

Gotta love Mr. Bean. It's hard to take him seriously, though. I'm so conditioned to laugh at his antics that it's difficult to not be looking for funny moments.