But I disagree that the US is any different, and is certainly not at the top of the ladder. To be clear: I mean freedom in practice, not freedom in legal theory.
"freedom of speech" is to the US as "politeness" is to Canadians: mostly true, but generally a stereotype that is fading with time.
I always thought it was funny in a tragicomic way, that a country that has freedom as one of its top virtues is the same one where you would quickly get sued (if not imprisoned) for acts considered harmless in other countries.
Perhaps the true free citizens of the US are corporations, to the detriment of natural persons.
Maybe this is not obvious until you've lived both in and out of North America for long enough.
IIRC Jeff was renovating an apartment in NYC and he had his car parked somewhere for days with accumulating fines in the order of 10s of thousands but really, those numbers are 6-7 orders of magnitude smaller than his wealth.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
I remember talking to a former coworker who had taken (or maybe taught) LL.M. classes at a law school with lawyers from all around the world (who were learning more about U.S. law as a form of continuing education). She said that she initially assumed that the foreign lawyers would be jealous of the U.S. first amendment (because the U.S. had succeeded in winning so much autonomy against the state, or against tyrannies of the majority), which is certainly the way many Americans would have learned to think about it growing up.
However, she found that most of the foreign lawyers were actually disturbed by or skeptical toward the first amendment, because they thought that some aspects of expression and communication were pretty dangerous and that it was an important function of the state to suppress or punish them.
As an American free speech activist, I was also extremely surprised by this!
One thing that's tricky is that there are several different reasons why people might be proud of or aspire to protecting speech, including:
- Free speech is a sign that your society is strong, peaceful, or successful, because it doesn't need to suppress subcultures or ideas by force. That suggests that the society is built, if not on consent, at least not on hiding something or getting people to pretend that they agree with things they don't. Conversely, censorship is a sign of weakness or fear, or an admission or clue that something is being covered up and people aren't being given a chance to investigate or think for themselves.
- Free speech is a human right that shows that you respect people's autonomy and conscience.
- Free speech is a mark of humility that shows that you accept for some purposes the possibility that you might be wrong or confused in ways that seem extremely unlikely or incomprehensible to you.
- Speech (and culture and belief) are areas of life that are not supposed to be regulated or controlled by the state (because they're too personal, they're too far from the things that states are really needed or appropriate for, or because they're used to define or understand the values and goals that people want the state to pursue in the first place).
- Free speech leads to good outcomes in some way (peace, understanding, progress, constructive deliberation, pluralism).
- Free speech prevents bad outcomes in some way (stagnation, totalitarianism, some abuses of power).
- Even though free speech might not always be that great, no state (or other entity) can be trusted to decide on the truth or the boundaries of acceptable discussion for everyone else.
In the U.S. we heard a lot about this idea during the Cold War and also during earlier days of tensions with China. Something like:
There's a conflict of these civilizations going on. How do you know which is right? Well, presumably the one that's not afraid to let you hear the other one's narrative or opinions. The one where you can buy the other one's newspapers if you want. That one doesn't have anything to hide, while the one where you can only get access to the local government's view of things presumably has a lot to hide and a lot to fear.
(However, I no longer think this distinction has been as clear-cut as we think. During parts of the Cold War, the U.S. government did a lot to reduce Americans' exposure to Soviet media or messages, or to stigmatize or deter in various ways the advocacy of the idea that the Soviet Union was right or that its system was better. Present-day Americans are also pretty concerned about Russians or others telling us things that we might find internally divisive. Some of these concerns are mediated by the idea that propaganda is bad or of no particular value if it is either false or conceals its origins, which might be approximately right, although the U.S. government has not consistently accepted either of those as ethical constraints on its own propaganda activities, and some recent American discourse has also evinced a surprising level of similarity to the Chinese idea that true information, or sincerely expressed ideas, might sometimes be bad for a society just because they are disruptive or divisive for it and not because they constitute lying or misrepresentations.)
(I also noticed that both North Korea and South Korea have laws prohibiting receiving or spreading propaganda from the other Korea. Even though I think it's obvious who has more to fear from the free flow of information across the Korean border, the symmetry in this legislation seems to show a lack of absolute self-confidence on the South Korean government's part...)
IMO one of the greatest enemies to success is broadening scope. General purpose computing: it's a good, specific focus. "Freedom in all areas of human activity" means endless conversations about what that means, what to focus on, what to prioritise, blah blah blah.
America is very quickly (and sadly) trending towards this, too.
https://eshoo.house.gov/sites/eshoo.house.gov/files/Eshoo-Mc...
Yikes. I wonder what happens to those companies if they have the "wrong" answers. Antitrust, make the executives testify, deny regulatory approval of random stuff... so many options.
It's just possible that maybe, just maybe some speech isn't compatible with democracy...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_expression_in_Can...
That's what history has shown again and again.
If you give free speech to people and groups who's express goal is to take away the power and speech of others they unironically will...
The paradox of tolerance isn't some other world hypothetical it has been demonstrated again and again.
> "coup"
Come on, man.
To people who are downvoting, the NYT story was made up: https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/22/what-we-know-...
Correct, it doesn't seem like they did; the NYT story was debunked.
> dragged an enemy flag through the senate
The rebel flag isn't an "enemy flag" any more than the Republic of Texas flag. It's a historical curiosity that has some function as a completely detached cultural signifier.
You are pathologically hyperbolic.
This is almost entirely heritable, and can only be "fostered" through demographic management.
I've always admired how much the general population defends freedom of speech in the US. In the rest of the world, freedom of speech is constantly eroded with laws against "hate speech", because our cultures (latin american here) don't value freedom of spedch. If we could capture the appreciation Americans have for freedom of speech and extrapolate it to all areas of human activity, we would rest assured that our computers would keep being general-purpose.