Some of these people were found guilty, some acquitted. All were prosecuted under these laws.
To be clear I don't agree with any of these people. I don't even find the Mike Ward joke particularly funny. It's a throwaway bit meant to be offensive from my point of view. But I don't think they should be able to be thrown in prison, fined, or sued, because someone's feelings got hurt over some words.
How do you determine this? If I define a common word to be offensive towards me, how would you argue against it if I really feel that way? Where do you draw the line?
>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-la...
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!"
Certainly. For example, in Germany it is illegal to curse at the police. There is a rather well-known video where police confront a man at his door but can't do anything more until he calls them cunts, at which point they turn around, force their way in, and arrest him.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Japan enacting harsher punishments for cyber bullying is not a slippery slope into free speech infarction, as the harm principle has always been part of the philosophy. GP's stance is based on an increasingly common misconception (these days in the U.S. at least) that free speech means freedom from consequence.
I do dislike people who say "citation?" (and I don't wish to seem presumptuous) but can you give me any further links or prominent examples of that?
Is it a social media thing? I don't use popular SM or trawl the sewers of chans any longer, so is it there? Is that representative of a wider society?
Do people who hold the extreme view that "speech has no consequences" distinguish that idea from "speech can have have bad consequences, but that's better than the alternative of curbing free speech"? Or have we reached a kind of intellectual low point in places where these beliefs are purported to hold?
- Post jan 6 insurrection has left Republicans trying to justify their seditious invasion of the U.S. capital as protests protected by speech: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/KF_F...
- The "Cancel culture" pejorative has created a double standard where a certain political party cries foul for being censored on private platforms (for violating TOS) and push for government regulation of said platforms to protect their political opinions. They are even trying to redefine private websites as the public square to do it.
- Sacha Baron Cohen also sums it up nicely in his speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
If you really are genuine with your questions and asking for citations, you can google more topics about any of the above.
I had to look this up. That's a pretty sad accusation off the bat isn't it? One of my opinions I'll share is that I think even HN, supposedly one of the better discussion forums - why I write things here - is also blighted by "toxic internet culture" of assuming the worst in everybody. Also I think the "move fast" design is deliberately not conducive to conversation, so I am wondering if you will see this response.
From a British perspective I think the rioters attempting a coup and then backtracking to calling it "a protest" is laughable. At least one should have the courage of ones convictions. If you're going to try a coup you damn well better know it's going to succeed - as the alternative in every other historical example is getting lined up against the wall. If what you say is true then saying "oops only joking... it was just a fun legitimate protest" makes them cowards. So I simply can't entertain an argument that anyone defending a failed coup as "free speech" is serious.
Mr Cohen has a lot of good things to say, and I think I get what you're talking about after watching the clip you linked, thank you.
> "the age of evidential argument is ending and knowledge is de-legitimised.... by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history."
Couldn't have put it better myself. Pleased that he cited what is the subject of a chapter in my book Digital Vegan; the role of Facebook in Myanmar - which sadly few people will touch. How SBC actually puts it is "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" - a nice turn. But then he flounders a little, not coming right out against Zuckerberg's "bullshit" reasoning as a purely driven by greed, he softens it as the "ideological imperialism" of the 'Silicon Six'. Cohen being accused of anti-Semitism isn't something I'd imagine can't happen these days either.
But in the end, SBC's beef seems to be with the unelected power of BigTech, and unfortunately he isn't a great philosophical scholar, by his own introductory remarks. What is to be done? He doesn't seem to know how to frame those who disingenuously deploy good arguments for bad ends... which is what I think the nub of your "lots of people equate freedom of speech with freedom from consequences" line. Zuckerberg couldn't give a fuck, and Cohen is correct in calling him a "bullshitter" in the strictest sense of Harry Frankfurt's definition. But to suggest that FB or any other company could "purge lies and conspiracies from their platform" is naive. There wouldn't be much left, especially of politicians and business people have to say - and when he hits that Cohen turns it into a damn joke to soften it! That's why comedians can say certain things that other's can't... up to a point. And then they risk losing their platform. So, much as I love Sascha Baron-Cohen he drifts into waters out of his depth. That said, I'm 99% with him (not afraid to be out of my depth).
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.
It's hard to judge, of course, but the USA is 42nd in freedom of speech from one press/media perspective.
Being an asshole online is unfortunately normalized among many players, which we can see from your comment.
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-...
What microsoft+ big media companies want the future to be:
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-hostin...
These "pirate" claims are just pro corporate propaganda, they want to eliminate software ownership.
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.
I don't believe this part has anything to do with your conspiracy
Binaries are in this format because it's convenient to store and more optimal to run them in this format. Most users don't really care/want to edit binaries/executables...
Regarding piracy: I'm sure you worked at a company that had a product, which was sold in some fashion. Part of that money went to paying your salary. Imagine there are no piracy laws/protection, and everyone uses your company's product without paying you. Where does your salary come from now? Trees?
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.
Some jurisdictions have criminalized "hate speech", but the implementation and definition of this is haphazard, and the consequences are often negative, rebounding on communities that were originally intended to be protected.
The one you missed which is consistently forbidden across the world is CSAM.
We're starting to see proposals and legislation to include police officers as a protected group under hate crime/speech statutes. That's a hairsbreadth from lèse-majesté.
Protection laws in the US are an absurd and abused mess. I would only be mildly surprised to see minorities prosecuted for hate crimes for attempting suicide.
You really should stop spreading that falsehood. It was overturned over 50 years ago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
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.
A popular term from a decision that was overturned by the Supreme Court decades ago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
this phrase will never go away, the fact that it stems from a 100 year old supreme court decision that used it as example why speech in opposition to the WWI draft was not protected free speech under the first amendment is still funny besides the fact that it was later overturned.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."