That sure is quite an assumption you're making.
Governments should have zero control over speech and zero ability to impose consequences on speech. Individuals and most groups should have absolute freedom of association, which is precisely what they're exercising when choosing not to associate with some speech and some speakers
Perhaps you are an "absolute" free speech absolutist, but does that include:
- Swatting?
- Doxxing?
- Yelling "Fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater?
- Liable and Slander?
- Spreading nude pictures (real or faked) or personal medical information without consent?
- Threatening (relatively) defenseless individuals with physical harm?
- Impersonation?
- Blackmail?
Emphatically not, in the sense it's commonly used, but I think the distinction between "shunned by private individuals/groups/companies" and "prosecuted" is critically important.
I'm not going to go through all of these point-by-point, but as a couple of examples:
> - Swatting?
Inciting an action should be charged on the basis of the action and the probability of having incited it. Charge them with attempted murder. Also, fix the mechanisms that make it feasible for a person to too-easily call down excessive force on someone's home or office.
> - Yelling "Fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater?
Inciting a predictable panic that gets people injured should get you charged over the injuries. But also, the original version of that phrase was used as part of an abominably bad ruling restricting people speaking out against a military draft, so it's a bad example.
See also laws about fraud: the speech isn't the issue, the deception leading to swindling people out of something is.
Similarly, credible threats to commit a crime should be charged accordingly, not because of the speech but as prevention of an intended/planned crime. (With a great deal of caution, due to the balance between preventing it and the hazards of charging a crime that hasn't happened yet; Minority Report is not a blueprint.)
its just fine to call the cops. its not ok for the government to act on it thoughtlessly.
if people had yelled fire in that swiss club, maybe more people would have survived the fire?
why shouldnt i be able to put on an elvis costume and a bad accent?
The things you are listing really arent a big deal, and to be bad, have to include something more than just speech, eg. commerce
I suspect it goes to explain why this new bill is bipartisan. That case failed because the plaintiffs did not have a legal standing to sue.
"In a dissent that detailed emails, press conferences, and past decisions, Justice Alito painted the "jawboning" as "blatantly unconstitutional".
Wednesday's ruling, he wrote, "permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think"."
Regardless if one agree with them, it do demonstrate that conservative side think that there is a risk that governments will attempt to persuade platforms to moderate content, and that this is a risk. This new bill seem to make it much easier to give people a legal standing to sue, thus allowing the supreme court to give a different verdict if a similar situation happen again.
> I suspect it goes to explain why this new bill is bipartisan. That case failed because the plaintiffs did not have a legal standing to sue.
In that case (Murthy v. Missouri), Missouri and Louisiana did not have standing to sue because they did not demonstrate a minimum of evidence that the government coerced (as opposed to requested) platforms to remove speech.
> This new bill seem to make it much easier to give people a legal standing to sue, thus allowing the supreme court to give a different verdict if a similar situation happen again.
The lack of standing was not due to something like "no law says you can sue for such a violation". This law solves a problem that courts did not consider in Murthy v. Missouri.
IVM Block is my tongue in cheek reference to the Biden administration doing everything in their power to block discussion of a safe and effective treatment for Covid which would eliminate the legal justification for the EUA on Covid vaccines and spoil their giant investments in those pharma companies.
Second, horse dewormer doesn't cure COVID. Censoring dangerous misinformation from fools like yourself who will believe it because it's given to them via the right mouthpiece is a good idea, because if you don't, then you end up with fools like yourself, years after the fact, still regurgitating it.
It really does, that's the entire point. If you go find somebody and physically attack them for what they've written on HN about for example medicine, that makes you the law-breaker.
I understand from the way you write that you might consider it your right to do such things to other people who don't have the same opinions as you, but freedom of speech protects them against retribution from you or anybody else, including from the government.
Yeah if I did this thing you completely made up, that would be illegal. Just like if the parent commenter was imprisoned for the post he made, that would also be illegal. Have you considered basing your politics on real things?
> I understand from the way you write that you might consider it your right to do such things to other people who don't have the same opinions as you,
Oh don't flatter yourselves. I have no interest at all in going to prison for slapping the shit out of COVID deniers. I'll happily tell you you're wrong though.
> but freedom of speech protects them against retribution from you or anybody else, including from the government.
Correct, but it doesn't protect them from social consequences, in this case getting downvoted, which is what they were pissing and moaning about.
People are totally free to shun you if they don't like what you are saying though, and that seems totally fine to me. If you insult my family members, you won't be welcome on my house. How could it be otherwise?
Freedom of speech doesn't mean everybody or even anybody has to like what you say, but you should be protected from repercussions.
Being fired is certainly a consequence, but at will employment pretty much means you can be fired for anything.
There’s a certain motte-and-bailey that goes on with the “speech has consequences” crowd, where the frontline people just say their people are only engaging in legal counterspeech, while all this horrible stuff goes on behind the scenes. And then they laugh about the horrible stuff when it happens and say things like “FAFO.”
I almost never see would-be cancellers (regardless of political affiliation) call out people on their side for encouraging or engaging in blatantly illegal conduct in order to “own” their opponents. Often they hang out in the same group chats!
It is not. It is a crime or a punishment. You can't drag somebody to a struggle session because you didn't like what they said. You can't spit on them in the streets, follow them with a chanting mob, tear off their clothes, throw rotten food at them, or any such things which are humiliating somebody in public.
"Calling out somebody for racism" or for "being woke" in public debate is not public humiliation in that sense.
Go ask teenagers and adolescents in gang-infested territory what public humiliation is if you want to know. They get forced on camera to go down on their knees and kiss the boots of gang members, or do worse things on camera as punishment for something they have said that was "disrespectful". Then those videos are spread as public humiliation all across the networks of these people and youth at large.
To start, sure, ivermectin is safe at proper dosing, yes hundreds of millions of people take it for parasites every year, yes there was an early in-vitro study showing it fucked with viral replication in a petri dish. Cool. This is true of a ton of compounds that do absolutely nothing for you once they're in an actual bloodstream instead of a lab dish, because the concentration needed to see that effect in-vitro was way higher than what you can safely hit in a human's body. For example, one of those compounds is bleach, but if you take enough to hit the concentrations for it to do what you what it to do in your body, you will have much bigger problems than the COVID you were trying to kill.
Further, "nobody ever looked into it" is just not true. TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 were specifically designed, peer-reviewed RCTs with thousands of participants, published in NEJM/JAMA, built for the exact purpose of answering "does this actually work?" They looked. The answer was no. "A couple big studies got waved off as inconclusive" is just an incorrect read, full stop. The studies were done and the evidence was in, and it was not the answer.
The "100+ studies, many positive" thing is doing a lot of heavy lifting too: that number gets real big real fast once you stop separating "huge well-controlled RCT" from "12 people in a non-randomized trial somebody ran out of a spare room." Lumping those together and calling it "the science" is exactly the kind of cherry-picking everyone (correctly) clowns on anti-vax studies for doing.
And the FDA/CDC "didn't look at the data" thing is also just bullshit. They reviewed it as the RCTs rolled in, which is why the guidance moved from "not recommended outside trials" to "no benefit shown:" that is literally the science working exactly as it should be.
Now, to be clear: people getting publicly dog-walked in the press for even mentioning it? Yeah that part was genuinely shitty and probably made some people dig in out of spite instead of curiosity, which I get. However no amount of that being a fair accusation does a damn thing to make it so the amount of IVM OR bleach required to pull this off in the way anti-vaxxers wish doesn't render you stone fucking dead.
It's not like the same damn pharma industry couldn't have gotten just as rich selling IVM, or whatever, cure to the literal entire goddamn world to cure the plague that was skull-fucking every nation on the planet, and to pretend otherwise, that an ineffective medicine was chosen instead is pure, unadulterated nonsense. If it worked, every pharma company would've spun up production of it immediately, and the companies that already made it would've seen the value fly through the goddamn roof. New billionaires minted overnight. It didn't, they weren't, because it didn't work.
I-Tech was a good RCT and showed 75% lower mortality in severe patients, p=0.02. Only 490 people though. Clearly this deserved replicating with more people. The fact that it wasn’t is a problem.
The FDA on their website stated they did not look at the data. The statement was eventually taken down, they have never said they looked at it. The CDC looked at 6 studies and didn’t write a report.
When I mentioned method of action, I’m not talking about petri dishes.
An anecdote related to bleach, but peroxide was also mentioned. Another overlooked treatment was artemisinin, which contains an endoperoxide group that could get into cells and kill covid virus.
Facebook's treatment of the BMJ investigation of the unblinding of the Pfizer trial (which of course, turned out to be spot-on) was absolutely shocking, and is just one of the many instances of "ICE block-level" censorship.
(In case you need a refresher on the Facebook-censors-BMJ drama, I summarized it a few months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232902 )
I've seen it discussed half a million times.
> spoil their giant investments in those pharma companies.
Whose investments?
In fact, it seems to me that you've chosen precisely two areas between which a palpable bridge exists, contradicting the two-party zeitgeist.
HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
Likewise, I don't recall anyone but a few trolls suggesting that Apple's assistance to ICE in covering its tracks was a legitimate exercise of state (to the extent that pressure was a factor) or corporate (to the extent that it created market esteem) pressure.
I get the feeling we're not discussing this submission on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48605139
I get the feeling it's going to be flagged/dead in short order.
edit: Subarashi! How elegant. HN has flagged it less than 30 minutes after I made this comment. So much for the bastion of enlightenment and free speech known as HN, right?