Example: I believe that IP is a direct contradiction of nature, sacrificing the advancement of humanity and the world for selfish gain, and therefore is sinful.
Edit: pls do not downvote the comments this is a constructive discussion
Edit2: IP= intellectal property
Edit3: sort by controversal
Absolute free speech is overrated. You shouldn’t be able to just lie out your ass and call it news.
The fact that the only people who had any claim against Fox for telling the Big Lie was the fucking voting machine company over lost profits tells you everything you need to know about our country
Republican senator floats using violence against journalists who report ‘fake news’
While I’m tempted to agree, the big problem here is that if the government can decide that some speech is illegal, they can use that to silence people they don’t like.
Obviously the system we’ve got now in the US isn’t working, but we need to tread carefully when giving the government power to decide what is or isn’t the “right beliefs”.
Nah,
If I walk up to you on the street and tell you to hand over your money or I’ll kill you, that’s enough to land me jail. Its maybe even enough for you to be justified in punching me in self defense, if you feared for your life and there was no other way you could ensure your safety.
But suddenly if I say I want to put a million people in a gas chamber that’s A-OK? Suddenly no one can punch back or else they’re “just as bad”? Suddenly the lines are super blurry and the slopes are super slippery and its absolutely impossible to tell what a threat of violence is.
Its a crime to say you’ll kill one person, its your right to say you’ll kill a million.
I understand and sympathize with your point, but unfortunately the law will never be that simple.
To use your example, you walking up to me and saying “hand over your money or I’ll kill you” is not justification to respond with lethal force per se. The missing element here is assault - in other words, I have to believe you both are able and intending to do me harm before I can respond with force. If no reasonable person would believe that what you said was actually a threat (like, for instance, if you were a five year old) then I’m still not justified in harming you in self defense.
Yes. They are. And that was your first example, the one meant to be unequivocally black and white.
The problem here is fundamentally an epistemic one. The law is not a thinking, reasoning being. It is merely a system of procedures. The law does not know - it cannot know - the difference between right and wrong. It only knows what the rules are, and those rules may be wrong.
You might think that there is absolutely no reason to advocate for the mass murder of an entire group of people. And under 99.9% of circumstances, I would agree. But if the zombie apocalypse broke out, I might find myself in favor of killing all of the zombies - and legally, there’s no reason that wouldn’t be genocide.
The law doesn’t know whether zombies are people. It doesn’t know whether or not we are. Therefore, there must be some way to have discussions about the law that are above (or outside the scope of) the law. That’s what politics is, fundamentally: the discussion of the law that’s untouchable by the law. Even if we tried to make certain political stances illegal, we wouldn’t succeed, because that is one area in which the law is necessarily blind.
So we can’t curtail the first amendment.
We can’t execute Nazis.
But we could lynch them, as that would be a political act and not a legal one.
deleted by creator
It’s not perfect, sure, but we as a society should be capable of deciding that some things aren’t okay without giving the state carte blanche to censor as they see fit. If the system can be abused, then we ought to fix it, not forgo it entirely.
Plus, governments and companies already suppress or ban a bunch of speech, often in favor of the ruling class. I doubt outlawing harmful speech like parent comment suggests would be the straw that breaks democracy’s back.
Hard to be the breaking point when it’s already broken. But if it weren’t broken already… then I think it actually might.
What we could do is make “journalist” a protected profession. So just like you can’t call yourself a fiduciary unless you hold to a certain set of ethical guidelines, you wouldn’t be able to call yourself a journalist unless you agree not to lie (among other things). So if you forgo the title of journalist, you can say whatever you want (obviously the other laws still apply, so you still can’t slander or libel, and if spreading misinformation causes harm you can still be liable). But if you are calling yourself a journalist, you voluntarily assume a higher standard for what you are allowed to say.
I think that would avoid any first amendment issues. But I’m not a lawyer, so please don’t take my word for it 🤣
Yeah, it’s like giving anyone who’s living somewhere illegally no due process. If they can deport people based on what they say is illegal and you have no way to fight that, then who’s to say that they aren’t going to call you illegal and deport you?
That is exactly what was on my mind when I wrote the comment.
People in the US often misunderstand what sorts of speech can be “free”. There’s plenty of restricted speech in the US - hate speech can intensify the sentencing on crimes, libel and slander are both punishable civilly, speech that directs or is likely to incite “imminent lawless action” (e.g. yelling fire in a crowded theater - that is actually the legal reason for why you can’t do that if there isn’t a fire).
That doesn’t even begin to cover the sorts of speech that are heavily suppressed by the government and media but aren’t legally restricted - like how the media chooses not to cover large popular protests sometimes (famously, the antiwar protests around the invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan), or gives disproportional representation to counter protesters to give the illusion that both sides are equally popular, or how anti-capitalist stances are generally ignored or downplayed. Not illegal, but if you can’t really engage in those sorts of speech publicly, they may as well be.
Agreed, news needs to be held to a higher standard than it is now. There’s a whole list of journalist code of ethics that basically distils to be truthful, minimize harm, be independent, and be accountable.
*some example of minimize harm;