Why I think “Draw Mohammed Day” is a bad idea
errant.me.uk
errant.me.uk
The free speech / censorship argument really doesn't hold water for the South Park episode. Comedy Central/Viacom is a corporation. They can choose to show on their air time whatever they want.
If you get killed because you drew Mohammed, then,
1) you totally had it coming
2) you were a victim of a criminal offense (poor you, you're dead now)
3) but, SURPRISE, your free speech was not violated! (remember, the goverment is the only one who can violate your free speech rights)
I think this idea is a far greater danger to freedom of speech than a few radical Muslims.
Otherwise, we might as well fear things like alcohol as well, since it can also kill you (and it's statistically more dangerous than extremists, at that).
I don't see any reason to make an artificial cut between this sort of action, and a similar action by a government. Even if you don't call it a violation of your right to free speech, it's still a bad thing, and just as much a cause for concern.
Libertarians like to make semantic distinctions here because they have a particular ideology that they want to push. In particular, they like to pretend that mere freedom from government oppression is all the freedom that anyone should want.
From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak without censorship and/or limitation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which
may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the
government or media organizations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_limitations
A statute of limitations is an enactment in a common law legal system
>> I don't see any reason to make an artificial cut between this sort of action, and a similar action by a government.
You can't arbitrarily decide that civilian threats and something like the great firewall of China are on the same level because they simply aren't. It's completely unfathomable to think that you could copy and paste the legislation for one and apply it to the other. That'd be like putting a single try/catch around the body of main and call it your exception handling framework :)
>> Even if you don't call it a violation of your right to free speech, it's still a bad thing
We agree there, but by your logic, any time someone says "man , IE developers should die" or whatever, they're basically the same as extremists. My beef is with people confusing threatening, actually killing and real oppression, and attempting to justify stupid actions by evoking a noble human right.
You can't just put the three in the same bucket and tell me that it's cool to troll millions of people that did nothing to you, when really, you just have a petty disagreement with some random guy that you don't even know.
The keyword you used that is central to all of this was "fear". Emotions tend to cloud logical judgement very fast. Look at the TSA. And ask yourself: do you really think you're safer or more free after EDMD?
(Oh, and for the record, I don't believe in Libertarianism)
However, I do think that (e.g.) large media conglomorates have the potential to seriously undermine people's free speech rights. And individuals can undermine each other's free speech rights to a certain extent. (E.g. by explicitly threatening violence.)
I don't know what you mean by the TSA or the EDMD, or why they're supposed to be relevant to this discussion.
If you get killed because you drew Mohammed, then, 1) you totally had it coming
I think we have a reasonable right to expect not to be killed for being rude/offensive. There are lots of rude and offensive people in the world - they don't deserve to die!