Comment by cfadvan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cfadvan | Hacker News Reader

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An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law?

If that was your intent, then absolutely, legally at least you’re civilly and criminally on the hook. See: inciting riot. Even it wasn’t your intent, if a court finds that a reasonable person should have predicted the outcome, yes. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences or responsibility.

I realize that this may be unpalatable for some who’s idea or free speech differs from the legal reality, so please understand that I’m just laying out the legal landscape. You are of course, free to believe in whatever you wish should be, I’m just addressing what is.

@Jack9

The solution to abuses of the law isn’t to throw out the law, but throw out the abuse. I despise idealistic arguments that ignore the reality of daily enforcement. Most people brought up on charges of assault and battery are not being framed or railroaded, they committed assault and battery. The times when those laws are abused need to be aggressively addressed, but not by attacking the law in general unless it’s badly written.

For example, traffic and public order laws can be used to good effect, or to harass a group of people. The problem isn’t that it’s wrong to have those laws, but the underlying issues thst lead to people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum being disproportionately targeted, and then poorly represented. It’s good that everyone can’t just parade through downtown every rush hour, but bad when those same regulations are used as flimsy excuses to deny people their right to assembly.

The real problems are more subtle and difficult to address than most people understand or care to admit. There is no Platonic ideal of law or ideology that can withstand human intentions and abuses. We need to focus less on perfecting an imperfect system, and more on the underlying abuses. Otherwise you get things that look good on paper, but are trivially subverted. In theory the US president can’t declare war, but 17 years ago the US congress put the US effectively in a state of perpetual war so they’re out of the intended loop. Even before that how long was Vietnam a “police action?” exactly?

The systems have to be enacted by poeple, which is why putting decent people with good intentions in charge is so very fucking important!

As far as I know, Brandenburg requires actual intent, not just a reasonable person test of likelihood.

> See: inciting riot.

The concept of "Inciting a Riot" is one of the more obvious overreaches to control distasteful groups that leads us down the path of thought control (vis a vis postmodernism or original economic stratification). If someone is so ignorant or intent that they take an unlawful action due to spoken or written word, they had problems before. The edge cases are something more akin to accomplice. Those "rioter" problems were historically in education/comprehension (ironically something the internet has helped with in many cases) or mental defect or justified outrage. Because capitalistic and social opponents could not affect the changes they wanted or changes fast enough, the idea of a riot was born as a club. Even in america, the right to assemble is curtailed by the judicious application of this opposing legal construct.

> If someone is so ignorant or intent that they take an unlawful action due to spoken or written word,

Speech and words can be loaded with ideological stances. Those can amount to political violence over time, and normalize such against others.

Speech and words aren't passive, but rather loaded ideologically and politically.

This doesn't begin to decant the fallacy of "unlawful."

Can you provide the definition of "decant" you're using? I'm having trouble finding one that fits the context.

Empty out, drain, etc.

The hidden ideological ground that all laws are ethical and just at any given point in history is absurd.

The whole point of the previous post is literally that one law (prohibition of "inciting a riot") is unethical, so the claim that they're saying that "all laws are ethical and just" is simply absurd.

> If someone is so ignorant or intent that they take an unlawful action due to spoken or written word, they had problems before.

See 'unlawful', which is difficult to unpack to "some laws" or worse "not all laws", agree?

Along these lines, my point was that racism, bigotry, homo/transphobia is a cultural byproduct of an accumulation of speech and text that may be politically violent.

Its strange to have such a protection for the worst atrocities, (though people tend to agree with you);

Imagine if the government did something so horrible, that just talking about it would reasonably cause a riot... it would be illegal to talk about it. I wonder if this limit could be extended to media (blurred as that definition is now), so it would be illegal to report anything the government or large corporations have done that might reasonably cause people to riot?

Talking about something upsetting is not inciting a riot, because reasonable people don’t just burn shit down when they’re unhappy. Standing on a podium and saying, “The police shot my son in cold blood, and we need to work to change society,” is different from, “The police shot my son, burn it all down!”

Marching against the Vietnam war isn’t the same as teaching people to make AP explosives to drop in recruitment centers. Remember that the law isn’t code, it’s not executed as written, but interpreted. Going back to the GP, “do I have a right to misinform?” Yes you do, mostly. If you try to convince people to take up arms and start burning shit down with misinformation though, the game changes. “I believe the government is poisoning our children with fluoride,” is protected. “The government is poisoning our children with fluoride, so let’s go to the water treatment plant and kill everyone there!” is not protected.

You mean, like leaking classified information?

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