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Comment by daed | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I need to rewatch it, but what I got from it was that he's not arguing against the right to free speech, he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights - specifically in his words, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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>he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights

This is what so many people miss in this debate. We already outlaw a wide variety of speech that infringes on the rights of others. You can't threaten violence against me because that infringes on my rights. You can't slander me because it infringes on my rights. You can't reproduce my copyrighted speech because it infringes on my rights. You can't use my image to advertise your product because it infringes on my rights.

The debate isn't free speech versus no free speech. We already decided against universal free speech. The debate is now where do we draw the line between one person's rights and another person's rights.

Of course the problem, though, is that certain folks have imagined a right “not to be offended” into existence out of thin air. Or imagined that certain speech is “literally violence”.

In almost any debate there are going to be people that take one side to an necessary extreme. But at least those people who claim to have a right not to be offended are engaging in discussion. The people who demand we adhere to absolute free speech are both by definition unwilling to compromise and are coming to the conversation under false pretenses that we currently have absolute free speech in the first place.

Although I do want push back against your "literally violence" point since we handle that differently on an individual versus group basis currently. For example, if we start with the idea that slander of an individual infringes on the rights of someone, why is slandering an entire protected class of people okay? Cohen could sue me if I called him miserly (to use one of the examples of hate from his speech), but it is fine to say all Jews are miserly including Cohen? That doesn't make much logical sense to me.

Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

>Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

Well, yeah, this is a debate about free speech so of course one side wants to redefine what is allowed to be discussed. The difference is one side says "these are the things we don't want to be acceptable anymore" the other says "any change is unacceptable". Which side do you think is more likely to compromise? And free speech absolutists definitely exist, there are plenty in the comment sections here defending Facebook and their practice of allowing nearly anything to be posted.

>I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

I was assuming your "literally violence" comment was in relation to hate speech since that is the only time I have seen that type of language used. I was pointing out that banning hate speech can basically be viewed as simply an extension of our existing laws banning speech like defamation.

Banning hate speech may well be a good idea, but it'd be much more complicated than our restrictions on defamation.

An accusation of defamation can be countered by showing the statement is true. And, even still, we significantly weaken our laws against defamation when the person being defamed is a public figure, especially a politician, because the people who wrote US law have been extremely concerned about restrictions on political speech.

Hate speech is not defined in US law, and defining and banning it would not in any way be "simple".

It is pretty sad if we believe it is a good idea, but don't even try because it isn't "simple".

It'd also be pretty sad if we apply a simplistic solution to a complex problem and make everything worse.

I wasn't answering the question of if we should try, I was narrowly responding to a single claim that laws restricting hate speech would be easy to write because it would simply be a matter of applying existing laws slightly differently. That isn't the case. Irregardless of what you think of the merits, nothing analogous to a ban on hate speech is currently on the books in the US

>The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed.

I've gotta say, this sounds real similar to the "very fine people on both sides" type logic that tries to equate antifa to white supremacists.

I don’t understand your point. How is antifa or white supremacists at all related to this?

Assuming you refer to US law your right to not be threatened with violence is extremely limited. Furthermore, when deciding if speech is protected US courts generally do not balance one person's rights against another's. They look at whether the speech falls into a set of well defined categories (which the Supreme Court has refused to expand on many occasions recently).

Unfortunately a lot of the debate around free speech online relies on flawed assumptions about current US law. I'm not sure what restrictions should be in place, but I think incorrectly understanding the current legal standards won't help us figure out the answer.

For example, the trite phrase "Shout fire in a crowded theater" was coined in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Oliver Wendall Holms during WW1 to argue that a communist activist who wrote pamflets urging people to hide if they were drafted violated the law and should be imprisoned. Thankfully the Supreme Court subsequently realized that criticing the government in wartime and urging people not to cooperate with the military should not be illegal. The phrase is completely outdated nowadays.

Two of the excluded categories I find most frequently misapplied in this sort of debate are "true threats" and "fighting words". In general, they don't apply to most things you might expect them to.

> A statement is only a "true threat" if a reasonable person would interpret the words, in their context, as an expression of actual intent to do harm. In addition, the speaker must either intend that the words be taken as a statement of intent to do harm, or at least must be reckless about whether or not they would be interpreted that way (that's still a bit up in the air, legally).

https://www.popehat.com/2016/11/16/true-threats-v-protected-...

Similarly, the doctrine of fighting words almost never applies in real life

> In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.

https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...

(I'm citing Ken White because I find his writing amusing and easy to read. If you don't like his presentation googling keywords will trivially lead you to more academically oriented sources that say essentially the same thing)

In that case any anti propaganda regulation is censorship.

We can't just reduce things down to being either censorship or free speech. Real life is messier than that.

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