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Comment by petermcneeley | Hacker News Reader

The issue here is should individuals be responsible for the consequences of actions of others given their speech.

I think the classical answer is No. I think it's anti enlightenment thinking to punish people for their discourse.

Debatable. Lying so as to cause immediate harm, and practicing medicine without a license, are neither of them new limitations to free speech.

I'm pretty sure that even in the midst of the Enlightenment, speech which directly encouraged violence, did harm or spread fraudulent ideas which led to death could be punished.

No, that's just the American answer.

Yes and fortunately we're not relying on eg the European answer, given the miserable condition of free speech across Europe today. Arrested for common insults on Twitter in Britain, and buried under the boot of dictatorship in Belarus or Russia.

The US was the last great European product of the enlightenment, so it makes perfect sense that the US would be by far the greatest defender of free speech in human history. No other culture or nation has come even remotely close to defending it better. Hopefully in the coming decades the US becomes even more comparatively extreme in defending all forms of speech, including the most vile.

Of all stories you could have used as an opportunity to argue for that absolutist stance on free speech, you're picking the one where it has almost directly caused dozens of needless infant deaths and immense suffering, and that still doesn't seem to make you flinch. The rebuttal writes itself, really.

By that impossibly naive logic, I suppose you also support the unconditional right to bear arms in any circumstances, another absolutist stance that's worked out so well for the US and its 1907 victims in 370 mass shootings in 2019 so far.

Or Facebook's decision to let politicians lie to people's faces, naively thinking citizens are all intellectually equipped to fact-check for themselves and should bear that responsibility (we can see how this worked out with Trump and Brexit)

The widespread support for absurdly extreme stances like these in a nation shouldn't be a source of pride : they aren't the hallmark of an advanced civilisation, but rather that of an immature one that hasn't yet found the right balance. If this is America, then I'll take European wisdom over this any day.

> 1907 victims in 370 mass shootings in 2019 so far.

I'm curious what this statistic would be if it didn't include gang violence.

If I yell "he's got a gun" as a prank intending people to stampeded out of a movie theater, trampeling and killing a someone in the panic, I'm responsible for the very predictable consequences. If I promote tea leaves as an effective innoculation to measels preventing people to get a life-saving vaccination, I'm responsible for the predictable consequences. There's a fine line somewhere and probably has something to do with opinion vs fact, but it's not crossed here.

Do not yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, especially if there is no fire.

>especially

I mean, if there is a fire, it’s probably ok to yell about it.

It's an interesting question. The yelling causes pretty much identical harm regardless of whether the fire is there. Evacuating (in general) is a difficult problem because you want to do it without letting everyone know what's going on.

We mostly say yelling "fire!" is ok when the fire exists because it looks bad to punish the true alarm, not because the false alarm is worse than the true one.

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