Speech doesn't kill people. People kill people.
Blaming this on Facebook instead of the people swinging the machetes is not going to solve the problem.
Suddenly the world is full of cliques, cabals and clandestine societies.
Social media / the internet as a whole, allows you to say and do things without any real fear of repercussion in the real world. That definitely doesn't help. Compound that by the ease of which we all can fall into an echo chamber, only hearing the ideals we seek out, and it's risky for sure.
The dopamine fix of winning in arguments or commentary through the various gamification definitely feed an unhealthy addiction.
You mean living in the country with the broadest, most unrestricted recognition of such a right in the entire world? And suffering from a persecution complex, nurtured by a steady diet of historical revisionism, concurrently with a creeping expansion of those rights?
I'm pretty sure we're already there.
Just because something is worse somewhere else doesn't mean that it can't be improved.
No.
> Just because something is worse somewhere else doesn't mean that it can't be improved.
I agree. I'm just not sure what needs to be improved, or why. The discourse around free speech has become, for lack of a better word, incoherent.
The only thing I have a substantial degree of certainty about is that most people, including an unfortunately large number of supposed legal scholars, have a very ahistorical notion of (or at least unjustified certitude about) what the term has meant politically and legally and the significance it was given relative to other rights.[1] And while history shouldn't dictate our decisions, its unfolding is often a good reference for understanding the interplay of various ideas. The loss of that reference is the loss of an anchor that could help keep the discourse grounded and constructive. Instead "free speech" has become a vehicle into which we shove a diverse array of beliefs and aspirations, which by dint of our fetishization of the Bill of Rights then become unquestionable and even sacred.
[1] For a hint at what might have been on the minds of the drafters we could look at, for example, Chapter VI, The Right to Freedom of Discussion in A.V. Dicey's famous Introduction to the Study of The Law of the [British] Constitution. I don't mean to suggest that British law was the same in the late 19th century as in 18th century America (or 18th century Britain, for that matter), but Dicey's take on the issue as well as his distinctions between British and French law suggest that American developments (most quite late, occurring in the mid 20th century), such as giving political speech and journalists special protections from, e.g., libel law, or eliding the distinctions between commercial and individual speech, might partially conflict with both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment as originally conceived. I could provide many other examples that contradict the history of free speech in the U.S. as we commonly assume it. None of which to say I think our modern conception is inherently bad; only that it is, indeed, modern, and in many respects can be traced in a direct line back to--or through--Louis Brandeis (i.e. market place of ideas, truth will conquer lies in a Darwinian struggle). So cries about the sky falling seem misplaced.
I agree there are parallels to US based issues, but this article is about Ethiopia and the struggles of the people living is a dynamic young system. In fact, the article is a very good look into a country that is estimated to have ~300M people by the end of the century.
But to play along, NO, because 42 U.S. Code § 2122 makes that illegal. If nuclear weapons are ever issued as standard individual weapons to soldiers, then they will be covered by the 2A via the Militia Act. Until they are, nukes are not covered by the 2A.
The constitution and current laws, clearly define what you can or can't have under the 2A. NFA laws exist as were voted to control Automatic weapons, SBR's, Silencers, Sawed off Shotguns etc. Until new laws are enacted that change this, it's pretty clear.
I for one don't want new laws written to change my first amendment rights, lest we get to the point where the 2nd is needed to defend the first.
That's a 10^1000 multiplier. It doesn't even matter what unit you use really...
If it was to serve its original purpose, it arguably might need to (just as private ownership of the heaviest artillery was in the early Republic not unheard of) but any hope of it serving its original purpose has been lost since at least the late 19th Century with the expansion of paramilitary police forces, and the final nail in it's coffin was drilled with the transition to a fully professional military after Vietnam, and what weapons are covered doesn't really matter any more to it's intended function, only to the degree of incidental harm it inflicts while failing to protect from the harms of the isolated culture of large permanent military/paramilitart internal and external security forces.
May the citizens rip apart the federal LE agencies into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.
The 'pen' amplified by the media - is much, much, mightier than the sword.
It is mass/social media that creates waves of outrage that compound unto themselves, without this, general uprisings are really quite hard to fathom.
This is exactly what happened in the Rwandan Genocide.
In Rwanda it was 'radio jockeys' on a daily basis would spew really crazy hate speech all day, every day: "The Tutsi/Hutus are like cockroaches, one day, we will exterminate all of them! They are vile creatures, from hell, they rape our children, the rape our women, soon we will rise up!"
And then it gets worse, and worse until one day "The time is now, come out of your homes, rise up and kill them!"
Now imagine people coming out of their homes, with machetes, hacking up their neighbours with knifes.
It's uglier than a zombie film.
Pregnant women hacked to bits, on the side of the road. Roving gangs of people, literally blood in their hands, burning down buildings with people inside them. Breaking into catholic girls schools, grabbing the girls, raping them, then hacking them up.
Unthinkable stuff.
The Rwandan genocide was not 'Force A' (pro this) and 'Force B' (pro that) fighting one another, it was more or less widespread ethnic warfare - a lot of regular people on the streets coming out to fight one another.
When General Dallaire (Cdn. General overseeing the tiny UN mission) tried to take action - it was to go the radio station to try to get them to appeal for calm, because that was the primary means of mass communication.
It's really, really easy to ferment 'hate' in the populist sense of the word.
It's one thing to talk about 'hate speech' in the sense of 'some guy said something terrible about another' - that's more or less an intellectual concept.
But when it starts to be organized and compounded, it becomes a serious problem very quickly.
Nobody cares about the redneck next door - but when people start forming mini-local movements ("Kill all the Cops", "Kill the Negros", "Kill the White People") then it will get out of hand, fast.
I have seen on TikTok in the last few days, some really scary stuff: A young Black man referring to some kind of African 'God' that will come and wipe out all the 'pale skins' and the 'sun will wither their white skin away'. Literally calling for genocide. And a young white guy with sunglasses, just staring at the camera with a note: "Hey, what if we didn't have any Black People in America. Just sayin' ..." Which is directly more or less a controversial, rhetorical question, but it has some pretty heavy/scary overtones.
This stuff can get out of hand very fast.
Finally note that the press - including CNN/Fox/MSNBC etc. have drastically toned down their coverage of protests. There are protests all over the nation right now - if you turn on TikTok it's crazy - there is a lot going on. The press realizes their 'complicity' in that covering such activities gives rise to the notion in other people and I believe have 'turned it down' on purpose on some level. Certainly the 'pro Biden' press is very wary because they realize images of violence hurt him.
Consider the 'Tea Party Movement'. It was a relatively small movement, but when Fox decided to 'go all in' on it, it got very big, very fast. When a small movement is thrust into the homes of millions of people, led and supported by 'respected advocates' then such things can grow quickly. Without national coverage, it's very difficult for movements to get big - which is of course one of the central sources of problematic editorial bias for cable news: they 'decided' what is going to be 'national news' by virtue of where they point the lens.
This is why propaganda works, and it's how you can get millions of ostensibly civilized people to put millions of other civilized people into gas chambers.
We can be smart as individuals, but mostly petty plebes when in groups and we are easily manipulated especially with anger.
Organized hate speech is different than 'individuals expressing their angry opinions'.
>As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building). But speech urging action at some unspecified future time may not be forbidden.
You are free to say what ever you feel like, and if anyone tells you differently say you use a foreign VPN! ;)
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater doesn't kill people, people trampling other people kills people. That seems about the sum total of the argument you just made
> The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."[2][3]:702 Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
> The Brandenburg test remains the standard used for evaluating attempts to punish inflammatory speech, and it has not been seriously challenged since it was laid down in 1969.
The context I believe they tried to share is that if we go beyond what we have established as free speech (to include your comments)_then we start our way down a slippery slope. Small changes will have big impacts.
The same is said for control measures around the 2A.
I don't see op's comment as anything beyond that.