Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

> The Left and the Right used to agree that freedom of speech was fairly sacrosanct.

Ha. "Agreed" only in the most superficial way. You might have caught people saying it occasionally.

If you follow civil liberties debates and the politics thereof you know there's often a gap between what politicians (or just ordinary people) say about freedom of speech and what they actually believe and do. In the US the politics of things like compelling public schoolkids to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, to give a perennial example, are illustrative of this. (there are tons of examples involving obscenity laws, etc.)

View on HN

As an immigrant, I find the Pledge of Allegiance pretty creepy.

I don't think it has anything substantial to do with freedom of speech issues.

Obscenity laws and flag burning are better examples.

The pledge itself is creepy but isn't a free speech issue. Compelled recitation of the pledge by agents of the state, like schools, at least to me, is.

"Free speech" to me means you can say whatever the hell you want.

Occasionally being compelled to say something is also bad, but a separate issue to me.

I don't understand your comment. Regardless of where you stand on the topic, I don't think it's controversial that compelled recitation of the pledge is debated in public and argued about in the courts as a first amendment freedom of speech issue.

(after reading your comment below I think I get it. It's one of the infringements of freedom of speech that you're willing to tolerate because it's merely "creepy?" If so, that's illustrative of the larger point I was trying to make about people treating freedom of speech hypocritically.)

Maybe you should reread the comment below?

It doesn't mention "creepy", and says something quite different from what you got from it.

Right, "creepy" is the word you used above.

You're welcome to entertain an eccentric definition of "freedom of speech" that doesn't include one of the major freedom of speech issues of our time. It's just very odd.

At least now you're mocking my actual opinion.

That's probably all the progress we'll make here :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com