"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
― George Orwell
― George Orwell
It was omitted from the novel under ironic circumstances (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Preface - "For reasons unknown, no preface was supplied, and the page numbers had to be renumbered at the last minute") and only rediscovered in 1971.
It is Chomsky's favorite Orwell piece, one he mentions all the time (e.g. https://chomsky.info/20101010_2/) and has probably done the most to popularize. https://www.google.com/search?q=chomsky+animal+farm+preface
Say, someone with a new brand of Nazi-ism is actually converting most of the people they talk to, using a combination of half-truths? Or even what if they are converting people by using celebrity endorsements and charismatic language? So no misinformation, but rather salient anecdotes, facts, and science?
What if someone's speech is effective at making people afraid of exercising opposing speech? What if someone's speech convinces people to attack the capitol? Maybe they don't plan the attack itself, and it's merely implied that the state of the world is completely unfair in a way that only a revolution and changing of constitutional rights, could a better world be restored?
> What if someone's speech is effective at making people afraid of exercising opposing speech? What if someone's speech convinces people to attack the capitol? Maybe they don't plan the attack itself, and it's merely implied that the state of the world is completely unfair in a way that only a revolution and changing of constitutional rights, could a better world be restored?
The government should not be censoring this. Private companies, as always, should feel free to censor what they want, regardless of positions.
And I'm really trying to get at the point that this speech is actually effective. Not sure why people are downvoting, because I don't think this has been discussed before.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323...
As much as I deplore their views I don’t think they should be legally barred from expressing them. Of course MSG has every right to decline hosting the above event, but the government shouldn’t be the arbiter of who can say what when in public.
It doesn't matter whether the speech is effective or not. The root of your problem is that what has happened traditionally is that governments will censor left-leaning views while leaving the right free. The problem, then, is not that the right is not being censored, but that the left is.
And what about when the government threatens private companies with new regulations or other actions if they don't suppress certain types of legal speech? Is there a point at which extralegal government pressure to suppress speech violates the first amendment?
What about when companies "voluntarily" decide to supress anything that disagrees with the offical stance of the government and thus grants the government indirect control over that entire category of speech?
Giving companies a complete free pass for censorship creates a huge backdoor that allows government censorship thrive with plausible deniability.
They aren't merely censoring, they are also libeling them by attaching a misinformation/disinformation type of label, or adding their own speech to it.
And, am I obliged to listen and/or give a thoughtful response to anything I do not want to hear?
Lies, yes. People are free to utter them. Nobody is obliged to listen, or let them go without a response, as may be appropriate.
Credible threats and defamation are legally defined and have criminal or civil consequences because we recognize that they overtly cause harm. Fraud too. What in your mind is the fundamental difference between causing harm by defamation, which is literally just lying in a particular context, and causing overt harm by other kinds of lying? In order to credibly differentiate them, saying that one is ok and the other is not ok, we must have some distinguishing essential characteristic. Significantly broader categories of lying definitely and overtly cause harm, so what to your mind brings a moral imperative to allow one but not the other?
I think our court system does a good job of defining this already. Our court system is extremely conservative regarding the types of speech that it allows the government to punish people for.
If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the 1st amendment, I guess.
I'm not sure that it does. Short of "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it) what definitions of the essential characteristic of good speech vs bad speech do we actually have if not overtly causing harm?
> If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the 1st amendment, I guess.
The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed when we got consumer protection laws, so I don't think so.
By definitions, I am simply referring to how courts have ruled in the past on this stuff. Which is to put very strict limits on what the government can do.
> The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed
The courts have traditionally ruled pretty darn strictly on what the government is allowed to do.
You should compared the supreme court precedents that we have in the US, to other countries, and you will see just how much more strict the US is, regarding what the government can ban.
So yes, based on how strict courts have been in the past, if you want to redefine how speech laws work in the US, you are going to have an uphill battle.
Based on what, though? What specific essential characteristics define the cases where it is deemed acceptable to restrict speech and how do the same exact criteria not also apply to many other scenarios as well?
Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true:
1) No such essential characteristic exists, which means that our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
2) Some essential characteristic does exist, but we just look the other way sometimes, which similarly means that our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
3) Some essential characteristic does exist that is actually applied everywhere that somehow morally differentiates "fraud" from "deception with intent".
I don't see truth in 1 or 3, so I think we must be doing 2.
If you are actually looking for the answer to that question, there are a multitude of supreme court cases that you can read.
Just go google supreme court, 1st amendment cases, and reach the actual primary sources.
People teach whole classes on this stuff, and the specific reasonings that our courts give, for their strictness.
It is a complicated, but we'll established topic, for which you could read many many books on.
And if you truly are looking for the answer, as to the many nuances to that question, you need to read the actual court cases yourself.
> Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true
Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you can learn in an afternoon.
There are people who spend their entire lives studying it. And you are not going to come up with some clever insight to it, in an afternoon.
Instead, you are going to have to actually do the work, and study the topic, for you to understand it fully.
If one's position is "I think our court system does a good job of defining this already", one should be able to point to an established definition that doesn't also apply equally to many other antiregulated contexts. Otherwise what the court system is doing a good job of is not "defining".
> Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you can learn in an afternoon.
Laws are numerous and capricious. I'm not asking about laws. I'm not even asking about history. I'm asking about any existing philosophical position that differentiates what we _should_ restrict from what we _should not_ restrict. If we start from the notion that capital-F Fraud is bad, which we must since we regulate it, surely we should be able to say why it is so and apply the same reason elsewhere.
The stated position is that you are going to be completely unable to understand, in an afternoon, the nuances of a topic, for which people spend their lives studying.
Thus, if you actually care about the topic, you need to read the supreme court cases or the numerous literature on the topic.
Otherwise, you are not going to be able to understand what the supreme court even does, or why they do it, when there is thousands of pages of reasoning, on this stuff.
> surely we should be able to say why it is so and apply the same reason elsewhere
And I am saying that such discussions require you to actually read the primary sources here, which is books and books, and court case after court case.
Sorry, but complicated topics are not solved by people debating a paragraph here and there.
Yes, you will actually have to take a class on this, or read books on this, to understand it.
Sorry, that's just life. When you ask extremely general and expansive questions, about philosophy, such as "what is the difference between different speech", unfortunately these are topic for which there is lifetimes of work discussing it, and you are not going to be able to have a debate in a couple paragraphs on it.
Such as the case that gave rose to the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" idiom
The reason why it takes a lifetime of study to understand what sorts of speech are actually protected is because the Supreme Court has had some very inconsitent decisions (such as the one I mention above) that require tortured reasoning to align with the first amendment and other case law.
Id there are indeed some clear criteria, you should be able provide a reasonable summary of them; it should not require a lifetime of study. If the average american can't be said to understand what their free speech rights are...can you really say that they have thoae rights in prqctice?
Yes, because the court system has traditionally been extremely strict, most of the time, in defending free speech, compared to other countries.
So yes, I can confidently say that the court system has defended free speech in the US, much more than in other countries, most of the time.
> If the average american can't be said to understand
Courts protecting a right that someone doesn't understand is still better than the courts not protecting it.
Sometimes our rights only matter to us when we really need them, and it is still better that they are protected in those cases.
We'll see if the Supreme Court has anything to say when the US finally get Assange extradited and puts him on trial for his speech. I don't have a lot of confidence he'll get any protections.
I don't think that is free speech related?
And these laws are literally all about scaring schools and teachers from saying things that make some people a bit uncomfortable.
So, yes, the way we use term free speech, it falls into that.
But the point is that we only see the people who claim to promote free speech as a general rule showing up to defend roughly one side of the education process (conservative students) and largely being silent when faculty are attacked.
Public schools having to avoid topics such as this. Private being free to teach what ever they want?
The problem I see is that this puts parents at odds with their children. If the parents are conservative should the schools challenge that? Or if the parents are liberal should the schools challenge that?
It becomes difficult becomes some academic topics can't be separated from politics.
The textbooks themselves are political. If you are approaching anything like history or sociology, your politics and worldview matter. And you cant strip it entirely out, because it affects what you teach.
The bigger problem is the curriculums being set in a way that precludes coverage of ideologically inconvenient topics.
History teachers in big government states simply don't have the time to pay more than lip service to jim crow and the government screwing the natives. Biology teachers in the bible belt are going to made to teach a requirement where the most realistic way to do their jobs is to give scant coverage to the evolution adjacent topics.
Was it the war of northern aggression or the civil war? Was it fought over slavery? Or states rights? Is one of those ways of teaching history more political than the other?
The problem is that propaganda is political, and how history is taught is propaganda.
Courses such as "Women in Medieval Europe" and "18th century Native American History" are decried as political. A friend of mine had a student complain that there wasn't enough discussion of the presidents in their course on Native American History. The "apolitical" approach that many people want means the almost total exclusion of subaltern voices from the historical record, and that is obviously BS.
Characterstically, Facebook and other media companies didn't suffer any consequences for suppressing public discussion on this matter.
(I don't hold any view about this theory. Comment is about absurdity of the idea of claiming that something is an outright lie, and also about hypocrisy of a so-called "fact-checkers")
Was it? I remember hearing plenty about the theory for a while. Sure, a lot of it (if not most) was saying that the theory is wrong - but not that it was a lie or anything, just giving evidence against.
(And to be clear, saying a year ago that it is for sure a leak was probably really a lie - just as saying it now, cause afaik there is no conclusive evidence either way).
Umm, to put it mildly, that was beyond obvious.
The person labelling something as a "lie" is usually doing so in order to outright dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth without actually having to prove it's wrong in its entirety.
Your generalization is a bad one, not because it has exceptions, but because it likely has as many as confirmations.
There has been plenty of debunking of the specific claims. If you have some specific claims that you don't think have been debunked, I'd like to hear them.
There are indeed examples where calling something a lie (or conspiracy theory) is a bigger lie. If this is one of those, you should have no trouble finding specific supporting claims that aren't also lies and haven't been expressly debunked.
I am not claiming the election was stolen or that Trump should have won. What I am saying, is that when you state "Trump's lies about a rigged election", you are labeling his comments as "lies" to dismiss any discussion of the very real problems with mail-in voting. And that denial is your attempt to "dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth", just what I stated in my first comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
If this had happened at large, or really at all, there would be (thousands of) accounts of this, which there weren't.
I'm labeling his lies about a rigged election as such because he specifically claims things that aren't true, demonstrably not true, or simply impossibly true.
Discussing any problems with mail-in-voting is very much still possible, but entirely beside the point.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/What_happens_if_someone_votes_by_mai...
I don't think the usually is well placed on that one. If I call something a lie, it rarely is about denial of the nuggets of truth in the big sentence - it's about the damn thing being a lie.
You don't have to prove things are wrong in their entirety. Arguments/statements are like house of cards or long Mathematical transformations - if any subset of the thing is wrong, the whole thing is wrong.
If you care about truth and correctness, you should stick to short sentences and properly using abstractions.
Censorship concentrates state power and should always be carefully exercised and limited to an absolute minimum. It is a tool that has never been exercised by a government or institution for the betterment of a society. It has been universally corrupted and used for authoritarian control throughout history. Trusting modern corporations to somehow competently manage such a historically treacherous and corruptible means of social manipulation is naive at best.
So yeah, that means your signal to noise ratio is gonna have to be lower than you'd prefer, and you're going to have to trust yourself and others in society to muddle through. It's the least bad because it doesn't preclude intellectual and ethical advances via morals and tastes of the day.
Strangely enough, the more liberal and unconstrained speech is, the better quality of life gets for that society. The clearest example of this is the abolitionist movement that led to the end of slavery. If the US had exercised censorship and projected the majority views as the filter of appropriate speech, history may have gone much differently. Instead, loud people made annoying speeches in public that offended and provoked society to address the problem. If the ability to overcome great evils like that means that society has to put up with qanon, anti vaxxers, and flat earth dweebs, that is a price we should be happy to pay.
No one has the right to force to you to listen.
Typically the the limits on free speech are base on the injury they cause another. If you lie about someone and it causes you harm you can sue them. If someone harasses you you can sue them.
Or the 'c-word'?
This is a misapropriation of Orwell.
Why do people have difficulty with the difference between 'slurs' and 'ideas'?
And the difference between 'civil rights' and 'private organizations'?
-> An academic, talking about a 'challenging idea' maybe using data points that challenge public norms or 'trigger' people - should be allowed to do so. Probably, using a word - any word - to talk about that word - or in historical context, said by a character in creative expression - should be fine.
-> But using racist slurs against other people in civil discourse is totally inappropriate. If I called a co-worker a 'negro' or 'slut' I would expect to be fired.
And neither of those things have to do with Free Speech.
If you're quoting Orwell, do it in the right moments, because the more oppressive types will point out that using the Orwell defence in these scenarios is literally tantamount to supporting intellectuals calling each other the n-word in public, which is plain rude.
Then they can discretid the entire range of people concerned about 'Free Speech' as just irrelevant radicals.
When media companies, governments, corps and universities are banning people for having ideas they don't like (or saying 'verbotten words' even in a legitimate context) then you trot out Orwell and issues of Freedom of Expression.
Please explain how this could be "literally tantamount"? I don't understand that phrase or how this statement could be true.
Obviously, that has nothing to do with Orwell, or even 'Free Speech'.
As for 'literally tantamount' - the phrasing is poor, and would work better with only one of the two words, probably better just 'tantamount' or frankly neither. But it's completely moot. It doesn't change the fairly obvious implication of the statement.
Free Speech is important, Orwell is important - but neither have anything to do with arbitrary ad-hominem slander among intellectuals in public.
The author of the article is effectively making a personal plea, not really an intellectual one. Really what he's saying is 'I'm not that offended, don't dump this woman because she said something really raw'.
Even if you remove the slur, the a statement such as "People think you're an idiot" is just terrible, playground rhetoric. Why would a University want to work with someone who makes arguments such as that that wouldn't even work well on Reddit?
Use Orwell for where it was meant to be used.
You keep sayong it is obvious but not explaining. If it is obvious, then it should be easy to explain what you meant by it. As far as I can tell you are conflating "i support their ability to say these things without laoing their job" with "i support them saying these things".
> Really what he's saying is 'I'm not that offended, don't dump this woman because she said something really raw'.
I think that is an extremely poor paraphrasing that puts words in the author's mouth. It's clear that the Author support this woman's freedom of speech despite any offense at the comment (the level of which is not specified, but some is implied). I don't see how saying the argument isn't "intellectual" isn't just an ad hominem attack itself.
> Even if you remove the slur, the a statement such as "People think you're an idiot" is just terrible, playground rhetoric.
I don't think "idiot" is at all synonymous with "house negro", especially in that context. I can't speek for whoever wrote that tweet, but I interpret it as implying that people think the author is failing his race because due to his priveleged position he lacks a personal understanding of the challenges that most face. It also can carry the conotation that the author is not "really" black. It's a pretty offensice thing to say, even if you say it without using slurs.
> Use Orwell for where it was meant to be used.
Which is?
Why would you ask about those two specific words, if the thrust of your questions was essentially the thrust of my argument?
There is nothing in Orwell, or anything he wrote, that would suggest he has anything to say about people distancing themselves from those who use racist childish ad-hominem attacks in polite company and getting culled for it. (The author's own word for it was 'bigotry').
Just it's the opposite: an Orwell quote in this context makes no sense.
The onus is on the OP to justify their use of the quote.
You can say 'House Negro' is not very offensive, but obviously a lot of people are going to be offended by that, it's unequivocally offensive to call a Black person that in most circles, ergo, if an organization is going to err on the side of civility, they'll just move on from that person. That's reasonable.
Let's do a thought experiment: go and call your local campus Black Republican a 'House Negro' and consider the reaction. Do you think your arguments here are sufficient? Do you think you really think it's appropriate for you to do that under the banner of some Principled issue of Free Speech?
This has nothing to do with Orwell's concerns about newspeak, thought police, language, controlling minds by controlling words.
If the University had forbidden a professor from ever using that term, i.e. reading aloud in class, banning all books with that term etc. - that would be Orwell.
The person who used the term could have used any other kind of language (even if 'idiot' is a poor substitute) - to make her point, she was resorting to crude racism for no reason.
There's nothing principled to stand for here.
It makes complete sense. Something that is "offensive" literally falls in the category of "don't want to hear". Thus the quote seems to be explicitly on topic and should need no explanation, regardless of if you agree.
> If the University had forbidden a professor from ever using that term, i.e. reading aloud in class, banning all books with that term etc. - that would be Orwell.
> This has nothing to do with Orwell's concerns about newspeak, thought police, language, controlling minds by controlling words.
Firing someone for using a word isnt "controlling minds by controlling words"?
Even so, Orwell did far more than just criticize goverments and autocracy. He was a complicated person (e.g. both an athiest and a dedicated curch goer), so I don't see why you think you can so easily decide on a "definitive" Orwell.
What about the racial abuse hurled over twitter at the black soccer players in the Euros who missed their pens?
If you argue that people need to just suck that up, then you'll find that most people won't buy what you're selling. We're going to see freedom of speech curtailed because of problems like this where people won't self-regulate their bigotry at all.
And I don't think its a good thing and you don't have to convince me that after they're done with the bigots that they'll come after the socialists. There needs to be a better argument than Absolutists-vs-Censorship though because I'm pretty sure censorship is gonna win that one.