Police killings are a common occurrence. What is also common is that many people dislike that being said out loud.
None of that has any relationship to free speech or proper debate. Unpopular truths have been suppressed by the majority throughout history. Almost always they needed to be said louder and more bluntly to be heard. Every advance in American culture has been made by rude speech.
However, every advance in American culture has also been hindered and delayed for decades by very loud and rude speech telling the other side to shut up.
If there is a way out of this dilemma it has not yet occurred to humanity.
I don’t know about ‘you must die’, which could be taken as a direct threat, but all the rest is completely protected. In fact, in the 1970’s the Illinois government tried to stop actual Nazis from marching, and were sued in court and lost. The ACLU defended thr Nazis and won, back when they still believed in free speech. So the Nazis got to march. It took the Bluesmobile to stop them.
You don’t need protections for speech that everyone likes and agrees with. The speech that needs protection is the stuff that majorities don’t like. That’s why it’s in the bill of rights and put outside of the popular vote.
People like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were opposed by majorities in many states, and lots of people thought their material was highly offensive. Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ was very offensive to many religious groups, but he was allowed to make and sell it. Pornography offends many people, but is completely allowed unless crimes are committed in making it (child porn, hidden camera nudity of unwilling people, revenge porn, etc.)
Canada has a weak constitution, and now we are seeing our speech curtailed. Donate to the wrong group or talk with them on message boards and you may have your bank accounts frozen. Criticize the wrong group and you can wind up in front of a tribunal and have your right to speak and freely associate taken away from you.
The majority appears to be perfectly okay with this, which is why you don’t allow fundamental rights to be voted on.
they pointed out in a recent essayThe ACLU is doing a lot more than any internet “free speech warriors” to push back against unconstitutional government interference with freedom of expression. As ,
If you want to fight some ignorance about conservative whining about the ACLU “no longer believing in free speech”, take a look at some of the cases they’re fought recently for conservative, racist, homophobic, and other bigoted forms of freedom of expression:
There is a lot of commentary out there about the ACLU being internally divided now on free speech:
And a decent article on what’s happening to the ACLU, with commentary from IramGlasser, previous head of the ACLU during the 70’s:
But you are correct that they have recently taken on some first amendment cases on behalf of people they don’t like to protext speech they no doube find distasteful.
So perhaps it’s more fair to say that the ACLU is becoming conflicted over speech due to a generational shift and increasing pushback from the left which has gotten stronger in the Trump years. Most of the changes and conflicts in the organozation are fairly recent.
Yes, I can see how anybody relying primarily on articles as slanted as the spiked-online ones you cited might not have been aware of that.
Meh, the ACLU was “conflicted over speech” back in the Skokie case days, too. IIRC, tens of thousands of ACLU members left the organization over their defense of the Nazis.
The less dramatic and more realistic narrative, as opposed to some quasi-tragic story arc of “loss of principles” or “generational conflict”, is that conflicts between freedom of speech and other civil liberties have always caused controversy about principles, including in organizations like the ACLU. After such controversies are well over, they get enshrined into mythic narratives that make the conflict of principles look less messy than it was.
So if a journalist confidently tells her audience that a box contains oranges, if later it is found that she had no idea what was in the box, or, worse, had seen there were apples in the box, then she knowingly lied.
Knowingly lying is unethical and not something society should make special protections for.
Secondly we do of course grant the courts (with the aid of expert witnesses) the power to rule on objective fact.
Why should it be any different saying “Eating McDonald’s cheeseburgers makes your testicles wither and fall off” (which could have you sued for defamation) than “The covid vaccine makes your testicles wither and fall off”?
I’m aware of where the line is drawn in the US. I’m saying that disagreeing about exactly where the line is doesn’t make one person pro and another anti free speech.
I do not believe that the US has set the line in the ideal place.
As I say, the thing that society needs is the protection to state any opinion.
So; being able to state the opinion that Jews were responsible for 9/11: protected speech (though, as I say, if an organization styling themselves as a news agency says this, then they may need to point to some data they had for making this claim).
A bunch of people with swastikas shouting racial epithets as people exit a synagogue? No societal value in protecting that.
And I stand by the same statement “who gets to decide what is a lie?”
Right now we are in a society where the two primary political factions can’t even agree on basic facts. To pick an absurdist example, what if a journalist writes an article about birds, and the people who get to decide believe that birds aren’t real?
A less absurdist example, what if the journalist writes an article, “The powers that be are corrupt, and here is proof.” Will the powers that be just let that slide? Or will they be able to come up with evidence showing it was a lie?
In your post you suggest that the courts get to decide, but if the powers that be have packed the courts? Even if the courts are fair, the danger and expense of a trial will cause a chilling effect on journalists writing critical things of those in power, even if in the end they are likely to get exonerated.
We already have slander and libel laws, which are an exception to free speech. In those cases (in the US) the burden is on the person suing to prove that what was said or written was a factual statement (not opinion), that it was wrong, (in many cases) that it was deliberate and with malice, and that it caused harm.
Even with that high burden, the threat of slander and libel still can cause a chilling effect on what people write or say. Look at SLAPP lawsuits.
Essentially, the person that made the claim. That is to say, it’s not the truth or falsehood of the statement itself, but whether the person making the claim had grounds for saying it. If they cannot cite anything (or the data was actually in contradiction), then they knowingly lied.
In terms of the courts, how shitty American courts are is another issue; we’re talking first about principles of free speech. And, if your position is that it’s fine to have laws against defamation and libel, but there should also be a “right to lie”, then your position – popular though it may be – is inconsistent.
I am starting to think the problem has very little to do with the speaker and a whole lot to do with the listener. I believe we have an entire civilization of people who really don’t know who they are. We simply lack identity and it doesn’t take much to suck someone in. Once you have tapped into someone’s identity you have them. Politicians are well aware of how powerful a force this is. I think we could solve a lot of the worlds problem by creating a framework of sorts that gave more opportunities for people to establish identities they are happy with…
Not disagreeing, just quibbling with the word civilization - while modern mass media, instant and targeted communications have made reaching out to people unspeakably more easy than at any prior point in history, it’s not like we were the ones who coined the term demagogue.
We’ve just lowered the bar on the difficulty of any crazy shouting on a street corner to reaching a world-wide-audience. In a sense, it’s the ultimate expression of manner-less free speech.
Not a value judgement on free speech, which I think we’ve all been trying to be careful about, but that rights and freedoms have consequences (often social in areas where the government is prohibited from interfering with speech).
Well said. Taking a slightly different tack, we in the audience have responsibilities.
If we’re all to be exposed to fully free speech, we cannot responsibly act as though all we hear is the truth or is the product of sound logic without actually going to the effort to verify that to at least some degree.
We talk about shielding “impressionable young children” from certain malign influences. Which is benign to beneficial in and of itself unless carried to extremes. But …
It becomes very dangerous to civilization when either:
a. The majority of adults still act like impressionable children, believing any line of malarky that’s well-told with enthusiasm,
or
b. Some TPTB decide to treat actual discerning adults as little better than children, and feed them a line of carefully considered malarky. Which many of them duly absorb uncritically.
There have been SF stories of all sorts over the decades about humanity finally inventing a technology too dangerous for us to control and it duly wrecks us.
It would be tragicomic if it turns out we’ve already done so and the tech that wrecks us is simply the ability for all of us to be heard unfiltered by all the rest of us.
Read American history. Any time period from the colonial days on. Every decade had enormous battles over what can be said and what can’t ever be said and who can say what when and what the government would decide to do about it.
Can we break away from the British? Is slavery legal? Are immigrants entitled to rights? Are free blacks entitled to rights? Are women entitled to rights? Are Communists entitled to rights? The House Un-American Activities Committee thought it should decide such matters long before Republicans controlled Congress in the 21st Century. The ACLU was founded in 1920 - i.e. post wartime censorship - in response to the Palmer Raids.
Nothing about this generation is new and different. Even the fact that nobody knows anything about our true history was sadly just as prevalent a disease in 1920 and 1820 as well.
I remember the first time I heard Hilary Clinton say that there was something wrong with 45% of the population. I was shocked. Since that time, I hear it daily. Things like that really bother me. I have no suggestions as to how to remedy it.
Without disagreeing with @Exapno_Mapcase , I’d argue that something is indeed wrong with a sizeable portion of our populace that does indeed fail to exercise adult skepticism and adult logic and does indeed buy transparent bullshit as if it were the truth.
They are abjectly failing at doing their duty as citizens. And they are, IMO, abjectly failing at their duty to be civilized adults of any nation. Credulous inhalers of BS propaganda are not what the world, nor our country, needs right now. Or at any time.
You mean, where Clinton originally said (and the next day retracted) that half of Trump supporters were a “basket of deplorables”, whereas HoneyBadgerDC thinks she said nearly half of the total population?
To be fair, that is a very common kind of misunderstanding. People remember (more or less) the stated percentage but forget what sub-population it was being applied to.