** Does said action violate the right of communication? What about the right of non-communication, which is necessarily implied by the first right?
** Is the spread of falsities occurring through communication? Then the right may not be denied.
** The right may not be denied.
** Is it preventing communication? No.
** Is said act communication? Does it infringe upon the right to communication? Does it infringe upon the right to non-communication?
You tell me. Is blaring a message in that fashion allowed or not? Why or why not? Since you claim this question is so obviously clear-cut under your rule, it should be trivial for you to answer these simple questions. **
So there’s no cause of action for libel or slander in your scheme? A person can’t enjoin the publication of false, injurious statements about himself? **
And you don’t have a problem with that? **
In fact, it does; the government prescribes a penalty for a certain type of communication, in this case a communication that operates in furtherance of another crime. That penalty is a deterrant for that type of communication. Surely the fact that prosecution occurs after the communication takes place is of no moment – were that the case, the government could arrest people after they had said things the government didn’t like. So again I ask: is this action protected under your scheme? **
Again: you tell me. Surely nonverbal actions can communicate ideas; are they protected under your scheme? And if so, can I walk my ugly ass all about town starkers without fear of penalty?
** This IS trivial. If the people in the surrounding neighborhood wish to hear the message blared at them at three AM, preventing the blaring would deny the right of communication. If not, they doing so would not – whether it would be required by or violate other principles cannot be determined from the principle we’re discussing.
Duh.
Now, can we cease this discussion and return to your failure to explain why certain speech can be arbitrarily regulated merely because of its content while similar speech is not?
What if some folks wish to hear the message but others on the same block do not? What if everyone but one guy just wants some damned peace and quiet, but that one guy actually enjoys late-night loudspeakers?
Or, to make it more nuanced: what if there are ten folks on the street. Two guys love all the blaring announcements. Four hate them. The remaining four hate most of the announcements, but actually like the ones with groovy dance beats, and don’t want to see them go away. Can this community agree to ban only non-musical announcements under your scheme?
What if there’s a town full of streets just like this one, more or less, with different apportionments among the three camps individually, but on average all working out to about the same numbers as the street described above. Can each street send a delegate to a town meeting voting to restrict only non-musical announcements? **
Because compromise is an important part of the legislative process. I agree that a blanket ban or a multiclassified list would be better, more effective solutions. But legislatures are made up of folks representing all manner of competing interests and opinons. If perfect solutions were demanded from those bodies, nothing would ever get done – there’s just no way to build the necessary consensus without a little give and take.
The only constraint on that give and take, at least in this country, is the Constitution, and for reasons I’ve noted earlier I don’t think its strictures prevent this particular compromise from becoming law.
Representative democracy is sometimes messy and sometimes arbitrary, but it beats the hell out of the alternatives. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good.
Then what in your principle would prevent people from opting out of receiving telemarketing calls by signing on to a government-administered Do Not Call list?
Also please explain why you believe the right of people not to receive death threats and libels cannot overrule the right of communication, but their right not to be blared at by loudspeakers can.
Regards,
Shodan
To be scrupulously fair, I think TVAA would say that the death threat recipient doesn’t want the communication, so forbidding it is OK. That, of course, doesn’t solve the problems with libel or murder for hire I outlined above.
Other points we still haven’t heard from TVAA on. First, this point on his formulation:
And, of course, we’re also waiting to hear his response to the very basic question of “what if there is a mix of opinion as to whether a broadcast communication is wanted?”
None of these objections involve ambiguity or uncertainty in the standard itself, merely your failure to actually apply it.
Care to elaborate?
I mean, really, this is piss-poor debating form on your part. You just give a hand-waving dismissal that “you’ve failed to apply my standard properly” with no explanation of why that is the case or how you reached that conclusion. Just saying “you’re wrong, but I’m not going to explain why” is quite insufficient as a response.
In a mathematics classroom, you don’t just get credit for giving the right answer; you also have to show your work, to demonstrate to the instructor that the processes you used to reach that answer were correct. Debates are much the same way; just saying “I’m right, you’re wrong” matters very little unless you can demonstrate why that is the case.
So start showing your work, Sparky.
“What is two plus two, class?”
“Four, Miss Chowder.”
“It’s not enough to give me the answer, class, you must also explain how you reached it.”
“But two plus two does equal four, Miss Chowder. It’s what we get when we apply the rules of addition to the sequence of ordered numbers.”
“And how do you do that? That’s not enough! Detention for everyone!”
:rolleyes: Not only to you refuse to debate in good faith, you strive to be a jackass in the process.
This ain’t 2+2. There’s additional steps involved here. Lawyers call these steps “the application of law to facts.” It’s where you explain how a given rule of law applies to a given fact pattern, and why.
You’ve proposed a rule of law, a replacement formulation for the first amendment’s free speech clause. You’ve been asked how that formulation would be applied to certain fact patterns. You continue to refuse to apply your formulation to those fact patterns. You continue to simply say “it’s obvious” without giving us the slightest clue what outcome would occur under your rule.
In short, you simply refuse to debate. Which makes me wonder why you’re in this forum.
This “debate” is rapidly moving from the merely ridiculous to the absurd.
If you understand what “right”, “communication”, and “deny” signify, then it’s an utterly trivial matter to interpret “the right to communication shall not be denied”.
You’ve looked up the meanings of those words. You supposedly understand the algorithm called “English semantics and grammar”. Now all that’s necessary is to plug the words into the algorithm and see what the result is.
It’s only necessary for lawyers to apply given rules of law to given fact patterns because current law isn’t algorithmic! The “correct answers” to these questions rely on learned lists of responses tied to scenarios; there are no underlying principles. If there were, then knowing the principles would allow anyone to produce the same answers from known data.
Good. Then it should be a trivial matter for you to tell us in no uncertain terms how your formulation handles the remaining hypotheticals, as well as the modified “van loudspeaker” hypothetical. **
Neither, of course, is your formulation. We’ve only scratched the surface of examples where its application is unclear.**
The idea that there are “no principles” in law is simply absurd. There are principles, they just aren’t lined up in a neat, orderly, 100% consistent hierarchy. The law most typically involves balancing competing principles, rather than one principle trumping another in every possible situation.
So what principles are used to balance between the principles?
Are you really incapable of perceiving the infinite recursion problem here?
Nope, because every one of those terms is ambiguous.
Your “principle” has been applied to several circumstances, with results just as ambigous as in using the First Amendment.
In other words, you have been proven wrong, and you are hoping to get away with ignoring that fact.
Indeed. And every time you decline to debate in good faith, it speeds up.
Regards,
Shodan
They’re a lot more ambiguous than their equivalents in the natural languages, but they’re a lot less than you think they are.
None of those scenarios are actually unable to be determined by the already-established principle. In each case, you can ask: is the right to communicate being denied?
Or more precisely, we can ask that. I am beginning to doubt that you’re capable of doing so.
Then what in your principle would prevent people from opting out of receiving telemarketing calls by signing on to a government-administered Do Not Call list?
Also please explain why you believe the right of people not to receive death threats and libels cannot overrule the right of communication, but their right not to be blared at by loudspeakers can.
Regards,
Shodan
The principle has nothing whatsoever to do with the DNC list. Haven’t you been paying attention to this debate at all? Dewey requested an example of an unambiguous principle, and that was an example of the closest you can get to that in a natural language.
** Their right not to be blared at doesn’t prevent others from communicating in alternate ways. A method that forces people to receive information removes their choice, which in turn violates the principle. Another method that doesn’t force information on those who don’t want it is not forbidden by the principle.
So it should be trivially easy for you to describe the outcome in each of the listed hypotheticals in concrete terms. Is the “right to communicate” denied in any of those circumstances? Why or why not?
This is a basic question of the type you should be prepared to answer whenever you propose an alternative rule of decision: how does it operate in the real world? When we get down to brass tacks, what exactly happens?
That you continue to refuse to answer – and simply saying “the outcome is obvious” is not an answer – speaks volumes about how “unambiguous” your standard actually is.
No, it merely speaks volumes about how utterly inexperienced you are with actually applying logic to language.
When the ability of two people to exchange information is blocked, the right to communication is denied. But when a person is forced to receive information from another person, the right to communication is also denied, as the removal of choice creates the obligation of communication, not the right. Therefore a method of information transferral that forces some to receive information cannot be permitted. Another method can easily be found to allow willing communication between interested parties.
So, again, how does that translate for each of the listed hypotheticals? What actually happens?
Why won’t you give a concrete answer to this very simple question? You keep restating your rule but never get around applying that rule to concrete facts. What are you afraid of?