
Why Is Freedom of Speech Important? - nkurz
https://theviewfromhellyes.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/why-is-freedom-of-speech-important/
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wu-ikkyu
>But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have
earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive,
nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that
it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could
rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of
creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for
nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help
men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights
of understanding and brotherhood... We merely bring to the surface the hidden
tension that is already alive. _We bring it out in the open, where it can be
seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is
covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines
of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure
creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion
before it can be cured._

-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail

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VLM
The essay misses an obvious opiate of the masses effect, more specifically:

There's less surprise in society when the opposition to the establishment is
always spouting off. Perversely this strengthens the establishment during
times of rapid change when the masses who are not paying much attention
continue to hear the same old stuff, its just now being heard from the
establishment instead of the radicals. Note how the 60s radicals are basically
the mass media today.

There's also a "three minutes hate" feature of blowing off steam where
permitting people without any power or influence to talk until they're tired
of talking is better for the establishment than bottling them up until furious
armed revolution topples the establishment. You want Klansmen to talk, to talk
a lot, to talk so much they have no time or energy to lynch, for example.

An establishment that pays attention to the speech both in the old days and on
social media can trivially figure out a map of the vocal opposition when it
comes time to round up the radicals. An establishment that allows free speech
is more likely to survive turmoil than the opposite, they simply have more
intel on the opfor.

Sometimes free speech is funny. The court jester is just simply funny and a
world with more laughs is better than one with less.

~~~
hsitz
> Note how the 60s radicals are basically the mass media today.

Huh? You do realize that someone who was 20 in 1967 would be 70 years old
today? How many in "mass media" do you think are 70 years old?

~~~
jhbadger
While he is far from being a 60s radical, probably the most influential person
in mass media today is Rupert Murdoch who is 85. He controls newspapers and
television news across continents.

~~~
quirkafleeg
> who is 85

He's more yer 50s radical then. Like Joe McCarthy.

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moomin
Yes, free speech is valuable, but unless you have thought through the
following three issues, it doesn't matter how many philosophers you quote, you
deserve to be taken as seriously as Casubon.

1) We have scientific evidence that repeating lies often enough causes
perfectly rational people to behave as if they're true, even when they know
they're not.

2) There's plenty of speech out there that is specifically targeted to exclude
voices from conversation.

3) What is known as stochastic terrorism, where people with large audiences
speak in a way that is guaranteed to get a violent response out of a small
part of the audience.

To put 1&2 another way, do you believe the fuzzing in Snow Crash should be
constitutionally protected?

~~~
psyc
The flip-side, and what I'd like to address to those hopping on the surging
"anti-fascist" bandwagon, is that unless you've familiarized yourself with
those philosophers, it doesn't matter how many likes and retweets you get for
comparatively shallow but "brave" stances on e.g. "hate speech".

The bottom line of the reasoning in your comment is profoundly anti-liberty,
_unless_ of course you consider it a more fundamental right to be free from
statistical harm. The notion that governments should be making laws to
restrict activity and expression that can be shown to cause indirect harm in
aggregate, points straight towards totalitarianism, regardless of how good and
pure the ends are.

Now, of course, as time goes on, and governments add more laws than they
subtract, they already do enact policy with this type of justification. The
question is whether they should continue on that road and extend such
principles to speech, and whatever else besides.

But be clear. I'm not singling you out, but rather the growing number of young
Americans voicing this rhetoric. Come out and say that you want hate speech
laws. Come out and say that you think too much liberty was a mistake, and you
want to move towards more authoritarianism. But maybe first you have to
realize what you _are_ saying.

~~~
moomin
Sorry, didn't see this comment earlier and it deserved a decent response. For
the record, I live in a country with anti-hate-speech laws. It doesn't seem to
make much of a difference. There's still plenty of people peddling racist
viewpoints who aren't anywhere close to violating said laws. Equally, some of
the things I've mentioned _are_ already illegal in the US, if not heavily
enforced.

The question of liberty is a fundamental one, but I'm going to ask you the
converse question: what are you prepared to do when your liberty is threatened
by someone exploiting your system to do it? This isn't theoretical: Chavez'
Venezuela demonstrates a good example where a democratic result was used to
plunge a country into authoritarianism. I'm sure you can find authoritarians
in your own country that are staunch supporters of the first amendment,
they're not as incompatible as you might think.

The Snow Crash example is extreme, but there will always be (and have always
been) bad actors. Some of these people will be exploiting the laws as they
exist to cause harm. Some of these people will be lawmakers exploiting
situations to gain greater control. We need to be on our guard against both.

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fatbird
Mill's great, but this essay misses the essential point in our current culture
wars where free speech is concerned, namely: whose speech is being protected?
For the latter half of the 20th century we adopted an extremist standard,
where we tested our commitment to freedom of expression by protecting the most
extreme examples we could--racism, pornography, pseudoscience--under the
belief that this would shelter all other, less extreme versions. But what
we've found is a tyranny of the grossest: the loudest, most attention
grabbing, least useful speech drowns out the quieter and more moderate voices.
Privileging the extreme edge of freedom of speech has the practical
consequence of disempowering the middle.

~~~
paulddraper
The problem with anything but free speech is this: who decides what is
"extreme"?

I heard from many news sources that a Trump victory was extremely unlikely. It
turns out they were peddling falsehood.

I would be scared if what was legally permissable was limited to the
conceptions and misconceptions of currently "mainstream" sources.

~~~
guelo
An incorrect prediction is not a falsehood.

~~~
paulddraper
It's partially false.

If I say there's a 99% of a meteor strike, and it doesn't happen, I'm 99%
incorrect.

~~~
jhbadger
No, you aren't -- you may have a perfect model of meteor strikes for all I
know, and the 1% miss is exactly accurate. That's how statistical models work,
whether of meteors or elections. Of course, if you say there's a 99% chance
again and again and they are all misses, people rightfully have a case to
doubt your model.

------
arca_vorago
Freedom of speech is important because it is a foundational bedrock upon which
other liberties are built and flourish. Without it, other liberties are
undermined and slowly eroded away.

It is worth reminding people that one of the revolutionary facets of the US
Constitution is that it was created _to protect, not to establish, already
existing natural rights_. That seems to be the main issue I have seen with the
current leaning towards nordic-europeanism in the intelligensia and academia,
is that they have forgotten the foundational matter that the American
revolution was about natural rights that exist completely independent of the
decleration, the bill of rights, or the constitution themselves.

In the end, freedom of speech is about natural rights, and natural rights by
their nature are about individual freedom.

Individual freedom is the true _American Exceptionalism_ , that has been
perverted and twisted into jingoistic vapid-nationalism by the oligarchs. The
oligarchs then strawman against individual freedom (the main true threat to
their power), by attacking the false narrative they created and pushed in the
first place.

Key reading for natural rights: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes,
Thomas Paine, Zeno of Citium (and the stoics in general), Martin Luther,
gnostic religions in general, Hegel, Benjamin Tucker, Ludwig von Mises.

~~~
Entangled
And Murray Rothbard.

------
lngnmn
Freedom of Speech is one of the most fundamental principles in political
philosophy, not just an optional decoration.

It contributes to sustainability of a democratic system by guaranteeing that
no issue or critic of the government could be silenced or hushed up.

The independent press, free information laws and freedom of speech as the main
principle is the immune system of a democratic society, so to speak, which
defends it from deceases such as the one US got a few months ago.

------
Tomte
Free Speech is important.

Germany has it. The Netherlands have it. Australia has it. Estonia has it.
Brazil has it. Many countries in the world have it.

What Americans defenders of Free Speech never seem to grasp is that their
variant of Free Speech is only the most extreme one on a whole spectrum of
"Free Speeches", and that their variant does not really deliver more benefits
than the (ImO) more sensible variants. I would argue the extremist position is
-- as usually -- inferior to the nuanced, balanced ones.

~~~
virmundi
How do you know that something is extreme if you can't hear it? How do you
engage individuals, hopefully productively, if you don't allow them to speak?

If the answer is social norms, how do you prevent those norms from drifting
overtime into authoritarianism? Start small, attack only the extremists. Then
slowly turn your forces against your opposition. This is the kind of thought
that Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote about in "First they came...." Notice that
historically that poem applied to Germany and even Estonia and Australia.
These countries were or seem to be morphing into an authoritarian state.

Edit spelling

~~~
physicalist
The reason for this poem is also the reason for the restrictions on speech in
Germany. Go figure. Also, the US has been morphing into an suthoritarian state
for quite a while. What is not the freedom of white affluent males is under
constant attack there. From the war against drugs to the war against women's
rights, there are countless examples.

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Entangled
Easy.

Absolute free speech in public property. Absolute owner control in private
property. However you define property is irrelevant to the universal principle
it holds.

~~~
darawk
What does absolute free speech entail though? Can you use a megaphone? Can you
broadcast over FM and drown out the 'owners' of that spectrum?

If the answer to #1 is no, how loud are you allowed to yell? Can I do that
yelling at night? Does my right to disturb the air end where your eardrums
begin?

We really have all kinds of restrictions on speech. For the most part, what we
do is restrict the location and mode of speech, and try to blind our judgments
on those issues from the _content_ of speech. We have decided this to be the
spiritual meaning of 'free speech' \- but of course, it is not its literal
definition.

~~~
Entangled
Speech as in content, not as in airwaves. You can not trespass on my property
(body or house) with your airwaves the same way you can't not with light or
matter. The quantity allowed is proportional to the force and resources
necessary to defend such property from invasion.

~~~
darawk
So, if i'm standing outside your property speaking, am I trespassing by
vibrating the air over your property?

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stevebmark
There have been a few "free speech" thinkpieces recently. Is anyone really
doubting the importance of free speech? They just seem like obvious thoughts
in an echo chamber to me. I'd rather read someone tackle actually thought
provoking issues around free speech, like how free speech is fine right now,
not under any obvious attack, and trying force someone to listen to someone
else is itself a violation of freedom.

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bleamishboy
Isn't political content like this (interesting as it is) off-topic for Hacker
News?

~~~
grzm
Here's a list of links from the mods on politics on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13527940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13527940)

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notadoc
This can't be a serious question?

