> If it only includes the things people would be ok with you saying, there would be no need to protect it as a right.
We have freedom of speech protected as a right to allow speech against government and oppressive institutions. Not to protect you from spending the night in jail because you decided to use your speech to hurl insults at your neighbor for 6 hours straight to disturb a barbecue party you feel they should have asked you permission to hold.
Speech is not just hollow wind, speech is actions, and some actions we protect.
You have freedom of movement, but you still get arrested if you trespass. You have freedom to own a gun and shoot it at animals, but if you shoot ar humans for sport you end up facing consequences.
Somehow for almost all other freedoms we have, everyone understand that their are limitations, but as soon as the subject falls on speech everyone acts like a 6 year old kid going “ok, so I can say anything without consequence!?! Mom is a whore and Dad is a drunk!” And then whine about their speech not being free because it has consequences when they go to bed without dinner.
> I don't think there's any society in history that has not allowed more freedom in speech then in action.
Speech is action. Therefore axiomatically every society has always allowed more freedom in action than in speech because speech in being action is a subset of actions.
You may be thinking about the difference between taking about a thing and doing the thing mentioned, and there there are obviously any cases where speaking about it is allowed but doing it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean you are more free in speech than in action, imagine how foolish that ends up sounding in Comparison between freedom of ownership and speech. “I am free to say that I own my butler but I am not free to actually own him, this shows I am more free in speech than i am in ownership!”
> Kindergarten kids are taught that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me".
Is a lie repeatedly told to children yes. And kids are taught to be nice otherwise the magical chimney man won’t give them gifts. The saying is obviously wrong to anyone who’s no longer a kid. Word can cause very real long term psychological trauma. The reason parents tell their kids this saying to get them to ignore the very real pains they feel when bullied ignored or neglected.
That’s just bad parenting, and doesn’t really have any relevance in a discussion about freedom of speech.
> Free speech must include the things people do not want you to say.
Says who? I understand the core principles of absolute free speech. I just don't agree. This is a very absolutist (and americano-centered) view of what liberties encompass.
Same goes for political activity. Some political organizations should be prohibited. And I dont see any issue knowing islamists or skinheads are excluded from parliement and prosecuted after intimidating opposition through violence.
Besides keep in mind, for most of those things, the legal hurdles are very high. Your voting rights cant be stripped away for small offenses.
> "Some political organizations should be prohibited."
And who gets to decide which ones are prohibited and the standards used? Because some people think Antifa should be prohibited while others think it's a necessary organization that is fighting the good fight. Some people think Christian organizations that reject homosexuality and gay marriage should be banned while others think they are doing God's work.
Thats why it's necessary to protect all viewpoints when talking about speech. Because your opinion is not the only valid one.
> And who gets to decide which ones are prohibited and the standards used?
In Germany's case, a bench of Constitutional judges, after Guardians of the Constitution informed the parliament that they will prosecute an organization deemed a threat to a free and democratic society. So again, a proper independent judicial instance whose mission is to examinate evidences and make a choice after a fair trial.
Regarding Antifa its more complicated for there is decision-making is distributed. There is no proper leader or leading-commitee, just a bunch of folks working together (and sometimes using dubious means), pretty much like Anonymous.
Also no, wishing a ethnical cleansing is no regular opinion. We aren't debating about budget or public service, but of literal state-sanctioned genocide.
> "So again, a proper independent judicial instance whose mission is to examinate evidences and make a choice after a fair trial."
So if an "independent judicial instance" decided that you or your organization should not be allowed to criticize an election result or election process because doing so would be "a threat to a free and democratic society", you would accept that?
> Says who? I understand the core principles of absolute free speech. I just don't agree. This is a very absolutist (and americano-centered) view of what liberties encompass.
It should be obvious, but the people in power will not want you to say bad things about them. If given the power to prevent that, of course they will. (and they'll say that "politician X was found in bed with a dead hooker" is libel, regardless of the facts)
> Some political organizations should be prohibited.
But which ones? Just genocidal ones? Do communists count? How far do philosophies need to differ before a party is allowed again, and who (besides the individual voter) should be the one to choose?
"They're totally just lying about their beliefs" can be both true and not an acceptable reason IMO.
> prosecuted after intimidating opposition through violence.
Then BAN INTIMIDATING OPPOSITION WITH VIOLENCE. Ban ALL of it. But "these words are violence, this violence is just protest" isn't ok.
> Your voting rights cant be stripped away for small offenses.
Only being able to vote for people with governmentally approved opinions is itself a removal of voting rights. This should obviously be true for the limit case (only one candidate), but it's a spectrum.
well yeah? In Germany, violent Marxist-Leninists have been prohibited, disbanded and expropriated. So why not ? Today they are allowed again in some Länder, for they dont use violence anymore nor threaten democracy as a whole. So yeah?
Germans had the experience of that speech at least being partially responsible for more that ten million people being murdered by the German state.
Of course speech wasn’t the only factor (far from it) but virulent antisemitism didn’t just suddenly appear fully formed.
If you agree that speech is powerful and important then you necessarily should also agree that speech can be harmful. As such it should be easy for you to understand that rational people can conclude that unlimited free speech is not a necessary component of liberty.
It can't exclude things merely because people (or the government) don't like to hear them. But it absolutely doesn't follow that it must therefore include everything someone could say. And it doesn't. The US knows many exceptions to Freedom of Speech.
> In the defamation case Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court said that there is "no constitutional value in false statements of fact".
Somehow the "free speech absolutists" always show up when it's about the Holocaust, yet the comment sections of defamation trials are not littered with their opinions...
Speech has consequences. Often indirect, sometimes quite direct. As such, maximising the liberty of the largest number of people is fundamentally incompatible with protecting all speech equally.
Popper's Paradox of Tolerance [1] is a more direct expression of this:
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
Sometimes, that intolerance of intolerance can be sufficiently dealt with by society merely expressing disagreement, but if the intolerance expressed involves direct abuse and threats, for example, by people undeterred by their opponent merely countering their speech with speech, the only non-violent means of preventing the harm, including limiting the liberty of the victims, may be through the application of legal restrictions.
Being "intolerant of the intolerant"? Does that include your own intolerance?
People are completely within their rights to be intolerant. Nothing gives you or the government the right to decide who/what I should like or want to associate with. Nothing gives you the right to persecute me for wrongthink.
People are completely within their rights to be intolerant up to the point where their intolerance does harm to others.
The preservation of liberty gives us all a right, and many would say an obligation, to persecute you when what you engage in puts others at severe danger of being stripped of liberty, or, worse, of life.
Not even the US allows unfettered speech for that reason, even as much as it goes further than most places in allowing harm to others.
> "People are completely within their rights to be intolerant up to the point where their intolerance does harm to others."
We're talking about speech. Speech is not "harm". Nobody cares about your hurt feelings.
The limitations on speech in the U.S. occur when the speech directly results in ACTUAL harm (again, not just hurt feelings). That's why the U.S. has the most expansive speech protection of any country in the world. I can deny the Holocaust as much as I want. I can call mock "trans" people as much as I want. Because, again, your hurt feelings don't matter when you're talking about protecting speech.
So you agree speech can cause actual harm, in other words, and hence the disagreement is only over where the line goes with respect to actual harm.
Germany has drawn in by considering the risk posed of another authoritarian regime as an unacceptable actual harm of allowing certain kinds of extremist speech, other countries consider the reduced feeling of safety and security or mental health consequences of harassment and abuse to be actual harm.
The US de facto considers things like many forms of defamation or false claims to be actual harm given that it renders a free speech defence moot in many circumstances, so it is clear that even in the US this actual harm does not need to be physical or direct.
I don't necessarily think Germany has gotten the balance right, but it's incredibly arrogant to think the US interpretation of harm is the only reasonable one.
If it only includes the things people would be ok with you saying, there would be no need to protect it as a right.