Free Speech

That's something I didn't expect from Reddit. Great news.

Free speech is a double edged sword for sure, but its worth the headache. Bad ideas are proven bad over time, trying to ban them only entrenches the minds of those who believe it.

I needed to hear this.*

There's no such thing as a free speech

Freedom is a tough concept. Some think of it in terms of ability to do anything one pleases (with perhaps some restrictions than vary by who you ask), others in terms of security from danger or worry.

In either case, I can't say what I want.

If I am free to do what I please, then others are free to impose heavy costs on me for my speech, making my right to it meaningless.

If I am free in that I am secure, then others are also secure, and they are in fact free from having to hear my speech. In that situation, it is only heard by those who already agree with it, making it meaningless.

So speech cannot be free, unless I have more freedom than others. This makes free speech quite the privilege -- I am yet to meet someone who has it.

^Well, on the internet you can just block the person so you don't have to communicate with them at all anymore, or even see them interact with others. If anything, this matter should be a no-brainer, and free speech should be especially easy to support online BECAUSE of the nature of the medium and technology. There's really no excuse.

In public, you can walk away. You can choose to not go to an event, rather than shut it down or act in such a belligerent manner that the target is unable to speak reasonably freely.

What makes things more confusing is this concept that speech harms you, and to what extent that is or isn't true, the question of whether every single thing that harms you is bad and should be illegal, and then what (if anything) to do about it. Is irritation at somebody's what-I-perceive-to-be ignorance a sign that I have been harmed? If ANY negative emotion whatsoever is detected within me, is that a sign that their speech has harmed me? Did they commit first degree speech-harm and premeditatively harm me, or was it by accident? And what nobody talks about but needs to be made clear: to what degree am I responsible for my own emotions, AND how I choose to act based on those initial emotions? Are we to be a society of egg-shells walking around other egg-shells, and there's no such thing as accidentally stepping on someone, and there's no degree of personal responsibility for handling our own emotions?

Yeah. You do have a right to not have to hear speech. And if somebody proceeds to make sock-puppet accounts to harass you after you have blocked them (and especially after you've made it explicitly clear that you do not wish to ever be in contact with them again), or if somebody proceeds to follow you to your home or act in a manner that can be constituted as harassment or breaking some kind of public ordinance, then it isn't even a free speech issue at that point. Likewise if somebody makes threats against you, commits libel, etc.

It's a valid point that absolute free speech exists nowhere. Even if we assume a legal system that in no way infringes upon it, we still have our own moral or ethical codes of conduct; unwritten rules that have no legal bearing, but still have social consequences.

But that fact of reality, in and of itself, is not simultaneously somehow a justification for trampling all over "free" speech. It would be like saying that no society anywhere is perfectly free of something tangibly, vaguely "authoritarian", so fuck it, let's just usher in the Fourth Reich. Just because we don't have 100% free speech doesn't mean we should say Fuck It to protecting it at all. Maybe I'm projecting, and you weren't even implying that, but I felt it was worth pointing out the non-sequitur.

@Matt E I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse.