Comment by lucumo
5 days ago
> > Even free speech has its limits
> It doesnt though, thats the point.
In theory. But in practive even the most staunch pro-free speech jurisdictions have limits on them. A lot for good reasons that most people would agree with (threats and fraud, stuff like that), but also some that would be absurd in other jurisdictions (obscenities for example, which is usually very locality specific).
There's a Wikipedia page with free speech exceptions in the USA. Those exceptions don't really seem weird, but just seeing that there are reasonable exceptions makes free speech absolutism less sensible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Most of the limits on free speech don't pertain to the speech itself, but rather the speech being related to some other form of criminal conduct. Incitement to violence can be punished because of the violence; fraud can be punished because of the theft, etc.
So one can still be a free speech absolutist with respect to speech in itself, while still holding people responsible for unlawful activity that the speech is helping to facilitate.
Your logic here is circular. You're arguing definitions, it doesn't make sense to point to examples of places that claim to have free speech and decide that free speech must have limits because those places said they have it and they have limits.
You could just as easily look at those places and say they must not actually have free speech because they have legal limits on what you say.
Sure, you could easily say that, but it would be a pretty silly thing to say. The world is not black and white, as much as we'd like it to be sometimes.
It's ok as long as you don't want the world to be black xor white.
Thanks for the link, I'll have a read through of that.