Comment by jay-barronville
2 months ago
> Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> […]
> I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
Very well said across the board.
My stance is that any time—literally any time—someone is proposing and/or promoting a policy that can stifle, chill, and/or suppress free speech in any way, even if indirectly, the bar for justifying such a policy must necessarily be extremely high.
In theory, I actually agree with many of the arguments against advertising, but there’s a clear slippery slope with this “let’s ban advertising” line of thinking, so yes, the bare minimum is being able to concretely define what advertising even is in such a context.
Not for nothing, but slippery slope reasoning is a well-known fallacy and more or less an argument against all laws ("first they told me I couldn't kill anyone, now I can't hit anyone, now I can't talk about hitting anyone, now I can't write a story about hitting anyone or think about hitting anyone, murder laws are fascism"). The process of creating laws is about balancing rights, in this case your ability to advertise vs. your ability to be free from advertising and whatever its effects might be. The whole "banning advertising is impossible" argument (in fairness this basically the topic verbatim) is a lot less interesting than trying to find the principle or test where we can say, "this advertising seems useful to humanity" vs. "this advertising seems harmful to humanity". There's very little of the latter happening in this thread, which I think says it all.
Logical fallacies aren't automatic falsehoods. They're things that can't be proven with formal logic.
The slippery slope is a fallacy and also a thing that fairly consistently happens in politics and law.
The point far up this thread, however, was that this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a leaky sieve. If there is a law against speech that covers enough cases to be even slightly effective against people with lawyers, and I am powerful and don't like you, then you are going to prison.
There are no laws that will constrain a regime defined by its lawbreaking. Your argument applies to all laws.