Comment by jakelazaroff
2 days ago
Man, if we can't agree that "freedom of speech" includes protection from legal consequences for something you say then there's really nowhere to go from here.
2 days ago
Man, if we can't agree that "freedom of speech" includes protection from legal consequences for something you say then there's really nowhere to go from here.
Well, he appears to have been a protester at Columbia University in 2024, and he is also not a citizen.
If you yourself are a citizen, I'm sure you can express your views and not be sent anywhere. You can also vote to get people in power who are more to your liking, or even attempt be one of those people yourself.
None of this is relevant to what you're trying to argue ("AFAIK, the speech is still free").
He can still express his opinion and he can still protest.
In your opinion, should anyone be able to travel to the US to protest? Would you set an upper limit to this process, or should any amount be allowed?
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> If you yourself are a citizen, I'm sure you can express your views and not be sent anywhere.
Under the current regime US citizens have already been deported to countries they have never visited.
If you actually care about these concepts then reading about them will be faster than relying on Cunningham’s Law to iteratively eliminate all conceivable wrong answers.
I recommend starting with the US Constitution at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_S...
So you are saying that anyone in the world has the rights listed in the US constitution?
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Remember, the far left uses terms like "assault" to describe speech they don't like. Maybe this is conservatives' chance to play "manipulate the meaning of words" and spin it as "denied entry in order to prevent assault" ?
Either way, they made certain forms of speech de facto illegal and we're not going to go all "free speech" a few years after people on the right were fired or kicked out of school for expressing wrongthink.
The far left is welcome to use those stupid terms. That is also their First Amendment protected speech.
Has anyone been charged with assault by the state for their speech? No.
Private schools and private employers are private entities (it’s in the name) ergo they do not have to respect the First Amendment. In fact they have First Amendment rights to kick out whoever they want, free of government compelling them otherwise.
Incredible eh?
Has any country ever functioned like that? The idea seems absurd. Of course you should be held legally accountable for what you say. You can see trivial examples in American culture with defamation law, laws against calling for violence, laws about when and where you're allowed to protest. Agree with it or not, we don't have a right to say what we want with no consequence. The devil as always is in the details. But people need to actually agree what sort of values we should have represented as a people to write those laws, and america has never figured out how to do that without either violence or a massive river of cash to distract us from each other.
For an instance of how bad free speech can get, look no further than the role RTLM played in the genocide of the Tutsi in 1994.
> You can see trivial examples in American culture with defamation law, laws against calling for violence, laws about when and where you're allowed to protest.
Defamation is extremely hard to stick in the US.
You also are allowed in general to call for violence in the US. Incitement is very specific and not merely "calling for violence."
> we don't have a right to say what we want with no consequence.
Yes, in the US you absolutely are allowed to say what you want with no state-sanctioned consequence. There are extremely, extremely narrow exceptions. Way, way narrower than most people on either side of the political aisle intuit.
For an instance of how great free speech can get, look no further than the role the 1st Amendment has played in creating a highly adaptive society that, despite the internal chaos, conquers most of its challenges.
I understand quibbling about specifics, but I'm still unconvinced "free speech" is a meaningful term or that it's necessary for industrialization with private investment. It's a bone given to morons to get them to not demand real rights. I would also not ever willingly live in a society with truly free speech.
> Yes, in the US you absolutely are allowed to say what you want with no state-sanctioned consequence.
When has this ever really benefited us? We complain endlessly but fix nothing. What value have unanswered complaints?
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It's the same thing a lot of the people on the right were complaining about ten years ago. Most people don't seem to understand these contradictions until it affects them.
Watching this happen twice has really killed the idea that polls are a useful way to determine mandates for government policy in my mind. Most of the population probably just shouldn't be involved.
What legal censorship were conservatives facing ten years ago? There is no real precedent for this that I can think of since maybe the Red Scare in the 50s.
Well there's all the fake censorship where private parties exercised their First Amendment rights to control which content they carried. According to modern "conservatives", private actors should be compelled by the state to carry certain kinds of speech (their kind, obviously).
They will claim the government pressured private platforms despite 1) the platforms never claiming coercion, 2) the moderation actions aligning with the platforms' own content policies, 3) the platforms routinely denying government requests for content moderation, 4) there being no evidence of an implicit or explicit government threat towards the platforms.
> Most people don't seem to understand these contradictions until it affects them.
And, by design, it won't affect most people. Except the people who have the chutzpah to speak out against israel, of course—good luck finding that on cable tv or the opinion column. That shit is only on social media.