fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2946 ]

[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2946 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Social pressure is absolutely a threat to free speech, and it's bizarre to me that we've come to such a thin conception of the right to free speech that we think it only means that no legal pressure is being placed on you.

If you think it's acceptable to have social pressure force people to recant their opinions or stay quiet, that's fine. But in a very relevant real sense, you no longer believe in free speech. And that's not the end of the world - it is, I think, actually a very defensible position. It might actually be the right position. I'm not ruling it out. But I wish people would defend it as such instead of twisting it into something it's not.

I would also point out (to cut some objections off at the past) that there's a difference between expressing disagreement and exerting social pressure. And I don't think that anyone should be free from having to hear people disagreeing with them. But I do think that free speech if it has any meaning at all has to mean that speech is not socially coerced or prevented. I don't want to enforce that distinction on a legal level, but I don't think that's a terribly difficult distinction to make on a social level.

A side note: smug Americans on the Internet like to say that people don't have the legal right to free speech, they have legal protection against the government stopping them from speaking freely. The implication seems to be that if it's not the government, Americans don't have legal protection against it abridging free speech. I'm fairly dertain this is misinterpreting something, but they really spread it around a lot.

I've seen a fair amount of people try to stretch the US definition of hate speech too. It's really surprising how little is covered.

It's not being misinterpreted at all. You have the right to speak freely (within certain parameters) in public spaces and in government spaces. You don't have the right to speak freely in private spaces. This is why it's legal for your place of work to fire you for, say, ranting about your job on Facebook.

I would argue that this is a completely valid understanding of the legal right to free speech

whether there should be a political right to free speech is a more vexed but valid question

That's pretty much my understanding of how free speech works, right there. If I don't like what you're saying, I can kick you off my property. I'm not stopping you from speaking your mind somewhere else. Free speech doesn't mean people are obligated to listen to or facilitate the speech in anyway. People are free to disagree with someone, to dislike them for what they say, and even refuse to work with them or boycott their businesses. If they didn't have the right to do that, it would be their free speech being impinged.

I do think people have ended up treating free speech as the same thing as the 1st amendment to the US Constitution. It's one thing to laugh at people who act like the 1st amendment applies to people arguing with you on the internet and explaining what it really says, but I agree that the general idea of freedom of speech means more than that.

So tl;dr you're the typical asshole who wants to say asshole things without being told to stop being an asshole, and you just learned you can't legally pull the free speech card for that.

I am not in any way! I have no interest in using slurs. I try to use politically correct language (although sometimes I fail, being only human, but I try to do better). No one's called me to the carpet about anything recently and when people do I try to listen to them. I disagree strongly with the idea that being an asshole is a good thing. I realize I can't prove this but I assure you that it's true.

I just... think that kind of is what free speech actually means. Of course, having the freedom to say it doesn't mean that you should say it.

"We've come to?" Implying that free speech used to be more open?

It wasn't, originally. Until the 20th century, the right to free speech was interpreted as being the right against prior restraint. You could be punished for saying something that the government didn't like, they just couldn't prevent you from saying it in the first place.

Our current definition of free speech is actually pretty damn liberal.

This is a fair point.

I would argue that the understanding I'm talking about is still distinct from that earlier view, so I would still say that we've come to it. It may be more liberal but it's different and I think wrong albeit in a different way.

what you're yearning for isn't free speech, it's free speech without consequences.

I'm familiar with the line of reasoning, but I really don't think it's accurate.

A) I don't have any problems being PC myself B) I don't have any problems with there being consequences for speech, I'm just trying to think whether those consequences should be "disagreement" or "intense social pressure".

And I think that is a real difference and a real distinction. And not only real but relevant.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

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