Freedom of Speech

[Petros Agapetos]

1st Amendment is awesome, but you can't yell fire in a Cinema and induce panic.

This is what I call the "Yes, but..." argument.
It is alright to express your mind, but not in this way,
otherwise we will arrest you, we will call you names, and tarnish your reputation.
This is nothing but tyranny of the powerful over the powerless,
where certain ideologies are unfairly competing in the free marketplace of ideas,
by being artificially promoted by the government.

I don't think this is such a good idea.

[Poise n Pen]

Freedom of speech, yes. Freedom of race, no.

[Petros Agapetos]

Freedom of speech, yes. Freedom of race, no.

You keep stressing race so often. Would I be appropriate for your country, or am I racially deficient to live in your country? Do I meet your racial quotas? Why don't you concentrate on culture rather than race. One cannot convert to another race, but one can live by the laws of a society and be a decent mensch. And what does race have to do with anything here? I am talking about the logical consequences of holding certain ideas in your head. I am fighting an ideology ideologically. What is this obsession for ancestor worship? Why don't you join some kind of white supremacist club that organizes parties in Nazi uniforms, why not.

By the way, as a Liberal, I support the right of Nazis to express themselves to, but also our right to ridicule them out of our Universities.
The Freedom of Speech will give the right people the voice. The ideas that need protection are the ones that are not popular, otherwise there would be no point for the First Amendment.

[Scholarios]

as long as you respect that the right to be an asshole and the right to be called an asshole is the same right, then i admire it.

[Petros Agapetos]

as long as you respect that the right to be an asshole and the right to be called an asshole is the same right, then i admire it.

Yes, that's precisely what I am talking about.

[Petros Agapetos]

The topic of free speech is one of the most contentious issues in liberal societies. If liberty of expression is not highly valued, as has often been the case, there is no problem; freedom of expression is simply curtailed in favor of other values. It becomes a volatile issue when it is highly valued because only then do the limitations placed upon it become controversial. The first thing to note in any sensible discussion of freedom of speech is that it will have to be limited. Every society places some limits on the exercise of speech because it always takes place within a context of competing values. In this sense, Stanley Fish is correct when he says that there is no such thing as free speech (in the sense of unlimited speech). Free speech is simply a useful term to focus our attention on a particular form of human interaction and the phrase is not meant to suggest that speech should never be limited. One does not have to fully agree with Fish when he says , “free speech in short, is not an independent value but a political prize” (1994,102) but it is the case that no society has existed where speech has not been limited to some extent. Haworth (1998) makes a similar point when he suggests that a right to freedom of speech is not something we have, not something we own, in the same way as we possess arms and legs.

[Petros Agapetos]

Another difficult case is hate speech. Most liberal democracies have limitations on hate speech, but it is debatable whether these can be justified by the harm principle as formulated by Mill. One would have to show that such speech violated rights, directly and in the first instance. I am interested here in hate speech that does not advocate violence against a group or individual because such speech would be captured by Mill's harm principle. The Public Order Act 1986 in the U.K. does not require such a stringent barrier as the harm principle to prohibit speech. The Act states that “A person is guilty of an offence if he ...displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress.”

[Petros Agapetos]

Do you support the 1st amendment?
Would you support it in your home countries?
Why and why not.

[Petros Agapetos]

Do you support hate speech legislation?

Do you consider some speech so hateful that it must be banned? Can you give examples?

[Petros Agapetos]

Should academic freedom entail within it Holocaust denial or the denial of the Armenian Genocide?