Free speech takes precedence over individual or group opinions

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

that's just a convenient way to excuse the silencing of anything you don't like to hear.

freedom of speech must be expanded and forced. anyone threatening it should be punished in the most severe of ways.

Sorry, but your wrong. Freedom of speech only protects you from the government, not other people. If someone punches you in the face because of something you said...he is guilty of assault...but your freedom of speech was never violated.

[derpkitteh]

And what qualifies as 'threatening it'?

the shit pulled at berkley? rioting, obviously.

[Bodakane]

The pissgate stuff was entirely unsubstantiated. Just because somebody wrote some fan fiction about Trump having a piss fetish and passed it off to the media doesn't make it true.


Now, the pizza emails on the other hand are 100% Podesta. They talk about pizza in context that I've never heard pizza discussed in before. That is at least evidence we can discuss because we all know who wrote the emails, under what circumstances and roughly how they were acquired. So completely different than the pissgate document.

Maybe Podesta just talks about pizza in weird ways. I guess it's possible.

You've been gaslighted bro. I'm sorry. You've somehow been convinced that Donald fucking Trump, a New York businessman who has been a household name for decades is a Russian puppet because #reasons. Because he dared oppose our progressive overlords, I guess.

Fuck our progressive overlords.

So you think something completely fabricated, Pizzagate, and reported on by the alt right new sources, is ok, but reporting on actual intelligence that Trump had a piss party in Russia, is not legit. Hmmm, I wonder why.

Again, your side literally invented alternate facts. Trump and his team are the guy the wife walks in on fucking another woman, and he says, "that wasn't me."

There is actual evidence that Trump is in bed with Russia. There's actual evidence his team is in bed with Russia. There's actual evidence Russia not only wanted Trump to win but helped him win. That isn't from the media, that's from every single intelligence agency in the US. Every. Single. One. That is what's known as a fact.

But forget all that for a second.

You guys were the same people that said and believed everything from Obama wasn't born here to him being Muslim to him being a Communist....all with literally not one single stitch of data. No reports. No nothing. You guys believed it, chanted it, took him to court over it...repeatedly. One person championing all that was.....?

This has nothing to do with right and left. This has everything to do with you guys were taken in by a snake oil salesman, because he peddled just the right amount of hate and xenophobia you could get behind.

The same man that says he had bigger inauguration turnout than Obama when have actual evidence that's not true. But you guys don't care, will accept any lie he tells because you guys hate the left and brown people just THAT much.

[Mormolyce]

From another thread:

That's assault.

It's not a free speech issue.

If the police were throwing people in jail for the things they say, that would be a free speech issue.

[Deleted]

Free speech does not exist. Hate speech and lying in court are free speech, and they're forbidden by law.

What does exist is allowing speech of all opinions as long as the speech itself does not bring actual harm and problems to others.
This is why I can say that I think a policy is stupid even if someone thinks it's great.
But I can't say X is a rapist without proof or at least formulating a charge at the police.
And I can't say [x] group of people are thieves and criminals without proof without facing problems with the law.

Now I know what some of you usually say "well yea, but you can say hate speech or lie in court, you're just not protected by the consequences!" - yeah, that's the definition of non-free speech. I can say Kim Jong Un is a retard in North Korea, nobody is stopping me, it is only after I said it that the law of that country sends me to prison/forced labor/whatever.

In short, in terms of free speech:
- you can't accuse someone without proof
- you can't have hate blanket statements
- you can't discriminate
- you can't tell names of undercover agents
- considering which public institution you find yourself in, you can't swear (try doing it in a court, see what happens)
- you can't create panic when there is no danger (yelling fire in a theatre)
etc.

Free speech does not exist. Although some of my example fit the threat or physical harm from the OP, not all do.

And I believe certain opinions are not good. For example, would the anti-vaccination movement be a threat through what they say? It depends. Yet that view is not banned it seems, even if it can lead to physical harm inflicted from parents onto their children. Why so?
Another example, the Black Lives Matter organization, which has shown a super hate speech at many times against white people, is not banned.
The Westbro Baptist Church, same deal.
Their views are sometimes threatening and can lead to physical violence, so why are they allowed to exist?

Also, what does threat mean? When Trump says that he'll deport the illegal immigrants, would that be a threat or a support of the law? For those illegal immigrants it might be considered a threat.
Again, the threat aspect is not clear enough, which leads to interpretations.

What should be allowed is opinions that are conflicting as long as they don't rest on total lies (as in the case of many of the so called "alternative facts" of Trump), which is what you are probably arguing for. And with that I agree.

[DSRilk]

Do you believe that the media has a responsibility to report objective truth. As in, are they free to say things that are patently false without repercussions?

Are they free to say false things? Yes. Do they have the responsibility not to? Also yes. This is very tricky water for a couple reasons. First, is knowing you have information pertinent to a conversation and not running the story okay? It's possible, for example, to only run pro-Trump stories that are all objectively true without running the stories that paint him in a poor light, and vice versa. That all still lets the media off the objective truth hook. Second, media is a very broad term that could arguably cover shows like Last Week Tonight. These shows deliver all kinds of viable news, yet at the same time, occasionally slip in patently false material to make it more comedic (hoping the audience will laugh, but still know the difference). Right now, the response to this is that the shows are comedy, and thus not responsible at all. However, as we do things like try to merge games into learning to make it more palatable, I think this is the merely the beginning of another merging of disciplines to make getting news more interesting. I agree with what I believe your end goal is, but I think its far more complicated than simply demanding objective truth.

[Spectral]

You've got a Prez who has seen to that all mentions of climate change is removed from government sites, and issued a gag order on climate scientists. Just burn your first amendment already, it's clearly not worth the paper it is written on.

Wait, what?

[DSRilk]

So you think something completely fabricated, Pizzagate, and reported on by the alt right new sources, is ok, but reporting on actual intelligence that Trump had a piss party in Russia, is not legit. Hmmm, I wonder why.

I think you just broke your entire comparison by implying that the "piss party" thing is a fact. It is currently unconfirmed. Personally, I think broadcasting unconfirmed information is not good. If you're a news organization who gets unconfirmed information, CONFIRM it before reporting it. If you're a comedy show, sure, run with it all day long; but I don't think reporting on unconfirmed rumors is much better than reporting on easily disproven rumors.

[Spectral]

In short, in terms of free speech:
- you can't accuse someone without proof
- you can't have hate blanket statements
- you can't discriminate<snip>

All three of these are obviously false and trying to impose them would be utterly tyrannical.

[JohnBrown1917]

I only support freedom of opinion, not speech.
I'm against incitement of violence.

[DSRilk]

Wait, what?

The EPA was apparently told to (and did for a short time) remove climate change data from their website. It was pretty quickly walked back. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/...imate-web-page

[Bodakane]

I think you just broke your entire comparison by implying that the "piss party" thing is a fact. It is currently unconfirmed. Personally, I think broadcasting unconfirmed information is not good. If you're a news organization who gets unconfirmed information, CONFIRM it before reporting it. If you're a comedy show, sure, run with it all day long; but I don't think reporting on unconfirmed rumors is much better than reporting on easily disproven rumors.

That's not what happened at all.

A credible intelligence operative released a dossier about how Trump's integrity against Russia has been compromised. The media reported on that dossier. They didn't say it was true. But that is a legitimate news story, like it or not. Literally farting into existence a bullshit child sex ring where literally no facts are involved, even down to something as stupid as the pizza place doesn't have a basement.

If anyone thinks these two things are equal, is quite literally a full of shit partisan sycophant.

Nothing said about Trump in the media has been a lie. Virtually everything he says and promotes is a lie, though, from why he lost the pop vote to the weather on his inauguration. He actually helped tie up courtrooms and taxpayer money promoting this egregious lie that had literally no proof.

[jellmoo]

"I think that all people from the country of Dipshitistan are worthless degenerates and should not have the same rights as wen do!"
- Government arrests the person for saying this. This would be a violation of the 1st Amendment (Free Speech).


"I think that all people from the country of Dipshitistan are worthless degenerates and should not have the same rights as wen do!"
- A crowd gathers around the person saying this and yells at him to shut the fuck up and calls him an idiot. This is not a violation of the 1st Amendment (free Speech).


All the First Amendment does is protect private citizens from the government when it comes to what they say and express. That's it. Other people and organizations are allowed to shut you down if they don't agree within the confines of other laws. Punching somebody in the face you disagree with is not illegal because it violates any 1st amendment laws. It's illegal because punching people in the face is illegal.

[Jinpachi]

You forgot to include "and is above censorship by the government." Not including that part of the phrase makes you either a liar or willfully ignorant considering how many times it's already been stated in this thread.

False. Although that's the original intent, the supreme courts have ruled time and time again that unpopular speech is protected in general. That's why rappers and musicians are allowed to use explicit lyrics on their albums. You must not be old enough to remember the controversy that 2 live crew created when they took this very issue to the U.S. Supreme court and WON. It's NOT just "by the government", its censorship, PERIOD, with the only caveat being that it is in public. Private businesses are free to restrict content in their business/on their websites

[Spectral]

The EPA was apparently told to (and did for a short time) remove climate change data from their website. It was pretty quickly walked back. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/...imate-web-page

What I quoted was someone claiming that "all mentions of climate change is removed from government sites". My link is to NASA's climate page, which looks about the same to me as it did six months ago (with some updated data). That people buy as ridiculous of exaggerations as "all mentions of climate change is removed from government sites" is pretty telling.

The uproar you linked doesn't really seem to have any serious factual basis. As part of standard procedure when new administrations come in, government agencies are generally asked to take a brief pause in communication to ensure that they're not communicating anything that's inconsistent with new policies. There's no actual evidence that anything more than that normal directive happened. It's pretty lame that anonymous employees were quoted breathlessly describing directives that don't seem to have actually happened.

[Pannonian]

False. Although that's the original intent, the supreme courts have ruled time and time again that unpopular speech is protected in general. That's why rappers and musicians are allowed to use explicit lyrics on their albums. You must not be old enough to remember the controversy that 2 live crew created when they took this very issue to the U.S. Supreme court and WON. It's NOT just "by the government", its censorship, PERIOD, with the only caveat being that it is in public. Private businesses are free to restrict content in their business/on their websites

you mean this one: http://mentalfloss.com/article/76606...or-2-live-crew ?

Thats about copyright, not free speech. All other instances mentioned in the article would be about gonvernment censoring them. So i cannot see any non government entity censoring them, nor did the fight it at the SCOTUS.

[DSRilk]

That's not what happened at all.

A credible intelligence operative released a dossier about how Trump's integrity against Russia has been compromised. The media reported on that dossier. They didn't say it was true. But that is a legitimate news story, like it or not. Literally farting into existence a bullshit child sex ring where literally no facts are involved, even down to something as stupid as the pizza place doesn't have a basement.

If anyone thinks these two things are equal, is quite literally a full of shit partisan sycophant.

Nothing said about Trump in the media has been a lie. Virtually everything he says and promotes is a lie, though, from why he lost the pop vote to the weather on his inauguration. He actually helped tie up courtrooms and taxpayer money promoting this egregious lie that had literally no proof.

Given that I'm a liberal that's voted nothing but Green party or Dem, I'd hardly call myself a pro-Trump "full of shit partisan sycophant." I simply believe we shouldn't take "someone said" as proof of a valid news story. That report is unconfirmed. Single sourced. It holds no proof other than someone wrote it in a dossier. That is NOT what you build a news story on. It makes great late night fodder. It makes a HORRIBLE excuse for news. Journalists should dig. They should research. They should find the truth. They should not publish anything they hear from one source just because it may garner ratings. That goes for assuming what Trump says is true to assuming what some Brit agent says is true. It's just plain bad journalism.

- - - Updated - - -

What I quoted was someone claiming that "all mentions of climate change is removed from government sites". My link is to NASA's climate page, which looks about the same to me as it did six months ago (with some updated data). That people buy as ridiculous of exaggerations as "all mentions of climate change is removed from government sites" is pretty telling.

The uproar you linked doesn't really seem to have any serious factual basis. As part of standard procedure when new administrations come in, government agencies are generally asked to take a brief pause in communication to ensure that they're not communicating anything that's inconsistent with new policies. There's no actual evidence that anything more than that normal directive happened. It's pretty lame that anonymous employees were quoted breathlessly describing directives that don't seem to have actually happened.

What I linked was totally factual in basis. It was a fact that they did remove it from the EPA site. There are screenshots of it having been removed. The article says they put it back. The article also says it was relatively normal for new administrations to control what comes out initially. It also doesn't say it ever extended beyond the EPA. I was simply stating that the implication that they didn't ever have data removed isn't entirely accurate.

To be fair, yes, the person you were quoting was incorrect in their exaggeration of the scope and impact.

[Spectral]

I was simply stating that the implication that they didn't ever have data removed isn't entirely accurate.

I didn't imply that. I replied to someone claiming everything was removed. That person bought into some pretty silly propaganda and should probably learn that what he thinks happened didn't happen.

[DSRilk]

I didn't imply that. I replied to someone claiming everything was removed. That person bought into some pretty silly propaganda and should probably learn that what he thinks happened didn't happen.

Then it was my inference. Apologies. Though saying what I linked had no "serious factual basis" was incorrect. I was apparently trying to do the same thing as you. Clear up the reality with what really happened. However, my response had full details of what transpired vs just a link to the current existence of the data.

[Bodakane]

Given that I'm a liberal that's voted nothing but Green party or Dem, I'd hardly call myself a pro-Trump "full of shit partisan sycophant." I simply believe we shouldn't take "someone said" as proof of a valid news story. That report is unconfirmed. Single sourced. It holds no proof other than someone wrote it in a dossier. That is NOT what you build a news story on. It makes great late night fodder. It makes a HORRIBLE excuse for news. Journalists should dig. They should research. They should find the truth. They should not publish anything they hear from one source just because it may garner ratings. That goes for assuming what Trump says is true to assuming what some Brit agent says is true. It's just plain bad journalism.

Again, Pizzagate was literally fabricated by the alt right media. Pissgate was not fabricated by the MSM. Acting as if these two things are the same or equally egregious is ridiculous.