and i've wasted the morning being pedantic to someone. what a pointless endeavor this was.

basically just came down to i don't support any propagation of "X is not 'speech', that way i can avoid saying i'm against free speech."

it's okay to be against free speech. you may get spaced or airlocked for that belief but you believe actions have consequences anyway.

:blobcatphoto: but moderation

yeah but that was always allowed. government speech provisions were there to protect the town square. the problem is just when a corpo takes over the town square and starts being hyper partisan with rules enforcement.

@icedquinn

Penises are not speech, therefore rape is not an expression of free speech

@freemo penises are not speech this is true. but it's also not what the problem is.

the problem is speech protections are there to stop the government from jailing you for having opinions the government deems to be wrongthink.

because people are failures at this whole constitutional republic concept, judges legislated from the bench that "if we just say it's not speech we can ban it."

well no, they can't, and those people are committing treason. problem is people now have bought in to this idea that there exists 'protected' and 'unprotected' speech, which actually even that is more coherent but its still derived from rulings claiming certain speech "isn't speech."

basically its a circumvention on the ban of wrongthink laws by claiming wrongthink isn't thought so the rule on thinking can't ban it.

i still agree that a private chat group is free to go "being racist is off topic" as long as its enforced coherently. i just don't agree wiith propagating the mind virus we can just reclassify bananas as apples for tax reasons.
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@icedquinn I mean, there is a type of spoken expression that I'd argue isnt speech in the sense of free speech, but I also agree that is a very dangerous and slippery slope.

Deaming that screaming "fire" in a theater is not protected by free speech is something I find perfectly acceptable.

@freemo the judge who made that ruling regretted it.

i saw someone worked out the answer to this is to sue that person for fraud.

@icedquinn cant sue someone for fraud if its protected as free speech either.. luckily fraud is not protected by free speech either (its a verbal contract and contracts arent free-speech protected).

@freemo individual states aren't covered by absolute speech protection. only congress is prohibited.

@icedquinn how ya figure.. states and their citizens are beholden to the constitution.

@freemo

Congress shall enact no law abridging freedom of speech nor of the press

because that’s what it says.

@icedquinn yes but in 1866 the 14th amendment expanded it to the states, which has been confirmed by the supreme court interpretation of the 14th amendment.

@freemo https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv it doesn't say anything about that.

> states can't abridge

sure, but the amendment says "congress" so i don't see how that applies. sounds like another brain fart.
@freemo or rather,

the first amendment says congress cannot do a thing
the 14th amendment says a state cannot abridge a civil right
the civil right in question is congress being banned from certain behavior

if you were to make this argument about the ex. right to due process then i'd agree but it would be redundant because that one wasn't limited in scope to begin with.

@icedquinn the 14th amendment says a lot more than that.. as I said already it states a "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;" and "liberty" has been deemed by the supreme court (and I'd agree with the interpretation) to include free speech and the bill of rights as a whole.

@freemo i pulled it open before i posted that.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

the majority of what it says has absolutely nothing to do with power extnesion. the only clause that can be construed as extending powers is this one

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

which is literally just a restatement of what the constitution already says, with the proviso of an added birthright.

considering the amendments already state all of these things except the birthright part, i don’t see the language which means this changes the phrase

Congress shall enact no law

to somehow mean

Any state shall enact no law

@freemo or rather, the provision for due process already existed in an earlier amendment.
@freemo when it comes to arms they wrote the right to keep arms shall not be infringed. when it comes to speech, they said *a specifically named entity* cannot take a particular action.

why wouldn't it just say "the right to free speech and of the press shall not be infringed" if it's not supposed to have been limited

@icedquinn I already quoted the exact clause, word from word, from the 14th amendment that extended the bill of rights to states.. So not sure how you can argue that there is no power extension.. the text is pretty explicit in the fact that it is extending the rights of liberty enumerated in the constitution to the states.

@freemo because that particular amendment IS SCOPED.

@icedquinn it **was** scoped, the 14th amendment then basically said "Everything that was a liberty mentioned earlier that was scooped now applied to all stated", the bill of rights being the liberties, thus removing that previous scope and extending it to the states.

@freemo except it actually doesn't, and they've just decided it does. much like how they just decided the commerce clause lets them do all the shit they do now :comfyglare:

@icedquinn No it does "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property..." The 14th amendment clearly extends "liberty" as a guarantee to the people, and no longer scoped to just the national level.

Of course you'd be right to say that there is a requirement for someone to interprit what "liberty" is defined as. But considering that was the purpose of the bill of rights, to enumerate the 10 things the constitution defines as liberties, it is objectively the most reasonable thing to use to fit that definition.

And as I said your arguing without awareness to the context. There was implied scope equal to that explicitly stated in the 1st amendment in all of the original amendments since at the time of writing on the constitution its scope was explicitly limited to a federal level. So the scoping you see in the 1st amendment was not intended to be a limiting factor but just idle verbiage since the scope was already defined at the time of writing and added nothing. The second amendment while not explicitly scoped had the exact same implied scope. Only after the late 1800s did that implied scope go away. The 14th amendment just did us the favor of reminding us that all the liberties that were originally under that implied (or in some cases explicit) scope now extended to all the citizens.

@icedquinn from the 14th amendment:

"nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;"

The bill of rights has been interpreted to fall under "liberty" and "due process" by the supreme court (and I would agree). Thus this clause extends freedom of speech to the states as per current legal precedence.

@freemo Yeah i don't really care what judges say though. They say a lot of stupid things like states don't have standing in election suits when the constitution says they do. :comfyglare:

i don't see how a provision that says
> this entity is not allowed to ban bananas. everyone else is allowed to do anything not mentioned here.
somehow is expanded by
> entities below us have to give due process

that's fine, but the law that overrides all laws only applied to the originating entity banning bananas.

the only way this makes any sense is if the subordinant entities are now also the fed, which they aren't, because you could also argue by that logic the tenth amendment doesn't exist and there are no states.
@freemo some amendments are scoped. some are not scoped. the prohibitions against gun restrictions are not scoped. in this case stating states have to obey the law is redundant because they already did.

the speech amendment is scoped.
@freemo but that's ultimately arguing over power creep which is just as much a waste of my morning as being pedantic over the "speech isn't speech so i can circumvent the censorship ban" was. :blobcatsnapped:

@icedquinn its not about just what judges say, like I said I agree with them.

14th amendment clearly states that a state can not deny a citizen liberty. The bill of rights was defined as an enumerations of the liberties the constitution intended to encode. Therefore interpriting that clause in the 14th amendment to extend freedom of speech to the states and its people makes perfect sense.

Its also important to understand context IMO. The only reason the bill of rights didnt originally extend to the states was because at the time state laws always overrode national laws, so it couldn't extend to the states. By 1866 however the law on this reversed and national laws overrode state laws. and by 1868 the 14th amendment was written to effectively ensure the "liberties" that were originally written under a different structure now explicitly extended beyond just congress.

@freemo @icedquinn

>Deaming that screaming "fire" in a theater is not protected by free speech is something I find perfectly acceptable.

You know no one screamed "fire" in a crowded theater, right?

It was a religious guy distributing anti-war leaflets that the judge *likened* to shouting fire in a crowded theater in the opinion. The abuse of the exception is not some theoretical slippery slope, it is the very genesis of the exception to begin with.

@anonymoose

First off, it is an example, no one has ever used it to claim it was a reference to an actual event.. that said the idea that "no one screamed fire" is false. There are at least 3 incidents I know of people intentionally and falsely screaming fire in a theater which got them in trouble.

"It was a religious guy..."

No, the example was never used to say what literally happened, it was an example that was intended as an analogy for the religious guy distributing anti-war leaflets. While the initial use of the phrase may have been a poor analogy for the situation he was trying to argue against it is still an entierly valid example and no one has ever thought that it was meant to describe a literal event that happened.

@icedquinn

@freemo @icedquinn

Sure, I meant there was no shouting at issue in the case that created that exception, I didn't literally mean it has never happened in the history of the universe.

> no one has ever thought that it was meant to describe a literal event that happened.

People are usually shocked when I tell them what that case was actually about, I think you would be surprised by the results if someone polled Americans about if the case was about anti-war leaflets or someone literally shouting fire in a theater. Maybe a generational divide.​

My point is that it's not possible to disentangle the exception from the abuse. If you support the government's ability to apply prior restraint on shouting fire in a crowded theater, you also necessarily are at least okay with the government having the ability to decide general dissent or any other bugaboo they like is the equivalent of shouting fire in a theater.

@anonymoose Perhaps, I never really asked people. But I always interpreted it as just an example of something that isnt protected by free speech and not a reference to a specific case of any kind. In fact I always figured there were many cases that would fit the example.

@freemo

>I always interpreted it as just an example of something that isnt protected by free speech and not a reference to a specific case of any kind. In fact I always figured there were many cases that would fit the example.

Well, I would say that you are probably comfortably on the right-hand slope of the intelligence distribution curve, but let me ask you; did you figure that disturbing anti-war leaflets would be one such case?

@anonymoose Not at first. Obviously once I looked into the origin of the phrase many years back I learned about how it was first used as an example in the argument around that case. But that seemed to be more relevant as linguistic history and an interesting fact than it was relevant to the modern day usage of the phrase.

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