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.

@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 @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.
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@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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