I've been moving more and more to the notion that freedom of speech is an all or nothing proposition. On a technical level when dealing with systems that protect the transfer of information such as encryption, this is an absolute, because the technology that provides the security (and thus freedom) cares not the content and any backdoor would destroy all integrity regardless of how it is used. But there has been a notion that laws, rights, and duties do not have the same requirement. We can build compromises in the laws, so we should be able to create a system where only the stuff that should be banned is banned and all other speech is free, no? But now I doubt that, as any ban sacrifices the integrity of the entire system. Maybe in theory it is still possible, but as many of us have seen time and time again, theory and practice differ far more in practice than in theory.
From this, I've moved to adopting an ever stricter view of all speech as being free. I will not say it is perfect as it does have flaws. But the flaws are a small price to pay to ensure one of the axiomatic rights is defended. For without free speech, we lose the power to criticize, to discuss, to be democratic.
While I know the author isn't regarded quite as highly in the UK and the US, I think the following passage captures the importance of the exchange of information being free.
>The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
I have it on clear authority that Lawtonfogle is a thief; a liar; an adulterer; responsible for a toxic spill that poisoned kids; stole from the pension accounts; rigged elections; and whatever political affiliation the reader might have, Lawtonfogle is the extreme opposite... and thinks your fashion sense sucks. Ultimately, Lawtonfogle can't act, can't sing, and can only dance a little.
It's actually pretty hard for someone with little or no resources to fight defamation as it is. Take away their recourse in an 'all or nothing free speech!' drive, and it's game over. It's also hardly 'a small price', if socially powerful people can just outright lie about a person and never be compelled to back it up.
And hey, fuck it - as a boss, I could say "Black people are inherently stupid, don't hire them". My hypothetical staff then take me at my word and don't hire them. There's no formal policy, it's just something I said. But I point at "no limitation on freedom of speech" and then any laws on discrimination are basically null and void.
Insurance companies in the US already have departments dedicated to getting them out of their contracts. Imagine how much easier their jobs would be if they could just flat-out lie, with no legal repurcussions? People can jaw all they want about 'the market would correct itself', but if you've already captured the market, fighting dirty keeps you strong - especially with a product with a very high barrier to entry.
The idea that freedom of speech is an all-or-nothing event is a simplistic, extremist position, that doesn't survive contact with the real world. You can still criticise, discuss, and be democratic with some restrictions on freedom of speech - pretty much all the nations we call 'western democracies' do exactly that.
So basically people shouldn't lie about things that harm other people?
Having the potential for civil action over defamation does not exclude people's right to say what they want. They are merely restricted to saying accurate things or else having to pay some money to the person they've lied about.
I do find it slightly surreal that defamation is being discussed in the context of the UK - a country with (even following the excellent reforms of 2013) the most ridiculous libel laws around.
I wasn't talking in context of the UK. I was talking in context of the GP's all-or-nothing-free-speech position. In an all or nothing system, there's no such thing as taking someone to court over defamation, because any restriction on speech is verboten.
In an all or nothing system, there's no such thing as taking someone to court over defamation, because any restriction on speech is verboten.
I don't think that's quite right. If you allow any speech (which you should, IMO) that is one thing... but it's not the same thing as saying that you can't be held responsible for the outcome of your speech.
To use a different analogy... people always talk about how you can't yell "fire in a crowded theater". I would argue that it should absolutely be legal to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. And if you do so, and nothing happens, then you have committed no crime. OTOH, if you do so and a panic ensues and people are trampled to death, then you will be punished - not for yelling "fire", but for causing the panic that resulted in people being trampled to death.
It might seem like a subtle distinction, but I think it's crucial. You should never be punished for what you say (or think) but you can be punished for actually causing harm to another person (including libel/slander/defamation, etc.)
I like how that sounds, but when I apply the same idea to other crimes I'm less sure. For example, if we take the position that doing potentially dangerous things is fine as long as they cause no damage, then it should be legal to deliberately shoot a gun at someone as long as you miss and they suffer no psychological damage. However, I've always felt it's a good thing that merely threatening someone with a gun is illegal due to the high risk of accidents.
Maybe it makes sense to special-case speech here, but I'm always more comfortable with ideas that don't need special-casing.
Yeah, but that makes the all-or-nothing proposition de-facto useless. Laws will be passed that punish unpopular speech not for their content, but for the harm they cause [society|our children|national security|economic security].
Technically, the speech was allowed. But when harms can be conjured up for any scenario, the speech is not really free anymore.
I'm NOT saying that libel, slander, defamation, and incitement shouldn't be actionable things. I'm just saying that it's impossible to allow all types of speech unless you're willing to strike those concepts altogether.
However, I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that civil dispute resolution mechanisms for defamation have to constitute a restriction on speech. People can still say whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want. They can merely be called out if they are lying.
Without a government to enforce that you stop lying, through fines or even prison time, how do you stop someone more socially powerful than you? You can call someone out and be right, but if they're more charismatic, more popular, or better at marketing their point than you, you still suffer.
> Without a government to enforce that you stop lying, through fines or even prison time
Is libel not a civil offence? I.e. the court case is person vs person not state vs person. You confront the person lying in court and if on the balance of probabilities they can't demonstrate what they said to be true then they pay you compensation (plus costs). No one goes to jail, no fines are levied. The government's role is to provide a judge (and potential jury) and court room.
Well this would be a debt from the person who has defamed you to you (and potentially a debt to the state for their share of the court costs).
I'm not massively familiar with what happens when someone doesn't pay a debt. As I understand it though. A civil case is heard, bailiff's arrive at the debtors property and their possessions are re-posed until the debt is cleared. These remain civil proceedings not criminal.
>And hey, fuck it - as a boss, I could say "Black people are inherently stupid, don't hire them".
You can already say this and not get in trouble, though it definitely wouldn't help your case in the event that a rejected black applicant chose to sue you for discrimination. The plaintiff would need to show a preponderance of evidence that they were passed over specifically because of their race and they would've surely been hired otherwise. A general statement showing a dislike for black people isn't sufficient. Discrimination is a civil, not a criminal, offense.
>I have it on clear authority that Lawtonfogle is a thief; a liar; an adulterer; responsible for a toxic spill that poisoned kids; stole from the pension accounts; rigged elections; and whatever political affiliation the reader might have, Lawtonfogle is the extreme opposite... and thinks your fashion sense sucks. Ultimately, Lawtonfogle can't act, can't sing, and can only dance a little.
All that put together isn't even half as bad as some of the things others have called me.
>if socially powerful people can just outright lie about a person and never be compelled to back it up.
They already can. Those with enough resources can get lawyers that allow them to get up next to the line without crossing it.
>And hey, fuck it - as a boss, I could say "Black people are inherently stupid, don't hire them". My hypothetical staff then take me at my word and don't hire them. There's no formal policy, it's just something I said. But I point at "no limitation on freedom of speech" and then any laws on discrimination are basically null and void.
Official policy has never been a requirement for discrimination lawsuits.
>Insurance companies in the US already have departments dedicated to getting them out of their contracts. Imagine how much easier their jobs would be if they could just flat-out lie, with no legal repurcussions? People can jaw all they want about 'the market would correct itself', but if you've already captured the market, fighting dirty keeps you strong - especially with a product with a very high barrier to entry.
Freedom of speech still means you are held to that speech when you sign it as a contract. Trying to stretch contract laws as being related to freedom of speech is showing an extreme attempt to stretch.
>a simplistic
It has far more thought to it than the notion that free speech means contract law is void or that discrimination is legalized.
>extremist
Being such a core right, any position is that of an extremist.
>that doesn't survive contact with the real world
Neither does the very concept of rights. Out in a jungle, no right you have will protect you from someone or something that wants your resources.
>You can still criticise, discuss, and be democratic with some restrictions on freedom of speech
Yes, for the issues that those in power don't reall care about. Those are the bread and circus; hope we enjoy it.
>pretty much all the nations we call 'western democracies' do exactly that.
Appeal to popularity? All goverments also engage in rights violations that we would not stand to defend.
>All that put together isn't even half as bad as some of the things others have called me.
I wasn't even vaguely calling you that directly. I've never noted your handle before now. I was just giving examples of things that people could say.
>if socially powerful people => They already can. Those with enough resources can get lawyers
I'm talking about a much lower bar for 'socially powerful' than you are. I'm not talking about the Murdochs of the world, but the socially powerful people that everyday folks run into personally. Someone in your apartment block starts lying about you to the tenants committee, for example. Perhaps they are more charismatic and better at getting people onside.
> Official policy has never been a requirement for discrimination lawsuits.
True, but without restrictions on speech, you don't get defamation suits, and discrimination suits become much harder. Penalising someone in a discrimination suit for being recorded saying "I hate black people" means you are restricting their speech by punishing it.
> Being such a core right, any position is that of an extremist.
Nonsense. Since when does being a core right mean any position is extremist? We have core rights not to be murdered or tortured, yet people taking the position that we should not be murdered or tortured are hardly extremist. It's boringly, yawningly mainstream.
> Neither does the very concept of rights. Out in a jungle
Reductio ad absurdum. We don't live in the jungle, in the real world.
> Appeal to popularity?
No, pointing out that people still criticise, discuss, and be democratic - and demonstrably so. You're painting imaginary pictures in an idealised black-and-white world. Yet people are demonstrably able to talk, criticise, and be democratic in western democracies. They yap on in bars, on facebook, on twitter, in knitting circles, at football games. Opposing political teams yell shrilly at each other. Folks can go and vote when elections come up.
You're saying that because there are currently some restrictions on free speech, that those things don't exist - and they demonstrably do exist. It does not follow that having some restrictions makes political discussion disappear.
>I wasn't even vaguely calling you that directly. I've never noted your handle before now. I was just giving examples of things that people could say.
I was saying that under current law, I've been called far worse (and by people who were serious and not just demostrating their point).
>I'm talking about a much lower bar for 'socially powerful' than you are. I'm not talking about the Murdochs of the world, but the socially powerful people that everyday folks run into personally. Someone in your apartment block starts lying about you to the tenants committee, for example. Perhaps they are more charismatic and better at getting people onside.
Someone in the HOA could already do that. I could potentially sue, but that could also make things worse depending upon the damage done. Even falsely accusing someone of a crime and having them arrested is often not punished except in the case of a repeat offender.
>Penalising someone in a discrimination suit for being recorded saying "I hate black people" means you are restricting their speech by punishing it.
They would not be penalized on that point. It would just add further evidence to a discrimination suit, and if that is the only evidence the suit actually provided, then the suit should fail. Namely, such a statement would be important in showing if a person would have motive, but motive alone is not sufficient to convict someone for discrimination.
>We have core rights not to be murdered or tortured
Depending upon what you mean by murder and torture, we may have far less of such a right than freedom of speech. All laws are enforced at gunpoint proxy (even if the penalty for breaking some law isn't immediately enforced at gunpoint, there is a chain of consequences that will eventually lead to such). And solitary confinement sounds like torture to me.
>No, pointing out that people still criticise, discuss, and be democratic - and demonstrably so.
In the areas that are pre-approved. You think the government really cares about all the fighting about sexism or gay rights? Even terrorism doesn't matter outside of being the trojan horse for draconian laws.
>It does not follow that having some restrictions makes political discussion disappear.
Chillings effects have already begun to be noticed.
I don't think we're going to change each other's minds, but I had to respond to this. It's a standard part of the libertarian rhetoric, and it's intended to make people fear laws just for the sake of it.
And it's intellectually dishonest. In this thread you're arguing that laws should be made to stop the government infringing upon freedom of speech. How, exactly, does that get enforced at gunpoint? If the courts forget themselves and decide to hear a defamation case? Or if the government passes a law that restricts speech, in violation of their free-speech law? Would you have the MPs that voted 'aye' frogmarched off? How does a law limiting the actions of government get 'enforced at gunpoint proxy'?
Similarly, there are plenty of other laws where this doesn't happen. There are laws that companies can break where no person is at risk of prison. It's why there are limited liability companies. And there are laws to give people incentives - here in Australia, the government encourages voluntary payments into your own superannuation, and will co-contribute to some degree. How do you enforce that law at gunpoint? What bizarre chain of events would involve putting anyone at gunpoint because a citizen voluntarily put money into their own superannuation?
There are plenty of laws that aren't 'enforced at gunpoint', even with following a ridiculous, tortured chain of events. Stop spreading libertarian FUD.
I'm not libertarian, though I may agree with them on some stances.
>And it's intellectually dishonest.
You haven't demonstrated such.
>How, exactly, does that get enforced at gunpoint?
>How does a law limiting the actions of government get 'enforced at gunpoint proxy'?
Generally a complex system which starts in the courts, wiht the courts making a ruling that applies increasing penalties. Those who continue to ignore such penalties will eventually reach the point of being in contempt of court and either fired or perhaps jailed (it depends upon factors such as who it is). Take the example of a clerk of court refusing to award a marriage license to a gay couple after a federal appeals court struck down a state ban. Something bad is going to happen, which includes losing their job. If they fail to remove themselves from the premise after losing their job, they could be charged with trespassing. If their superior doesn't fire them and continues to pay them, then it gets messier but there are channels, albeit slow moving ones.
Simply put, if there is any point that you can thumb your nose at the court and tell them you are going to ignore them, then it isn't a law, only a suggestion.
Of course, there is a problem when the government does do this (look at three letter agencies ignoring court rulings or otherwise creating secret courts to bypass them). But, at such a point, the laws prohibiting what they are doing are no longer enforced and are thus no longer laws.
>It's why there are limited liability companies.
Who can have their assets seized. What happens when the government comes after an LLC's account due to violations and someone gets in the way?
>And there are laws to give people incentives - here in Australia, the government encourages voluntary payments into your own superannuation, and will co-contribute to some degree. How do you enforce that law at gunpoint?
>What bizarre chain of events would involve putting anyone at gunpoint because a citizen voluntarily put money into their own superannuation?
These are laws about what the government will do if you do X. What happens when someone refuses to credit an account because the account belongs to a minority? They would be fired, but if their supervisor refuses to fire them, it could go to court, where you end up with contempt of court. Refuse to show up in court and you'll be arrested. Resist, and out come the guns.
>There are plenty of laws that aren't 'enforced at gunpoint'
You are making the mistake of considering laws that never get to guns drawn because even unreasonable people don't want to escalate the situation (as well as thinking that 'if A does X, then B does Y' as being laws about A doing X instead of laws about B doing Y).
>Stop spreading libertarian FUD.
Nothing libertarian about it except for how it is worded. If you ignore the rule of law, there will be escalation til physical force is involved. Most people just submit or cut deals long before that happens, but they do so knowing that to resist will escalate.
This is ten days old, just going through the backlog, sorry.
You missed what I meant by intellectually dishonest. I gave you a few examples of laws that aren't 'gunpoint-enforced', including laws around incentives to do things. Your rebuttal was to invoke a long string of events that eventually resulted in 'trespassing', and invoking 'gunpoint' for that. It's not, however, gunpoint for the original law.
> If you ignore the rule of law, there will be escalation til physical force is involved
This is also part of what I mean by 'intellectually dishonest'. You're claiming that all laws are 'gunpoint' and therefore de facto immoral because you can concoct a long chain of unusual events that ends up with some form of physical law enforcement... but your own requirement for 'all speech should be free' falls into exactly the same pattern. You concoct some government official who refuses to pay into a minority's account, loses their job, refuses to depart the premises. But your own FOS laws do nothing to alter that chain. Slot in a FOS violation for the government official instead of paying into an account, and the chain remains unchanged. From your own reasoning, this means your FOS law is 'gunpoint enforced'.
It's usual for this style of libertarian FUD - claim all laws other than their own proposals are 'violent' or 'at gunpoint', and then skip over the details that their own suggested systems rely on exactly the same mechanisms. And yes, it is libertarian to say things like 'all laws are violent'. No other group takes this baroque standpoint; it's pure libertarian rhetoric. And seriously, laws around governmnet co-contribution are 'violent' because a government employee might lose their job if they don't comply?
> The idea that freedom of speech is an all-or-nothing event is a simplistic, extremist position, that doesn't survive contact with the real world. You can still criticise, discuss, and be democratic with some restrictions on freedom of speech - pretty much all the nations we call 'western democracies' do exactly that.
See, you are casually ignoring he is talking about top-down Government censorship rather than the kind of speech that opens you up to civil liability (defamation).
Defamation, libel, etc. laws are necessary to prevent abuse of speech to the point it causes financial damage via falsehoods.
However, it does not require government censorship and prior restraint which is what the UK Government is advocating.
----
EDIT (to get around post timer, this is the last time I'm responding to you because your argument is just disingenuous at best):
...that is such a disingenuous argument that I'm assuming you are just are oblivious.
> So let's change it to government censorship: an absolute stance with no restrictions on freedom of speech now means that there is now no longer any confidential or secret information. No need for spies - senior government employees can just sell national secrets to the highest bidder, and if they're found out, hey, speech is not restricted.
No one is suggesting people are suddenly immune to contract law or NDAs, which solve this problem. You simply sue such people for breech of contract until its not financially profitable to sell such information.
> And privacy laws go out the window. It's not defamation if it's accurate, right? So now people in the NHS can quite happily spread around gossip of your private medical history. Privacy laws are specifically, at their core, top-down government censorship.
...no?
NDAs also solve this problem and/or a requirement for NDAs.
The problem with free speech restriction is not that you can't ask people to sign NDAs in return for a job. The problem with free speech restrictions is when it restraints everyone.
I really don't think you are getting the concept that:
A) Everyone has a right to exercise their freedom of speech without restriction.
B) If they lie, break a contractual obligation, or otherwise cause destruction...they can still be forced to suffer civil financial penalties via the Courts to deter such activities without massive justification. None of this requires Government censorship beyond "NHS employees must sign NDAs" [e.g. Snowden would have stayed in the US if he would have been bankrupted rather than thrown in prison for decades, I bet]
you are casually ignoring he is talking about top-down Government censorship rather than the kind of speech that opens you up to civil liability
It seems that you are casually ignoring the points I made in my third and fourth paragraphs.
Anyway, you can argue against the UK's new laws without requiring complete purism in freedom of speech. But my point was that an absolutist stance is simplistic. So let's change it to government censorship: an absolute stance with no restrictions on freedom of speech now means that there is now no longer any confidential or secret information. No need for spies - senior government employees can just sell national secrets to the highest bidder, and if they're found out, hey, speech is not restricted. They can't lose their jobs - or even suffer reduced chance of advancement - because that would be seen as a punishment, a restriction of speech.
iscrimination point I raised.
And privacy laws go out the window. It's not defamation if it's accurate, right? So now people in the NHS can quite happily spread around gossip of your private medical history. Privacy laws are specifically, at their core, top-down government censorship.
There's all sorts of sticky areas where extreme purist views get sullied from contact with the real world.
I've always felt that "free speech" is only one side of the coin, our civilization needs to promote the education of critical thinking. In a free speech society, critical thought is essential, as it is the tool to filter all speech one encounters, from political to commercial to religious to nonsense.
It was Thomas Paine who said it was only the absence of knowledge that could keep a man ignorant; but while he maybe kept ignorant he cannot be MADE ignorant. Therefore free society should recognise people as rational beings and leave them to discover the truth by their own devices. Incidentally, most arguments for totalitarianism start with the opposite view: people need protecting from "dangerous" ideas.
The truth will out. You can't fool all the people all the time. Etc.
It's not about protection from dangerous ideas, it's about arming the populace with the tools to more readily determine for themselves which ideas are dangerous, and to protect themselves.
And the thing is, you don't really need to fool all the people, just most. Unfortunately, it seems that willful ignorance is the norm in many areas, and while I agree that reality has a tendency to win out in the long term, it can do a lot of damage in the short term.
What you're saying sounds good and is one of the reasons for the creation of public schools. But it also creates an opening for government indoctrination.
Then there's the opposite problem, privatized indoctrination where billionaires like News Corp's Murdoch get to influence millions with his propaganda.
Then the internet was supposed to save us but it turns out people like living in their own indoctrination bubbles and the internet is more than happy to provide it for them.
Starting out by teaching them to recognize indoctrination would be a good step, then. That's a fairly core part of critical thinking anyway, recognizing bias in the speaker.
Therefore free society should recognise people as rational beings
and leave them to discover the truth by their own devices.
Unfortunately, societies are not perfect systems and as can be seen, people can be influenced; not because of anything other than laziness. Majority outsource decision making to others and can easily display herd mentality. I agree that critical thinking and education is the most useful tools against ignorance but I don't know of a fix for laziness.
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ...
Well put ... and does not absolve anyone of the consequences of their speech. People keep forgetting that exercise of rights have consequences for which they may/must be held accountable for. Say what you like, but be aware that you are still accountable for how you obtained that content, or what happens as a result of what you say.
To counter your opinion, I will quote to you from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The US Bill of Rights is simply an acknowledgment of the inalienable right to free speech, is it not a definition. The role of the US Constitution is to define the powers of the US federal government. The absence of a protection from private attacks on free speech is not an endorsement thereof. It's simply the nature of the document.
All too often I see the expression, "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences." In fact, that's precisely what it is. The freedom to say what you want without being punished for doing so, whether that punishment be execution, imprisonment, social exclusion or anything else. Society seems to be accepting some limitations to free speech (i.e. shouting fire in a crowded theater, personal political opinions having professional ramifications, etc.). If we've decided, as a society, that it is necessary to limit free speech then let's be honest about it. We should not present those limitations as some inevitable part of having free speech in the first place.
Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences. That we have decided consequences are sometimes necessary is a testament to how much we value freedom of speech.
As I noted elsewhere here (esp. my bit about "fire!"), there is a difference between consequences emanating from the speech due to others acting on the information therein, vs punitive consequences contingent on the speech itself.
Don't confuse punishing someone for yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater regardless of reason for doing so, with punishing someone for instigating a crushing stampede by yelling "fire!" in a theater when there knowingly wasn't a threat thereof. Both are certainly "consequences"; I'm concerned that some here seem unclear of the difference and would protect the speaker in the latter case on grounds conflated with the former.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used that example. I wasn't trying to make a value judgement, rather to point out that we have collectively decided, "yes, we like free speech - but only up to a point." That's fine, I'm OK with it, but I think we ought to be clear that when we place limits on where and how people can express themselves we are, by definition, limiting their freedom of speech and expression.
I disagree that the difference you've identified truly exists. In some cases we punish a speaker based on how others reacted to what they said, in some cases we don't. We deliberate on these things on a case-by-case basis, there's no consistent rule.
Yelling "fire" into a crowded theater is more than speech. Similar to when a person gets in another's face and screams at them it becomes more than speech. We can restrict modes of expression without restricting content.
> We can restrict modes of expression without restricting content.
Absolutely we can, but we need to be careful in how we do so and we really should be limiting those restrictions to the smallest number possible.
Niceties like "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" help us easily accept more restrictions on speech - in fact they make those restrictions seem like common sense! As a society, though, we should be ultra-vigilant when it comes to protecting our speech and only restrict it when we are absolutely sure it is necessary. I'm not just talking about legal restrictions here, either, cultural restrictions are just as important. We don't want to find ourselves in a situation where the "mode of expression" being restricted is, say, talking to friends in a bar.
> we really should be limiting those restrictions to the smallest number possible.
Agreed. I was only trying to produce a notion of speech that we can safely declare inviolable. There may be a gray area between that which is certainly black or white. Having those boundaries lets us explore it while mitigating the slippery slope.
> Say what you like, but be aware that you are still accountable for how you obtained that content, or what happens as a result of what you say.
In other words, say what you like, but don't be surprised when they haul you off to a concentration camp for being a naughty little thought-criminal, huh? It's your fault for saying whatever you said! You should have been more careful!
No, that's punishing the speech itself - NOT addressing the consequences thereof. Do I really have to explain the concept? Saying that "I have it on clear authority that vacri & sillygoose are thieves; liars; adulterers; responsible for a toxic spill that poisoned kids; stole from the pension accounts; rigged elections; etc" is of itself not actionable, but if such libel can be adjudicated the cause of otherwise baseless abuse by society inflicted on vacri & sillygoose then yes I can be incarcerated as a danger to society.
Apparently some people can't discern the difference between punishment of speech and punishment for consequences of speech. Obviously such people need be kept out of legislative office.
Honestly, I wouldn't be too upset if the ones who committed the abuse itself were the ones held responsible. The person who said that ctdonath is a predator has wronged you but the one who stabbed you because they thought you a predator is the criminal.
The consequences come down on both, one is a homicide the other is a case of manslaughter, both should be judged by the law, and punished if that's the judgement.
> No, that's punishing the speech itself - NOT addressing the consequences thereof.
You do realize that the kind of speech that needs to be protected is not the kind with negative consequences for innocent bystanders, don't you? It's not like I'm defending yelling "fire!" in a movie theater.
The poster whom I responded to didn't seem aware of these distinctions, which is why I snarked at him.
> Do I really have to explain the concept?
No, you don't.
> Apparently some people can't discern the difference between punishment of speech and punishment for consequences of speech. Obviously such people need be kept out of legislative office.
But I guess it's alright to have liars, crooks and wannabe-tyrants in there?
It's not like I'm defending yelling "fire!" in a movie theater.
I absolutely do defend the right to yell "fire!" in a movie theater. I also absolutely think you are subject to the consequences thereof.
If there IS a fire, then by all means yell "fire!" accordingly.
I've twice seen Penn Jillette stand on stage before thousands, juggling flaming torches, pontificating loudly about and proceeding to yell "fire!"
I've seen the movie _Backdraft_ in a movie theater; there was much yelling of "fire!" therein.
And, of course, if you scare a crowd into a life-threatening stampede by yelling "fire!" when there isn't one, then you're culpable for any harm that follows.
All of this is different from what you portrayed, which was incarcerating someone for yelling "fire!" in a theater purely on grounds of doing so, regardless of whether there was/wasn't a fire and whether (in case there was) it posed a threat.
> I absolutely do defend the right to yell "fire!" in a movie theater. I also absolutely think you are subject to the consequences thereof.
That's still not the kind of speech that needs to be protected and heard, as I'm sure you're aware. So I can't see a reason to spend this much time discussing yelling "fire" in a theater.
> All of this is different from what you portrayed, which was incarcerating someone for yelling "fire!" in a theater purely on grounds of doing so, regardless of whether there was/wasn't a fire and whether (in case there was) it posed a threat.
I portrayed nothing of the sort. Here's what I originally said:
>> In other words, say what you like, but don't be surprised when they haul you off to a concentration camp for being a naughty little thought-criminal, huh?
But nevermind, we've probably wasted enough of each other's time here.
> That's still not the kind of speech that needs to be protected and heard
This is the whole point of the discussion, right here. You're discriminating against a certain type of speech because you've judged it to be the wrong kind of speech. Once you've set a precedent that the wrong kind of speech can be infringed, you no longer have free speech - you have a struggle for the power to define allowed speech and disallowed speech.
It seems like you are unnecessarily conflating speech and the consequences of speech.
No false dichotomy, I didn't suggest that it's either crooks or those who "can't discern the difference between punishment of speech and punishment for consequences of speech".
The point was just that there are much more obvious problems with people in positions of power than not being able to distinguish with punishment for using one's vocal chords and punishment for whatever it caused.
The false dichotomy is that if one opposes one group one can't oppose the other. Or that if there are several bad things, drawing attention to one means approving another.
This is an honest question: if someone uses their freedom of speech to vocally support overthrowing a democratically elected government and replace it with a fascist dictatorship, would the government watching that person closely be a violation of their free speech?
Watching, insofar as it does not get into 4th Amendment search-and-seizure territory, is reasonable. This is a variant of: you have the right to publicly say what you like, and I have the right to listen, document what you said, and say you're an idiot for saying it.
Rather than freedom being defined as "doing what one wants", Kant defined freedom as man "rising above his animal instincts" (sp).
In other words, it's perfectly natural and convenient to behave like the "free" and "extreme" tattooed apes pandered to in modern television commercials, whereas it takes relative effort be polite and follow the golden rule.
Ask yourself who is more "free", the chair-throwers on Jerry Springer, or, Scott's Rob Roy who was shackled for refusing to lie about a stranger.
America, given its near constant prating about freedom, is itself in dire need of a dialectic on its essence.
It takes some herculean logic twisting to claim that someone who is not shackled is less free than someone who is.
If you are locked away and your speach censored, then rising above your animal instincts does you, at best, only personal good. If you are not locked away, then rising above your animal instincts could let you do good to some larger fraction of the world.
You are talking about two distinct concepts. The Constitutional Convention was concerned about individual liberty and protection from overbearing government, not personal enlightenment.
You're conflating private spirituality and philosophy with civic matters like law; inner with outer. The latter is powerless to affect the former. The chair thrower and the erudite intellectual must be subject to the same law. Otherwise the law becomes arbitrary.
The problem (as usual) with the US law system is that it allows unconstitutional laws to pass through the legislative and executive bodies (which aren't specialized in the Constitution, just in the "will of the People") without official judicial preview. It can then take decades (if ever) to verify if a law that makes something illegal is actually constitutional (at the Supreme Court).
That's how you end up with unconstitutional laws 5 decades later, and some lower Court judges just end up upholding that law because they don't want to upset the cart, allowing for the existence of the law decades more.
See the recent ruling on Patriot Act's bulk collection. It took 14 years just to reach an Appeals Court. If the USA Freedom Act reinstates some of Patriot Act's unconstitutional powers, it may take another 14 years before it reaches the same level.
There are two dimensions here: when is speech protected, and what is speech? If speech is just speech, it's easy to give it very broad protections. But we also consider physical actions to be speech (e.g. protesting). Clearly you can't allow people to engage in any action as long as they call it free expression. So it's a "nothing" proposition, where the government can ban any sort of protest activity.
I think it's relatively easy to distinguish "speech" from "speech plus other action," such as protesting. Even someone who supported free speech and a person's right to protest wouldn't likely support them protesting on their front lawn because other rights besides freedom of speech exist (such as property rights).
I don't think it's controversial in Western societies that freedom of expression, especially in spoken or written form, is one of the most important rights of a free society, and as such is worthy of protection. Other actions associated with that speech may not be protected, so we need to distinguish between them.
Is it? Publishing an anti-government article in a newspaper, something we think as the core of free speech, is actually speech (the writing) + action (publishing). So is putting anything up on facebook or sending it over the intertubes. You can apply a binary protection to speech, but that just moves the battleground to defining "speech" versus "not speech."
The U.S. approach is a pretty good one. It defines "speech" as almost anything expressive, and focuses the analysis instead on whether any restraints on speech involve the content of the speech. Protesting is protected in the U.S., which it would not be under a "speech" versus "speech plus other action" dichotomy. The attended activity may be limited, but not based on the content of the speech. Hate speech laws have been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional, because they ban particular types of expression based on content.
> I don't think it's controversial in Western societies that freedom of expression, especially in spoken or written form, is one of the most important rights of a free society, and as such is worthy of protection.
I'll say that even given only my real world experience with hearing local opinion on the matter, there is in fact quite a controversy around the concept. This isn't even taking into account the similar opinions coming through in forms of media that aren't real-time, in-person conversation.
That freedom of expression is even an important principle is not something where there's clear-cut agreement. There exists dissent aplenty.
Even spoken words can be magnified til they cause physical damage. In general, it is the information itself that must be held immune from restriction, not the physical expression via sound, light, or other physical medium.
Also, I'm not as clear yet on my views of the rights of protesting and assembly. I consider these important, but I have not yet thought through them and they may not need to be so binary in nature.
I would consider myself a free-speech absolutist. I support, unconditionally, anybody's ability to say anything without government intervention.
Unfortunately, the only checks on this vast power--vast especially now given the ability of mass point-to-point communication--are caused by a decent education and the ability to use said education to think critically about things.
The sad fact of the matter, though, is that at least half of everyone is below-average in this regard, and not only not worthy of such freedom but indeed likely to make life miserable for the other half by way of doing such things as parroting nonsense or abuse.
By definition, that's not free.
That's like saying that Texas is the best state in the United States except Colorado, Washington, and Nebraska. The previous statement contradicts itself. Either Texas is the best, or one of the other three states is the best. Texas cannot be both the best and be bettered by 3 other states.
Nonsense. Freedoms are never unlimited. I can't think of any that would even be unlimited in idealistic worlds like software licensing. Can you name any?
No country with 'freedom of speech' does not define acceptable and unacceptable.
Unrestricted freedom is anarchy. Give me ultimate freedom of speech and I'll stand outside your house with a megaphone calling your family illegitimate so you can't sleep. (Ok I won't, but I promise you people will)
I hereby declare that criticism of the current government's policy dealing with rape and rape victims to be harassing rape victims and will be treated as such.
I'm not sure how you jumped from free speech, to harassing rape victims. Last I checked, harassment requires something more than just freely speaking an opinion once or twice.
IMO, freedom of speech refers to content, not necessarily delivery. There really seems to be three types of speech. Private (home), subscribed (church, book, TV show), broadcast (commercial, billboard sign, office cooler, email inbox)). The difference being how wide the audience, and how much freedom they have in listening to you.
The problem IMO is ‘the internet’ mixes the three basic types of speech. Things that feel private often don't end up that way.
PS: A mortician making a book based on autopsy photos seems reasonable. But, sending those same photos to a parole officer or someone else you know less likely to be acceptable. Though in book form it is once again probably ok, same content different context.
I think I see where you're going, and you do raise a valid point. My comment was aimed more at the abrupt logical jump made by the user above, from free speech to rape harassment.
By that logic, no-where as freedom of speech, and it's highly unlikely that anywhere every will, since it will require abolishing many laws that many people desire (like medical privacy or copyright).
You ever notice how medical privacy always has the 'except as required by law'. It prevents them blabbing about it to your friends, but not to the government. Also, contracts would resolve this. You can restrict your speech per a voluntary contract (such as an NDA). The key difference here being a contract is voluntarily entered into while a law is enforced. If you want to work for the medical field, you'll have to enter into a contract to stay silent about key information.
> Also, contracts would resolve this. You can restrict your speech per a voluntary contract (such as an NDA)
Yes in theory. In practice too much of the population are bad at legal issues and would not ensure they get their doctor to sign a NDA and would be screwed.
>If freedom of speech is absolute, then it means that any contractual clause purporting to restrict it is void.
No it doesn't.
>In the same way that any contractual clause purporting to enslave a natural person, even with their consent, is still void.
Such a contract is banned because of how one-sided it would be. Even a contract for selling property can be overturned if it is too one-sided. The difference being is that there are many fair contracts for exchanging property while there are none for enslavement. Compare this to indenture servitude, where some variants are allowed, though they include some way to break away.
Consider that a person owning their own creations, something largely considered quite absolute, does not preclude them entering in a contract where such creations are owned by the other party.
The core difference here is that the government cannot punish you for information you gave or received. You can have a civil case for breaking a fair contract you consented to (and if court ordered damages are not paid, you can then be guilty of contempt of court).
Though I agree, I can't help but think of Anwar al-Awlaki [0]--the first US citizen killed by JSOC [1] for what seems to be his expression of anti-US sentiment (and calls for violence against America & Americans). That said, he was a) an American citizen and b) expressing what one might consider his freedom of speech.
Is speech protected only in so far as that we agree with it and that should someone say something we're not comfortable with (e.g., "I hate the US policy in Country X and think the US should be stopped") we should have the right to stop them, or should there be no barriers on it whatsoever?
The article seems to be suggesting that it's alright to limit freedom of speech a little, as long as some "suitable" Schelling points are established.
But that doesn't work because Schelling points are subjective. You can't reliably convince everyone that some specific arbitrary threshold should never be crossed, because it will surely lead to doom. Some might agree, and others will see things in a different way.
That's why it's pointless to even try, and that's why it's pointless to think about freedom of speech in terms of Schelling points.
So how about just pretending there's a Schelling point at 100% of freedom of speech? Any concession from that will inevitably lead to more, and besides, losing our freedom of speech is not a clear-cut phenomenon anyway.
It's a bit like new currency entering circulation at various points in the economy - some people's perceptions of what's acceptable will shift before others', but will in turn affect the perceptions of others around them. Freedom of speech rots in arbitrary, unpredictable and uneven ways.
When applied to some action that hasn't been tried yet, I'm not sure that statement has ever been true. In fact, I largely see the advancement of humanity as people trying pointless things until they stumble upon the few things that work. I can imagine there have been many times and many peoples in the past that when considering their own government, thought that human nature and the the nature of power would never allow a different governing system than the one they knew.
Things change, and it's largely due to a few doing what the majority consider "pointless", and accomplishing the "impossible".
> When applied to some action that hasn't been tried yet, I'm not sure that statement has ever been true.
Alright. Try melting steel with your mind. It's reasonably likely that's never been attempted before, so I guess it's not pointless to try, right?
You're basically just saying "extreme statements are unlikely to be true", but while that's often an accurate observation, especially when discussing groups of people, it's not really relevant to what I said.
On the other hand, what I said earlier boils down to "it's pointless to attempt something that can't be done". I fail to see how that warrants lodging a complaint like yours.
I'm pretty sure that has been tried, likely millions of times before. How do we know we can't melt steel with our mind? Because we've tried, and it didn't work. We weren't born with some inherent knowledge of physics and the universe, we painstakingly experimented with everything until we developed a model of how things worked, and we've passed that along.
> On the other hand, what I said earlier boils down to "it's pointless to attempt something that can't be done". I fail to see how that warrants lodging a complaint like yours.
But you've provided no real evidence that it can't be done, have you? Trying provides that first bit of evidence, in whatever direction it goes. I'm all for prioritizing what we try, but stating something is pointless to try when it hasn't yet been tried implies you not only have perfect knowledge of all the variables that constitute the outcome, but can also use them to correctly predict the outcome. I feel fairly safe in asserting that neither you, nor any other person alive, is truly capable of that. As such, nothing is truly "pointless". It may be undesirable for a number of reasons, but pointless is not one of them.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for argument's sake. I truly believe that that the original idea has enough merit to at least try. That's not to say the outcome will be as hoped, but that doesn't mean we won't learn something in the doing. Is that not why we try things? To learn?
Try getting a bunch of open source developers to agree on which editor is the best.. and there you'll have support for the claim you've spent all this time pointlessly arguing against.
The discussion will likely bring to light facts that some in the discussion didn't know. Even with no immediate change accomplished, people get a feeling for another, a chance to formulate opinions that may have been tenuous before, and the past informs the future.
As to whether my actions were pointless, there decidedly were not. I enjoyed putting my opinions down, and thinking about the matter, so in that manner it entertained me for a while. An upvote received leads me to believe someone found some merit in what I said, whether it be a reinforcement of their existing views, a fresh look at something they hadn't thought much about, or some other reason. Your thoughts on how pointless it was for me are, to put it bluntly, irrelevant. To some degree, so are my own thoughts. We don't control how important something is, we simply strive to steer it to our desired level of influence. How much control do you truly have over whether you remember this exchange a year from now?
To play devil's advocate, what about treason (or some other form of state secret sharing)? When Julius (and allegedly) Ethyl Rosenberg shared secrets from the Manhattan Project with the Soviets, should it have been a crime, let alone a capital one?
Conversely, if the government can say that certain speech is Treason, what stops it from declaring any speech it doesn't like Treason?
I don't see how you get a security through obscurity angle out of what you were replying to, assuming you are referring to the well known cryptography saying.
That's not what "security through obscurity" is about. The admonishment against "security through obscurity" in cryptographic circles is about not relying on your adversary's ignorance of your systems to protect your secrets.
So, for instance, if you are using cryptography to secure a transmission, you don't rely on eavesdroppers not knowing what algorithms and protocols you are using. You rely on them not knowing your keys.
Free speech as a right to criticise government is exceptionally important.
Free speech as a right to abuse people is not something I want to see in Europe.
I don't see these as being the same. I think there is something wrong with the common English language usage that we use the same term to cover multiple definitions.
That is the question of course: who gets to decide what constitutes 'abuse'? Do you trust anyone in your government to decide which of the words, writings, blog posts, comments or tweets you make constitute 'abuse' of another person?
Given that the go-to rhetoric of so many political and religious groups is to be "offended" as a substitute for being right, laws that restrict 'hate' speech or 'abuse' speech create more legal cover for the people who are least willing to cope with criticism than the people who are most vulnerable to abuse.
And, usually, you will find that the people who are least willing to cope with criticism are the people who should be most criticized, because no one's ideas are sacrosanct.
Freedom of speech is also the freedom to listen, or not to listen. Abuse and hate can be countered with more robust freedom of speech, more social shunning, more economic boycotting--it does not require government intervention to curb all the 'isms'.
What are you talking about? How can abuse ever be countered with economic boycott?
The government should decide because that's what the government is for. If the government doesn't get it right, then the people should hold the government accountable.
In my opinion, Western governments lack sufficient accountability, but I still trust them to decide more than I trust an all-or-nothing anti-philosophical principle.
The government isn't an intelligent entity; it's made up of people. And people have prejudices, hatreds, fears, and worst of all, a pack mentality. Governments have the worst track record when it comes to oppressing minorities--why would we expect giving governments the power to censor speech help minorities?
>How can abuse ever be countered with economic boycott?
You can make the argument that by boycotting abusive business, like for example Chick fil A and their actions against homosexuals, you speak against the business in the only language they understand, money.
Nobody wants to see abusive speech being used. The question is whether or not the law should "protect" people from it. I'm not talking about making credible threats, because the crime of assault already covers that.
If a society decides that abusive speech is a special case that must not be tolerated, it also has to define what "abusive speech" is. This requires, by its very nature, a subjective and often emotional interpretation. That society must also determine whether unintentionally abusive speech is a crime.
If the law is charged with protecting people against abusive or potentially abusive speech, it has to have powers necessary to do so. This requires the power to censor, the power to silence dissenting voices, and the power to (re)interpret the words of others based on the emotional reaction of anyone who hears those words (which may not be the intended audience).
Those powers undermine the use of speech for all purposes, not just ones that society deems appropriate.
I don't understand why people seem to think that any kind of distinction here can be enforced without undermining free speech as a whole. By way of example, you have property rights and if, by exercising them, you erect a hideous statue on your property which your neighbor finds offensive, your neighbor has no right to have the statue torn down simply because he finds it distasteful.
Freedom of speech is only really valuable when you're saying something that someone might want to censor. Nobody cares if you're saying something everyone already agrees with.
> By way of example, you have property rights and if, by exercising them, you erect a hideous statue on your property which your neighbor finds offensive, your neighbor has no right to have the statue torn down simply because he finds it distasteful.
Also on this unrelated topic, exactly the opposite is common in Europe.
In the UK, you would need planning permission to place a statue, a process which allows a neighbour to voice their objection to the planning committee of the local government.
"Free speech as a right to abuse people is not something I want to see"
And if you take that to mean "people" as any group of people, then it means you aren't free to speak out against ISIS, or the attackers at Charlie Hebdo, or those doing things you think are objectively wrong.
In parts of the world now, it is not socially acceptable to speak out against the actions of Israel, as such critiques are considered anti-Semitic. Maybe this is fair, but if the Israeli state begins decapitating innocent people in the streets, should you be allowed to condemn it publicly?
It's a nice fantasy that the disenfranchised could somehow be immune from hateful or critical speech, but to suggest that there's ever any group that qualifies as saintly enough to deserve such protections is, I think, naive at best.
I agree that there is potentially a distinction. Speech that is restricted in public (eg through a public libel trial) is different to speech that is restricted by preventing the person from ever speaking.
In the former, you get to state your opinions publicly but then have to defend them, but no secrets are kept.
So, the devil of it is, governments--especially ones with elected officials--are made of people, and so criticizing the government and its officers often looks quite a bit like abuse.
What about it? It is certainly detestable, and we should prosecute whoever produces it, but censoring is censoring. There are some good articles by Rick Falkvinge[0] that has been discussed here a couple of times[1].
What of the reddit sub that hosts pictures of dead children? What of videos of adults being sexually abused (not staged, actual abuse)? What of videos/images of other crimes that could cause emotional damage to those victims if the content were to spread? What of the abuse of the current laws to punish teens for engaging in what is quickly becoming normal behavior? What of the potential for the government to create systems to catch this one exception we make that we then once again find being pushed to cover other areas? What of making drawings/computer generated images illegal?
I will say this one area is probably the harshest test of the viewpoint, especially giving current social norms and morals. And I will say that the view point isn't perfect, only the best of the limited choices available. As such, there are areas where the outcomes are less than ideal.
And of course, production of such material would still involve a horrific crime that would be met with extremely harsh punishment. It may even force authorities to focus on producers, which would increase the number of children rescued.
In many cases the laws come before the social norms. In other cases, they are counter to the norms (such as with drugs).
Also, I think there was an attempt to make gore illegal (at least when it was real individuals) but it was ruled as protected (in the US, don't know about other countries).
Pictures of people being harmed (child abuse images are not porn) are not speech they are evidence of a crime.
EDIT
To make things clear.
I used the words child abuse images.
This may have been a hint that I was talking about images of actual child abuse rather than selfies taken by teenagers.
We are in a discussion about an ideal world. Let's imagine that if we were really in a position that governments were legislating about absolute freedom of speech they could also draw up some non stupid laws to protect victims of child abuse?
> Pictures of people being harmed (child abuse images are not porn) are not speech they are evidence of a crime.
No, they are a crime in se.
Child pornography is special in that possession of child pornography is automatically a crime, even if the person didn't know the pictures were of children[0], or even if they person didn't know they had them.
Let's say your 16-year-old friend, as a joke, puts a nude photo of himself/herself on your phone. If a policeman searches you and finds it, and you admit you were in possession of the phone before the search, you are automatically guilty of possession of child pornography, even if you can prove you didn't know the photo was there.
I'll say it again: if you admit to possessing something that is later found to have contained child pornography while it was in your possession, you are automatically guilty of possession of child pornography.
That is the opposite of correct. There is in fact a Supreme Court case on this (X-Citement Video). The Supreme Court interpreted the federal child pornography statute to extend the "knowing" mental state requirement to the "child pornography" element of the statute in order to save its Constitutionality.
Agreed. However, they are also evidence that a child has been abused and this was my point. That images of abuse are not speech in the sense of exchange of ideas, opinions and facts and don't need to be protected by free speech laws.
> However, they are also evidence that a child has been abused and this was my point.
"Child porn" is defined very broadly, and is a very politically loaded term. Many things that are defined legally as child porn would not be considered evidence of abuse by many (most?) people.
If you're 16 and snap a photo of your junk in the locker room and send it to your teammates as a prank[0], you are all guilty of possession of child porn. Who abused whom here?
There are also many things that are defined legally as child porn that are unambiguously abuse, in very horrific ways. But the problem is that they're both conflated when you use the term "child porn", which is both overloaded and politically charged.
This may have been a hint that I was talking about images of actual child abuse rather than selfies taken by teenagers.
We are in a discussion about an ideal world. Let's imagine that if we were really in a position that governments were legislating about absolute freedom of speech they could also draw up some non stupid laws to protect victims of child abuse?
There isn't exactly a difference since there has been some efforts to call the former the latter to focus on the issue of the abuse. If you are wanting to get highly specific with your terms, you'll probably need to work with some definitions stated up front because otherwise people will be assuming layman usage.
Also to note, under current law, those selfies are images of abuse. It may seem absurd that the law considers such an action as abusive, but that is just because the sometimes is absurd.
Punish the category of crime aggressively & severely enough, and evidence of such crimes will be hard to come by. Include lewd abuse of that evidence in the scope of "libel", and the occurrence of such crime can be reduced further.
A key problem which this solves, and which is a terrible side-effect of such law as currently implemented, is crushing punishment of those oblivious to their possession of such content (say, malware surreptitiously caches such content on your computer, then anonymously sics CSI SVU et al on you).
Wow I wouldn't normally comment on this but five people (so far) have considered that child abuse images are not evidence of a crime strongly enough to downvote... Scary stuff.
> five people (so far) have considered that child abuse images are not evidence of a crime strongly enough to downvote
I actually didn't downvote you, but the problem is that you're making a lot of assumptions when you say "child porn", and you're ignoring a key way that that child porn is already treated specially by the law[0].
If you're 17 and your 17-year-old boyfriend/girlfriend texts you a nude selfie, that's child porn. If your phone is confiscated before you even open the text, you're guilty of possession of child porn.
If you're 5, and your parent or relative sexually abuses you and records the events on film, that's child porn even if they don't distribute it. If they do, everyone who receives it is in possession of evidence of your abuse.
Child porn is evidence of a crime, but the question is, crime by whom? In the first case case, it's not clear morally that the person who unknowingly received a nude selfie from an underage person committed a crime, even though legally the law treats both cases as identical.
[0] For contrast, if you are found in possession of drugs, you can theoretically make the defense that you didn't know you had them. It's a weak defense, but it is legally possible - with child porn, even if you succeed in convincing the judge/jury of that fact, it doesn't affect your case one bit.
This must depend on jurisdiction, but in most western legal systems it's called "Possession of Child Exploitation/Abuse etc Material". Some material that might strictly fit into the age category is not CEM due to some other merit, especially when borderline- ie is art. We have case law for that where I live.
2ndly "possession" is formed by 2 elements- knowledge and control. Can't have it without them. Now you may live somewhere with different law, but this is pretty standard.
Btw thanks for writing this and clarifying that I was being miss-understood. I was genuinely worrying for a few moments that people voting on my comment were members of some type of child love association.
Impose severe punishment for the process of creating/acquiring that content, and for subsequent actions inspired by it. (Presumably I need not elaborate on the details.) Like "life in prison" severe.
I've actually gotten depressed at the results of the election. I was scheduled to go back to the UK in a few months, but decided to move to another country instead.
Cameron is on a rampage. I've never feared rapid descent into dictatorship until now. I'm well and truly afraid of what the UK will look like in 4 years.
Cameron is on a rampage. I've never feared rapid descent into dictatorship until now. I'm well and truly afraid of what the UK will look like in 4 years.
A lot of people said that about Bush in 2004. People are alarmist. Status quo is generally maintained with only minor changes in course - that's what our political systems are designed to do.
The US has direly changed since 2004 and not for the better. The UK is a much, much smaller country than the US; what do you think will happen to it on the same time scale?
I'm not saying Cameron will start WW3, but I really am afraid of what will happen.
> The US has direly changed since 2004 and not for the better.
It's complicated.
Since 2004 we're finally getting to the point where some of the insanity put in place in the aftermath of 2001-09-11 is starting to go away.
On the flip side, the ways some of that is being done (see TSA PreCheck, put in place in 2011) are quite odious... but I have a hard time blaming Bush for a policy put in place in 2011.
While I agree that the changes from 2004 to 2008 were fairly negative, the ones from 2008 to 2012 were just as negative if not worse.
All of which is to say that the two major parties were quite happily marching in lockstep toward creating a security state for a while there. I'm glad to see that at least the electorate and the judiciary are now moving in the opposite direction.
Well it's only my dumb opinion but Cameron merely comes in second place to ISIS for this year's entry on the things the media want us to be scared of - previously populated by CJD, Y2K, anthrax, avian flu, worldwide economic collapse, swine flu, Eurozone collapse, North Korea and Ebola.
I'd dare say most Americans think the US is worse today than it was before Bush. While the US isn't under the rule of a dictator, an increasingly large number of people are wary of if not fearful of the government.
People may be alarmist, sure, but when an ever-growing number of people worry about governmental actions, there tends to be some reason for it.
I honestly think you've got blinders on if you believe that. The right track/wrong track polls and congressional approval ratings are usually a good indicator of that - even Obama's meteoric rise couldn't put a dent in the way that people still feel like the US Government is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate america.
Pretty much. I'm not sure how many western countries are left which have not succumbed to the dark side of global surveillance and "security at any price", if any. Maybe Iceland?
IIRC, Iceland is indeed pretty privacy-conscious as a whole. If it were easier for me to move there (which would be difficult to do right now both financially and because I'm not already in Europe), I probably would.
A campaign to make Manchester part of Scotland has gathered momentum after a surprising 72 per cent of respondents voted in favour of secession. The results of an online poll conducted by the Manchester Evening News revealed that thousands of people want the city to be ruled from Edinburgh, rather than London. A Twitter campaign with the hashtag #TakeUsWithYouScotland is being used on social media, and a Change.org petition has already been signed by 17,000 people.
Can anyone share why exactly the Liberal Democrats, who seem to have been against this sort of stuff, got crushed at the recent elections? Was it because of some unpopular positions or were there many "scandals" that appeared regarding their candidates (perhaps about personal issues?).
- In the election 5 years ago there was no clear winner, the Lib Dems chose to go into a coalition government with the party who received the largest proportion of the vote.
- This coalition meant compromising on several key issues, for example tuition fees for university, in exchange for getting through other policies (raising the free tax allowance for the lower paid).
- The lib dems failed to properly communicate their achievements as a liberal/progressive force within government, and spent their time apologising for every compromise.
- Scotland moved strongly to a nationalist party, hurting a traditional source of seats.
- The polls looked as though there would be another coalition, and the people who previously voted lib dem were damned if they were going to vote effectively for another coalition in which they felt the party betrayed its values
tl;dr they got burned for doing the "right thing".
As I've said before on HN, people here seem to think that security is a huge issue. Surveillance, police state etc. In all of the election content I saw, it was mentioned maybe once or twice and barely scrutinised. The people of the UK did not care about it, and the politicians left it in the manifestos.
As for the GP comment suggesting something about dictatorship, it's probably the most ridiculous thing I've read in some time.
The Liberal Democrats did extremely well at implementing some of their policies (notably increased personal allowance), obsoleting that part of their manifesto. I think they are right to be proud of that record, but it means that some of their strongest policies are now irrelevant.
The Liberal Democrats did extremely poorly at implementing some of their promises (notably tuition fees), going back on their word and making themselves non-credible in these respects, obsoleting the other part of their manifesto.
The Liberal Democrats were not observed to take any position that would contradict the two major parties during the election campaign. They were criticised for being "blank tiles", easily able to meld with either of the major parties in coalition. A vote for the Liberal Democrats could easily be a vote for the worse of two evils, whichever side you think that is. And many (former?) Liberal Democrats would think that the worse evil would be their coalition partner.
The major parties and UKIP have been very effective in pushing an anti-immigrant and anti-human rights agenda with the help of the press. The Liberal Democrats did not appear willing to stand openly against this in the election campaign.
During the election debates, the Green Party, Scottish Nationalist Party, and Plaid Cymru made a convincing claim to stand for human rights. The Liberal Democrats did not.
I'll add that anybody who actually believed in what the Lib Dems were offering in 2015 (a centrist party) knew that after the election the Lib Dems would probably revert to being a left-wing party anyway.
So they managed to alienate both their prior left-wing vote and their new centrist vote. Quite an achievement!
In the run-up to the 2010 election, they promised to oppose any rise in tuition fees, then reneged on this in government.
On its own, that's probably not that significant, but it appears to have helped cement their reputation as untrustworthy, not least among those who thought they were voting for a party more left-wing than Labour have become in recent years.
But... they came last out of the three main parties, so it is hardly surprising that they weren't able to implement the entire of their manifesto. The conservatives reneged on many of their manifesto pledges too.
I suspect it is more that the conservatives have much stronger support by the media.
It wasn't that we (I was a Lib Dem candidate in the election) promised it in the manifesto; it was that individual MPs made a personal promise to vote against an increase in tuition fees, and then voted for it.
In addition to the "got blame but no credit" answer that others have offered I would also suggest that they have previously been the preferred "none of the above" response for people who wanted to express dissatisfaction with either Tories or Labour depending on who happened to be the more popular party in their riding; by being somewhat between they two major parties they picked up a lot of votes from dissatisfied by somewhat engaged voters. Once they were a part of government they were a part of 'the establishment' and so the protest votes went ukip or green depending on the voter's base political preference.
Speaking personally, I voted lib dem in 2010 on the basis that they were a party broadly of the left, but distinct from the Labour party of the time in a number of positive ways. To then form a coalition with the party of the right and support a number of measures that I think were quite regressive did not match with the party I thought I voted for.
Of course after seeing 10 days of government without the lib dems to moderate I'm starting to re-evaluate how positive an influence they likely were...
One theory I've heard is the way votes are counted.
I've heard that UKIP had around 3.881.129 votes and got only one seat, Green party with 1.157.613 won a single seat and Scottish national party had 1.454.436 votes and got 56 seats.
I'm not sure it's plausible, but it could be a valid explanation.
The SNP only stood candidates in a small fraction of the country:
UKIP: 3881129 / 624 = 6,220 per area, winning 1/624
SNP: 1454436 / 59 = 24,651 per area, winning 56/59
Non-proportional voting systems are barbaric and anti-democratic, but when they're in place you might consider that voting for parties that can't realistically win to be a measure of how little your voters understand the political system or at best a protest vote. On the other hand, without large numbers of people publicly wasting their votes, then there's no push for change. The Green party explicitly told their voters to "vote with their heart" i.e. waste their vote, and have now suggested that the progressive candidates work together to avoid splitting their vote.
There was no change to the way votes were counted that I'm aware of. This is a FPTP political system in action.
There was a referendum to move to a more grown-up voting system, but the majority voted against it. Depressingly, many of those who voted against were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting against. I could only weep as someone left the polling station proud to have taken a stand against proportional representation.
I suppose they could have been balanced by people who voted in favour who were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting for, but I suspect that is less likely.
The AV system we voted on wasn't actually PR, any kind of PR got veto'd by the conservatives, and the Lib-Dems were perhaps foolish to try to continue with such a meagre reform, as it now gets used as an excuse to not implement PR in future as "the country voted against it" (except of course they didn't, as it wasn't one of the two options they were allowed to vote for).
Yes, that's why I said I wept as people left the polling station having thought that's what they were voting about. That's my point. Lots of people didn't know. They thought that's what they were voting on.
My particular hatred was for the people who chanted "One man, one vote", like only being able to express yourself in favour of one candidate was some kind of superior state of being, rather than the kind of democracy you have to introduce to a society coming out of a millenium of dictatorship to get them used to the idea before they can move on to a grown-up political system.
"AV is not proportional representation and in certain electoral conditions, such as landslides, can produce a more disproportional result than First Past the Post (FPTP)"
Yeah they clearly bet the farm on it, lost it, and got hammered in the election. But had it passed, the Lib Dems could have been reaping the rewards for decades, since they'd almost certainly gain more seats.
I'm not sure that we are that stupid. I think that many people agreed with me that AV was a needlessly confusing system that the LibDems wanted only because it would boost their electoral chances in a country where there were at the time two left of centre parties and one right of centre one.
(I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)
> We also thought that AV would probably increase the number of pro-PR MPs and therefore increase the chances of getting actual PR later.
Ahh I didn't think of it like this. I thought that AV would allow the Tories and Labour to say that we'd had electoral reform and that would be it for another 100 years... I'm hoping that the pressure will build against FPTP now - especially after the farce of an election we just had.
I do hope that we don't go full PR or even region based PR for the commons though (maybe for the Lords if it ever gets reformed?). Political parties already have enough power in deciding who gets to run. I don't want them controlling the list order as well. I want voters to control the list order with their ballots.
> (I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)
Really? Because AV is what Ireland uses and called it PR-STV.
For elections to President of Ireland, there is only one 'seat' available. And it is elected under PR-STV. The PR-STV system works fine with only one seat. You select the quota the same way, you do transfers the same way. Ireland uses PR-STV for single-member constituancies just fine.
This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person. It's not possible for someone to be 40% blue party and 60% red party, because there's only one of them. So, in Ireland votes for the president, and for by-elections to replace a single member use AV.
STV and AV (and a bunch of variants of each) are closely related, but they do have differences, and repeatedly claiming that one is the other, when they're not, isn't that helpful to the conversation.
> This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person.
Proportional representation is really a matter of degree rather than a binary categorization -- a system doesn't magically become proportional when you apply it to a two-member constituency that would be not-proportional when applied to a single-member constituency.
OTOH, the maximum degree of proportionality you can achieve in an electoral system increases with the number of seats that are elected by the same set of ballots.
STV is an election method defined for any arbitrary number of seats, IRV/AV is exactly STV applied to a single-seat election.
It's got nothing to do with disagreeing with me. People who thought that they were voting for/against proportional representation were just plain wrong. That's just plain not what the referendum was for.
Are you saying that these people were not misinformed? That somehow, even though the referendum was not about PR, and they thought it was about PR, they were still right? Is this some kind of "prizes for all, everyone's correct in their own way" situation?
When faced with the exact same evidence, a majority of people will react the same way.
What's more likely is that the sum of the evidence isn't actually the same.
People will generally vote based on what they know (the evidence that's been presented to them). What they know isn't much for most of the population - it's whatever TV channel they watch, whatever newspaper or website they read.
IOW, anyone who disagrees with GP is, in fact, likely to be misinformed - at least from the point of view of GP.
I think one of the reasons was tuition fees which the Lib Dems were very much against. The moment they got into power (2010) - fees were hiked to £9k per year and many people treated that like a broken Lim Dem promise
In the run-up to the previous election, many Lib Dem candidates made personal pledges - above and beyond their manifesto - that they, personally, would never vote to raise tuition fees. And then did so (and not because they were required by the coalition agreement - the party made it a free vote).
That was how they lost my vote and those of others I know.
Because they were a small party in a coalition with a larger party that did some horrible things. Their core voters deserted them, since they were in government when things were brought in that their core didn't like.
Well, a very large proportion of the population is pleased at the results of the election. I think that things would be much, much worse if the hard-left Milliband Labour Party had won the election.
I am not sure of the context in which Cameron's quote came from, but societies and governments interfere all the time in activities that are legal. Take smoking tobacco for example, totally legal yet there is tremendous effort put into discouraging this activity.
Smokers are still left alone. We discourage smoking by limiting where it's legal and making it more expensive, but smokers are still totally free to do what they like within the law. Cameron seems to be saying that people who don't share his values will be harassed somehow.
Yes. Fun fact: Orwell lived in a cheap hostel in Whitechapel known as Tower House, Stalin was another occupant. At the time it was next to a Jewish synagogue, these days that's closed down and it's behind London's largest mosque, next to a very well regarded (by Londoners) Indian restaurant. Later the building was abandoned and gained a reputation for drugs and violence... people used to throw themselves off the upper storeys to effect a quick suicide. Later on it was fixed but by a Cypriate real estate investor and carved up in to cheap units. I had a go at living there, and successfully sublet a room to a guy on the interest rate committee of the Bank of England. Hosting this social mobility in a hundred years ... not bad for a building on a backstreet!
More details on the Stalin, Orwell, Whitechapel connection. Jack London visited it as well.
Stalin "fetched up in London in 1907, living in a Jubilee Street tenement flat – the future home of Golda Berk."[0].
"Tower House was immortalised in 1933, when George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London, praised it as the 'best of all common lodging houses with excellent bathrooms'."[1]
"Jack London, the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang was first in the line of anarchists, authors and lost souls to shelter here. He christened it The Great Monster Doss House in his seminal work of living among the East End poor, People of the Abyss, in 1902."[1]
I'm not sure that Orwell had much faith that he was writing an extreme cautionary tale, rather that he was just exposing what he saw as real forces acting in politics.
During a crisis, it seem like a good idea to grant more power to police and security services. But that power always gets used to subvert democracy and silence dissenters.
This is not a new problem. There's a bunch of literature about this, starting with Robert K. Merton's 1936 paper The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposeful Social Action [1].
Maybe the best way to counteract the perverse outcomes of feel-good social policy is to acknowledge these mistakes and teach future policy makers how to anticipate the second- and third-order effects of their actions [2].
Stross shows this in his hypothetical Labour Party communication:
The party recognizes that that our own legislative program
of the late 1990s and early 2000s established the framework
for repression which is now being used to ruthlessly suppress
dissent.
> During a crisis, it seem like a good idea to grant more power to police and security services. But that power always gets used to subvert democracy and silence dissenters.
In France, the currently in power socialist party seemed well aware of the "unintended consequences" when the conservatives were voting their own think-of-the-terrorists laws. One has to think that they either think this doesn't apply to them, or that they in fact don't really care.
> I'm afraid you can't buy a copy of the Glorifying Terrorism SF anthology (it's out of print, and not going to be reprinted or published as an ebook any time soon, because of the ongoing VATMESS headache)
I wonder if in this day and age a 500-year old book like "Vindiciae contra tyrannos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindiciae_contra_tyrannos) would land his/her author in jail. I suppose it would. And I cannot remember the exact title, but there were books similar with this one, written at about the same time, which were advocating for even more drastic measures: i.e. the assassination of the tyrant/king.
Anyway, in the US it has been illegal for some time to say "I want to kill the President of the United States of America" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY), the UK had remained one of the few countries where a liberty of speech "loophole" was still in place. Sad to see it gone.
...and here in the US, a major party candidate for president just said "If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL [Islamic State], I’m not gonna call a judge, I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you."
There's a big difference between somebody saying that who will never be given the chance to act on his promise, and somebody saying that who has actually been elected and is talking about what he plans to do with the power he has.
Even by Republic standards, Lindsey Graham is on the crazy end of the spectrum. Luckily, there's almost zero chance anyone would put him anywhere near any power.
It will be impossible to really discuss free speech issues on a venue that is predominantly American.
America has a very idiosyncratic view of free speech, embodied in their constitution. Good for them.
Unfortunately they usually categorically deny that any other variant of free speech, other than their own specific formulation, can ever be free speech at all.
That ties in with the general feeling in America that the US constitution is the best constitution there is and could ever be, to the point where the Founding Fathers are venerated beyond belief, and changes to the constitution are next to impossible.
To make a tangential point: America often criticizes Germany for not having the right flavor of free speech. While having more than just influenced our constitution.
So basically they approved our constitution (after demanding a few changes), especially the parts that were designed to counter Nazism. Understandable, after World War II. Unsurprisingly that ran counter to the American view of free speech, but that was intended at the time.
Starting out your comment by intentionally insulting most of your audience is an even better guarantee of not being able to have a good discussion about free speech issues.
A second foreign policy adviser to Mr Romney said: “Cameron’s contacts with Republicans are really quite limited, and have been going back to when [George W.] Bush was president.” The adviser added: “In many respects Cameron is like Obama.”
I think we need to be honest with ourselves and realize:
A) The US and the UK are basically operating under the same "security at any cost except raising taxes" mindset.
B) The logical conclusion of that mindset is to take away freedoms, minimize restrictions on law enforcement, minimize restrictions on espionage, and maximize government's ability to control the message to avoid "leaks".
The only real difference is the US was attempting to do it domestically under the radar with tactics like parallel construction that allowed them to bypass the firewall between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence.
It seems Cameron has decided to take the opposite approach and say "Fuck it, we are doing this openly and publicly." We'll hack machines, we'll suppress speech of anyone we consider a danger, and anything else we have to. The really sad part is there is a large segment of both country's populations who will go along with it just because it promises to make them "safer" and ignores the fact terrorists are as dangerous as lightning strikes with pre-9/11 procedures and funding.
Is it really worth giving up freedom to reduce the risk of a threat that is fundamentally less dangerous to the population at-large than lighting strikes or bee stings? Especially given that to do so we are removing safeguards that protect the general population from law enforcement whom kill more people (particularly in the US, in the UK the numbers are much closer) than terrorists?
The flip side of the coin is a voting public who refuse to accept terrorism as part of life. Demanding that politicians do something when a terrorist act happens, and blaming them for not stopping it.
Here in Australia we've been ridiculously safe from terrorism. If we get a serious terrorist event, people here are going to lose their marbles, rather than accept that 'one got through' the net. You see a similar thing in the US, where the public quite happily throw hundreds of thousands of US soldiers at muslim countries, but then complain that they die, and that they aren't supplied with enough armour and equipment. There's a very weird disconnect going on there. In general, the voting public want this surveillance, to protect them from the 'bad guys'.
The flip side of that flip side is that people in "our" camp (against ubiquitous surveillance, believing terrorism isn't the biggest threat, accepting "one got through," etc.) seem to have great difficulty accepting that the public largely disagrees with them.
Look at the discussion over NSA dragnet surveillance. It's almost always discussed in terms of an abuse of power against an unsuspecting public. Politicians set it up to further their own ends, or the NSA itself is grabbing power by blackmailing politicians, or at least implicitly threatening blackmail if anybody gets out of line.
The reality as far as I can see it is much more mundane. Things like NSA dragnet surveillance are happening because it's what the people want. Terrorism is seen as a threat that justifies almost anything required to counter it. The politicians are just giving their electorate what it wants.
If we want to fight this stuff, we need to win the war of public opinion. Unless the plan is to subvert the government ourselves and institute some sort of enlightened dictatorship, the only way to get this stuff to change is to convince people that our position is actually better, because most of them don't think that right now.
HBO has a documentary on the so called called Cannibal Cop, who was convicted for conspiracy, a so called "thought crime". He never really acted out on the underlying criminal act in question, and it's difficult to say if he conclusively took a substantial step in furtherance of the crime with someone else. Though, much of the evidence that did stack instead him included chats and search queries from Google.
I always thought that the crime of conspiracy was ahead of its time, but I really don't know how it fits in today's context where everything can be tracked. Not that conspiracy shouldn't exist, but that the world has finally caught up to the law.
I would encourage UK based people to join the various pressure groups and political organisations (e.g. the Liberal Democrat party, the Open Rights Group etc) that campaign (and in the case of the LibDems actually vote in the commons against) against the sort of Stasist legislation that Cameron's government is trying to push through.
Do remember that the UK's informal version of a constitution does not allow the Lords a lot of scope to change or reject e.g. the Snoopers charter. (It is convention that the Lords doesn't oppose things that were in the ruling party's manifesto..) Therefore there is not a lot of time to act on these issues.
Never mind V for Vendetta, what about Robin Hood? Hard-left propaganda glorifying armed robbery and violence against public officials under the guise of wealth redistribution.
In the eighties series Robin of Sherwood, the Sheriff does at one point describe Robin and his gang as terrorists.
Depends on your branch of right wing. Some right wing governments (e.g. Nazis) have ben very in favour of the government being able and duty-bound to oppress people.
No, it was the Nationalsozialismus party. "Schoolhouse" isn't a type of "house", and Nationalsozialismus wasn't a socialist party. Their main political enemies were the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, both left wing.
That was written in 1920, before they even adopted the name "Nationalsozialistische". It's better to look at what they did while in power. About a year after getting power in 1934, was the Night of the Long Knives when the party assinated the more left wing higher ups in the party who wanted wealth redistribution.
Absolutes are a powerful thing, in rules, in law, in communication and in all sorts of other ways. Absolutes make all sorts of things easier. Laws deal with them easier. Technology too. Compromises and caveats are trickier.
That's kind of what rights and freedoms are supposed to be, some abstract fundamentals we can all agree on that don't need much detail or qualifications.
The pursuit of absolutes (or ideals) is a problem though. Trying to stick them where they don't fit is a problem.
A friend of mine, a very smart local restaurant owner, had a long talk broadly on this subject yesterday. We both believe the same thing: 1) the US government and other major governments have been negotiating and executing for a long time on a smooth as possible transition from the US dollar being the world's reserve currency to using special drawing rights (SDRs) as the reserve currency. 2) This will badly effect the economy of the USA for several years and the economies of other countries for a much shorter readjustment period of time. 3) A lot of moves to reduce privacy and rights is an attempt to make sure that society remains civil during this transition. 4) It is crazy to not be at least a little prepared by having 3 or 4 weeks of water and food in your home just in case there are supply disruptions.
We also talked about the normalization bias of most people we know - people are so uncomfortable talking about this that they simply deny the possibility of this happening. Best thing: do a little prep work, try not to take on new debt, and after preparing live life and don't worry about the future.
The argument, that makes sense to me, is that other countries pay a high "tax" for the US dollar being the world's reserve currency, and they don't like it.
I don't read ZeroHedge but my son in law does.
My attitude is that the things to do to prepare for "The Death of the Dollar" are the same things that make sense even if this does not happen (or happens far in the future): don't take on extra debt, have job skills that are globally valuable, keep a reasonable amount of emergency supplies in your home (the US government has a web site with recommendations: http://www.ready.gov/kit (except I would argue having more than just a few days of emergency supplies, a few weeks would be better)).
Then why would the US go along with allowing the dollar reserve currency to go away? Answer: they won't go along with it at all.
There's no strong replacement for the dollar, and looking out over the next 20 years, there are none even on the horizon. An independent digital currency perhaps, but that would be outside the realm of the context you're talking about.
China is one of the most indebted nations on earth, even more so than the US, and the Yuan isn't a first tier currency. As they accumulate ever more debt, it's going to guarantee their currency is never trusted globally.
The Euro is practically ripping itself apart at this point, and always had to (unless they choose to go all the way as a union). After seven years of zero growth, the ECB has taken to debasing Euro members standards of living to reduce debt and artificially (and temporarily) juice the economy. Unlike with the US QE program, in which dollar inflation is substantially exported and others pay part of the QE cost, the Euro members will bear almost all of the cost of the debasement there.
The other major currency, the Yen, is aggressively being debased by the Japanese government, because it's bankrupt and can no longer afford to pay the interest on its debt. While simultaneously the Japanese people have stopped saving, in an economy that hasn't grown in 25 years; which means the government has run out of sources to borrow, forcing them into currency devaluation to reduce debt (hammering Japanese standards of living).
So there are the major competitors, all in terrible shape.
The US will do a lot of things before it allows the dollar standard to go away.
Just 5% interest on the US national debt would bankrupt the government (or wipe out social security or the military). Zero chance they just roll over and allow it to occur, much less actively sign on to such a thing.
Thank you for your well thought out reply, I appreciate it.
I still argue that using the dollar for country to country trade and commerce (where neither country is the USA) is in general not good for either country if they can negotiate a fair rate of exchange between their own currencies. This is letting market forces work as they should work. What we have in the USA with the Federal Reserve is far from free market capitalism (source: Katherine Austin Fitts (solari.com), and I agree with her - she compares our current system to Soviet era style central planning).
There are trading blocks that are increasingly trading in their own currencies and in a few cases there is not much my country (USA) can do about it. Recently there have been large trade and cooperation deals between China and Russia and I would bet that they will not be using the US dollar, similar to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) trading block.
Unless anyone mistakes me for a pessimist, I think the long term outlook for the USA is pretty good. Our advantages are great natural resources and relative geographic isolation. In the future after we adjust to much of the trade in the world not denominated in the US dollar, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't end up in good shape again like we were in the 1990s.
Sorry, in my other reply I didn't state any hard evidence. Assuming my theory/prediction/opinion is true, it is unlikely that there would be a public release of information concerning secret inter-government negotiations.
However, this did happen: 1) three countries (Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea) in the early 2000s publicly stated their intention of going off of the US dollar for trading (the first two, Iran and Venezuela are oil producers). 2) shortly afterwards, all three countries were labeled "axis of evil" states. I am no fan of any of the governments of any of these countries but it seems like more of a coincidence that strong actions were taken right after the declarations to go off of the dollar. In addition to sanctions against Iran, shortly after Venezuela made its announcement, the US Navy had it largest ever peace time prolonged naval exercise right off of the coast of Venezuela.
So, I admit that I personally don't have any hard evidence, just my own analysis. That said, I thought that I made it clear in my top level comment that what I was saying was the shared opinions of my friend and I.
You claim the US is going to sign on to a gradual removal of the US Dollar global reserve currency, switching to SDRs.
Then you claim that the US Government is very aggressively fighting to prevent such an outcome. And is so powerful, it can apparently wreck the world's 27th largest economy (Venezuela) without so much as breaking a sweat.
I don't think that I am contradicting myself. My government can be negotiating a slow burn transition off of the dollar, while still digging in its heals when that makes sense.
Maybe I am just being too optimistic, but given my belief that year after year the US dollar will be used less in international trade and business, I HOPE that my government negotiates to make the transition as slow and painless as possible. Some countries we will be able to bully and some countries we can't.
I subscribe to Katherine Austin Fitt's solari.com report - she and her guests usually seem very well informed. She was the under secretary of HUD in the George H. Bush administration, but got it some trouble for publicly speaking about how US government finances work. She claims that Dick Cheny tried to ruin her life.
I also like James Rickards' two books "The Currency Wars" and "The Death of the Dollar."
Thanks for posting that. SDRs are a basket of currencies, including the US dollar.
The thing that will change, if I am correct in my prediction, is that all countries whose currencies are part of SDRs (including the USA) will have a difficult time printing money out of thin air.
Can you explain what SDRs are and what the implications of such a move would be, in particular why it would be disruptive and why major governments would want it?
Quite the opposite, free speech and privacy demand each other and cannot exist without each other.
Consider these two scenarios, taken to the extreme to elaborate a point.
Unfettered free speech, with zero privacy.
Total privacy, no free speech.
Both examples are impossible in a human society (maybe in a robot society).
In scenario one, there can be no free speech if you have no right to privacy. The concept of chilling comes into action. If humans were robots, one might say that zero privacy would encourage and illuminate perfect speech because there would be greater total information and understanding. However that is not how people function. When faced with zero privacy, people will always self-censor, often dramatically. We can see this in practice time and time again, in numerous countries throughout just the last century.
In scenario two, if you have a government enforcing zero free speech, there's no chance they're going to simultaneously grant their people complete privacy (they can't, they have to constantly monitor speech).
The point of these examples, is to show that one can't exist without the other, not in actuality. As one erodes, the other will go with it.
A government willing to use extreme violence (which is what it would take) to stop all privacy, is not going to give you free speech. No such contradiction can exist for long. Any government willing to use violence to stop your freedom of speech, is not going to respect your privacy because they'll need to monitor you constantly to check against your speech (not to mention a violent government in reality simply isn't going to respect individual rights anyway).
From this, I've moved to adopting an ever stricter view of all speech as being free. I will not say it is perfect as it does have flaws. But the flaws are a small price to pay to ensure one of the axiomatic rights is defended. For without free speech, we lose the power to criticize, to discuss, to be democratic.
While I know the author isn't regarded quite as highly in the UK and the US, I think the following passage captures the importance of the exchange of information being free.
>The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.