Freedom of speech?

I can be blunt, though I don't think I'm the bluntest. All I'm asking you to do is back up what you've said with some evidence. It's easy to claim things as facts and then run out of the door. I'm asking for evidence because you're not the first poster to make such a claim about "...talks..." and then fail to cite the actual instance and content of such talks.

Why do you think this discussion is stupid?

I don't think the discussion is stupid, I think it's quite an important one actually. Haha I guess I'm just not the best with arguments. This was published 4 years ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/2597481.stm
Is that good enough for you?

Thanks! This was all I was after.

This is the story:



Personally I think they were probably being over sensitive; although given the nature of their work overseas and the way religion has political meanings elsewhere in the world I don't think that it was outlandish for them to consider it. What I would say is that this story doesn't exactly match my expectations with respect to your original post - in which the actual banning of Christmas was alleged to have been discussed.

I don't think the discussion is stupid, I think it's quite an important one actually. Haha I guess I'm just not the best with arguments. This was published 4 years ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/2597481.stm
Is that good enough for you?

Right, now ask yourself who made this decison. Was it the ethnic minorities? Or over-zealous jobsworths? You need to think about who you condemn after such decisions are made, because i doubt Muslims would care about a nativity scene, seeing as they recognise Jesus in their religion and revere him anyway.

I was merely agreeing with your post and using "human rights" as an example.
What is there to elaborate upon?
Can't you remember what you said?

Why don't we have the government hold our hands day in, day out, reminding us "tut tut you can't say that". Freedom of speech is freedom in itself. Its up to the every day person to make moral decisions of what is right or wrong to say. An individual has to assess every situation, and act in the way thats best. If somebody were to shout "fire" into a cinema, the cinema owns the premises and has them taken out. If hate speech leads a person to commit an actual crime, you punish the actual crime. The last thing we need is laws stating what we can and can't say

What's witht his persistent belief among some of you that laws and norms should somehow always have 'you' in mind rather than 'me', when they are enforced? The Personal Responsibility mantra simply points to a good solution then stares right back at the problem again. Supposing people are not personally responsible, even if I am? Personal responsibility is little more than a legal shortcut to enforcing policy - it isn't open ended. That is to say, where a particular result is sought, individuals are charged with achieving it by whatever means they are able, and bear in mind that should things go wrong, they're likely to shoulder the blame. Maybe I've misread its use but I'm pretty damn sure that half of you guys have it back-to-front. It does not mean "let people decide how to behave", but, "let people decide how to obey the law".

The truth is, the Harm Principle sets the bar too high for dealing with free speech. I mean, it's hard to speak of physical harm and the offense caused by certain speech as being the same, so the punishment cannot be the same, yet there is still clearly an unresolved issue. A number of factors need to be taken into account when deciding whether speech can be limited by the offense principle and these include the extent, duration and social value of the speech, the ease with which it can be avoided, the motives of the speaker, the number of people offended, the intensity of the offense, and the general interest of the community at large (which sticks the middle finger up at many of the popular objections to "political correctness"). A case in point is hate speech. It causes profound and personal offense. The discomfort that is caused to those who are the object of such attacks cannot easily be shrugged off (which is why I find some of the defences for it made here quite simply incredible).

The truth is, individuals will not always assess a situation and make a reasonable or informed choice, and definitely not always a choice that will be in my interests. Laws can and should tell you how to conduct yourself in public, even if this includes what you can say in public. The right to free speech is little more than a right to protest. In the liberal west, people have gone out armed with fine sounding slogans to rampantly scent-mark every social habit with the status of "rights. Without legislation, cultural pressure would often perform the same task that laws attempt to. Controlling what people say is not the same as controlling what they think. Free speech is one of those rights which I take to be residual, but not absolute: you can say anything until I tell you not to say it.

In conclusion, "free speech" is not a personal liberty but a political one. It's chief objective is to ensure political dialogue, and to allow social participation. It's the truce flag of society. It's on these two criteria that curbing free speech is often balanced - social usefulness and political usefulness. So, gratuitously offending a particular group of people has no political objective. It's just nasty, and don't ask me to defend it even on principle. The question must be asked before restricting free speech, what value the offense being caused may have, and if it's avoidable. When fighting words are used to provoke people who are prevented by law from using a fighting response, the offense is profound enough to allow for proscription. Apart from the moral imbalance in such a case, the threat to peace that can occur as a result, is reason enough. Law and the political process are reflections of the things a society takes seriously. If moral considerations are among them, then I can see no reason to yank them out of the way.

I'm not a racist or anything, but last year there were talks about putting a ban on christmas, just because other ethnic groups didn't approve and it isn't part of their religion. I'm sorry but we don't tell them to put a stop to their celebrations like ramadan! And it's supposed to be our country, Great Britain. Now I'm not one to actually start arguments, infact I am the complete opposite, but when you get the feeling that you are not allowed to say what's on your mind then something is wrong. Censorship is wrong...I feel like it's World War Two all over again!

loadKezzle, you delicate flower, (no insult intended, just an accurate description) though YOU may not be racist, the millions of non-Whites who are colonizing your country most certainly ARE, and when the fit hits the shan they will not differentiate between evil White Nazis like me and good White non-racists like you. They will treat us equally; no questions asked, and It will not be pretty.
If you and I were to take a stroll through Soweto, do you think that the black denizens there would listen to your pleas of not being a racist? Hell no, they would kill us both. And do you think that the Pakistanis who abducted, beat and torched kriss Donald enquired first as to his racial politics? Hell no, they just wanted a White man to vent their murderous savagery upon. And their victim could equally have been you or I. So wake up dude and smell the racial reality. Even if you ignore IT, IT won't ignore YOU!

Is freedom of speech an absolute right or should it be restricted by governments?
Here in the West we are told that we have freedom to speak our minds, but in reality we don't, for our governments restrict what we can say with hate speech laws; so we don't really have freedom of speech.
The only exeption is America, whose people are protected by the first amendment. So, do you want the freedom to speak your mind even if it causes offense to certain groups, or are you prepared to accept government censorship in the name of cracking down on.... "hate"?.

There is no total freedom of speech in the US. But it doesn't matter since freedom of speech should be total.

loadKezzle, you delicate flower, (no insult intended, just an accurate description) though YOU may not be racist, the millions of non-Whites who are colonizing your country most certainly ARE, and when the fit hits the shan they will not differentiate between evil White Nazis like me and good White non-racists like you. They will treat us equally; no questions asked, and It will not be pretty.
If you and I were to take a stroll through Soweto, do you think that the black denizens there would listen to your pleas of not being a racist? Hell no, they would kill us both. And do you think that the Pakistanis who abducted, beat and torched kriss Donald enquired first as to his racial politics? Hell no, they just wanted a White man to vent their murderous savagery upon. And their victim could equally have been you or I. So wake up dude and smell the racial reality. Even if you ignore IT, IT won't ignore YOU!

There is no total freedom of speech in the US. But it doesn't matter since freedom of speech should be total.

Well, it is founded on reason and logic. What more do you want us to say!

The "problem" of the standard libertarian position on animal is nothing more than the problem of applying logic to a situation where people don't want to apply it to their own position. There seems to me to be strong arguments for an "anything goes" position on animal rights or conceding them total rights - nothing in between. This is in stark contrast to the (let me call it) naive view of animal rights (which I hypocritically hold myself...), i.e. that it is morally acceptable to kill animals in extremely brutal ways provided we are going to eat them, while anything else is just gratuitous and clearly wrong.

For example: I believe the evidence suggests that it is not necessary for anyone to eat animals to live. So we are in the position where people are killing animals for nothing more than "gratuitous" reasons - the deaths are completely avoidable! The question is, why is OK to kill an animal gratuitously in order to get pleasure from sinking your teeth into its burned and butchered flesh while it's not OK to kill an animal gratuitously in order to get pleasure some other way? There really doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to regard one as morally acceptable but the other as wrong to me.

If it really doesn't, can you answer the point above?

Sorry for taking a while to reply.

"Founded on reason and logic" means absolutely nothing. Like I said, it's enlightenment demagoguery.

If you posit libertarianism, you have to give an argument for that claim. Libertarianism isn't some base axiom which all properly functioning agents are rationally obligated to give their assent to.

From what I know of libertarianism, the cart is put before the horse. Specific rights seem to be posited while rejecting the moral assumptions that allow them to make sense. And they say they're allowed to do this by pointing right back at those rights.

Second, it needs to be explained how we get from those general and abstract rights to the specific rights found in a political dogma which takes itself to be "axiomatic". Natural rights give us options in our behaviour. How those options "automatically" lead to particular political theories - even human rights - I really can't agree. Just my two cents.