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Comment by xwolfi | Hacker News Reader

Free speech is nothing to be absolute about. Things that were encouraged before can become absolutely abject later on - free speech in the public sphere must be regulated, and is in many jurisdiction (I'm French, I live in China - both are very similar in how they approach it in principle, China is more ideological when implementing but France can go very far when someone must stop talking).

I'm glad that as an absolutist, you managed to make a compromise, even if it's just for beheading. How can we convince you rape, insults, religious conflict, racism apology, or even treasonous discourse also can be regulated ? What is so good about stupidity that it has to be exposed so free to the public or what is so special about it that it can't be distinguished from intelligence ?

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I don't think there is a conflict between a right for absolute speech (on a practical level) and being held responsible for direct and foreseeable harm without a mitigating reason.

I.e. nobody can shut your mouth, or stop you from speaking, but there can still be consequences if your speech is directly aimed at unjustifiable harassment.

For instance, simply making the video available on a web site would be protected speech (no restriction on that) - assuming no other law was conflicted (copyright, etc.) But going out of one's way to push the speech to those it harms, and on services that prohibit it, creates a problem independent of the freedom to simply speak/publish.

Likewise, you can publish technical secrets you were given under a nondisclosure agreement, but will be prosecuted civilly and possibly criminally (depending on circumstances) for the damage you have done to intellectual property value.

You can claim anything you want for some product, but expect to pay for it legally if you are defrauding people.

You can publish any code you want, source or object code, but expect to pay the consequences if you are publishing code that doesn't belong to you, or violating an open source license by only publishing in one form, without providing the required form, or without proper attribution.

Etc.

For all those cases, nobody limits your speech, but direct consequences of your speech can still result in enforcement action.

Your freedom stops where another one's freedom begins.

You don't have rights that prevent you from hearing things you dislike, things you don't want to hear, or things you find offensive. But you absolutely have protections against repeated harassment.

Restraining order.

And in this case, it should be issued against any Does that engage in the activity.

Rights are a social construct. Why couldn't we simply construct those examples as new rights?

Rights are best when fundamental and few. Even then it takes a lot of thought to balance between them.

If you start creating a long list of rights then the complexity of balancing all the areas of contradiction will be so many that inevitably an elite will simply use the plethora of rights/contradictions to rationalize getting their way.

In most important things, we need to keep boiling down the principles to as few as possible to explain/perform as needed.

> What is so good about stupidity that it has to be exposed so free to the public or what is so special about it that it can't be distinguished from intelligence ?

The problem is: who gets to define “stupidity” and “intelligence” and the exact limits of what speech is allowed or not. We already have provable examples of people who were considered some of society’s biggest idiots while alive but ended up having a deep and lasting impact to society in the long term (Socrates is a notable example). It’s also guaranteed that this power would be abused to prevent legitimate political discourse almost immediately after granted. There is no such thing as perfect, consistent enforcement. It’s always subject to the human biases of today.

Based on your concerning desire for that poster to indulge the endless slippery slope of censorship, which you (wrongly) may believe is in your favor, perhaps they should consider retracting said post and reaffirming said absolute-ness.

The problem with calling the slippery slope a fallacy is there’s always someone trying to shove you down the slope. QED

The key distinction is not that China is more ideological (it's just a different ideology), but rather that they're is a democratic and rule-based foundation to the regulation of free speech. Both the democracy and application of the rules may be flawed at times, but it's the consent (through democratic politics) which makes the situations very different.

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