[lenticular]

It's pretty incredible how recent many of our seemingly inalienable rights (actual freedom of speech, de jure racial equality, right to representation, prohibition of the use of illegally obtained evidence, etc) have actually only been around a few decades, mostly thanks to the visionary Warren and Burger courts.

They were considered dangerous activist judges by many in their time.

[nullc]

With the US standing almost alone among developed nations and even the ACLU backing away from its policy of defending impolitic or hurtful speech we can probably expect this recent anomaly of free expression to be relatively short lived.

I'm glad I got to live now and not some other time.

[peteretep]

Could you briefly outline how you think the USA has benefitted from this freedom, in a way that other rich Western countries haven’t? I guess I’m specifically thinking of Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, as all have broadly similar legal systems and robust judiciaries / policing, but not the singular focus on free speech.

[exolymph]

How about a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions? The UK has gotten positively absurd. You can be forced to talk to cops about un-PC tweets. Example: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated...

I'm against transphobia, but not being able to vocally dissent on a certain politically loaded topic... that shit is bad.

[peteretep]

> a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions

To be absolutely clear, "their opinions" here (in the example you gave, and presumably what you're referring to) is hate speech, which the US allows[0].

What advantages have accrued to the US through hate speech being protected, in your opinion? You say "a lot fewer people being jailed", but a quick scan of, say, UK cases prosecuted as hate speech[1] don't show examples of people being jailed for it. Do you have some statistics for "a lot [of] people being jailed or otherwise punished" for hate speech?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...

[brigandish]

From The Times[1]:

> More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums

13 forces declined to give the information which means it is very likely to be far higher. That was a couple of years ago and it appears to be increasing.

As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. Even the anomolies would support it, like China, by using a historical chart.

Are hate speech laws making Europe safer? Maybe it would be better if you tried to show that with some statistics.

[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...

[peteretep]

> As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly.

I suspect you have not done your research

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

But, the question I originally asked remains, although I'll restate it to make it even easier to answer. You are tasked with convincing a newly formed republic to add a constitutional right to free speech like the USA, rather than free-ish speech like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. What are your arguments, based on these countries? What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?

[pjc50]

"Safety" from hate speech is difficult to define in statistical terms, because it tends to be nonlinear - everything looks fine until someone goes on a murder spree or starts up the death camps again. The last European genocide was in my lifetime, at Srebrenica (which, incidentally, Spiked Magazine are denialists of)

Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems.

The US seems to hang on the cusp of this, in having racially motivated mass murders only occasionally, that don't quite spill over into mass genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_attacks_...

[foldr]

> Citing 30 potentially offensive tweets, the PC singled out a limerick Mr Miller had retweeted which questioned whether transgender women are biological women. It included the lines: "Your breasts are made of silicone, your vagina goes nowhere."

The most disturbing aspect of this is that there is no possible limerick including those lines!

As a Brit who's lived in the USA and UK, I'd say that people outside the UK probably get a misleading impression from new stories like this. I'd say that political discussion in the UK is actually freer in practice than in the US. There's certainly a wider range of opinion in the mainstream press, and Prime Ministers are more effectively held to account by Parliament than Presidents are held to account by congress and the judiciary.

What the article describes is obviously an absurd waste of police time. However, no-one was even arrested, so it's hard to get excited about it as an example of someone's free speech rights being violated. I would happily take this kind of police harassment over the kind that leads to unarmed people being shot. It at least targets people who vaguely deserve it.

[Kalium]

In the US, there's this notion of a chilling effect. Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, police harassment has the effect of convincing people to stay silent. This is not exactly a win, and definitely the kind of tool that the less kind sort of government has used to suppress ideas they dislike.

[foldr]

Yes, sure, but this particular example of police harassment isn’t especially disturbing. Do you not think that, for example, routinely shooting unarmed black men probably has a bit more of a “chilling effect” than this does?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...

As I said, I’d be wary of forming your opinion of what political discourse is like in the UK from reading news stories. How much time have you actually spent in the UK?

[conjectures]

> 'I would happily take this kind of police harassment over the kind that leads to unarmed people being shot.'

Yup, can confirm that not getting shot ranks quite highly in my list of policing preferences.

Also, I note the story points out that the book was first printed in the UK to avoid problems in the US...

[DanBC]

You don't have to talk to police.

If you're arrested it's probably a good idea to talk to police, with your lawyer (state funded or privately funded, you have the choice) at your side.

Was anyone arrested in this case?

[Kalium]

English defamation law makes it very easy to use libel to silence critics. In the US, by contrast, standards are much higher and silencing people much more difficult.

The UK has not profited in any way, shape, form, or manner by this. It clogs up courts to no productive use and serves mainly to intimidate people into silence in the face of money. A free society is better without this.

[peteretep]

Sure, that's a valid criticism. However -- and as far as I'm aware -- this isn't an issue in any of the other countries, suggesting that this is more a peculiarity of the British system, rather than an inherent feature of not allowing free speech?

[Kalium]

This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech.

I would say that once you have free-ish speech, you have incentives for people to find ways to characterize speech they dislike for any reason as on the wrong side of the "ish" lines. The more flexible and privately actionable the enforcement is the more people will seek to find ways to use it for their own gain.

To put it another way, how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens or the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons? Before any protests that this can be countered by clear legal drafting, perhaps consider how readily criticism of Israeli policies is cast as anti-Semitic hate speech.

[peteretep]

> This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech.

Sure, but the Americans are innovative yo! (cf: Peter Thiel and Gawker)

> how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens [...] to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons

I do not want this, but I feel the press in the UK counter-balance that pretty effectively. Rich people seem to love bringing down other rich people

> how easy do you want it to be for [...] the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons

I feel like Americans hold a uniquely strong distrust of their government. If you're British you just have to suck up the fact that Parliament can pass any bill they like to do whatever the hell they like with a simple majority, but it's been _working ok_ for a few centuries now.

[Grue3]

Cultural domination. There used to be a time when countries such as UK, France, Germany were incredibly influential in areas such as music and film. Now they're barely a blip on the radar. All the famous movies and music artists come from the US. I'd argue that stronger protections of free speech is a major advantage that led to this happening.

[DanBC]

I don't get it.

If we outside the US lack freedom of speech how does that help US media companies, who'll have to obey our laws to sell in our territories?

[Grue3]

The part that gets exported, the pop culture so to speak, is as uncontroversial as it can be. But it's just the end product of a creative process. And this creative process works best in a free society. Moreover, pop culture is the tip of the iceberg standing atop all sorts of cultures and counter-cultures that make up the free society. It wouldn't have been created if free thought wasn't allowed to flourish.

[Simple_Guy]

Freedom is an end in and of itself. You don't have to show that a freedom will benefit a person in another way for it to have value.

[exolymph]

No idea why this comment would be flagged, so I vouched for it.

[alkibiades]

are you really asking someone to justify how people benefit from freedom?

[peteretep]

Yes. I think most people would strongly argue against "more freedom" when it came to their neighbors being "free" to store large quantities of explosives in their house, for example.

[bloak]

I would guess that to most of the world's population "prohibition of the use of illegally obtained evidence" is a crazy and stupid idea. Apart from the USA, which countries have a rule like that? (Perhaps Germany does?)

I'm not saying the rule didn't serve a useful purpose in some particular historical circumstances, but in general if you know that X is true then you should use that fact to avoid miscarriages of justice, and if crimes were committed in establishing the truth of X then you should hold a separate trial of the people responsible for those crimes (unless of course they are dead or for some other reason cannot be tried).

[jmpman]

The right to support and be a member of NAMBLA - not our greatest achievement. Just happens to be another of Allen Ginsburg’s achievements.

[asveikau]

Ginsberg's association with NAMBLA is indeed odd and unfortunate, as it taints a lot of his more respectable work. Here is what wikipedia quotes a friend of his as saying:

> But, in fact, he was a pedophile. He did not belong to [NAMBLA] out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to [f*ck] children and his constant pursuit of underage boys

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg#Association_w...

In the same way that it's hard to like a Woody Allen film or Michael Jackson song -- you can recognize the quality of the art but then realize they may have a monstrous side.

[jmpman]

Except that we are talking about celebrating the publishing of Howl. Does Howl advocate child rape, or does he keep that out of his works like Michael Jackson doesn’t advocate relationships with children in Thriller and Woody Allen doesn’t advocate for marrying underage relatives in Manhattan.

I expect Allen Ginsburg’s Howl is about as depraved as the man.

[asveikau]

> Does Howl advocate child rape,

There is a lot in there of which I am not intimately familiar but I don't believe it does. It seems to me that contemporary claims of depravity of Howl centered around depiction of consensual homosexual acts, or drugs, or simple use of swearing, all of which are less shocking today than they were in the 50s. If you can find a specific example do tell.

> Woody Allen doesn’t advocate for marrying underage relatives in Manhattan

There is a creepy relationship with an underage girl (played by Mariel Hemingway) in that film. The amount of seeming autobiographical material in his work of the time make this hard to dismiss.