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by Rebelgecko 1410 days ago
How "direct" does the direction need to be? "Hey, here's a knife, use it to go stab this person" is pretty direct. What about "So-and-so ought to be stabbed" or "Golly I sure wish someone would get around to stabbing $whoever"
2 comments
dTal 1410 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
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denton-scratch 1410 days ago
1 and 2 are clear incitements to violence, and are clearly illegal already. I don't know about 3; that appears to be a possibly truthful statement about the speaker's state of mind, and truthful or not, it seems legitimate to me. IANAL.
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pessimizer 1410 days ago
> What about "So-and-so ought to be stabbed"

> [That is a] clear incitement to violence, and [is] clearly illegal already.

Not in the US it's not. Clear and present danger, not hypothetical horseshit. I'm shocked at how unfamiliar censorship maximalists are with the current state of speech rights. I think it's why they think that censoring anti-vanilla ice cream speech or anti-Nolan Batman films speech is such a small step.

Every single would-be censor thinks it's illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater, and don't realize that phrase was used to jail someone for anti-war speech.

What makes you think that "incitements to violence" are illegal? Is is that "incitement" is a very legal-sounding word?

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denton-scratch 1410 days ago
The law in both the UK and the USA is that it's a crime to tell other people to commit violence. I think these are sensible laws.

[Edit] I'm no censorship maximalist! But populist politicians can stir up real violence just by speaking through their megaphone, and people die as a result. I think it's perfectly proper to forbid speech that exhorts violence.

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nradov 1409 days ago
So are you stating that President Roosevelt (a populist politician) should have been forbidden from telling other people to commit violence against German and Japanese people during WW2?
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denton-scratch 1409 days ago
I have not made any such statement. I have opinions about how USAians might better organize their affairs, but it's not my place to express them.
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tekknik 1409 days ago
> USAians

we call ourselves Americans.

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Rebelgecko 1409 days ago
May not be the case where you live, but 2 is definitely legal in the US (although obviously very rude)
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