| It rather is the argument! The problem with your perspective is that it's completely undefined and the words you used are so pliable, they can be used to suppress more or less any kind of speech. For example, in the UK recently there was a notorious case where a Muslim teenager posted on Facebook that he hated the soldiers who went to Muslim countries and killed women and children, and he hoped those soldiers would go straight to hell. That is 100% pure political speech .... so what happened? Well, a woman who was the mother of a soldier saw the post and was of course terribly offended. She reported him to the police, on the grounds that nobody should be allowed to criticise her boy's choice of career. The police arrested him and he was tried in court. The plods said, "He didn't express himself very well and that's why he's now in a spot of bother". Sounds so pleasant, doesn't it, except he was found guilty and sentenced to community service. It would have been jail but he agreed to renounce his heresy in public. The moment you say "I support free speech but not if it upsets someone" you don't have free speech. The entire purpose of protecting free speech is to ensure ideas that some people might find ugly or insulting can still get heard and debated, and thus to keep flexibility in the political system. It must be possible to enrage other people with your speech. I'm not an absolutist, there can be some exceptions - for instance I don't consider publishing a list of people's passwords to be "free speech", but the definitions of what's not acceptable should be incredibly tightly defined. And no countries laws even try, really. Especially not in Europe. |