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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Well the very first and most important thing they wanted was to give you the right to say that or whatever you want about them.
Before they enshrined that concept in their document, saying such things about members of your government would get you jailed or executed.
Sounds like it was useful. Now it seems like it just differentiates us from countries that can do something about the spread of hate.
Not against the Constitution, but the Freedom of Speech **is **perhaps the most anachronistic freedom if you look at much of Europe.
It still is? Unless you think someone should be able to go to jail for making a joke about a government official.
Yeah you say that when a party you support is in power.
Before getting into line items, let me clarify that I'm talking about the "Freedom of Speech" in capitals, referring to the part of the First Amendment, not to laws that allow people free expression in general.
That's an unintentionally leading question, in my opinion. In response, let me point you to the majority of Europe where untethered speech is not an inalienable right, and yet it's still perfectly legal to make jokes about government officials. Yes, there are parts of Europe where you can't. I'm not fond of lèse-majesté laws, but you don't need untethered free speech to forbid just that one type of law.
We'd be in a lot better place if this paragraph from the ECHR's freedom of expression were attached to it:
Bingo. I say that the party in power, even if I somewhat support it, should not be Constitutionally empowered to lie to us from a position of authority. They should not be allowed to use their position to "freely express" things that hurt others. In fact, free expression in speech belongs with all other free expressions. I can throw my hands around unless I'm intentionally throwing them into innocents' faces.
In most of the world, free expression means when I know I'm not lying, and when I'm not being grossly negligent or antisocial in my speech. I'm sorry, but I approve of the censoring of Naziism or any organized expression that seeks to eradicate or punish any ethnicity. I would support a law that forbids people from what the South did after our Civil War, targeted lies that have led to over a century of the country "expressing" the supposed inferiority of non-white people.