Whether someone wsays "I think he is an idiot" or "he is an idiot" both are generally accepted as opinion.
Not only is it generally accepted as opinion, whether it *should be* accepted as an opinion is also an opinion.
On the other hand, if the statement was "he has an IQ of 50" would be libelous if it was not true.
Or maybe it's not libelous if it was a joke, or a quote of what someone else said, or a myriad of other subjectively assessed reasons.
Again, that is a false dilemma [wikipedia.org]. Freedom of speech with reasonable limitations is very far from no freedom od speech. It is definitely worth giving up the right to publish lies so that there can be recourse for people harmed by them.
I know what a false dilemma is, and what I am doing is clearly not that. I am acknowledging the "third" option that you are proposing but I am arguing that it actually falls into one of the other 2 categories.
According to wikipedia a flase dilemma is
a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.
I have considered and specifically acknowledged the option you presented and presented my own argument of why it is not really an option distinct from the 2 I presented.
You're with us or you're against us.
is a false dilemma because you can be neither.
You're with us or you're not with us.
is a true dilemma because you can't be neither.
Presenting only 2 options is not a false dilemma if the 2 options actually provides full coverage for all the possible options.
How about identity theft and impersonation? Your argument shields both those acts as "free speech", even though this is exactly what happened.
I think you actually need to be engaged in something like fraud in order to be in trouble for identity theft. If you are just "impersonating" someone to defame them, I don't think treating it as identity theft is in the spirit of what those laws were intended to stop.
I think the correct course of action was to lobby facebook to take down the page, and when they don't, then apply social pressure to try to force them to do it. It is in their interest to take down fake pages created by mean high school dick heads. I think publicly shaming the kid that did this and his parents is also appropriate (and protected by the 1st amendment).
Why is making an exception to freedom of speech to punish this kid or his parents so bad? I think it's hard to articulate concretely. Would it be so bad if we formed a mob and wore masks and beat the shit out of this kid to teach him a lesson? I don't think it would be the end of the world. But as a society we do lose something intangible when we don't uphold our own principles, and we do gain something when we are able to hold ourselves to a very high standard.
That's what societies do with adults. Children are a whole different ballgame. First, because they are children, they do not have the same ability to stand up for their rights, second because they do not have the legal competence to make such decisions themselves.
That's what parents are for. I think the parents of the bullied girl did an admirable good job advocating for their child. But they were working with the tools they had. I'm saying we should take away suspension of freedom of speech as a tool for victims of defamation and instead give them other tools that are not as harmful to the rest of society.
Too bad that is not the objective of libel and slander laws. The objective is to create a deterrence for posting those lies.
Too bad that is not the actual/only effect of libel and slander laws. The actual effect is more time and effort wasted on litigation and a chilling effect on freedom of speech because even if you are right, there is a chance the judge/jury may not reach that same conclusion, and it's safer to just keep your mouth shut. Especially when the person you are accused of slandering or libeling is providing the judge's livelihood.
Notice that you said "far less likely to be harmed" which means that some people will be harmed by these lies. How do those people get compensation for that harm?
Of course I noticed it. I said it intentionally. You are making an assumption that everyone is entitled to be compensated for being harmed. I do not agree that this the right or even feasible. How am I compensated form the harm caused to me when I am dumped by a girlfriend? How am I compensated for the harm caused to me when my favorite sports team lost the big game? It is not possible or desirable to compensate every instance of harm caused to someone.
Maybe one day when we are actually capable of providing this service of compensating every bit of harm down to a hurt feeling, we can talk about deciding whether we actually want it. Until then I don't think it's fair to advertise libel and slander laws as solutions to people being harmed. People will be harmed with or without them.
Without libel and slander laws such lies will become much more commonplace.
I agree.
There will be much more time wasted trying to counter the lies than is ever taken up in libel/slander suites.
You don't need to waste time countering lies that lack validity in the first place.
If I posted a nasty lie about you in slashdot, you might try to track me down for libel. But you would probably just assume that no one gives a shit about what some random person said in the slashdot comment section. And that's the way it should be. We should treat every claim made from an unreliable source as unreliable. We would all be better off if this was the expectation.
We could create a society where every time you dumped someone, there was a court that would determine how much each person was harmed by the break up and award money to the appropriate party and their attorney. The fact that we do not have this system does not mean that we don't care about people's feelings when they get dumped. It does not mean we condone jerks who dump people for stupid reasons. It just means that we don;t think courts are an effective mechanism to right those wrongs. We have decided collectively that we are better off with anarchy in this specific area.
All I am saying is that I think we are better off without lawyers and courts battling over whether certain things people said were true or not. I am not saying no one was ever harmed by something someone said.
I am not presenting a false dilemma. I am presenting a true dilemma.
Either we have unfettered freedom of speech, or we do not. This is true.
There is a third option which is the one that is generally followed by most countries
This "third" option is really just the 2nd option. When you have the right to say things that the government has deemed acceptable, you really don't have freedom of speech. The right to popular speech doesn't need to be protected.
China has a democracy. Everyone can vote for any candidate they want except in a few well defined categories. The communist party does get to approve or deny all the candidates, and they do frequently deny well defined categories of bad people from being on the ballot. Non-communist party members are in such categories.
Unfettered freedom of speech *is* freedom of speech. Just like how unfettered democracy *is* democracy.
And yes many countries do have slander and libel laws. I am saying that these laws do degrade the freedom of speech to "the freedom of non-libelous and non-slanderous speech as determined by an authority figure".
I am also not saying that speech is never bad. I am saying that the "cure" for bad speech of degrading freedom of speech is worse than the disease.
I wouldn't say it's "far beyond namecalling". Getting beaten up in an alley is far beyond namecalling. Having a defamatory website made about you is just an extreme form of namecalling.
I don't doubt that people might face criminal charges for similar things. I am saying that nobody *should* face criminal charges for speech, whether it's protesting at military funerals, or wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit, or burning a flag, or calling a high school girl a whore on the internet.
I am not condoning any of this behavior. I am saying that the correct way to combat this kind of behavior is not to shutdown freedom of speech, but rather to use more speech to publicly shame people who deserve it. That's what free societies do.
We don't form lynch mobs and kill bad people even when they really deserve it. Free societies provide due process to even the worst people. We also provide freedom of speech to the worst speech. One of the prices of living in a free society is that someone might same something really mean about you and hurt your feelings. You have the right to say mean things back or ignore them. This might suck in high school, but it's nice when you want to criticize the president as an adult and not end up in a torture chamber.
Is "He *is* an idiot" an opinion? Or is it a statement able to be factually verified and proven false and libelous?
is "I think he diddle's small children" just an opinion?
Is there anything truly gained by forcing people to premise every potentially libelous statement with an "I think" or an "I heard someone else say" in order to avoid litigation?
Is it worth giving up the right to freedom of speech for something so much worse?
I don't see how depending on a for profit corporation for security could be anything but the definition of temporary security in the best case. In the worst case it is the complete and immediate destruction of security.
Not on the whitelist is the right of the government to people people from using encryption or compelling companies to develop their products in a way that aids the government in performing it's searches.
No, the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects" are... your papers and effects. If you want protection to be applied to technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for e.g. a constitutional amendment.
Or we could just encrypt our data.
If you want the government to have the additional authority to deny people the right to a new technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for a constitutional amendment.
I think by freaking out over this, it legitimizes the idea that people should be hurt by things posted on facebook. It's like when a baby trips and falls, but it doesn't start crying until the parents freak out and alert the baby that it should be scared and in pain.
I have been called worse things when I was in school. What difference does it make that it is on the internet? Why not just make more fake pages of every student to make everyone even? Or better yet we can work to teach kids that they live in a world where sometimes people will say nasty things about them. Having freedom of speech kind of sucks sometimes, but it's better than living in North Korea.
You need to look up the difference between normative and descriptive claims.
There is also such a thing as the 1st amendment of the constitution.
It is our job as members of society to decide if it is more important to have the right of freedom of speech, or the right to never have anything false (as determined by someone) published about you.
Saying "it's illegal" is not an argument for whether it *should be* illegal. That is for us as members of society to decide through public discourse, social pressure, and voting.
I can say "Libel laws are illegal according to the constitution", but it really doesn't mean anything until it is interpreted by courts in that way.
If everyone was called a pedo on the internet at some point, then we might be able to finally convince people that things on the internet aren't true. There are only about 7 billion people on the internet, it shouldn't take a computer more than a few hours to call every person in the world a pedo.
I would rather have a functioning 1st amendment than slander and libel laws. I think having slander and libel laws, especially in the 21st century, attempts and fails miserably to create a environment where public information can/should be trusted by virtue of the fact that it is published.
I would much rather have a society where every piece of published information is treated with healthy skepticism, and freedom of speech is more than just some lofty ideal.
If no one expects information found on the internet to be true, then people will be far less likely to be harmed when it turns out to be false. Also we can save our society a lot of waste by avoiding all the unnecessary slander and libel litigation and instead have all these would-be lawyers doing something more productive with their lives.
I tried to find the nearest robocoin kiosk to see if it was possible to witness one of these things in person. The nearest one is in "Los Angeles" California. More specifically it is at this Latitude and Longitude 3646'41.7"N 11925'04.6"W which is along a desolate road with no name that runs along side the King River 20 miles outside of Fresno.
I was hoping for a bar or some other urban public space.
I really don't want to run into Jordan Kelley or anyone from his company in the middle of the desert with no witnesses.
Really? What position is that? I can't even see a position there
The position that whoever the teacher is, they are innocent of accusations against them, and that whoever the administrator is, they are guilty of petty vendettas but too gutless to actually fire any teachers.
Also, even if we assume administrators are doing a terrible job (and I don't doubt that in general they are), this doesn't imply that there are no incompetent teachers nor does it imply that the teachers unions are a doing a good job.
I'm pointing out the lack of foundation of your own which appears to just be based on mindless propaganda of weasels going for soft political targets.
I'm not exactly sure who the soft political target is. It's not teachers. I actually suggested we double their pay.
I am taking the very reasonable position that some administrators are incompetent, some teachers are incompetent, some people in every profession are incompetent, and it should take 3 years and half a million dollars to fire someone that is incompetent, regardless of whether they are an administrator, a teacher, a policeman, or whoever.
Clearly you've been brainwashed by teachers' union propaganda. It's not like I have been listening to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. I listen to the "weasels" at NPR and PBS.
The founding fathers were not infallible. Many might very well have supported criminalizing "smut" while defending things like slavery. This does not mean we should prevent the 1st amendment from reaching it's full potential anymore than we should treat the entire bill of rights as no applicable to women and minorities because that was not initially what the founding fathers intended.
Unlike the bible, what makes the constitution valuable is it's content, not who it was created by.
There's plenty of other rumours but how do we really tell them from fiction?
You can never know for 100% certain. So I suppose the only rational thing to do is to assume that *every single* teacher that ever existed was competent, and that any allegations of teacher incompetence are actually administrative incompetence./s
Think back a bit. We've seen a teacher fired for a "drunken pirate" costume party photo on Facebook.
So your argument is that if one person is wrongly fired, it means that every person who is fired is fired wrongly?
You've been misled by hype from some professional weasel going after a soft target to build popularity.
Should I instead believe you that there is no such thing as an incompetent teacher?
That sounds incredibly unlikely and like something written up by a political intern to be spewed from the mouth of someone who has decided to define their politics by crusading against "lazy teachers" of similar weasel campaign.
I'm not saying teachers are lazy. I am saying that, like every group of people, it's impossible that 0% are lazy, and I think it's crazy that we can't fire the ones (however many or few they are) that are.
What should be obvious is that an low level employee does not get to choose their assignment to get paid to sit in a room.
What should be obvious is that large groups of people being paid to do nothing is a sign that it is too hard to fire someone.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether someone wsays "I think he is an idiot" or "he is an idiot" both are generally accepted as opinion.
Not only is it generally accepted as opinion, whether it *should be* accepted as an opinion is also an opinion.
On the other hand, if the statement was "he has an IQ of 50" would be libelous if it was not true.
Or maybe it's not libelous if it was a joke, or a quote of what someone else said, or a myriad of other subjectively assessed reasons.
Again, that is a false dilemma [wikipedia.org]. Freedom of speech with reasonable limitations is very far from no freedom od speech. It is definitely worth giving up the right to publish lies so that there can be recourse for people harmed by them.
I know what a false dilemma is, and what I am doing is clearly not that. I am acknowledging the "third" option that you are proposing but I am arguing that it actually falls into one of the other 2 categories.
According to wikipedia a flase dilemma is
a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.
I have considered and specifically acknowledged the option you presented and presented my own argument of why it is not really an option distinct from the 2 I presented.
You're with us or you're against us.
is a false dilemma because you can be neither.
You're with us or you're not with us.
is a true dilemma because you can't be neither.
Presenting only 2 options is not a false dilemma if the 2 options actually provides full coverage for all the possible options.
How about identity theft and impersonation? Your argument shields both those acts as "free speech", even though this is exactly what happened.
I think you actually need to be engaged in something like fraud in order to be in trouble for identity theft. If you are just "impersonating" someone to defame them, I don't think treating it as identity theft is in the spirit of what those laws were intended to stop.
I think the correct course of action was to lobby facebook to take down the page, and when they don't, then apply social pressure to try to force them to do it. It is in their interest to take down fake pages created by mean high school dick heads. I think publicly shaming the kid that did this and his parents is also appropriate (and protected by the 1st amendment).
Why is making an exception to freedom of speech to punish this kid or his parents so bad? I think it's hard to articulate concretely. Would it be so bad if we formed a mob and wore masks and beat the shit out of this kid to teach him a lesson? I don't think it would be the end of the world. But as a society we do lose something intangible when we don't uphold our own principles, and we do gain something when we are able to hold ourselves to a very high standard.
That's what societies do with adults. Children are a whole different ballgame. First, because they are children, they do not have the same ability to stand up for their rights, second because they do not have the legal competence to make such decisions themselves.
That's what parents are for. I think the parents of the bullied girl did an admirable good job advocating for their child. But they were working with the tools they had. I'm saying we should take away suspension of freedom of speech as a tool for victims of defamation and instead give them other tools that are not as harmful to the rest of society.
Too bad that is not the objective of libel and slander laws. The objective is to create a deterrence for posting those lies.
Too bad that is not the actual/only effect of libel and slander laws. The actual effect is more time and effort wasted on litigation and a chilling effect on freedom of speech because even if you are right, there is a chance the judge/jury may not reach that same conclusion, and it's safer to just keep your mouth shut. Especially when the person you are accused of slandering or libeling is providing the judge's livelihood.
Notice that you said "far less likely to be harmed" which means that some people will be harmed by these lies. How do those people get compensation for that harm?
Of course I noticed it. I said it intentionally. You are making an assumption that everyone is entitled to be compensated for being harmed. I do not agree that this the right or even feasible. How am I compensated form the harm caused to me when I am dumped by a girlfriend? How am I compensated for the harm caused to me when my favorite sports team lost the big game? It is not possible or desirable to compensate every instance of harm caused to someone.
Maybe one day when we are actually capable of providing this service of compensating every bit of harm down to a hurt feeling, we can talk about deciding whether we actually want it. Until then I don't think it's fair to advertise libel and slander laws as solutions to people being harmed. People will be harmed with or without them.
Without libel and slander laws such lies will become much more commonplace.
I agree.
There will be much more time wasted trying to counter the lies than is ever taken up in libel/slander suites.
You don't need to waste time countering lies that lack validity in the first place.
If I posted a nasty lie about you in slashdot, you might try to track me down for libel. But you would probably just assume that no one gives a shit about what some random person said in the slashdot comment section. And that's the way it should be. We should treat every claim made from an unreliable source as unreliable. We would all be better off if this was the expectation.
We could create a society where every time you dumped someone, there was a court that would determine how much each person was harmed by the break up and award money to the appropriate party and their attorney. The fact that we do not have this system does not mean that we don't care about people's feelings when they get dumped. It does not mean we condone jerks who dump people for stupid reasons. It just means that we don;t think courts are an effective mechanism to right those wrongs. We have decided collectively that we are better off with anarchy in this specific area.
All I am saying is that I think we are better off without lawyers and courts battling over whether certain things people said were true or not. I am not saying no one was ever harmed by something someone said.
I am not presenting a false dilemma. I am presenting a true dilemma.
Either we have unfettered freedom of speech, or we do not. This is true.
There is a third option which is the one that is generally followed by most countries
This "third" option is really just the 2nd option. When you have the right to say things that the government has deemed acceptable, you really don't have freedom of speech. The right to popular speech doesn't need to be protected.
China has a democracy. Everyone can vote for any candidate they want except in a few well defined categories. The communist party does get to approve or deny all the candidates, and they do frequently deny well defined categories of bad people from being on the ballot. Non-communist party members are in such categories.
Unfettered freedom of speech *is* freedom of speech. Just like how unfettered democracy *is* democracy.
And yes many countries do have slander and libel laws. I am saying that these laws do degrade the freedom of speech to "the freedom of non-libelous and non-slanderous speech as determined by an authority figure".
I am also not saying that speech is never bad. I am saying that the "cure" for bad speech of degrading freedom of speech is worse than the disease.
I wouldn't say it's "far beyond namecalling". Getting beaten up in an alley is far beyond namecalling. Having a defamatory website made about you is just an extreme form of namecalling.
I don't doubt that people might face criminal charges for similar things. I am saying that nobody *should* face criminal charges for speech, whether it's protesting at military funerals, or wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit, or burning a flag, or calling a high school girl a whore on the internet.
I am not condoning any of this behavior. I am saying that the correct way to combat this kind of behavior is not to shutdown freedom of speech, but rather to use more speech to publicly shame people who deserve it. That's what free societies do.
We don't form lynch mobs and kill bad people even when they really deserve it. Free societies provide due process to even the worst people. We also provide freedom of speech to the worst speech. One of the prices of living in a free society is that someone might same something really mean about you and hurt your feelings. You have the right to say mean things back or ignore them. This might suck in high school, but it's nice when you want to criticize the president as an adult and not end up in a torture chamber.
Is "He *is* an idiot" an opinion? Or is it a statement able to be factually verified and proven false and libelous?
is "I think he diddle's small children" just an opinion?
Is there anything truly gained by forcing people to premise every potentially libelous statement with an "I think" or an "I heard someone else say" in order to avoid litigation?
Is it worth giving up the right to freedom of speech for something so much worse?
I don't see how depending on a for profit corporation for security could be anything but the definition of temporary security in the best case. In the worst case it is the complete and immediate destruction of security.
You can still write in names.
Not on the whitelist is the right of the government to people people from using encryption or compelling companies to develop their products in a way that aids the government in performing it's searches.
No, the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects" are... your papers and effects. If you want protection to be applied to technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for e.g. a constitutional amendment.
Or we could just encrypt our data.
If you want the government to have the additional authority to deny people the right to a new technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for a constitutional amendment.
It should be Mark Zuckerburg's parents who should have to go to jail for not compelling him to delete the fake account when asked.
Whatever the responsibility of parents is, it should not depend at all with Facebook's (or any other random website's) policies.
I think by freaking out over this, it legitimizes the idea that people should be hurt by things posted on facebook. It's like when a baby trips and falls, but it doesn't start crying until the parents freak out and alert the baby that it should be scared and in pain.
I have been called worse things when I was in school. What difference does it make that it is on the internet? Why not just make more fake pages of every student to make everyone even? Or better yet we can work to teach kids that they live in a world where sometimes people will say nasty things about them. Having freedom of speech kind of sucks sometimes, but it's better than living in North Korea.
You need to look up the difference between normative and descriptive claims.
There is also such a thing as the 1st amendment of the constitution.
It is our job as members of society to decide if it is more important to have the right of freedom of speech, or the right to never have anything false (as determined by someone) published about you.
Saying "it's illegal" is not an argument for whether it *should be* illegal. That is for us as members of society to decide through public discourse, social pressure, and voting.
I can say "Libel laws are illegal according to the constitution", but it really doesn't mean anything until it is interpreted by courts in that way.
There isn't a difference. Libel laws are stupid in general.
If everyone was called a pedo on the internet at some point, then we might be able to finally convince people that things on the internet aren't true. There are only about 7 billion people on the internet, it shouldn't take a computer more than a few hours to call every person in the world a pedo.
I would rather have a functioning 1st amendment than slander and libel laws. I think having slander and libel laws, especially in the 21st century, attempts and fails miserably to create a environment where public information can/should be trusted by virtue of the fact that it is published.
I would much rather have a society where every piece of published information is treated with healthy skepticism, and freedom of speech is more than just some lofty ideal.
If no one expects information found on the internet to be true, then people will be far less likely to be harmed when it turns out to be false. Also we can save our society a lot of waste by avoiding all the unnecessary slander and libel litigation and instead have all these would-be lawyers doing something more productive with their lives.
I tried to find the nearest robocoin kiosk to see if it was possible to witness one of these things in person. The nearest one is in "Los Angeles" California. More specifically it is at this Latitude and Longitude 3646'41.7"N 11925'04.6"W which is along a desolate road with no name that runs along side the King River 20 miles outside of Fresno.
I was hoping for a bar or some other urban public space.
I really don't want to run into Jordan Kelley or anyone from his company in the middle of the desert with no witnesses.
Really? What position is that? I can't even see a position there
The position that whoever the teacher is, they are innocent of accusations against them, and that whoever the administrator is, they are guilty of petty vendettas but too gutless to actually fire any teachers.
Also, even if we assume administrators are doing a terrible job (and I don't doubt that in general they are), this doesn't imply that there are no incompetent teachers nor does it imply that the teachers unions are a doing a good job.
I'm pointing out the lack of foundation of your own which appears to just be based on mindless propaganda of weasels going for soft political targets.
I'm not exactly sure who the soft political target is. It's not teachers. I actually suggested we double their pay.
I am taking the very reasonable position that some administrators are incompetent, some teachers are incompetent, some people in every profession are incompetent, and it should take 3 years and half a million dollars to fire someone that is incompetent, regardless of whether they are an administrator, a teacher, a policeman, or whoever.
Clearly you've been brainwashed by teachers' union propaganda. It's not like I have been listening to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. I listen to the "weasels" at NPR and PBS.
Your position is untenable. Just give up.
The founding fathers were not infallible. Many might very well have supported criminalizing "smut" while defending things like slavery. This does not mean we should prevent the 1st amendment from reaching it's full potential anymore than we should treat the entire bill of rights as no applicable to women and minorities because that was not initially what the founding fathers intended.
Unlike the bible, what makes the constitution valuable is it's content, not who it was created by.
There's plenty of other rumours but how do we really tell them from fiction?
You can never know for 100% certain. So I suppose the only rational thing to do is to assume that *every single* teacher that ever existed was competent, and that any allegations of teacher incompetence are actually administrative incompetence. /s
Think back a bit. We've seen a teacher fired for a "drunken pirate" costume party photo on Facebook.
So your argument is that if one person is wrongly fired, it means that every person who is fired is fired wrongly?
You've been misled by hype from some professional weasel going after a soft target to build popularity.
Should I instead believe you that there is no such thing as an incompetent teacher?
That sounds incredibly unlikely and like something written up by a political intern to be spewed from the mouth of someone who has decided to define their politics by crusading against "lazy teachers" of similar weasel campaign.
I'm not saying teachers are lazy. I am saying that, like every group of people, it's impossible that 0% are lazy, and I think it's crazy that we can't fire the ones (however many or few they are) that are.
What should be obvious is that an low level employee does not get to choose their assignment to get paid to sit in a room.
What should be obvious is that large groups of people being paid to do nothing is a sign that it is too hard to fire someone.
What makes you think I am a white liberal?
So you think all black people are the same? Where do you work at?