to Hadji

what is free speech, and how do we use/control it?

What is free-speech?

What would Sherlock Holmes say? What would Nancy Drew do?

Free-speech is ontologically impossible. And, all speech is free speech. All speech is necessarily free. That out of the way...

What is free-speech? What is free? What is speech?

What is a bull? What is a dog? Does this give us any better an idea of a bulldog?

What isn't free-speech?

Words are words, but spelling something out with terrified hog-tied civilians sends a message. Carving it into someone's forehead does too.

Can you have free-speech if you can only speak in longs and shorts? "...squeeze once; and twice for...." Freedom of medium and message.

Having a gag in your mouth isn't free-speech. Or a gun to your head? St. Peter does not accept duress. You can always start to speak.

It isn't so easy to hold-back under torture. Torture frees up speaking, "the truth will set you free". Never mind chat forums, we need a philosopher bound under a hot lamp in Morocco, electrocuting him, shouting,

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?!"

*BUZZ* *BUZZ*

"Ahhhhh!"

"Does it or doesn't it!?"

*BUZZ*

Self-reported self-flagellation fills this niche?

How is free-speech similar to similar things? Free-press, freedom of movement?

Free-speech evidently shouldn't cost anything. It is not connected to the sin of money. This is its connection with God: not for Caesar. Free-speech isn't worth standing up for. It isn't worth anything. Free-speech has this exstential truth about it. Its teleology is without influence, not a tool, not a means, an end in itself.

Much of what is actually called free-speech is unfree-speech. Dualism means free is never without cloistered. Free-speech has often been or could be censored. Free-speech is freed-speech. Free-speech is like cabbage, it thrives in inhospitable ground.

Free-speech is a good thing, seems people say. Say one thing and do another. It's a conspiracy theory.

Means?
Motive?
Opportunity?

Who stands to profit from free-speech?

Pragmatism: What function does free-speech have? Where "form follows function", free-speech is a cliché used against us by our enemies.

Free-speech is a diversion, a non-issue. Which is mightier, the pen or the sword? They know guns are dangerous. Unless he spits bullets, no speaker is going to assassinate presidents. Do attack helicopeters have speakers? Police cars do. Does a radio have free-speech?

Inferring meaning from context,

sanddab :

_________________________________________________________

"As Shamil approached the warm Andaman water, sanddab flicking darted into the reeds and shadows."

How is free-speech different from automatic writing? Can women and children have free-speech? If I put a muzzle on my neighbors Bichon Frise, is this a free-speech issue? Is it free-speech if it's spoken in a forest and no one's there to here it?

If I denounce the king of Erowhonistan, right in front of the royal palace -- in Xhosa, I'm not likely to be charged with lèse majesté.

Is it a matter of free-speech two seconds before Johnny and Jenny are whipped by their eves-dropping mama for using dirty-words?

If free-speech it would be as free as a bird, "wing'd words" (Iliad, BK. IV), a parrot.

wow, that was pretty confusing, Hadji. What about a brief summary?

What about a summary? Good idea. That can be your job, a synopsis.

Believe it or not, I don't know how to sum up everything that you said in that post. Do you want me to give a synopsis of my view on this free speech issue?

Nexus wrote:

Believe it or not, I don't know how to sum up everything that you said in that post. Do you want me to give a synopsis of my view on this free speech issue?

You're right -- it is the synopsis.

How about this way,

Spoiler:

Questions or comments on this part?

Children can hardly understand what free-speech is about...i don't think they could care about it anyway...

ok, let me see if I can sum up my opinion on this subject:

freedom of speech, like all kinds of freedom, is and must be limited and restricted to certain situations. We can 'speak our minds' here in a web board like this because we aren't supposed to do any harm to the status quo, and nobody is really interested in what a lot of 'outcasts' (what the members of such a 'dissident' web board are supposed to be) have to say about anything, as long as they cannot alter anything with mere theorizing/analyzing/idealizing anything...

Therefore we have here a 'safe haven' to state our opinions and to discuss ad nauseam about everything that might come to our minds, within certain limits, of course. As long as the ones who might be interested in any sort of disrupture that might be born out of such a place are not concerned with what we speak here, we are 'free' to talk about everything we want. However, this 'everything we want' is always necessarily limited/restricted. And experience has shown me that when it's not the system itself that creates this limitation, the participants of the online environment themselves will do it, with obvious consequences to the members of the place as a whole (some will accept the rules of the place, some will not, some will stay, some will leave, etc, but in a sense or another, the freedom of speech allowed in a determined environment will always and invariably be limited/restrcited. The ones who do not understand/accept a certain line of reasoning will be labelled as 'idiots', and 'treated' as such, etc, you get the picture...

What's, therefore, the use of our 'free speech'? I guess the only practical use of it is that in a certain way we can achieve true knowledge through the free presentation of ideas. We can learn a lot, even though this 'lot' will not have any huge impact on our real lives. We can grow intellectually, though our behaviour in the real world will still be dictated/controlled by the same things that control/dominate the lives of 'common' people...but we can enjoy our free-speech and the illusions created by it while we're logged in here...So as far as my own experience of life is concerned, the idea of having a place where free-speech is welcome and endorsed is very good, as long as we don't delude ourselves about its possibilities and as long as we understand that everybody, everywhere, will try to restrict certain things that they think are offensive/idiotic/useless to them, even through implicit means (such as threats or the traditional slander, that is nothing more than a means to tell a person that he/she is not 'welcome' in a certain environment and should either leave or be silent, what amounts to the same on a web board like this...). We can try our luck and we can test the limits of a determined environment or group of people, but in the end we'll unavoidably come to the conclusion that our little amount of 'free-speech' is not sufficient to produce any significant amount of change in society or even in our immediate surroundings. We will learn, in a word, that having the 'right to speak one's mind' doesn't mean that our 'speaking our minds' will be effective or respected, and according to the general mood of the place we're posting in, after three or four times we post we'll learn how much limited our 'right' to express ourselves is, even in a so-called 'dissidence' place like this...

o I guess it got a bit confused. Please tell me if I said something utterly absurd, Hadji...