Originally Posted by
Brenus
"Calling for violence is where I draw the line" What kind of violence? Resistance to oppression is recognised as legitimate.
The states in general use violence, the legitimate violence in principle. What is the violence is not THAT legitimate?
Some newspapers and media owned by billionaires "think" strikes are a form of violence. Should strikes be banned?
The problem lays in the fact that an opinion doesn't have to be informed or logic, plausible or even true.
To go back to my example, you might be of an opinion that the French bath only the blue moon, that they were only beret and eat baguette and ingrained cowards, that is your opinion and no facts will change your mind.
The difficulty is to make a law which should be universal, as a law should be. Human behaviour adapts and extremists do. Orwell described it prospectively well in 1984, when words change meaning. Oppressors are becoming the oppressed, killers the victims...
What is new is the "social media" power. Suddenly, opinion are (or became) more important than facts. Well tailored video can turn light in darkness in a blink, and the time for Justice or facts to be made, reputations are made and events forgotten.
Opinions are not held responsible for any effect. Ooops, I was wrong, by it was my opinion... I changed my mind, no harm done. Except of course, some opinions did some harm.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to express opinions, and until now, the counter power was the Court (defamation). Now, one of the possibility could be to ban of "opinion" which are against the law, but then you have the problem of the law itself, and the process of law making. Again an sample: If you want to ban all movements/ideologies that have written principles that go against the French constitution, you have to ban all religions immediately. All of them are against the principle of equality of gender. Now, most of the followers of these religions don't actually follow this non-sense, so, wisely the state didn't banned religions as principle. But, we have an Imam in France who is making speech for women inequality, advocate to kill (socially he said) homosexual etc... Freedom of speech or not? Note that he is just reading what is in the book.
Freedom of opinion is as well the door for anti-social behaviour. At what moment a "rebel" becomes a fanatic? I could have fall in this, younger...
Unfortunately, violence is not the line to cross, because when some use violence, it is too late for the ban. And you will have a lot of nice people explaining that it is useless as it will only make "them" martyrs, and this is not the answer, that dialogues and understanding are the keys etc.
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