Quote Originally Posted by Redleg
Advocation of violence against others is consistent with wanting to deny them their civil rights.
Some times it's, sedition, however, is mostly about trying to regain those freedoms, occasionaly when your government believes it can do whatever they want. Now, how can you regain those freedoms if it's not by sedition.
The John Stuart Mill quote is consistent with what I have been saying about Free Speech as it relates to the 1st Ammendment in the United States.
Not at all. Exceptions made by obscenity, sedition, offense and establishment of religion (though the latter has had other aplications and it's expressed on the 1st Amendement text) go far beyond that simple text of the 1st amendment, wich text appears to be limitative as it's written, and way far the idea of liberalism of Stuart Mill.
Believing that words are harmful, in some way, is believing in magic. The words by themselves mean little, that's why it's not sufficient to cause any effect. If it's accompanied by a true intention of sedition, then ask you this, what will you do if suddenly an act or bill is passed and you cannot write your ideas on the internet without been punished...Are you going to talk about sedition? Or are you going to accept it? Again, I understand your point that this is how the positive law is configured in your country, as that was the question of the initial poster. But what the Courts make are interpretations, at some point you should ask yourself if the ones that control your freedoms should be the ones sitted inside the "ivory towers" or you and the rest of the peasants. All this interpretations trace back to the Founding Fathers and their wishes, this kind of resource has been critizied many times because it's moot, it really doesn't mather what three or four (I don't know how many were them in the USA) thought 300 years or more in the past. What it matters is, how can we use it to extract the most just, and why not, liberal, resolution in any given case. So far there's some exceptions made that are not consistent with that idea, many of them anchored on archaic traditions alienated from an ever changing society and culture wich has grown up and doesn't believe in fantasies anymore, like "foul language", or maybe it does...