Shots fired in Dallas of mohammed cartoons.

[Aractus]

Advocating a person's right to provoke in such a way as to predictably put others at risk who did not consent to embrace the risk is a very gray area.

Who's provoking who Chuck? Wouldn't you agree that non-Islamic no-go zones are provocative to non-Islamics:

[Minimalist]

The decision of the court in Brandenburg was that:  "The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation. "

Brandenburg was a KKK leader with the predictable calling for vengeance against "niggers and jews."

But he didn't say "let's get 'em, boys!"

[robvalue]

Free speech doesn't mean no consequences to speech. Of course I'm talking about legal action, not vigilante action.

I agree that deciding whether or not someone "incited hatred or violence" is a judgement call. But then welcome to the club, that's morality for you. It doesn't mean it's a bad system.

Allan could presumably kill all the unbelievers with a sneeze, but instead he likes seeing his followers fight for his name and die without giving them any backup at all. Yet his followers carry on this imaginary battle. Indoctrination, again.

[Thumpalumpacus]

We do a somewhat similar thing here in the USA by banning gang members from gathering together or making gang signs or speeches in public places. Ogden, Utah has a court injunction against the Ogden Trece gang with such provisions plus a curfew. And it allows police to decide who's gang and who isn't. This of course doesn't ban an idea per se; it's the group that's targeted. Yet groups and ideas go hand in hand. The gang injunction is probably just as intrusive on civil liberties, especially as once someone's on that police gang list, it can be a long row's howing to get off it.

The thing is, gang-injunctions aren't comparable to hate-speech or Holocaust-denial laws precisely because the HS/HD laws aren't banning behavior, they're banning spoken expression.

---

Then where is the line drawn and who draws the line?  I served my country to defend (among other things) the right to free speech.  Even if they are dicks.  All one has to do is walk away, change the channel, turn the computer off, etc..

Exactly. I've written online on plenty of occasions that the best thanks I could get for my service would be for the other to exercise their rights vigorously, even in causes I oppose.

[Hatshepsut]

In 1969, the court established stronger protections for speech in the landmark case Brandenburg v. Ohio

Duly noted.

Free speech doesn't mean no consequences to speech...I agree that deciding whether or not someone "incited hatred or violence" is a judgement call.

If speech but not sequelae are to be protected, the call may occur when something concrete happens as a result of a speech. Then the imam could preach to heart's content, but might be arrested if one of his followers takes his advice to blow up a building. I dunno.

The thing is, gang-injunctions aren't comparable to hate-speech or Holocaust-denial laws precisely because the HS/HD laws aren't banning behavior, they're banning spoken expression.

Granted there's probably a theoretical difference between them in law; I'm not a good enough lawyer to tell. However, making gang signs or using gang code words is a form of expression, and gang laws, while they don't ban the expressions themselves, do ban persons identified as "gang members" from using them in public. So it's a case of selective denial of free speech: I can make gang signs if I wan't since I'm not a gang member, but a gang member goes to jail if caught doing it. At least in Ogden; the Democrat-leaning Salt Lake City doesn't have a gang injunction.

[Minimalist]

Free speech doesn't mean no consequences to speech.

It means that the government cannot stick your ass in jail.  If you go on Facebook and write "my boss is a dickhead" you can expect to be fired and that is not a constitutional question.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

I'm curious if anyone has or will hold "free speech events" in Europe to advocate people's rights to deny the Holocaust (where 14 nations outlaw such rhetoric and have even imprisoned "offenders")---not on the grounds that they think it never actually occurred, but on the principle that no one should be treated as criminals for expressing a point of view that threatens to harm no one, however dumb it may be.

The basic rule is that if a person doesn't believe in the Jewish fairy tales he's an anti-semite.  

The interesting thing about the muslim nuts is that most of the terrorist acts are committed by recent converts.  The old nut cases impose their BS on everyone else while the average muslims don't seem to really give a damn except to avoid trouble with the rabid nuts.  

The Bible has countless stories where the average slob had to follow the nuts or get killed.  

[Aractus]

I'm curious if anyone has or will hold "free speech events" in Europe to advocate people's rights to deny the Holocaust (where 14 nations outlaw such rhetoric and have even imprisoned "offenders")---not on the grounds that they think it never actually occurred, but on the principle that no one should be treated as criminals for expressing a point of view that threatens to harm no one, however dumb it may be.

As I mentioned over here I was privileged enough to be able to see the Australian screening of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945/2014). The documentary, which had never been completed, was completed according to the filmmakers intentions, including their scripted voice over read word-for-word. There were a number of factual errors in it; and as time has gone on historians have corrected the errors told in the concentration camp saga. Yet if you questioned whether Dachau really was an extermination camp with a gas chamber that was used for mass Jewish killings - if you questioned that fact (which was later found out to be wrong) you'd be labelled as a Holocaust denier. So of course it's not sensible to outright ban "denial". It doesn't change the fact that there are deniers out there who refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that shows that over 5 million Jews died in concentration camps and most of them through systematic extermination.

[Hatshepsut]

The basic rule is that if a person doesn't believe in the Jewish fairy tales he's an anti-semite.

Yad Vashem certainly manipulates the Holocaust story to extract maximum justification for Jewish self-interests. But in reality it was extraordinarily brutal and frightening in its industrial efficiency. Often the emotion in the perpetrators wasn't active hatred; they were laughing and cracking jokes with each other as they poured the cyanide pellets in. Hannah Arendt told us how banal evil can be.

So I don't think the story should be forgotten or become distorted beneath a confectionery  coating. Though Holocaust denial is probably better confronted with the facts than with a ban.

[Minimalist]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-levi...07012.html

What separates Geller from the terrorists who attacked her venue is not hate but violence. In the United States the Supreme Court has, over recent decades, fully protected the expression of viewpoints that are offensive, bigoted and even provocative as long as they do not constitute a genuine threat. Funeral protestors, homophobes, flag burners, anti-Semites, and Geller do not, and should not, need government approval to hawk their hateful wares in the marketplace of ideas, nor do we need to buy it. I am far more concerned about terrorists, as well as religious, government, and academic institutions, limiting my right to free speech than I am about the purveyors of hate exercising theirs.