this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
108 points (92.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36167 readers
1342 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] atro_city@fedia.io 3 points 3 weeks ago

No. Absolute free speech means allowing people say whatever they like and that means anything. You can spam somebody with messages telling them to kill themselves. You can put a loudspeaker in front of somebody's house and play a message on loop telling them to kill themselves. You can openly call for somebody to kill another person and not get in trouble for enticing a murder. You can shout down anybody you like and tell them to shut up or threaten them, all you have to do is be louder and look like you have the means to kill them in order to intimidate. And that will all be fine because if someone tries to stop you from expressing your opinion, they will be infringing on your right to absolute free speech.

It does however create a paradox: if someone uses their free speech to infringe on somebody else's free speech, what can be done? You can't tell the person infringing to stop because that would infringe on their free speech. After all, they have a right to absolute free speech, don't they? So, if you say "your right to free speech ends where the right of somebody else's begins" then it's not absolute anymore.

It also opens a can of worms as to what counts as expressing free speech and what counts as suppressing it. Does blocking somebody on a platform infringe on their right? Does muting? If the rule is "right to speak, but no right to be heard", what counts as speech? Does typing and hitting send count as free speech? Well, I could give you an app with a textbox and a send button, disconnect you from the internet, and you could write everything you want, hit send and it never leaves your computer but you did express yourself, didn't you? Or maybe the sounds coming out of your mouth count as speech / expression ? Well, I could gag you, you can make sounds and that's speech, right?

So no. I don't believe absolute free speech can exist.