Re: nuremburg files judgement

Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Tue, 02 Mar 1999 14:03:44 +1100

"Michael
made me laugh out loud by saying

> As long as the Brits are... going to throw the baby out the window, they
> might as well toss the bath water with it too....
;-)

Anyhow, I said
>> Is free speech all speech which does not >> directly aid specific acts of violence?

and mike concurred
> yes.

We had a woman talk to us last year who supported Dworkin' s position that whatever a powerless person (apparently this included women) said was harmful was harmful. And the FACT of its harmfulness was proven by the "victims" statement to that effect.

In other words, whatever I think is bad, is, and you have no defense whatsoever and you will go to jail for causing me to say you harmed me.

This just about made me cry it is so stupidly arrogant.

So, how do we explicitly exclude from "violence" all notions of subjective harm such as this?

Do we exclude people's "self esteem" and other such intangible's from their property?

tim

PS: I think these are critical issues for extropy as many of the technologies which we embrace are already illegal, and their adoption is retarded if the law forbids their free discussion.

I was surprised too, to see that this list is not wrapped up in encryption/privacy discussions, as it was some years ago.