Rowan Atkinson on free speech (2012) [video]

A couple years ago, somebody remarked to me, "oh, you're one of those free speech guys, aren't you?" and I realized it was meant as an insult. Yes, I guess so! I'm not sure what changed, but I doubt that would ever have happened a few decades ago. You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it. You wouldn't accuse someone of "being a free speech guy" because everybody was expected to be one. I really hope that's not in the process of getting thrown out with the bath water.

It&#x27;s from 2012, it&#x27;s a reposting of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU</a>

Sometimes missing in these debates is that right to free speech isn&#x27;t the right to be listened to.

There seems to be a generational divide on this topic. A lot of younger people seem to be fine with restrictions on free speech, often under the guise of various progressive causes

Although I agree with much of what he says, it seems like Rowan Atkinson is unfamiliar with Popper&#x27;s Paradox of Intolerance. He easily brushes it away as if it can&#x27;t stand up to 5 seconds of thought, but I&#x27;m pretty sure Karl Popper (undeniably a smart guy) put more than 5 minutes of thought into it.

I believe that an intelligent person should be able to hold two conflicting perceptions at the same time.<p>Therefore, I understand and accept that free speech is a foundation for a civilized life, that there should be no restraints on free speech.<p>But, I also acknowledge that free speech isn&#x27;t so free at all. For a long time and in many places in the world there are minorities without the right to speech. And the barriers aren&#x27;t just authoritarianism. In many places, even in democratic countries, there are non-formal mechanisms to restrain the speech of women, ethnic and sexual minorities.<p>When an European soccer fan shouts &quot;monkey&quot; to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play (e.g.: google for &quot;Vinicius Jr Valencia&quot;). There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open. The same thing goes for, say, women in South Korea, Christians in Muslim countries, Muslims in India, native American people in Latin-America, etc.<p>Wanting &quot;free speech&quot; to justify oppression of a minority that is already constrained in their speech is not exactly advocating freedom. A lot of times it is advocating hypocrisy.

&quot;The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.&quot; -- Alfred North Whitehead<p>This effect only works if we let the ideas joust with each other as our champions. If we try to bury the ideas instead people tend to joust less metaphorically. When we stop talking we find much worse ways to express ourselves. That turns the areas we won&#x27;t talk about into danger zones.

Censorship is not about free speech. It&#x27;s about political warfare. In my country, 85% of the press is from the left.<p>if a leftist comedian makes a joke, nothing happens. If a right-wing comedian makes the same joke, he could be sued.<p>This happened several times.<p>Someone relatively famous on the left came out as a pedophile, he confessed in an audio. The left was very worried that he was going to commit suicide...<p>The same does not happen when some famous pedophile is from the extreme right...<p>The left is against any arrest of homeless drug addicts. They don&#x27;t try to treat these people, I saw a video on the left teaching how to use crack, taking care of your health, not using soda cans, because the paint on the can (!) is bad for you.<p>Of course the solution for homeless addicts is to kill everyone, for the alt-right.<p>Our former president is right-wing. &quot;An anti-scientific and anti-ecological president&quot;<p>The current president is leftist. With the same anti-scientific and anti-ecological ideas, BUT NOW he is right.<p>And between these two idiotic views, nothing is fixed.<p>My country has many basic problems such as hunger, security and basic health. But people in power are arguing about pronouns and shit.<p>Yeah, you can argue about anything, but for me, with decades of watching this shit, it&#x27;s not about arguing about pronouns, or... it&#x27;s about doing nothing about real issues.<p>Nothing about this is new, it&#x27;s just weirder than in the past.

Defending free speech without going at all into the nuances of the matter is intellectually extremely lazy at best and virtue signalling to the alt right crowd at worst. And the real bummer is that it&#x27;s basically never interesting.

Gotta love Mr. Bean.<p>It&#x27;s hard to take him seriously, though. I&#x27;m so conditioned to laugh at his antics that it&#x27;s difficult to not be looking for funny moments.

This is a great speech, and I recommend anyone to listen to the whole thing.<p>An aspect it doesn&#x27;t touch on is that today, free speech is often <i>legally</i> constrained by social networking sites, when they are, all too quickly, label certain things as &quot;misinformation&quot; or &quot;hate speech&quot;, censor it, and ban the author. Facebook is particularly brutal in this regard.<p>The problem with saying that something is &quot;misinformation&quot; is that it must mean &quot;something we <i>believe</i> is false&quot;. If I claim that it&#x27;s raining, and you that the sun shines, then we both just say what we believe. Unless we express our mental states (&quot;I&#x27;m cold&quot;) we never express facts, just our more-or-less justified beliefs about states of affairs. You can&#x27;t &quot;ban misinformation&quot;, you can only ban information you <i>believe</i> to be false. When an authority controls &quot;misinformation&quot;, they are necessarily forcing their beliefs upon others.<p>Second, &quot;hate speech&quot; is an insidious concept. It ascribes a motivating emotion to some speaker where it is unobservable from the outside whether that emotion even exists. Claiming that something was done out of (unobservable) hate serves as a convenient excuse to ban things where the <i>observable</i> evidence isn&#x27;t sufficient.<p>Of course many of those pieces of alleged hate speech and misinformation aren&#x27;t illegal in many countries, but that&#x27;s of little help when they are banned on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Allowing speech only where it is hardly audible is not much better than banning speech outright.

He can talk?

Old man ranting into the abyss. Perhaps that worked in his day but in these days of bot farms, ai generated bullshit, deepfakes and state sponsored trolling it’s unworkable.