Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!pprg.unm.edu!hc!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!jha
From: jha@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Jamie Andrews)
Newsgroups: news.misc,news.admin
Subject: Re: Expansion of rec.humor.funny to other networks
Keywords: herrings, red
Message-ID: <1605@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 21 Mar 89 11:05:14 GMT
References: <439@corpane.UUCP> <3100@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <9773@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <19926@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <1989Mar16.165623.20831@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@etive.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: jha@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Jamie Andrews)
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
Lines: 23
Xref: utzoo news.misc:2752 news.admin:5206

In article <1989Mar16.165623.20831@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Freedom of speech means nothing if it's only the freedom to speak "clean",
>"pure" words, where somebody else defines what is clean and pure.  It has
>to include the right to be obnoxious and offensive.

     No one's trying to deprive people of the right to be
obnoxious and offensive, Henry, otherwise you would have been
kicked off the net long ago ((-: badaboom :-))

     But seriously folks, why do some people think the only
choices are absolute freedom of speech or total fascistic
censorship?  The law has always been dependent on juries and
judges to decide matters of interpretation.  If you're worried
about "who will decide", you might as well free all people
convicted because of the decision of a jury.

     Let's decide individual cases individually, as we've been
doing all along in real life and on Usenet.  Absolute freedom
of speech is a RED HERRING.

--Jamie.
  jha@lfcs.ed.ac.uk
"Look at this tangle of thorns"