I was close to agreement with you woulfe until this:

>>There are valid grounds for limiting freedom of speech that all of us endorse: inciting violence, a hoax fire alarm in a crowded theatre (as noted above), defamation, any speech intended to bring about harm or violence to others.<<

These are "false positives" in the realm of free speech, and unfortunately are used far too often as evidence that free speech should be curtailed.

"Inciting violence" is an entirely separate concept from freedom of speech. It is quite correctly an offence, but has nothing to do with the license to express an opinion.

"This country would be better off without immigrants" is an opinion that, when expressed within a normal social context, should be protected.

But in a public place, when followed by an exhortation to the assembly to do something about it ("Wogs OUT! Send the Mozzies home!) it clearly falls into the category of inciting violence.

Similarly, shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre cannot be protected as free speech, since it is a deliberate act of mischief. The same act in the privacy of one's home clearly demonstrates this.

Using these as evidence that "there are valid grounds for limiting freedom of speech that all of us endorse" completely undermines the logic of "we still don't have ways of dealing with speech that is hurtful, rather than harmful".

The tendency will always be to generalize from the particular. If I say to my mate Abdul over a coffee that I think he would be better off going back where he came from, he would undoubtedly be hurt. If I said the same thing to a crowd of rednecks from a soap-box in Hyde Park, that would be potentially harmful.

It would be better for all concerned if we avoided the invention of feel-good laws such that try to capture and isolate "hate speech" whatever its context, and concentrated on prosecuting those whose intent is to cause harm.

hatred has no power,as one who has gone through his entire life as'the victim'of hate,i am hated;...that wont be the reason for the new hatred laws nor offer any remedy..because the hatred-laws are by the same special-intrests trying to hide the reason for being despised

any how i have a wog_name,so am hated because i got the wrong name,the wrong name meant my family moved arround a lot trying to find the promise of this promised land[resulting in my not having peers]

not having'peers',i sought peers from the fellow outcasts and joined a bike_group,i thus became the hated and feared biker/outcast now legally called a'terrorist'

in time i out grew bikes and became a'doper'[i chose to smoke weed[only god can make a seed grow,read the bible gen 1;29[yep became a religious'kook'too],got a conscious and became a greenie,an activist,and banned blogger

i know hatred,..i lived my whole/life being hated,[yes im a crazy conspiracy-theorist too..911 was an inside job,..jfk wernt shot by ozwald,..suspect men never went to the moon,and know for fact global/cooling and global/warming is bull[the sun pours more energy into the earth in one day than a year of fossil-feul usage]

but,people out there that cry for govt-regulation dont want crazy/nutters talking about the zionista controled banking/system,or the new[same old]new world order,The powers that run this globe love posting fear based scams,and getting new powers under de-facto law powers[they even control the media,and the courts,run the prisons and hope to bring in their own fiefdoms,..with we allready and perpetually oppressed being their serfs

i dont resent the learnings i have had in being the eternal victim,i need no govt law,need no protection,seek to harm or hinder no one

this is my way to fight back to those claiming eternal victimhood[while really being the oppresor]i need no new[neo]man-made-law[gods ten work just fine[govt get out of my life,

if your not serving gods creation your hindering[serving the same old elites who changed gods 10 laws into their own fiefdom powerplay,...via legislated acts,govts and a fiat currency,ruled by govt revenue freedom sukkking public servants enforcing ever more statuted regulations

Feel just audio-bashing each other is getting us nowhere.

Getting on with each other, even the so-called opposite each other, reminds me of back in the early eighties, when as a mature age student, including my wife who was an art student, we were invited to spend a couple of months in Sri-Lanka, where surpisingly there is or was a reasonable population of Muslims.

Pretty well as soon as we got there, we were assembled before an American who warned us that though many of us were studying alternative religions, our learning was about how to get on with other peoples not to run them down.

While my historical study was Colonial Oppression and the Tea Economy, most of the younger ones were engaged in trying to be decent to all world populations.

Naturally all of us were invited to a prayer session in a huge Moslem mosque, and naturally we all also knelt down in respect for the hundreds of Muslims who attended.

Further, when my wife and I discussed about the prayer session later, we both agreed we felt the same kind of peacefulness we felt in our Church back home.

Also thinking about a Soviet cruiser anchored out from Colombo for a long time, and our younger female students flirting with snappy Soviet sailors, it was rather like a more modern Casablanca.

I think the author is really more interested in the justifying the Israeli case against the the Arabs than in any philosophical issue. A case of the pot calling the kettle black, neither side is on that of the angles. Bigotry in any flavour is a bitter concoction.
As my cousin is fond of saying “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” in this 100 + year war extremists on both sides have taken over the asylum.
It's sad to note after centuries of being the “victims” from diaspora and a genocidal wars that either side are so keen to inflict the same.

I find that those who insist the loudest about freedom of speech are usually the ones who respect it the least and abuse it most while being the most afraid of it.

I'm new here but look at these two programs and if you're not convinced that some thing's going horribly wrong then good luck.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/449/video.html
It the above note the locations of the communal hut.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/449/video.html
Note here the analogy with moving the rock and the boiling experiment.
Think of the climate change as an inertia wheel damn hard to get moving, but when so easy to keep running and nearly impossibly hard to stop. If we stopped pushing now i.e. stopped adding CO2 the wheel is moving how fast and how long would the damage continue? One thing is for certain the damage is INCREASING this means the water will probably rise faster as time progressed. Anyhow watch the videos they're interesting

cheer

David Knoll says: “The licence to offend has led to social decay and even genocide”

Blaming insensitive comments for social decay & genocide plays to popular bad-guy stereotypes, but doesn’t sync with the facts . It is hard to see any amount of bad-mouthing leading to genocide, unless, there were other contributing factors.

In the examples cited in the article modern Iran & Nazi Germany , and, others that could be cited, the Armenian genocide , Saudi fundamentalism:
-- one segment of society has an exclusive right to determine what is – offensive– .
--It has the right to deny voice to any contrary argument.
--It has a monopoly of policing powers.

It is noteworthy that in modern day Iran the slow erosion has already started,
with everything from soccer & pop music to childrens preference for barbie dolls being seen as a threat to the ruling class.

Real bullying power lays in the ability to cry “offence!” and shut down the “offending” source.