This is very clarifying on where your thoughts are. I think we both realize what is physical and monetary damage to others and we'd both be in agreement that it's wrong. What you're eluding to here, however, is the idea that it somehow pains you (or the society in general) to watch or even know when I do something that's against your morals or liking, even though I am not physically forcing you to see my actions and you have every opportunity to walk away from. And that, my friend, is where your right to not be offended does not get to infringe on my right to do what I want.

You are correct that I was conflating the two subjects and I appreciate your sticking to the one that matters.

I think what you're not pointing out in your example of slavery as an "affront" is that slaves were forced into slavery against their will. Of course that is wrong and nobody's arguing for something like slavery to come back, although some would probably not mind that -- and, in a tangent, I could argue that we're all still slaves of just a different sort.
 
 

I guess that's the crust of the argument. I'm originally from Iran and when I moved to the U.S., I saw that the individual liberties afforded to us (or rather not taken away) are unparalleled in the rest of the world (Yes, including countries like Norway and Sweden). Because of that, I agree with the OP's "slippery slope" argument. What's a slippery slope to one is not necessarily so to others. Even what's a slippery slope to most is not grounds for laws against or banning it. Case in point, take the treatment of gays throughout the ages. If you took a poll in the 50s on whether homosexual relationships should be legal, you would have gotten an overwhelmingly "No!" answer. Just because most people don't like something, it doesn't mean that it's wrong. If you ban someone killing themselves and filming it while doing so under the guise of it being an affront to human dignity, what's next? Why should prostitution be illegal? Should mutilating your body be illegal? Do note that, in my examples, I am only taking this stance when it involves adult humans wills (the term adult to be defined by local laws, I guess).

It's HIS dignity, not yours. He wasn't hurting anyone else. When the police investigated him because of his channel, their conclusion was that he was in full control of what was happening and he was doing it for money and fame. Where do you get off making decisions on how someone else should live their life when it doesn't concern you? Your "an affront to humanity" argument is rather weak when his actions don't affect you.

I don't believe that is correct. You can install Windows 11 for free on any device, with some features disabled (customization and personalization - like desktop background). It's called an inactivated installation.

You can install Windows 11 for free. The only thing that's disabled is customization (as in desktop background and stuff like that).

Firstly, you actually can say fire in a crowded theater. It only is a problem if people panic, start to run, and someone gets hurt. For details, see this where the decision of the court specifically says it has to cause panic (injury). Saying "bomb" in an airport falls under the same category as shouting "fire".

In general, your freedom of speech stops when it lead to actual harm to others, whether it be physical (SWAT team), or monetary (libel). In certain cases, this may even include emotional IF you've been targeting a specific individual, but never if it's directed to a general group of people. For instance, I can say, all day long, that white people are cunts until I'm blue in the face and nobody can do anything about it.

You lost me on the insurance company phone call.

I'm not saying U.S. is a utopia, and I'm didn't even say anything about FB at all in this thread. All I'm saying is that freedom of speech in the U.S. is unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

There. It's apparent you don't have a clue what's considered speech, at least not in the U.S.

Where do you pull crap like this out of? According to Legality of Holocaust denial, the rule stems from 1985 in Germany. Even the earlier law, Strafgesetzbuch section 86a, wasn't enacted after WW2 ended, but during the cold war.

Where? France? Germany? The concept of free speech is literally unknown to them. What do you mean a Muslim woman can't wear her headscarf in her university class in Paris? What do you mean I can't deny that the holocaust happened while I'm in Germany?

There NO other country out there where I can run my mouth in as many directions as I can in the U.S. Not having free speech in the U.S. is about as far from the truth as you can get. It's probably the thing I most enjoy since having become a naturalized citizen.

Funny how you can say, without any risk of a lawsuit, what you just did. It's called parody and is very protected as free speech. See Hustler vs. Falwell.

On the receiving end from a priest? I would call that more than sex.

I was comparing it to regular Heintz. The ingredients in French's are Tomato Concentrate (Made from Red Ripe Tomatoes), Sugar, Distilled Vinegar, Salt, Onion Powder, Spices and Natural Flavor, which is very similar to Organic Heintz, with the exception of the "organic" part, so I wonder if I'd like Organic Heintz.

Try French's Ketchup. I did and now Heintz tastes like shit.

That's an odd question to ask. I love what I do and would recommend everybody to take on a job that they enjoy doing. But that's far from saying that my work is my main satisfaction in life. Mind you I've been self-employed for 27 years and would recommend that as well. Don't get me wrong. If I'm in the middle of a good coding run, I'm in Zen and enjoying myself. But as much as I like my work, I like traveling and listening to music more than my work.

Talking about being self-employed, I have noticed how some of the people who are employees get envious of me. That even includes my wife, who has to get up at 5:45 AM while I can sleep in until 10. But as much as self-employment comes with freedom perks, it also has a lot of drawbacks, including health insurance, lots and lots of paperwork, no paid time off, being on-call pretty much all the time, yada yada. I don't think people think about all those things.

This reminded me that I used to get paid, in beer, in 1987 to type people's papers into a word processor (Word Perfect back then). The kids didn't really know how to use a computer, let alone the intricacies of using a word processor. But the main reason they had me do it for them was because I was familiar with all the different methods of elongating their paper: margins, font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, and so on. The awesome thing was that my price was one beer per page, so when they asked me to modify their 5 page paper to appear as 6 pages, I got an extra beer! If they were willing to pay me 2 beers per page, I'd actually retype the paper in Unix on a PDP11 (didn't have a way of transferring files between the PC and the PDP11) and then run it through the style analyzer that came with Unix so that they'd get feedback on sentence structure and whatnot. Those were the days!