this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
82 points (86.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35831 readers
1037 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I went to some palestine protests a while back, and was talking to my brother about the organizing, when revealed something I found pretty shocking, we (the protesters) had acquired a permit to hold the protest. Apparently this is standard policy across the US.

More recently, my University is also having protests, and in their policy, they also require explicit approval for what they call "expressive activity". I'm pretty sure not having a permit has been used as an excuse to arrest students in some other campuses.

My question is as the title, doesn't this fundamentally contradict the US's ideals of free speech? What kind of right needs an extra permit to exercise it?

When I was talking to my brother, he also expressed a couple more points:

  1. The city will pretty much grant all permits, so it's more of a polite agreement in most cases
  2. If we can get a permit (which we did) why shouldn't we?

I'm assuming this is because of legal reasons, they pretty much have to grant all permits.

Except I think this makes it all worse. If the government grants almost all permits, then the few rare times it doesn't:

  1. The protest is instantly de-legitimized due to not having a permit
  2. There's little legal precedent for the protesters to challenge this

And then of course there's the usual slippery slope argument. You're giving the government a tool they could expand later to oppress you further. Maybe they start with the groups most people don't like and go up from there.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The fact that the permit requires approval, whether it is always approved or not, it is still a permission to practice your free speech. Instead, it should be a notice by the people. This will allow the government to prepare for it. On the other hand, this notice should merely be a formality and not necessary.

In a real democracy, people should always have the right to practice their free speech that serves to protect the masses from exploitation or being oppressed. Furthermore, all public spaces are open to protest, whether they are in the middle of the street, in public squares, parks, inside and outside of government buildings, etc. The obstruction to traffic or anything else is merely a tool for the ruling class to act out violence against the peaceful protestors.

All universities, schools, and other places of knowledge whether public or private should be exempt from trespassing laws for the protestors.

People like to get technical about acting on your free speech versus right to free speech. This is a BS arguments that supports no one but the ruling classes.

In a real democracy, people have the power and government serves to obey the people, sadly, this is not the case in the US, and anyone that thinks otherwise are simply opportunist in the capitalist system or given in to the capitalist democracy propaganda.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

All universities, schools, and other places of knowledge whether public or private should be exempt from trespassing laws for the protestors

Problem is, there's a vocal minority convinced education is bad. Can you imagine the havoc if they could shut down any university without consequence?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I mean maybe that would force the rest of us to actually take them as a serious threat instead of just letting them schedule big speeches on campuses that attract a bunch of out of town fans of theirs and financially organize.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't entirely agree: in a real democracy, government is an extension of people. They are hired brutes and managers that do the job that people tell them to do. So what if the majority of people collectively don't want mass protests at the universities? Or that they want to be protected from masses of people randomly obstructing traffic?

Yes, it is possible for a government to use those restrictions as means of oppression: when people don't even agree with those laws, but the government tries to shut the protesters down regardless. In such a case, a permit doesn't even matter: just go out without a permit, because the government does not represent the people. If there were no permits, they would find some other loopholes to try and shut the protesters down: COVID restrictions, endangerment, (staged) complaints from neighbours, provocation etc. In Belarus, Russia, or Iran, they have millions of excuses ready to why all the protesters must go home or be arrested, the lack of permit isn't even that common these days.

P.S. Also wanna point out: I'm not from the US.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What you're describing sounds like a classic case of the tyranny of the majority

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I don't see it that way, but okay. And tyranny of majority could be interpreted twofold here: it's probably a tyranny for the majority against protesters to tell them that they can't protest at the university, but it's also tyranny of majority for 10000 protesters to tell 1000 students of a university that they don't care about their wish to study in peace? No?

Surely if you live in Iran or something just as oppressive, protesting against the government is probably more important than studies and even in the eventual best interests of students. But at that point (as I mentioned), permits and restrictions are irrelevant: go protest in Iran without a permit regardless or whatever. You don't need to take opinions of something as ridiculous as Iranian government into account.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Sure, though I've never heard of a protesters being the majority