LogFAQs > #945573385

De re free speech is still a concrete example of free speech in the world, so not quite. Free speech can be STIFLED but it still clearly exists, there are degrees of it it. I gave you examples you chose to ignore. You can't say it doesnt exist when there are political documents saying it does.

you're saying that people are deprived of free speech AND free speech doesnt exist? Sounds like a contradiction:

if it can be stifled, and has always been stifled no matter the circumstances, then it is not free speech. the agora is limited to freedmen and citizens, the press limited to those who could afford to run or were allowed to run it, the wive's gossip to the speech deemed acceptable between the wives, etc.

it exist as an ideal and nothing more.

Re: governments being extra-moral entities
well that is a different subject. At the end of the day people dont want genocide and look down on leaders who promote it...

indeed. but everywhere in the world, the government, authority or society, dictates free speech to the degree of which that body finds acceptable. there is no place on this earth outside of the mind (in the ideal) where one can have free speech, and even then it is limited to what you know and have been exposed to. this is the material perspective.

Such a rule exists to control people, it's not to the benefit of the citizenry

a rule dictating that a science teacher cannot preach non-material, anti-scientific beliefs to a child is to that child's and the world's benefit. individual rights do not outweigh the collective.