Ken WhiteI was procrastinating from making pie and so I wrote a post: why the observation “well, there are exceptions to the First Amendment” is not particularly helpful.
https://popehat.substack.com/p/the-first-amendment-isnt-absolute
Steve@Popehat
I find three interesting topics to address in the essay: child pornography and animal cruelty, and incitement.
The essay says that child pornography is an exception to First Amendment free speech because child sexual abuse is necessary to create it. Doesn't that mean that a painter or animator could produce legal, protected child porn, as long as it was solely the product of a twisted imagination?
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@Popehat
I find three interesting topics to address in the essay: child pornography and animal cruelty, and incitement.
The essay says that depictions of animal cruelty are protected. But if a jurisdiction has a law against animal cruelty, defined in a way that passes legal muster, would that make depictions of animal cruelty produced by recording acts of animal cruelty unprotected (unless done to expose animal cruelty perpetrated by others)?
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@Popehat
I find three interesting topics to address in the essay: child pornography and animal cruelty, and incitement. (I repeated this paragraph in case people don't click through the content warning.)
In the case of incitement, we have a case of a speech to the effect of, "Let's go fight like hell or we won't have a country, but be peaceful", addressed to a belligerent crowd.
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@Popehat
My understanding is that juries decide the facts of cases, and appeals courts generally can't overrule a jury on findings of facts, only matters of due process, legality of applicable law, and so forth.
If a jury finds that the "but be peaceful" was intended to dodge responsibility for foreseeable violence, as opposed to being a since appeal for peaceful "fighting like hell", is that a finding of fact that would be outside the reach of appeals?
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@Popehat
Does this question make you more interested in working on a pie?
Does this question make you more interested in working on a pie?