Marat

Two centuries ago Kant argued that unless you had a reasonably stable empirical world in front of you, you would never be able to perceive yourself as an equally stable, perdurant, consciousness-thing which exists as the stage of that stable world which focuses you into determinate form as an internally perceivable object. Ca. 1200 Emperor Frederick II in Sicily wanted to know what the natural language of humans was, and so he tried an experiment in which babies were raised from birth in an isolated chamber where they had only minimal contact with nurses who fed and cared for them, but who were ordered never to speak in their presence. Frederick thought that these infants would spontaneously begin to speak Hebrew, which he believed was the language of God and thus the natural language of humans. However, all the infants soon died, because infants need loving care to live, so a perceptual deprivation experiment would not work.

I don't know where the idea ever got going that Harvard is a liberal arts institution! It grants graduate degrees in all the sciences, and all students at Harvard and MIT can cross-register for whatever course at either institution they want to take. It is also only a very short bus ride (on the university-run bus service) from one campus to the other. As for studying for either an MBA or a PhD, it is important to note that the former degree only trains you to be a money-making machine, while the later actually trains you to think and opens the opportunity for a life of curiosity, fascination, and exploration rather than just heaping up cash to buy more and more consumer goods until you choke on the glut. Although making money seems important to young people, and it is when people are young that they have to choose their career path, with increasing maturity money seems less and less important, so it would be a pity to saddle yourself in middle age with a goal that no longer seems deep enough for your eventual state of maturation.

How about this alternative solution for reducing world poverty? There are about a billion people in the developed world, and for each of them, losing $10 a year would make absolutely no difference in their wealth. So if we collected this money at no real pain from everyone in the developed world and distributed it among the poorest of the poor, whom UNICEF estimates could each be kept alive for just $300 a year, we could save about 33,333,333 people in the Third World from death through poverty. You would have to discount this a bit for administration and logistics costs.

E.g., if the United States had three trillionairs and 330,000,000 peasants, then all the peasants could be perfectly happy with the government because they could avoid all taxation, while only the three trillionaires would be angry at having to pay about $2 trillion a year in taxes among them to fund the government. But in a democracy, this many angry people wouldn't matter much. But the downside of that system is that all governments use progressive taxation to dampen the inequality of wealth distribution in the name of social justice, and under this arrangement, that goal would have to be surrendered at the outset. In theory, liberal democracies can only function where there is a large middle class with sufficient resources for the leisure, education, and public spiritedness to participate in the political process, so without a more even wealth distribution, the whole system might collapse. Even in economic terms, capitalism only functions because of the constant cycling of wealth from the rich who invest in productive enterprises at the top down to the middle class and poor below who work in those enterprises, earn a wage from the rich, and use it to consume the products the rich manufacture. With too much money concentrated at the top, inventories pile up in the factories and stores because consumption power falls, and you have the economic conditions which produced the 1929 crash.

I'm not making a political point about unequal wealth distribution here. I'm just saying that even if people found Bill Gates taking up so much money that it had negative side effects on the rest of society, the way our society is organized, he would still have the right to inflict that much harm on society to preserve his own private autonomy. The right to suicide is analogous to this, since even though a person killing himself may harm his loved ones, family, dependants, employees, students, etc., the law recognizes the right to commit suicide as part of a person's preserved sphere of autonomy, not as something which can be limited out of respect for the interests of others.

The usual Christian answer is that god permits sin to preserve our free will to choose sin, since by having this capacity, we become morally significant beings, such as we would not be if we were robotically programmed to be incapable of sin. But then the question becomes, why would a merciful god punish sin with such maniacal cruelty as the Christian god purportedly does? Even according to the human mercy of ordinary law, if a person punished people for 'sinning' against his property rights by erecting an electrified fence around his property, he would be guilty of negligent homicide. Yet the infinitely loving god punishes those trespassing against his rules by consigning sinners to infinite torture, even though god could perfectly well preserve our moral significance and free will by permitting us just to commit some tiny range of minor sins, for which we would only deserve and receive equally minor punishments.

Wouldn't that mean that dreams occurring in response to real circumambient stimuli, such as dreaming about being in a freezing environment when your bedroom is cold, or dreaming that you are searching for a bathroom when you in fact have to urinate while asleep, would produce a more lasting memory and be more easily recalled and preserved as a memory after waking? What do you think of the old Freudian explanation for the rapid forgetting of dreams after waking, that since dreams present conflicts between the id and ego which the ego cannot deal with in non-symbolic forms while awake, we have to forget them quickly after awakening, since otherwise the ego would be threatened with unacceptable material which the waking mind might be more adept at stripping of its symbolic guise than the sleeping mind?

Also, refusing to impose tax increases on anyone earning up to $250,000 a year is hardly a very left-wing program, since those earning that much have an income six times higher than the average American. The GINI index measures the relative equality of wealth distribution throughout a society, and on this list the U.S. has one of the worst maldistributions of wealth of any major economy. By keeping tax increases off of people earning up to six times the average income, the present program will do little or nothing to correct the wealth imbalance in the U.S.

I think we can accept that identification with a group rather than with a universal interest can be a matter of degree. I loosely identify with certain cultural and political groups, but I always remain open to being rationally persuaded to change allegiance on any particular issue where the other parties have better ideas. But someone who goes around refusing ever to vote for anyone on any issue for any platform as long as he is a Pashtoon is identified with his tribal group in a way that is almost unknown in modern, Western democracies.

Just take a look at the index of any modern criminal code of any Western jurisdiction: You will find under 'Suicide' that 'aiding, abetting, and counselling' suicide are illegal, but not committing suicide yourself. Suicide used to be illegal until the early 19th century, when the British Prime Minister, Lord Castelreigh, committed suicide, and this made people realize that there could be rational reasons for suicide which the law should respect. When you think of it, making suicide illegal was always rather silly, since the only punishment that could be inflicted on those guilty of the crime was that their estate be forfeited to the state rather than passed on to their heirs, and that the body be buried at the crossroads at midnight with a stake through its heart. As soon as these punishments began to seem too barbaric and silly in the early 19th century, suicide became legal because it was recognized to be unpunishable. The law on suicide is still in a rather illogical state, since it is rare to find aiding, abetting, and counselling a perfectly legal act to be criminal, but so it is. While it is true that suicide is a form of homicide, homicide is legally defined only as the killing of a human being, which is distinguished from murder, which is the unlawful killing of a human being. Many forms of killing human beings are legal, such as killing someone while acting in self-defense, while acting under the defense of necessity, while acting under military orders in a war, etc. Killing yourself has no logical implications for killing other people, since the main concern of the law is to prevent one person invading the rights of another, whether those are rights to personal property, personal liberty, personal physical integrity, or life itself. Thus if you kill yourself you don't violate anyone else's rights, since your death is in that case your own choice, so your personal autonomy is preserved, not invaded. That is why suicide is no longer illegal. While it is true that if a person commits suicide it may have harmful effects on other people or on society generally, the interest of the person in escaping his life is deemed to be greater than the disturbing effects that may have on others. The law and morality both allow people a sphere of autonomy in which they may do many things which are against the wider social interest, which is why it is perfectly legal for Bill Gates to hogg $40 billion for his own pleasure while people around him die for lack of shelter, medical care, and food.

Needimprovement: I do agree that the Bible is useless as a text to guide us unless we have some infallible interpreter, such as the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church acting under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Just as any lawyer will tell you that no law is self-interpreting, but always requires a judge to construe and apply it before its meaning can become clear, so too any theologian should realize that a book of messages alone only communicates ambiguously until we have an interpretive community that can focus its significance. However, we are then confronted by the question of why the Divine Intelligence would bother giving us a book separate from the institution to interpret it, given that neither can codify the meaning to be transmitted in itself? The authority of the book is frequently emphasized in the book itself, but the connection between Christ investing Peter with authority to create an institution to interpret the book is much looser and less certain, so that undermines the significance of all the assertions in the Bible as being the true message of God. We then have the further problem that both the book formulating the message of God and the expositors interpreting that message, the Church, are historical institutions plagues with all the contingencies and imperfections that go with any historically instantiated message. The canonical texts constituting the Bible were only assembled arbitrarily under political pressures during the first few centuries of Christianity's history up through the Council of Nicea. And then, the exposition of the meaning of those texts by the Church was also highly arbitrary and operated under the influence of a variety of purely mundane and crass political pressures. So the message we are left with still gives us nothing sufficiently secure to rest our entire belief, behavior, and ethics on, often at great cost to our own practical interests and rational insight.

You're right that Iraq and Afghanistan will be able to move quicker than the West did toward democracy, respect for human rights, and tolerance, but this process will no doubt take much longer than the decade or so that military planners have set aside for it. After the American public gets tired of paying for these adventures and all forces are withdrawn, democracy may well not have had time to take hold and the old ways, together with the 'failed state' opportunities for terrorism to take root, will return.

There There are basically two ways to stimulate the entire economy -- and thus benefit everyone -- by giving a targeted tax cut to one social group. You can give tax cuts to the rich, who will save much of it and invest a lot overseas because of their greater financial sophistication, or you can give tax cuts to the poor and the middle class, who will spend all of it on immediate consumer needs locally. Targeting tax cuts to the rich thus wastes much of the revenue lost to the Treasury, since it fails to stimulate the domestic economy, while targeting tax cuts to the poor and middle class produced a greater stimulus for the economy per dollar of Treasury revenue lost. This is part of the reason why the greatest growth in the history of the U.S. economy came after World War II, since the GI Bill fed money to the poor and the middle class. In contrast, the period after World War I without anything comparable to the GI Bill saw a recession. Also, many of the Republican tax cuts to the wealthy have had little benefit for the economy, since they went to inflate the speculative bubble by fuelling investments in artificial bets on market performance (derivatives) rather than going to genuine investments in the real economy, which is where all the increased consumer spending from middle class tax cuts would ultimately go. Insofar as the speculative bubbles fuelled by tax cuts to the rich often burst, as happened in 2008, they can be positively harmful to the economy, as the increased consumer spending of the middle class never is. Finally, there is the social justice issue to consider. Since tax cuts do not just stimulate the economy but also incerase the buying power and thus the wealth of those groups which receive them, a tax cut for the poor and the middle class helps those who need it most buy necessities, rather than increasing the luxuries of those who already have more. Tax cuts for any group hurt the poor and the middle class since they reduce the government budget for free public institutions, subsidized public programs, and social welfare agencies on which these two groups most depend, so if the tax cuts are at least concentrated on these groups, they are partially compensated for their loss. If they go to the wealthy, however, the maldistribution of wealth is increased, which diminishes the net social benefit of wealth, since $1000 in the hands of a poor person produces much more happiness than the same $1000 in the hands of a rich person.

That makes an interesting contrast to today's situation, in which CEOs are often making 400 times entry-level employees. Whether anyone can really perform work that is objectively worth that much more than someone else who is also working full-time seems doubtful, unless we are covertly operating with some covert notion that some people are inherently superior to others, which is rejected by most religions and democratic governments. I suppose that you are suggesting that capital-formation for companies to invest comes from the surplus wealth of the higher-paid employees, which would be available for investment. Companies themselves would have to be able to skim profit off the total wages paid to employees, since otherwise the corporations themselves would have no motive to form, risk capital, and expand by investing more capital. Unless there is a steeply progressive tax system, concentrations wealth would gradually be re-created by the profitable or unprofitable interactions among people, so a steeply progressive tax system to constantly restore some measure of equality would be needed. Ultimately, the net effect of profits generated under the influence of this steeply progressive tax would be that they would be spread out again among the mass of people. I wonder how much wealth differential is really required to induce people to work harder? In a society where everyone had essentially the same amount of money, very small differences in holdings might generate all the sense of prestige and luxury that would be needed to encourage the required effort. If I have a three-room cottage with a television, a computer, and a bicycle out front, I might stare out the window curtains in envy all night at your four-room cottage with its flat-screen tv, computer, and moped, eager to do more overtime the next day to get a moped as good as yours someday. If such small differences in wealth would suffice to encourage the hard work and competitiveness society requires to be productive, then a huge amount of capital would be left over to invest in social programs to guarantee humane care for everyone regardless of need.

I heard a lecture by a Jungian once who argued that depression used to be regarded in earlier cultural periods as a normal aspect of life, to be experienced to the fullest as part of the total human development. 'Melancholy,' as it used to be called, had to be controlled rather than explored once we moved to a capitalist economy, since the new economic form required people to be constantly engaged in working and shopping, neither of which people are eager to do when depressed. At that point 'melancholy' became a 'mental disease' labeled as 'depression' and simply had to be eliminated. The famous early 17th century work, Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' represents the more positive view of the condition as an important maturing experience which is now nearly forgotten.

The operative impact of all money is a function of how large a ratio of one's total assets it is. We could make a street person deliriously happy by giving him just one of the rooms of Jerry Seinfeld's 200-room mansion in the Hamptons, while it would probably take Mr. Seinfeld a few months before he even noticed he had lost one of the rooms of his mansion. This effect of money extends throughout the whole spectrum of income distribution, so for a middle class family unable to afford to send their child to university, getting $100,000 from Bill Gates' $40 billion estate would be a life-changing event, while no one but Mr. Gates' accountant would notice his loss. Thus capitalism, by naturally tending to distribute money upwards and concentrate it among those who already have the most money, is profoundly wasteful of the net economic resources of society, since the way it distributes these maximally reduces their effectiveness in producing human happiness, which has to be the ultimate goal of money. While this would seem to argue for a social system which provides everyone with the same amount of money so that its happiness-producing effect is maximized, there are two limits on this. First, there has to be some concentration of wealth in a few hands to allow it to be rationally directed to the large investment projects which help generate more wealth. Also, although there have been many societies which have produced great things without individual wealth incentives -- such as Ancient Egypt's ability to build the pyramids or the Soviet Union's ability to defeat Nazism, both without capitalist incentives -- in today's society some rewards of extra money seem necessary to inspire people to work harder at dangerous, difficult, or stressful jobs. However, in a society where the overall goal was to maximize happiness by distributing the money as evenly as possible within these two constraints, very small incentives, such as paying hard-working or brilliant people 10% more than other people, might seem sufficiently dramatic amidst the general equality of wealth that they would suffice to inspire the required extra effort.

If people felt sad simply because sad things happened to them, then psychologists and psychiatrists would lose sadness as a disease of the mind they could claim to treat, rather than as a highly varied problem in the outside world they could not, and with this they would also lose income, social prestige, and power. The usual phenomenological distinction to separate the 'depression disease' from ordinary sadness in response to sad events is that depression is deep and lasting while normal sadness is temporary, but what about sad events which are long-lasting, constantly evolve so that people can never accommodate to them, and cannot be fixed? It would seem that the normal response to such depressive, real-world triggers would be perpetual sadness, and that any reaction other than sadness would be the 'belle indifference' of schizophrenia, or some form of mania. However the person reacts, he falls into one diagnostic category or the other and so never escapes the power of the psychotherapeutic establishment. But the psychotherapeutic establishment claims that depression is 'real' and distinct from ordinary sadness because it corresponds to chemical changes in the brain. But since no modern scientist believes that thoughts, emotions, and mental states occur in an immaterial soul, but believes instead that all thinking goes on in a material brain where it corresponds to physical changes in that brain, then obviously all thought, pathological as well as healthy, corresponds to chemical changes in the brain. When we see an apple, there corresponds to it some electro-chemical state of the brain which we could call 'seeing an apple disease' if we wanted to, and if psychiatrists were particularly short of business, perhaps they could define this in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a form of mental illness which required talking therapy, social management, and medication to remove, rather than just removing the apple, to cure it. The true treatment for lasting sadness is to get rid of the objective stimuli in the outside world causing it, rather than to tinker with the mind of the perceiver until he can't respond to it normally any more, so when he is drugged to the point of feeling better we can say he is 'cured.' A diagnosis of depression only seems appropriate where extreme sadness exists where there is no objective stimulus which could account for it, but what adult human has ever been fortunate enough to live in a world where there is nothing -- from the thought of the inevitability of death to concern over the suffering of other people -- that could prompt feelings of extreme and lasting sadness?

News footage of the 9/11 disaster shows some people jumping to their death from a burning building, since they obviously preferred to die a minute sooner by hitting the ground rather than living a minute longer at the price of experiencing the horror of burning to death. If we all recognize those actions as a rational choice those people had the right to make, then we have already accepted in principle that suicide can be a reasonable choice people should make for themselves. Other cases of suicide differ from this example only in degree, since longer periods of potential future life are given up, or lesser horrors are avoided, but in principle the issue is the same: People may rationally prefer death rather than living longer at the cost of enduring future suffering they can't avoid. But even though suicide is legal almost everywhere in the Western world, we still see governments conducting public campaigns to prevent it. While the government can certainly legitimately try to influence the public to make better choices even where the alternatives to those better options are legal, such as when the state runs tv ads to persuade teenagers not to exercise their legal right to leave school at 16, in such cases government only tries to persuade, not prevent. But everywhere we see people deemed to be 'a danger to themselves' because of suicidal tendencies -- that is, the tendency to do something legal -- being detained against their will or committed to an insane asylum. Where I live there is a bridge which people have used to commit suicide but now the government has erected barriers along the edges so that people can no longer jump off. Similarly, in nursing homes, where there has always been a high suicide rate -- for obvious reasons! -- wall hooks are now being designed so that they collapse if the weight of a human body is attached to them, just to prevent old people, who may be sick, lonely, and suffering, from escaping their misery. But since suicide can be a rational choice, since it is not illegal, and since it is obviously infinitely more important to the person planning suicide that he die than it is to society that he live, why do we still try to prevent suicide, as though we could somehow always know for certain that it is always preferable for everyone to continue living, which the 9/11 example proves is false? Some critics object that since suicide is permanent, people should be prevented from possibly making the wrong decision, but few major decisions in life are without permanent effects -- such as marrying the wrong person, having a child when you shouldn't have, investing your money in the wrong enterprise, joining the army during a war, picking the wrong major in college, etc. -- yet we are left free to make all these mistakes which leave permanent marks even if we later struggle to get out of them. Exceptions might have to be made for a few extreme cases, such as temporarily insane or intoxicated people who would quite likely regret their choice to die later, and for young teenagers who are ready to throw themselves into the river because the captain of the football team didn't ask them to the prom. But generally people should be allowed to act on their own decision.

If some priests just made up a religion with an invented god, they would obviously be obsessed with ensuring that people believed in it and were committed to it, since that would be the weak spot in the entire charade. That is why I find it quite suspicious that religions are so often preoccupied with whether people have faith in what they posit, whether people obey what the doctrine asserts, or whether people praise what is stipulated by the mythology to be really praiseworthy. All these concerns boil down to a constant fretting over whether people are actually buying the deception and how clearly they are showing that they have fallen for it. But if god were real, why would he, knowing himself to be the omniscient, eternal, divine creator, be so preoccupied with whether a collection of tiny minds on Earth believed in his existence, whether those people were praising and blessing him, or whether they were slipping away from his control by worshipping false gods? All these concerns are characteristic of earthly kings and governments which fear that their citizens will lose faith in their legitimacy, but the Bible never explains why the infinite god of the cosmos, who is in charge no matter what we think, is so perpetually nervous about whether he is still supported by the populace or not.

But look at what a long development the Western world had to undergo to become amenable to democratic governance! First there was just cultural tribalism, then an approach to a universal legal order applicable to all ethnicities and religions in the Roman Empire's 'jus gentium,' quickly followed by a retreat into medieval particularism where even legal rights just depended on where you were born, where you lived, what you did for a living, and who your parents were. It look another long evolution of about 1400 years duration from there for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to establish the notion of equality of rights and equality of persons to go with it, but even then, it took about another century for the obvious next step to be taken, which was that equal people with equal rights also deserved an equal share in governing the country via democracy. So in historical terms, introducting democracy in Iraq now, with only about a decade of preparation, and still expecting success, is equivalent to expecting Western Europeans to have elected Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor by popular vote.

I notice, Moontanman, that you wrote 'prostrate' surgery rather than prostate surgery. Let's hope you're not 'prostrate' after the procedure!

Just as colonial imperialism in the 19th century was justified by 'the need' to bring Christianity and civilization to those without these 'benefits,' today protecting women's rights, promoting democracy, and guaranteeing freedom are used to justify neo-colonialism. But it's still the same old stealing of sites for bases to project international influence, of natural resources to increase wealth, or suppressing rebellious tribes for supporting the wrong geopolitical interests. The major difference is that a better, more economical form of colonial control has been discovered, in which military forces concentrated at strategic bases have been found able to do the work of entire colonial administrations. Also, the propaganda machine has become more sophisticated, so modern neo-colonialism appears less rapacious than its old counterpart did. But you have to wonder why we went to Iraq and Afghanistan to 'help' the people there at such enormous expense, when we let homeless people die in the streets in America because it would raise taxes too much if we provided decent housing and medical care for them.

Did we win? Well, we spent about $2 trillion dollars to devastate a foreign country and cause a long-term reduction in its oil output, thus artificially inflating the price of oil worldwide from what it would have been otherwise. In the process, we killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, plus causing the deaths of many of our own soldiers. We invaded Iraq primarily in order to prevent being attacked by its 'weapons of mass destruction' which were such an imminent threat that we couldn't even afford to wait even for the U.N. inspector, Hans Blix, to complete his mission to determine whether they existed. These weapons turned out to be a complete myth. We also invaded Iraq supposedly to free the Iraqi people from an evil dictator, but of the 204 nations of the world, probably about 80 of them are governed by equally evil dicators, and yet we feel no obligation to act as the world's policeman and remove them, perhaps because most of them are our allies or have no oil. Also, you have to ask if getting rid of a dictator for people living 10,000 miles away from us is worth $2 trillion to the American taxpayer. We also invaded Iraq to avoid general threats to our security from Saddam Hussein, but in fact he was never more than a local bully. All he ever did was attack Iran (with our material support and encouragement) to recover the tiny Shat-al-Arab channel for more profitably exporting oil out of Iraq, and Kuwait for sucking out the oil from Iraq's reserves through extractions sucking it out across the border. Kuwait had also been part of Iraq until the Ottoman Empire had been dismembered by the Allies at the end of World War I and the British decided it would be geopolitically to its advantage to detach Kuwait from the rest of it, so you could say Hussein was really just reintegrating his own country against Western imperialism. During the first Gulf War Hussein proved that his ambitions were purely local, since after the U.S. intervened, he briefly remained in Kuwait to gain some cache with Palestinians and then withdrew in what Secretary of State Baker called 'the mother of all retreats.' Was such a person ever a real danger to U.S. security? We also invaded Iraq to punish Hussein for supporting the 9/11 terrorists whom his agents met with in Prague to prepare the attack. Only that turned out to be a myth as well, as anyone with any knowledge of Iraq could have told us, since Hussein led the Baathist Party, which was a secular political force hated by Islamic extremists like bin Laden, so the two would never have joined up on any common project. We also invaded Iraq to bring democracy to the people, but any sociologist could have told us that a tribal people subdivided into important ethnic and religious units can never overcome their divergent cultural identities to merge into a common will such as is the rational prerequisite of democratic governance. The only way to hold these divergent tribes together into one nation and prevent them from attacking each other is to unify them with a strong man, such as Tito provided to unify the divergent people of Yugoslavia into one state. But somewhere along the line we seem to have gotten rid of the strong man who was perfect for this job, Saddam Hussein. In the process of this attack the U.S. won the condemnation of most of the world and many of its allies, so the loss of diplomatic capital and 'soft power' around the world was enormous. So did we win? We defeated Iraq and Hussein, but as Pyrrhus said after winning a great battle at too high a price in Antiquity: "One more such victory and I am undone."

I think the issue is irreducibly political rather than just pragmatic. We could, after all, adopt a Mathusian model for the economy and let the starvation of the poor solve the unemployment problem. Economics just describes what will happen if you do x, y, or z in your public policy choices, not how much of a burden in human suffering you should permit to fall on the poor. How far we let the pressure of economic downturns be absorbed by the human suffering involved in unemployment, lack of access to health care, lack of access to education, lack of housing, etc., and how far we shift the pressure of economic stresses to reductions in the surplus material goods of the wealthy is more or less a reflection of how much we value poor people over rich people. I say 'more or less' because certain laws of economics, like the need to allow some wealth to become concentrated so it can provide rationally directed investment capital to fuel economic growth, restrict our options.

The problem with saying that free speech is intended to prevent subjective reality from overcoming objective reality is that the issue is then just pushed back one stage when people say, "But my vision of reality is the objective one, while yours is the subjective one." This disagreement about what is objective and what is subjective then becomes something which can only be settled in a free society by debate and discussion, so then we are back to allowing free speech without any predetermined restrictions that it always only be 'objective.' American law has some good instincts for dealing with free speech restrictions. If speech is uttered in a time, manner, or place where it creates a danger of physical harm so immediate that there is no time for reasoned debate to defuse it, then it can be forbidden. But what is forbidden should only be the time, manner, or place of the speech causing a danger, not the content of the speech generally, since if the government discriminated among speech acts by their content, this would violate the neutrality of a government committed to respecting free expression of opinion.