Tocky on 26/6/2011 at 03:38

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Soooo when I get naked on the street and shake my willy I can claim it as my private domain and if anyone challenges that I can refer them to your post and break a whisky bottle and glare at them over the top of it right?

I need to be certain because past experience has taught me telling the officer that privacy no longer means something I do out of public observation hasn't always gotten me first choice of sleeping arrangements.

demagogue on 26/6/2011 at 13:02

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But the street is a public place, so ... no. That's ... that was like ... the whole point.

It doesn't matter who sees it; it matters if it's a private context like a bedroom (ok) or a public context like a street (prob not ok).

Now in the prison cell, on the other hand: go for it.

http://i51.tinypic.com/1zc1o9g.gif

Tocky on 27/6/2011 at 04:48

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So we agree there is no privacy in public. But pictures taken in public are private property and one can do whatever one wants with them this side of defamation which altering them for the purpose of causing harm would be. Thus no matter how anyone personally views showing assholes being assholes in a public setting there is no law against it nor should there be as long as they are not altered. Vigilantism can only be in the actions taken against the law which showing true pictures is no part of. The law is not for protection from public perception of true acts only for protection against unlawful actions such as the rioting idiots were doing.

I've never heard of incitement to violence applying to anything beyond direct suggestion of violence but then I'm not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV.

demagogue on 28/6/2011 at 03:33

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I was being colorful but I didn't screw it up, and if you read the two posts again they're the same basic logic. But they were making two different points, or looking at the same point from two different angles, so that's why they don't grok well side by side. And I see that too. I only made the second post to respond to Tocky adding a new situation to my original point. That first post was largely just talking about blatantly "private" things (in the classic sense) and I hadn't even gotten to blatantly "public" things (in the classic sense), so that's why they're looking at the same basic logic from two different perspectives.

Anyway, to spell out the logic in both of those posts again: There are two senses of "public" and "private", a classic sense & a revised sense. In the classic sense, "public" means things that happen in public view (literal eyes in traditionally public places like streets), and "private" means things hidden from public view (behinds walls that people in public places can't see through, like in bedrooms). Then my point was (sort of sensationalized; I was exaggerating it for color), that this classic understanding is essentially now useless. We should assume everything that happens everywhere will end up in a .jpg or .flv online, thus, in public view (=viewable by the eyes of others everywhere).

So then the next step is (which my first post didn't really address at all I think, but I had to explain it in the 2nd post to address Tokcy's question) even though the public/private distinction in terms of publicly viewable is now useless, we still need a distinction to handle our intuitions about situations we can feel authorized, e.g., to tell people to take their willy out of the pudding and get dressed and situations where we shouldn't feel authorized to demand that (or we punish people for doing it).

Then my point was we should just reconstruct new concepts for that. It's tricky to call them "publicity" and "privacy" because those refer to a property (being in public view) that we've already found to be useless. But Zooey essentially got it. The new concepts (maybe call them "legal publicity" and "legal privacy") should be a social contract or understanding. We should all just have a shared understanding with each other that when something happens in a bedroom, even though it's in public view online, we aren't authorized in demanding people take their willy out of the pudding and put their clothes on or punish them for it. But if that happens on a street, we can feel authorized to demand that or punish them if they don't. It no longer has to do with who can see it. Orders of magnitude more people are publicly viewing what goes on in some bedrooms than could ever witness what's going on on a street. But that's irrelevant to what we should feel authorized to demand from people or punish for doing.



I think I already addressed this, but a billion bedrooms are publicly visible, and I think that could well be an underestimate. The difference between a private context like a bedroom and a public context like a street should be a social understanding we all have with each other that we (the authorities, or employers) can tell people we publicly see on streets what to do but not people we publicly see in bedrooms.

I'm talking about stuff like firing, not hiring, or prejudicing people for their Facebook profile or some photo they see on the internet or lord knows what else they find online (not counting illegal behavior). If we don't care what people do in their bedrooms, we shouldn't care what they do in their bedrooms that's publicly available. That was the basic point. I didn't mean it just as a "legal" thing either, but just basic decency to each other; you might criticize people for something they do on a street but not for a .jpg you saw of them in their bedroom, which is effectively like inviting yourself into their room just to bitch at them.

BTW I think the logic might also apply somewhat in the riot case, but it's trickier because that is in a traditionally "public" kind of place where we would probably still agree there's stuff you shouldn't do. But with cameras everywhere on streets now, even the "publicity" of "public places" may be getting distorted I think (where it might get complicated). And it's fact sensitive of course (we're talking about a guy just standing around, not a pic of someone actually committing a crime). But if a riot is a faceless mass of 10,000s of people (I'm just making shit up on the spot, haven't thought it through), then we might have a basic social understanding that any individuals just standing around should just melt into the faceless crowd and it would be unfair to single *one* person out for special punishment just because a pic came out of him when there's 10,000 other people that are no better. I don't know though; I'd have to think through it some more.

Anyway it's a dick thing to prejudice someone just for their associations or speech in any event. I don't know the Canadian constitution, but the US Constitution might give you a decent case against a gov't employer doing that (if it were a political rally it would be a slam dunk case). But it's much harder to make a case against a private employer, which isn't subject to the Constitutional protections. You can do it, sue a private employer, in some cases but it's limited. The German constitution makes it easier to stop private employers doing it, and is generally more rational IMO about protecting fundamental rights* from abuse by both state & private actors. (*What we're really talking about here, specifically the fundamental right to a shield of "privacy" for certain kinds of actions, which we used to distinguish as things happening out of public view; but I'm proposing we now understand as happening in places we just agree it's okay to happen even if .jpgs of it get online.) And again, half of my point was just about what's decent behavior aside from what you can legally do.