Instructing Vs. Teaching: Mo wrote in to respond to my last post on censorship. It was actually a comment of Prof. Vu's that got to her:

"Suppose, for example, that a man 'teaches' that racial minorities are subhuman, explains in detail how to make a bomb and then encourages his listeners to plant the bombs in places where minorities gather. It makes no sense to say that this activity is 'protected' while a woman baring her breast is not."

To start with - that man can "teach" people whatever he wants about minorities and bombs... First Amendment, free speech, blah blah blah. Should he be able to? Absolutely. What he teaches makes my blood boil, but living in a truly free society means that freedoms I have to express my beliefs and opinions should be the exact same freedoms given to the people who make my blood absolutely boil. However, this isn't what got me steamed about what Prof Vu said....

To encourage someone to plant bombs in places where minorities gather is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT issue from teaching someone about how to build bombs and/or how racial minorities are subhuman. Encouraging someone to plant a bomb is a call to criminal action - something that is NOT protected because you're not "teaching" someone anything. You are trying to get someone to DO something illegal. I don't know all the legal terms for it, but that borders on "inciting a riot" or "aiding and abetting" or something. If a listener takes the message to heart and DOES end up planting a bomb, the messenger is just as guilty as the listener.

For example, let's say I told you that I was mad at someone, and during that same conversation I mention that there's a knife in the drawer. If you then took that knowledge of the knife and my anger at someone and then ended up killing that person, I am not guilty of the murder because I never told you or encouraged you in any way to kill that person. HOWEVER, if, during that same conversation, I encourage you to kill the person I'm mad at, I would DEFINITELY be guilty of the murder. Simply saying "there's a knife in the drawer" isn't what would have caused my guilt - I was merely providing information. Saying "I'm mad at _____" isn't what would have caused my guilt because, again, I was providing information. Those two pieces of information are (relatively) innocuous because it would take a logical (or, in this case, illogical) leap from you to go out an kill the person I was mad at with the knife in the drawer. It's the call to action - me saying "You should kill _______ with that knife in the drawer because I'm mad at him/her" - that would have led to my conviction because I'm taking those two innocuous statements and making the (il)logical leap of what you should do with that information for you. Providing people with information and then encouraging those people use that information to commit a crime IS NOT protected speech.

I think that's a valid point. The example used probably does cross another important line--for lack of better terms, I'll call it "Instructing vs. Teaching." If your words encourage evil, they're protected. If they cause evil, like if I gave an order to someone who worked for me to do something bad, then they're not.

Simply because the order involved some teaching ("Here's how to work a gun. Go shoot that man with it.") doesn't pull it under the protected umbrella of what I call "teaching." For semantics sake I'll call such teaching "instruction," and say it's part of the order rather than educational or political.