If we're not supposed to condemn the jerks that made the anti-islam movie

[JoeyT]

150. I don't think there's much chance of

a wrongful death lawsuit winning. Otherwise we'd have seen them against Pat Robertson and his ilk over anti-gay hate crimes and that would actually have a much better chance of succeeding, since the lawsuit you're suggesting is one step further removed. (O'Reilly and Tiller are another example that would have ended in a wrongful death suit if this were possible.)

Legal repercussions are silencers of speech. You can't say "You should have the freedom to criticize Breatharianism, but we're going to have the government flay you alive in public when you do." and claim you're not in favor of censoring speech. If we go by the "Free to accept the ruinous consequences" metric, citizens of Soviet Russia had exactly as much free speech as we do. They just had to accept the "consequences". Flay you alive is a joke, but "Fine you into oblivion" works there too.

If Dave mocks Bob's favorite episode of Friends and Bob's idea of a rebuttal is to take out a Target with an assault rifle, Dave isn't criminally or civilly liable, even if Dave knew Bob was kind of weird about that show. Dave *is* morally liable, and everyone should give Dave no end of shit for setting Bob off. Even if the show did suck. (It did.) Even if Dave hated Target. We can't set a bar for rational vs. non-rational criticism, because we'd still need someone to determine where it begins and ends, which would make that person the sole arbiter of speech.

Making someone liable for wrongful death for the actions of others that they insulted would mean allowing anyone that was willing to commit violence to utterly control the discourse and would immediately spell the end of speech, free or otherwise, once everyone was afraid to say absolutely anything.