I hope you realize one needn’t agree with everything an author believes in order to agree on a few points. I thought Marx’s along with Hobsbawm’s account of Encosures was well cited and accurate, though I refute the theory that capitalism (which I find a stupid term) was somehow the cause. And though I find your point valid and agreeable, I’m not sure the debate is entirely settled.

Undoubtedly, the Swedish account you describe is more preferable, morally and economically.

Clearly consciousness extends beyond the brain due to the simple fact that brains aren’t conscious. Consciousness is a direct one-to-one ratio with conscious beings, meaning that it both extends to the limits of, and must be reduced to, the being itself. As a description of conscious beings, consciousness and the being are in fact one-and-the-same.

You’ve convinced me, ssu. It clearly happened because of population growth, which would have followed rather than proceeded the rise in industrial employment and opportunity. Though I still think the enclosures acts were an injustice, and the evicted peasantry were left off with not much else, it cannot be said these acts immediately provided an army of laborers for the factory.

It wasn’t until the 17th century that enclosures became acts of parliament in England.

So What did Marx write that was wrong? I’d be interested to hear a university-educated perspective.

This is answering the wrong question: "what is the relationship between the world and the organism's body?" This can be direct, or indirect, per your examples. But this is trivial.

It isn’t trivial if perception involves the body. If perception involves the senses, and the senses are in direct contact with the rest of the world, there is less and less room for the indirect realist’s intermediary.

I’m surprised you’ve never heard it, given your education. Is it your opinion that the enclosures movement had no effect?

It’s out of Marx’s Das Kapital. The Enclosure’s Acts expropriated the land from the peasantry, creating out of a class of peasant proprietors a class of day-laborers forced to work for other men in order to survive.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm

So long as the environment is presented under the conditions of voluntary cooperation there ought to be no problem. Voluntary conditions makes of employment a partnership between owners and workers. Should any tangental ethical issues arise, or the partnership is violated, there are avenues one can take to resolve them. He can seek compromise, or, absent that, he can terminate the relationship.

Wherever there are involuntary conditions, however, that's where the real ethical issues arise. Why is one forced to seek out employment? When the factory system came into being in England, an army of workers were readily available because the State had expropriated them from their land. It was either go into the factories and work for sustenance wages or else to beg, steal, or starve. These sorts of conditions, and the conditions of statism in general, are the unethical, unjust, and slavish conditions we now find ourselves in.

I don’t see how the term applies to anything else.

I just wanted to add another question (if you would allow it) regarding the so-called “content” of thought. Can the content only ever describe the thinker more-so than what it is intended to describe?

I argued that the best technology can do is mimic the biological activity. This is for two reasons: technology isn’t biological, so mimicry is all it could ever amount to, but also because the technology is designed to mimic the biological activity, not to be biological activity.

Anything that isn't human cannot do what a human does by virtue of it not being a human being. Whatever sapiens build in their pursuit of artificiality and technology will have to be content with mere mimicry. It's the same with human thought. Although I don't think it could be said that thinking is a strictly human affair any more than drinking and running is, the problem occurs in believing we can apply strictly biological concepts and activities to technological and artificial ones. Do submarines swim? That answer, along with others of the similar themes, is invariably a "no".

not my fault. You elicited the response. The force and content animated me.

Yes, private persons, the unskilled, laymen and those unconcerned with the state are all idiots. There’s that concern for “our commonality” revealing itself for what it really is.

It is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation. Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying: "[we] regard... him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" (τόν τε μηδὲν τῶνδε μετέχοντα οὐκ ἀπράγμονα, ἀλλ᾽ ἀχρεῖον νομίζομεν).[9] However, neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe non-participants, or in a derogatory sense; its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert.[10] The derogatory sense came centuries later, and was unrelated to the political meaning.[11][4][2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot

The Greeks had a word for those who consistently engaged in fallacy, and it wasn’t “philosopher”.

Thanks for the input.

But the premise of “doing things with words” still stands out as mistaken wherever it is mostly focused on the so-called acts of the speaker, especially given that communication more often than not involves those who are faced with his utterances. It seems to me we're missing out on myriad acts of a listener: what to do with the utterance, how to understand it, read it, consider it, judge it, respond to it, and so on. Austin himself spends an inordinate amount of time doing this, considering utterances, what they might mean, and how one might respond to them. These acts, such as they are, can be explicated in both physical terms and using Austin's nomenclature of "doing things with words", whereas expressing the words seems far less consequential, even inconsequential, given the physics and biology of these interactions and behaviors.

This is more a question for the Direct Realist. Would they agree that perceiving photons of light entering the eye is what they mean by perceiving the external world?

That’s one part of it, yes. But we also touch and taste things, and so on, so we need not limit our relations to other things to just the light alone.

It just means there are no intervening factors when it comes to perceiving the rest of the world, or that perceiving the rest of the world is not indirect.

Good stuff. Then we share common grounds.

Is the variation in colors a direct perception of internal qualia, and not a direct perception of external objects, such as the light and the things it bounces off of?

For all you know our color wheels could be exactly alike, and thousands of years of evolution might have produced an anatomy very similar, with only slight degrees of variation. Nonetheless, we’d all be seeing nothing if both the objects and lights didn’t afford us the information of the outside world that it does.

Which features would those be?

And yet that seems to be a feature of every definition of direct realism.

I’d be interested to read a direct realist using such a phrase in their arguments, if you know of any quotes. I guess we can say the indirect realist believes he perceives the world as it really isn’t.

True, the photons of light that enter my eye were caused by something that existed in the past, and just because something existed in the past doesn't mean it still doesn't exist in my present.

Whilst the Indirect Realist is more of the position that I see the photons entering my eye which I can then reason to have been caused by something in the past, the Direct Realist is more of the position that they are immediately and directly seeing the external world as it really is.

Yet how can the Direct Realist be immediately and directly seeing the external world as it really is when there is no guarantee that what they are seeing still exists?

I was under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that the direct realist believes he views the external world directly, while the indirect realist views the external world via some internal or mental construction.

Your distinction seems to me to be one without a difference because photons are of the external world, and if so, one is immediately and directly perceiving the external world. And the qualifier “as it really is” doesn’t much pertain to direct realism in the same way as the phrase “as it really isn’t” might pertain to indirect realism.

However, if we're going to amend these accounts of words to incorporate useful delineations, then we 'perceive' directly the representations which we are 'seeing' indirectly, as a result of 'looking at' a object. This seems to cover all three positions presented, and doesn't disturb the empirical facts. An Indirect Realist would see themselves in this, as would a Direct Realist in the way Banno is putting forward that 'seeing' is, in fact, an indirect activity of hte mind regarding an object, and no of an object. I'm quite happy with this, personally, pending any substantial problems being pointed out.

Where does the perceiver end and the mediator begin, in your analysis? In my thinking the perceiver and your mediator, the visual system, are one and the same. Essentially this means there is no mediator. It’s all perceiver.

Ok, so since Hitler never murdered anyone, and wasn't even in the room when anyone was murdered, he cannot be a criminal. All he did was speak words. If we cannot ever make speech illegal, because speech has no power to cause harm, than leaders are rarely if ever war criminals.

It's that or we do make some speech illegal, like giving orders to carry out war crimes, while simultaneously maintaining that speech can never cause war crimes to be carried out. Thus, in one breath we declare the harmlessness of the crime, it's absolute inability to have led to any deaths, and with the other we condemn for speaking then.

He led the Nazi party, which is responsible for millions of murders and war crimes. One doesn’t need to believe speech causes harm and pushes people to do things in order to believe this.

Tell me, when a plant grows, is it the rain that causes the growth, or the sun? When a solar panel charges an RV, is it the sun's light that causes the charging, or the person who put the solar panel out, or the solar panel itself?

I'm curious, can a dog's master calling its name cause a dog to come to him? Or are animals also causally uneffected by words?

If you're unable consider that events have multiple causal elements, or to distinguish between necessary and sufficient causes, you're going to end up with an extremely confused concept of causation.

I’m curious: since the rooster crows before the sun comes out, does the rooster cause the sun to come out?

Is a dog’s master calling his name responsible for if dog runs away? Is the leader who orders a soldier to kill an enemy the cause of him refusing?

Relationships and correlations and the fact that one event occurs before another is not enough to show causation.

I can't help your confusion here. It seems like it should be obvious that doing the same thing to different objects doesn't result in the same effects. Are you equally confused by how you can throw the same baseball (cause) at both a wall and a window and only the window responds by breaking? Why does the same cause have disparate effects?

But you seem to be saying that for words to play any causal role in people's actions the same words should have the same effect on all people. This is like stating that a baseball, if it breaks a window, should shatter everything it is thrown at. Different objects respond to the same causes in different ways.

No, I’m not confused much about the physics. What I am confused about is your suggestion that you can move larger objects with words, like human beings and dogs, but cannot even make a leaf or feather tremble under the might of your voice.

So why don’t we just test your theory? We’re already half way there. You’ve caused my eyes to read your words. You’ve caused me to consider your arguments and I guess you’ve caused me to disagree.. So let’s see it through. We can name any act you think you are able to make me perform and through the power of your words you can make me perform it. Go make me do something silly. Let’s have some fun with it.

The indirect Realist directly perceives something in their field of vision, which they can reason to be the planet Mars. The word "sense data" should be taken as a figure of speech, not literally, in that no-one has ever found sense data in the brain. As the word "house" is a representation of an object in the world, the dot is a representation of the planet Mars.

I suppose my confusion lies in whether the “representation” is a product of the perceiver or the percieved. Are we viewing mars indirectly via the light or indirectly via some construction of our visual system?

Ok, then if you accept the rest, you accept that we sometimes do things with words?

I did something with a keyboard. I can watch myself do this. Rather, you did something with the words. You read them. This appears to be the only thing we’re doing with words.

The Indirect Realist says that they directly perceive a dot in the sky. The Direct Realist says that what they directly perceive is the cause of the dot.

I’ve always understood the indirect realist to say they directly perceive sense-data, representations, perceptions and the like.

The “directness” of perception refers to the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived. The contact between the perceiver and the perceived is direct, meaning, not indirect: the perceiver literally collides with the perceived, with no intermediary between them.

When we look at the night sky we never just see a dot. So in a way isolating a single object in the way the question proposes is impossible. We perceive the entirety of our periphery, including the information provided by our other senses. And it is only through this direct contact with the perceived that we are able to see Mars, with the light bouncing off it to directly touch our eyes.

Here it is again, set out so the actor is clear:

NOS4A2 pressed buttons on a keyboard (if that is what you indeed did)
NOS4A2 made marks on a screen
NOS4A2 made a sequence of letters
NOS4A2 wrote "Any advice?"
NOS4A2 asked a question
NOS4A2 asked for advice
NOS4A2 elicited responses from Banno and others

NOS4A2 did things with words.

Which of these is false?

I would argue against the last one because I performed no action worthy of the verb, and no one in particular was the direct object of my act. I simply put it out there. Your response and the response of others are the direct result of “listening acts”, your reading and so on. As for the rest, none of them are false.

I took some time away from reading the thread to illustrate how your act “elicit” has become separated from you. You elicited an answer days ago but your “force” never had any effect, intended or otherwise, until days later, when it would finally spring into action. A perlocution of this sort could occur over a millennia.

But if I were to film myself responding to your question, and if we were to observe this film rather than sifting through the actor’s byproducts, I think we’d have to admit that I was just plunking away on the keyboard. The other acts you describe become visible only when we analyze the text, and by then we are no longer observing the actor.

Saying that John smells smoke doesn't explain what it means for John to smell smoke.

John will perform the act of smelling and report that he does indeed smell it. We can watch smoke go into John’s nose. What more do we need?

And yet I see and talk about Joe Biden without ever being anywhere near him. The point I am making is that this supposed connection between what I see (and talk about) and the (meta)physics/epistemology of perception is a false one. You're getting stuck on an irrelevancy.

You see a television and the lights through which the imagery is displayed. You are near the television. In fact you must be near enough in order to see it. So really, all we need is a more accurate description.

Pain is very real. I don't know what else to say. You're lucky if you've never felt it.

I’ve had enough injuries to know what you’re talking about, and have no problem with people using that language to articulate what they feel. But if we are to describe what is there, metaphysically-speaking, something called “pain” just isn’t. For one, it isn’t a person, place, or thing, and so isn’t necessarily worthy of a noun-phrase. Two, what it is you are feeling (perhaps a broken bone) might be better described in terms of the actual things involved.

I think the question isn't clear. What does it mean to say that I smell some X?

A subject (you) smells some direct object (smoke, for instance).

When I see Joe Biden on TV I am seeing Joe Biden on TV, and the term "Joe Biden" refers to the man who is the President of the United States.

I don't see how this addresses the (meta)physics or epistemology of perception.

The word refers to an external object. If you were to point at that object you would never point internally. The direction towards which your eyes face, in combination with measurable distance between you and that object, never reveal that any of it is internal, and in fact prove the opposite.

We might disagree over whether or not pain is a physical or non-physical thing, but whatever it is it is real and we feel it, so I don't see how this amounts to folk psychology.

Perhaps physicalism is correct and that pain is reducible to the firing of C-fibres. It still entails that pain isn't a property of the external world object (e.g. fire) that is causally responsible for the firing of those C-fibres. The indirect realist will say the same about tastes and smells and sounds and colours. They're reducible to some bodily function (whether it be in the brain or in the eyes), not to some property of external world objects.

Pain is neither a thing nor a property. It is a noun, sure, but it is without a referent. It is folk biology because the exact situation and condition of the body right down to the cellular level isn’t immediately apparent.

Wording aside, the general idea is that when I put my hand in the fire the pain I feel isn't a property of some external world object but a mental phenomenon caused brain activity (and in turn caused by the nerves in my hand). The same principle holds with tastes and smells and sounds and visual imagery.

Many read far too much into the particulars of English grammar. The fact that we say "I feel pain" and the fact that pain is a feeling and the fact that a simple substitution gives us the non-standard "I feel a feeling" has no philosophical relevance at all. The same for tasting and smelling and hearing and seeing.

The ordinary way of speaking and the (meta)physics/epistemology of perception are two very different things.

I agree with a lot of what you said there about the over-concern with the language. But what it is one is seeing, and what object in the world that noun ought to refer too, is important and relevant; and if the indirect realist is unable to state what that is, then the ideas are immediately lacking.

A term like “pain” is a sort of folk biology. Maybe one feels a pinched nerve or some other malady that would reveal itself upon closer examination. If true, the latter ought to supersede the former as a more accurate accounting of reality.

“Directly acquainted with perceptions” seems a roundabout way of saying we perceive perceptions, which is to assume the initial point. We cannot perceive perceptions any more than we can see sight or observe observations.

I have not expressed a "doctrine." I have expressed what follows from your claim that "words cannot cause people to act."

This is not an either/or distinction, either the person who pulls the trigger is responsible for the executions OR the person who ordered them is. You can have an account where both are culpable and culpable in varrying degrees, and such an account seems eminently reasonable here. We should not be forced into claiming that either Hitler is a war criminal or the SS officer who butchered Jewish civilians is, but not both. Both can be war criminals in virtue of the same atrocity, just as no individual player/coach is ever responsible for winning a basketball game.

The doctrine I am speaking about is your defense that words are responsible for a person’s actions. If the words are responsible, how can the officer be responsible? If the words cause him to act, how can he be responsible for acting?

It is either/or. Either the words caused him to act or they didn’t.

And biology isn't consistent with physics?

It is. It’s just that the body is not a Rube Goldberg machine.

The point you raised before about different people responding different ways to words doesn't demonstrate that "words have no influence on behavior."

Now we’ve moved from “cause” to “influence”. I’ve called into question the word “influence” in the original post and I must request that we avoid using it (and its various synonyms) because of its figurative upbringing and the action at a distance it implies.

Why should we expect that they all respond to words in identical fashion?

We shouldn’t. They are different people. The question is, given the doctrine that words are responsible for a person’s actions, why would they respond so differently to the same cause, the words? Did the word come at their ear drums of at a different angle?

Yes, it would eliminate determinism. Free will and determinism are not binaries. An absence of determinism does not imply the presence of free will. Where is free will in a random universe?

Further, causes that are based on nothing, the spring spontaneously into being, are arbitrary and random. If our actions are arbitrary and random, they are not "ours" and so we lack free will. Certainly, our bodies act non-deterministically, but it cannot be we who determine what they do if the causes of our actions depend on nothing that exists before the act occurs.

The causes are not based on nothing, but on the being itself. If the genesis of an act begins in the actor it implies the presence of free will for the simple reason that the actor determines his own actions and nothing else does. Moreover. if he determines his own actions they are not arbitrary, but rather, they are the acts of a highly-evolved organism, many of them decided without him even noticing, even at the cellular level.

The mechanical act is not identical because the act of writing B takes longer than writing A. More letters and punctuation is used.

It’s becoming more and more clear that people are searching for acts in the text and not in the actor. Philosophy of language in a nutshell: the philosopher drifts from a clear and plain view of the human being into the muddled pursuit of sifting through his expressions.

So how do people learn what their jobs entail or what their superiors want them to do?

People communicate with each other. If you’ve learned a language you can understand the language and words coming out of someone’s mouth. What causes you to hear words? the words or your ears? What causes you to understand the language, a lifetime of learning and understanding the language or the words?

The whole, "words cannot play a causal role in other's actions," bit would imply that most war criminals are completely innocent. After all, most high Soviet and Nazi officials never shot a single person. In general, they weren't even speaking to the people who actually carried out the atrocities. They told a subordinate, "liquidate all the Polish officers in the camps," and that person told someone else, who commanded a fourth person to carry out the executions.

There is definitely a dilemma there. But I think it's the other way about. Many war criminals have used your defense, for instance at the Nuremberg trials, that they were just following orders. They weren’t partners to the crime, they were subordinate to the words of another, and therefor innocent. Your doctrine implies people can get away with war crimes, and in fact it was used as such a defense numerous times.

You could just say the superiors were guilty for what they had done, which was ordering the liquidation of all Polish officers at the camp. I’m not sure the fact they didn’t pull the trigger makes the organization of mass murder any less of a crime.

Would you agree that sound waves propagate deterministically such that one part in the process can be said to cause later ones?

Yes.

Does the skin of the ear drum vibrate deterministically in accordance with the laws of classical physics that predict the behavior of classical scale objects?

it does, as far as I know.

But if these all function deterministically, with a clear causal chain, where in "the brain," does determinism stop? If it doesn't stop, if the brain responds deterministically like the rest of the physical world, if it is not a sui generis substance, then it would seem that causal chains can absolutely be traced from sound waves to actions.

Not sui generis, but causa sui. Once the soundwave hits the ear the chain is over. That's when the biology takes over. Whatever energy is left over is fully under the direction and operation of the biology, and the biology is the sole determining factor in the entire interaction. The energy doesn't direct the body, or determine its motions; the body directs the energy, determines what happens to it. The body converts the wave into mechanical energy, eventually transducing them into electrical energy, and so on. The structures, the processes, the movements, the manipulation of the energy into various forms, are causa sui, all fully determined by the body and nothing besides. The biology and the scope of its operations has been fine-tuned to perform these tasks over millions of years of evolution. We can't just throw it aside and say it provides no determining factor in the lifespan of a soundwave.

Further, the genesis of human action, if it springs into existence inside the brain with no reference to prior physical states, would seem to eliminate the possibility of free will. After all, if the genesis of human action is determined by nothing that exists prior to that genesis, then it can have nothing to do with who we are, our memories, preferences, desires, etc., since those pre-exist our actions.

The opposite is the case. If an action is self-caused it would eliminate the possibility of determinism because the genesis of an action cannot be shown to begin elsewhere.

I agree entirely, and add that the where and when of the illocutionary act is the same as the where and when of the locution: In your having written "Any advice?" you performed both a locution and an illocution; which is to claim no more than that you both wrote a sentence and you asked a question.

I performed one visible act, did one measurable thing, but you saw two visible acts, or me doing two visible things. So did I really perform two acts, or are you describing the same act in two different ways?

If I were to record myself writing I would see one act. I can point to it, witness it again and again. I am unable to see two.

Yes, you did, and continue to elicit replies by your responses. I would not have posted this, had you not posted that.

I can’t say I made any such action. I wrote the thread, you showed up. And when you finally abort the discussion no amount of eliciting will bring you back. I suppose I can understand the logic—before this therefor because of this—but I just cannot see it. I mean, we can even test it: elicit me to do something.

At best these kinds of verbs are metaphorical and they don’t much give an accurate description of what is occurring.

...which involves both making marks and asking a question. Again, the issue is that asking a question is different to making a mark, and this difference is well worth marking, and hence the terms locution and illocution.

How is it different?

So the genesis — begining — of the process that ends up with the bank teller giving the robber the money begins with the teller, not the robber? This seems implausible on the face of it if the teller would never have given the robber the money but for being threatened.

That’s right, because the teller could also do otherwise. The teller could also not give the money, trip the alarm, run away, or perform any number of other acts. How does your chain of causation account for this if all subsequent actions are determined by the threat?

How does your chain of causation skip between human beings, even while they are from a distance from one another? Does the light bouncing from the weapon hit the retina, leading to a predetermined chain of causation throughout her biology until it ends in her handing over the money?

Your account sounds implausible on basic physical and biological grounds.

According to your own statements this is impossible. The state can never be responsible for anything. With what arms does the state beat a protestor? How can a state tie anyone to a stake?

If all actions have their begining and end with the individual agent as you say, it is impossible for a state to be responsible for any such actions. Individual executioners might kill, but not states. Laws might mandate death, but they are words and thus cannot cause any human action. Thus, even if we allow that some forms of censorship are bad, laws mandating execution for speaking of certain things can only be neutral as they can never cause anyone to die. Plus, to preclude such laws from being proclaimed would itself be a form of censorship, which is never justifiable because words can never cause anything.

The state is composed of and run by individuals. So it’s not impossible. And those that censor according to law do so because they believe in the law and seek to enforce it. One can be confident that they will enforce it because they are employed to do so, not because the words and laws are running things in their brains.

And one needn’t evoke action at a distance or magical thinking to account for this. No one needs to pretend that a law can force someone to abide by it simply because they read it. According to your reasoning, writing the law should be enough. So long as the law is “don’t fight each other” we’ll have world peace.

It doesn't seem that, by your reasoning, a state even can issue threats. Only people issue threats, right? With what mouth would a state proclaim threats? With what hands might it write them?

Nor can states wage war. Only individuals wage war right? And all the causes of individuals waging war begin and end with the individual. Very strange then that they should all come to begin waging war at once though. One might wonder, from whence comes this coordination?

In any event, it seems we must allow that if the managers of any state want to pass a law proclaiming that all schools shall teach the supremacy of the Aryan race and the need to subjugate or destroy all other peoples, they should be allowed to do so. After all, such laws cannot cause anything to be taught or not taught by teachers, and to preclude such laws from being promulgated would be to "steal" them from their audience and posterity.

Why would you allow them to do so? It’s such a weird non-sequitur. Of course any objection or dissent wouldn’t matter according to your reasoning. Everyone would follow along because they received their instructions. The chain of causation has begun and the end is predetermined.

You might want to consider how sound waves propagate. As it stands, your reasoning seems absolutely riddled with contradictions.

I did in the opening post. “The actual physical and biological effects, such as a sound vibration hitting the cochlea and its subsequent movements throughout the anatomy, do not match the presumed effects, like the incitement of a behavior or emotion. Moreover, the presumed effects vary wildly according to who listens to the words and rarely (if ever) according to what is said.”

Your account is chalked full of magical thinking, I’m afraid. It’s tantamount to sorcery. But given your special powers can’t you just make me agree with the force of your words?

If agent's actions were actually determined by "nothing outside the agent," then it should be the case that agent's actions have no relation to the world. You seem to be engaged in a strange sort of variation of Ryle's Regress.

The agent can affect the world and be affected by the world by virtue of him being embedded within it. But the genesis of all his acts occur within him.

Why is sharing words a human right?

It’s how we communicate with one another. We converse to survive, to mate, to live and to enjoy living. It’s a necessary part of the human condition. But as mentioned censorship is a double violation. Not only do you deny the speaker’s right to speak but also everyone else’s right to hear it.

We respond to threats because survival may depend on it. Evolution has gifted us the ability to fear threats, and rightfully so. So while the state is not responsible for my taking their threat seriously (or not), it is responsible for the threats, for letting us know it will punish us should it not like what we say, and any subsequent acts it makes towards those ends.

You may not see this as a problem until you end up burning at the stake. You can be forgiven for not speaking because someone threatened you, but the state cannot be forgiven for issuing these threats.

The rest about being shot and tortured does not apply because no one shoots or tortures another with words. Kinetic force is not in doubt here.