I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
I think if white nationalism was spreading culturally, the president's approval ratings would be going up, but really they're holding steady around ~40%.
While the right has been trying to create a parallel system of education to the public school system and liberal university system, its a big fat joke still. Like, I'm not sure how much of the right's "culture war" is serious or grifting people. It mostly seems like right winger pundits scamming people out of their money, and Trump is the biggest grifter of them all.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
Sure, the quest for progress goes on and on. This is the way of the universe, I’m down with that.
But perspective is necessary, if only to avoid flipping your shit and ruining the things you built unnecessarily. The rhetoric used here is scarily close to the sort of thing I used to hear post 9-11. When people are scared and angry they do stupid things, like stripping themselves of their own speech protections because a relatively small group of malcontents raised some hell.
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
Sure, the quest for progress goes on and on. This is the way of the universe, I’m down with that.
But perspective is necessary, if only to avoid flipping your shit and ruining the things you built unnecessarily. The rhetoric used here is scarily close to the sort of thing I used to hear post 9-11. When people are scared and angry they do stupid things, like stripping themselves of their own speech protections because a relatively small group of malcontents raised some hell.
It's really not that hard for rational, ethical people to make a narrow set of laws and reasonable consequences for baseline standards. Something like:
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of rape in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of murder in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of slavery in violation of federal law
Note that this means that advocating for a change of the definition of any of these is not part of it, but only advocating to break the law itself, as could be enshrined in legalese. So if someone goes and defines abortion as murder you can still advocate to change that definition, you just can't say "while this is still illegal go ahead and do it anyway" without consequence.
And then you use actually sane consequences.
+2
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MeeqeLord of the pants most fancySomeplace amazingRegistered Userregular
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
“Maybe we should bar the promotion of genocidal ideologies that are, again, implicitly founded on committing forms of genocide to enshrine a pure white ethnostate.”
“Why do you want to tear down the bedrock of Enlightenment Liberalism”
This seems to be the thing that keeps happening and it is infuriating.
We can prohibit genocidal ideologies without becoming fascist hellscapes. Improving things is possible!
I am utterly baffled at how somehow the operating fear here is “yes but what about the slippery slope” instead of the literal movement that is actively killing people.
Lanz on
+15
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VariableMouth CongressStroke Me Lady FameRegistered Userregular
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
I think if white nationalism was spreading culturally, the president's approval ratings would be going up, but really they're holding steady around ~40%.
While the right has been trying to create a parallel system of education to the public school system and liberal university system, its a big fat joke still. Like, I'm not sure how much of the right's "culture war" is serious or grifting people. It mostly seems like right winger pundits scamming people out of their money, and Trump is the biggest grifter of them all.
the things that are accepted by placing yourself in that 40% have arguably expanded, though, to more and more blatantly include racism, xenophobia, etc.
in the beginning people tried to cutely deny that he meant the things he was saying. now he's doing them.
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
I think if white nationalism was spreading culturally, the president's approval ratings would be going up, but really they're holding steady around ~40%.
While the right has been trying to create a parallel system of education to the public school system and liberal university system, its a big fat joke still. Like, I'm not sure how much of the right's "culture war" is serious or grifting people. It mostly seems like right winger pundits scamming people out of their money, and Trump is the biggest grifter of them all.
the things that are accepted by placing yourself in that 40% have arguably expanded, though, to more and more blatantly include racism, xenophobia, etc.
in the beginning people tried to cutely deny that he meant the things he was saying. now he's doing them.
Yep.
We have an entire thread devoted to how this administration is pursuing a white supremacist-driven immigration system, complete with what amount to camps on the border where we’re stuffing anyone who might be “an illegal.”
But somehow white supremacist speech isn’t a problem and doesn’t lead to a festering rot of the soul of the country
Lanz on
+2
Options
VariableMouth CongressStroke Me Lady FameRegistered Userregular
I just want to remind people that want to have a positive outlook - which I do respect - that the people that say they're fighting for freedom of speech, aren't. the president that supposedly signed an executive order to I guess reinforce the very first amendment, that's not really why he did that.
so if what liberals are saying scares you but what conservatives are saying doesn't, you're trusting the wrong people. if it all scares you well, I understand. I don't really want to government silencing political speech and I don't really love platforms doing it either, I think we need to be careful to separate 'stances we take to show conservatives/fascists how inconsistent their supposed worldview is' and 'stances we actually want to take' (ie, it's great to say youtube can ban speech it doesn't like when you're talking to someone that thinks a bakery shouldn't have to serve a gay customer, but is that actually how we want to go about solving this? giving google the keys to the kingdom?)
(in case it's not clear, I don't have anything approaching an answer, just thoughts on how to think about this issue as it's been everpresent of late)
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
I think if white nationalism was spreading culturally, the president's approval ratings would be going up, but really they're holding steady around ~40%.
While the right has been trying to create a parallel system of education to the public school system and liberal university system, its a big fat joke still. Like, I'm not sure how much of the right's "culture war" is serious or grifting people. It mostly seems like right winger pundits scamming people out of their money, and Trump is the biggest grifter of them all.
the things that are accepted by placing yourself in that 40% have arguably expanded, though, to more and more blatantly include racism, xenophobia, etc.
in the beginning people tried to cutely deny that he meant the things he was saying. now he's doing them.
Yep.
We have an entire thread devoted to how this administration is pursuing a white supremacist-driven immigration system, complete with what amount to camps on the border where we’re stuffing anyone who might be “an illegal.”
But somehow white supremacist speech isn’t a problem and doesn’t lead to a festering rot of the soul of the country
We already knew that they were voting Republican for racist reasons since the Southern Strategy. They've had these attitudes all along, and everyone knew it. We played along for the sake of civility in a post-MLK world.
Now Trump made them break that civility, but it doesn't seem to be spreading out of the racist core of the GOP. They've alienated everyone who thought the GOP had principles and left themselves with only the racists. They've had their moment and they've fizzled.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
While this is true, most Western hate speech laws involve weak sanctions and have spotty enforcement. It's also true that the ones which are narrowly drawn get used infrequently, while the ones that are more broadly drawn do get used more often--but also more often to spotty or ill effect (eg as in France where BDS has been prosecuted as hate speech).
They have not caused a collapse that into fascism, but they also haven't cured intolerance... partially because they just haven't done that much at all. And where they do actually get used, the record is at least mixed.
+5
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited March 2019
Also: I find that Popper quote annoying, and like it even less when it is presented as if "the Paradox of Tolerance" was something approaching a proof, as opposed to an offhand political argument made by a figure primarily famous as a philosopher of science.
The claim that there are conceivable circumstances where we could be justified in restricting the freedom of ideas when social collapse is otherwise imminent is not particularly interesting or controversial. All the interesting and controversial questions concern when and how you would recognize that those conditions actually hold and then how precisely you would respond to them.
In the United States, the main people pushing expansive "paradox of tolerance" style arguments were politicians seeking to criminalize the Communist Party. The Smith act (1940) made it illegal to organize attempts to overthrow of the government, and this was initially taken to apply to Communist Party membership in and of itself. In Dennis v. United States (1951) eleven prominent CPUSA figures were convicted on these grounds. The evidence presented was not that they had formed any particular plot, or that they were trying to, but on the inherently violent and anti-governmental elements of Communist political thought, as attested to by the Communist manifesto and other philosophical and political documents.
Dissenting, Black writes:
These petitioners were not charged with an attempt to overthrow the Government. They were not charged with overt acts of any kind designed to overthrow the Government. They were not even charged with saying anything or writing anything designed to overthrow the Government. The charge was that they agreed to assemble and to talk and publish certain ideas at a later date: The indictment is that they conspired to organize the Communist Party and to use speech or newspapers and other publications in the future to teach and advocate the forcible overthrow of the Government. No matter how it is worded, this is a virulent form of prior censorship of speech and press, which I believe the First Amendment forbids. I would hold 3 of the Smith Act authorizing this prior restraint unconstitutional on its face and as applied....
Dennis was not overturned, but later in Yates (1957) the Court changed course and the Smith act was sharply limited by the decision to distinguish between the academic teaching of a mere belief that the government should be overthrown versus actually organizing for the overthrow of the government, and holding that the former was still protected. There weren't further high profile prosecutions, and the government nonetheless managed to avoid overthrow by communist revolutionaries (even though professors got to wax philosophical to undergraduates about the classless society). Popper's Paradox of Tolerance (1945) did not do a particularly good job of anticipating events as they were about to unfold.
Oh well.
(On a related note, I just finished watching Wild, Wild Country last week, and it is remarkable how the Rajneeshees had the law on their side in a remarkable number of cases, but how little that mattered when their local community and politicians all the way up and down the ladder were closedminded reactionary bigots who were out to get them. And surely this is generally true--it can be harder to effectuate your rights in practice, when you are a despised minority. But despite this general pattern, the claim from earlier in this thread, and from many others, that free speech rights are ~for the powerful, to prey on the weak~ strikes me as simply ignorant of American history. No one more powerful than some blacklisted commies or a bunch of high school kids protesting the war.)
"We should treat movement preaching intolerance and incitement to action on that intolerance as we do the incitement to murder or attempts at kidnapping."
To
"Why do you want to make the intolerant second-class citizens or worse?"
Like
Literal Nazis! Literal Goddamn Goose Stepping Third Reichening Adolf Adoring Nazis are back as a political force. They are literally forming an international movement and guising it under every bullshit term they can think of, while their membership is literally going around murdering and plotting to murder anyone who isn't goddamn white.
At what point have we not literally found ourselves facing the very thing Popper wrote about during the goddamn Second World War?
The US government is fundamentally incompatible with that philosophy. This goes beyond making a new amendment - the principles of the constitution must be revamped.
The first amendment comes before all other amendments, even the 14th amendment of equality. Think about what that means.
I'm going to put this as nicely as I can manage: you have no idea what you're talking about. The order of amendments is very strictly last one wins if they conflict. The 1st doesn't have a special spot.
Also someone needs to ask: In what way are Amendments 1 and 14 in opposition such that the first triumphs over the other?
"No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The paradox of tolerance demonstrates a situation where a group is denied equal protection under the law. We presume this is due to exercise of the first amendment.
Yet the supreme court continues to strike down hate speech laws repeatedly. Go figure.
Except that they're not being denied the equal protection of the law - everyone is just as restricted about spreading hate. And yes, such "ministerial" laws do, in fact, past muster - for example, public colleges are allowed to enforce rules that require officially recognized student organizations to open their membership to all students as they are receiving funding from the student body as a whole.
I didn't explain it very well, but I was saying that popper's scenario demonstrates a violation of the 14th amendment by exercise of the first amendment, and the supreme court is ok with this happening, showing their priorities.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Also: I find that Popper quote annoying, and like it even less when it is presented as if "the Paradox of Tolerance" was something approaching a proof, as opposed to an offhand political argument made by a figure primarily who is primarily famous as a philosopher of science.
The claim that there are conceivable circumstances where we could be justified in restricting the freedom of ideas when social collapse is otherwise imminent is not particularly interesting or controversial. All the interesting and controversial questions concern when and how you would recognize that those conditions actually hold and then how precisely you would respond to them.
In the United States, the main people pushing expansive "paradox of tolerance" style arguments were politicians seeking to criminalize the Communist Party. The Smith act (1940) made it illegal to organize attempts to overthrow of the government, and this was initially taken to apply to Communist Party membership in and of itself. In Dennis v. United States (1951) eleven prominent CPUSA figures were convicted on these grounds. The evidence presented was not that they had formed any particular plot, or that they were trying to, but on the inherently violent and anti-governmental elements of Communist political thought, as attested to by the Communist manifesto and other philosophical and political documents.
Dissenting, Black writes:
These petitioners were not charged with an attempt to overthrow the Government. They were not charged with overt acts of any kind designed to overthrow the Government. They were not even charged with saying anything or writing anything designed to overthrow the Government. The charge was that they agreed to assemble and to talk and publish certain ideas at a later date: The indictment is that they conspired to organize the Communist Party and to use speech or newspapers and other publications in the future to teach and advocate the forcible overthrow of the Government. No matter how it is worded, this is a virulent form of prior censorship of speech and press, which I believe the First Amendment forbids. I would hold 3 of the Smith Act authorizing this prior restraint unconstitutional on its face and as applied....
Dennis was not overturned, but later in Yates (1957) the Court changed course and the Smith act was sharply limited by the decision to distinguish between the academic teaching of a mere belief that the government should be overthrown versus actually organizing for the overthrow of the government, and holding that the former was still protected. There weren't further high profile prosecutions, and the government nonetheless managed to avoid overthrow by communist revolutionaries (even though professors got to wax philosophical to undergraduates about the classless society). Popper's Paradox of Tolerance (1945) did not do a particularly good job of anticipating events as they were about to unfold.
Oh well.
(On a related note, I just finished watching Wild, Wild Country last week, and it is remarkable how the Rajneeshees had the law on their side in a remarkable number of cases, but how little that mattered when their local community and politicians all the way up and down the ladder were closedminded reactionary bigots who were out to get them. And surely this is generally true--it can be harder to effectuate your rights in practice, when you are a despised minority. But despite this general pattern, the claim from earlier in this thread, and from many others, that free speech rights are ~for the powerful, to prey on the weak~ strikes me as simply ignorant of American history. No one more powerful than some blacklisted commies or a bunch of high school kids protesting the war.)
The question really is (and I’m not talking about anyone in here mind) how much of censorship hitting the far left is a feature and how much is a bug.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
doesn't have the same kind of impact when the reply is
"Thanks! Now, when we're done encouraging vulnerable, angry white youth to mass murder this particular group, we'll move on to the next one on our list of hate!"
The argument kind of jumps from hate speech to the general removal of civil rights from the intolerant. The focus is on making them criminals so they can be completely removed from society. Hate speech laws deter behavior. This kind of goes further, putting these offenders in a different class from the rest of society.
Everyone is in the same class. The class that doesn't get to use their freedoms as a weapon to demolish those freedoms.
That is the real paradox, since members of such a class cannot enforce this restriction.
Only if you believe that "slightly restrict" and "demolish" are synonyms with regard to freedom. I do not.
(On a related note, I just finished watching Wild, Wild Country last week, and it is remarkable how the Rajneeshees had the law on their side in a remarkable number of cases, but how little that mattered when their local community and politicians all the way up and down the ladder were closedminded reactionary bigots who were out to get them. And surely this is generally true--it can be harder to effectuate your rights in practice, when you are a despised minority. But despite this general pattern, the claim from earlier in this thread, and from many others, that free speech rights are ~for the powerful, to prey on the weak~ strikes me as simply ignorant of American history. No one more powerful than some blacklisted commies or a bunch of high school kids protesting the war.)
Those are edge cases that make for some interesting moments that we put on the brochure, but they don't reflect the everyday life of our history.
Ask yourself throughout the 300 years of American history, how much freedom did a wife have to criticize her husband? A slave to criticize his master? A queer person to proclaim their love openly?
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
Did you know that anti-nazi laws have caused videos from the youtube series contrapoints to be banned?
Hate speech laws are misused all the fucking time. Such as when France tries to ban the hateful act of being a Muslim woman in public.
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
Did you know that anti-nazi laws have caused videos from the youtube series contrapoints to be banned?
Hate speech laws are misused all the fucking time. Such as when France tries to ban the hateful act of being a Muslim woman in public.
Yes, badly designed regulation or regulations handled badly are bad. But this doesn't invalidate the idea of regulation.
“Maybe we should bar the promotion of genocidal ideologies that are, again, implicitly founded on committing forms of genocide to enshrine a pure white ethnostate.”
“Why do you want to tear down the bedrock of Enlightenment Liberalism”
This seems to be the thing that keeps happening and it is infuriating.
We can prohibit genocidal ideologies without becoming fascist hellscapes. Improving things is possible!
I am utterly baffled at how somehow the operating fear here is “yes but what about the slippery slope” instead of the literal movement that is actively killing people.
cue banning the nation of islam, disappearing Malcom X's works into the memory hole...
we've already made significant strides without broad censorship, why don't we just continue to do the things that worked for us in the past? Weapons given to the govt to silence speech will be used to silence speech - including the kind you like.
other nations of the world where hate speech laws "work" do suffer reduced freedom and also are generally less heterogeneous than the US as well - to the extent they work, it's a reflection of their homogeneous racial/ethnic culture, not their allegedly successful hate speech laws.
Plus they don't work anyway. Plenty of racism in Canada, plenty of fascism in France, plenty of anti-lgbt rhetoric in the UK...
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
Sure, the quest for progress goes on and on. This is the way of the universe, I’m down with that.
But perspective is necessary, if only to avoid flipping your shit and ruining the things you built unnecessarily. The rhetoric used here is scarily close to the sort of thing I used to hear post 9-11. When people are scared and angry they do stupid things, like stripping themselves of their own speech protections because a relatively small group of malcontents raised some hell.
It's really not that hard for rational, ethical people to make a narrow set of laws and reasonable consequences for baseline standards. Something like:
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of rape in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of murder in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of slavery in violation of federal law
Note that this means that advocating for a change of the definition of any of these is not part of it, but only advocating to break the law itself, as could be enshrined in legalese. So if someone goes and defines abortion as murder you can still advocate to change that definition, you just can't say "while this is still illegal go ahead and do it anyway" without consequence.
And then you use actually sane consequences.
A few thoughts!
How does this deal with humor and/or satire? I know the standard response on these forums is that humor is used as a shielding device, and that is certainly true, but dark humor is a thing and it's no crime to have a bad sense of humor either. At least, not currently. Look at the UK and the "Nazi Pug" incident as an example. I don't like the guy at all but his situation is totally fucked and a massive government overreach, and the joke was hilarious. Edgy, to use a word no one loves anymore, but funny. And I'm dubious of how you craft a speech law to get around "it's just a joke, bro". At least, in such a way that doesn't trample on speech.
Which brings to the next point, which is that the speech I see complained about the most here is the notorious dogwhistle. In any set of narrowly defined speech laws that would have to remain, no? I don't see a way to narrowly define speech laws that allow extrapolation of meaning in such a way.
With that in mind, what do we gain from this? You can't stop people dogwhistling and any clause seeking to deal with humor is going to be a massive overreach, so that's out too. So now we've overthrown several centuries of tradition and messed with our speech laws--that taboo is broken, setting the precedent for going back in to change more later--and for what?
(On a related note, I just finished watching Wild, Wild Country last week, and it is remarkable how the Rajneeshees had the law on their side in a remarkable number of cases, but how little that mattered when their local community and politicians all the way up and down the ladder were closedminded reactionary bigots who were out to get them. And surely this is generally true--it can be harder to effectuate your rights in practice, when you are a despised minority. But despite this general pattern, the claim from earlier in this thread, and from many others, that free speech rights are ~for the powerful, to prey on the weak~ strikes me as simply ignorant of American history. No one more powerful than some blacklisted commies or a bunch of high school kids protesting the war.)
Those are edge cases that make for some interesting moments that we put on the brochure, but they don't reflect the everyday life of our history.
Ask yourself throughout the 300 years of American history, how much freedom did a wife have to criticize her husband? A slave to criticize his master? A queer person to proclaim their love openly?
Think of where we are now, though. Queers can proclaim their love openly. Women's rights have come a tremendous distance and you have left-wing politicians talking about slavery reparations.
Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee things will be perfect. What it does is gives a society an opportunity to improve itself. Which we have done, and continue to do.
For America we need to word hate speech laws carefully so that the next time a Trump takes power he doesn't start throwing the media in cells, we have lots of good models to copy so I dont see it as an insurmountable challenge
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
And a lot of them enacted anti gun policies that werent naked attempts at disarming vulnerable populations, but we sure went there.
Any argument for hate speech laws has to reckon with who holds power in this country. Even the "good guys" seem perfectly willing to support acton against BDS.
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
Did you know that anti-nazi laws have caused videos from the youtube series contrapoints to be banned?
Hate speech laws are misused all the fucking time. Such as when France tries to ban the hateful act of being a Muslim woman in public.
Yes, badly designed regulation or regulations handled badly are bad. But this doesn't invalidate the idea of regulation.
I think categorizing hate speech laws as just another regulation is unreasonable
+3
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
Did you know that anti-nazi laws have caused videos from the youtube series contrapoints to be banned?
Hate speech laws are misused all the fucking time. Such as when France tries to ban the hateful act of being a Muslim woman in public.
In this instance you fix the law, not abandon the concept of barring hate speech. Is it hard and will it take time? Yeah.
Remember what JFK said; "we choose to do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard." Granted he was talking about going to the moon and all, but still. Government is not an easy thing.
Obligatory Citation of the Paradox of Tolerance as a general good guideline to operate under when attempting to balance individual rights with maintaining a society that doesn't go off the rails and tries to get its Ethnonationalism on.
I think, and this is less about your post specifically as much as about the thread in general, that there's this leap in belief from "society should not be ok with X belief" to "and the government should take action against it" that I have a hard time abiding.
It seems to rely on, at the least, a belief that the government is a balls and strikes calling machine and all you need to do is plug in the right rule set. I entirely agree with the first premise, that there are beliefs that society should not tolerate, but the government is, at least as often as not, the promulgator of those beliefs. And not just the Republicans, though they're obviously far worse about it. Democrats would almost certainly use hate speech laws against Palestinian protesters. The party is still trying to get over its racist beliefs on policing.
Its on all of us as citizens to take action on a personal level. The solution to fascism and other repugnant ideologies is for the rest of us to personally make sure that the people who push those ideas are scared to be in public, not to give a murderous and toxic government the power to decide which ideologies are verboten.
Obligatory Citation of the Paradox of Tolerance as a general good guideline to operate under when attempting to balance individual rights with maintaining a society that doesn't go off the rails and tries to get its Ethnonationalism on.
I think, and this is less about your post specifically as much as about the thread in general, that there's this leap in belief from "society should not be ok with X belief" to "and the government should take action against it" that I have a hard time abiding.
It seems to rely on, at the least, a belief that the government is a balls and strikes calling machine and all you need to do is plug in the right rule set. I entirely agree with the first premise, that there are beliefs that society should not tolerate, but the government is, at least as often as not, the promulgator of those beliefs. And not just the Republicans, though they're obviously far worse about it. Democrats would almost certainly use hate speech laws against Palestinian protesters. The party is still trying to get over its racist beliefs on policing.
Its on all of us as citizens to take action on a personal level. The solution to fascism and other repugnant ideologies is for the rest of us to personally make sure that the people who push those ideas are scared to be in public, not to give a murderous and toxic government the power to decide which ideologies are verboten.
Why Shapiro gets boosted is evident, he's a millionaire/military industrial complex mouth piece. But why Spencer got so much attention on the first place?
+1
Options
MeeqeLord of the pants most fancySomeplace amazingRegistered Userregular
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
And a lot of them enacted anti gun policies that werent naked attempts at disarming vulnerable populations, but we sure went there.
Any argument for hate speech laws has to reckon with who holds power in this country. Even the "good guys" seem perfectly willing to support acton against BDS.
I don't disagree that these types of laws can be misued and have been in the past. I was pushing back against the framing that any limitation on speech immediately leads to totalitarianism, when that is demonstrably not the case.
Who does things and how are very relevant to this, I am very opposed to the recent EO Trump signed about stripping funding to colleges if they don't allow outsiders to come and threaten their minority students. I am very curious how this will play out on my campus this next quarter, the alt right shitheads are everywhere, even in good ole Bham Wa. The institution I'm attending has done a decent job of protecting their student body, I'm really afraid this is going to open the floodgates, ostensibly by expanding free speech.
Obligatory Citation of the Paradox of Tolerance as a general good guideline to operate under when attempting to balance individual rights with maintaining a society that doesn't go off the rails and tries to get its Ethnonationalism on.
I think, and this is less about your post specifically as much as about the thread in general, that there's this leap in belief from "society should not be ok with X belief" to "and the government should take action against it" that I have a hard time abiding.
It seems to rely on, at the least, a belief that the government is a balls and strikes calling machine and all you need to do is plug in the right rule set. I entirely agree with the first premise, that there are beliefs that society should not tolerate, but the government is, at least as often as not, the promulgator of those beliefs. And not just the Republicans, though they're obviously far worse about it. Democrats would almost certainly use hate speech laws against Palestinian protesters. The party is still trying to get over its racist beliefs on policing.
Its on all of us as citizens to take action on a personal level. The solution to fascism and other repugnant ideologies is for the rest of us to personally make sure that the people who push those ideas are scared to be in public, not to give a murderous and toxic government the power to decide which ideologies are verboten.
Why Shapiro gets boosted is evident, he's a millionaire/military industrial complex mouth piece. But why Spencer got so much attention on the first place?
Spencer was handsome, polite, well dressed, and white. That gets you serious treatment from a press corp that doesn't really take its job very seriously.
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
Sure, the quest for progress goes on and on. This is the way of the universe, I’m down with that.
But perspective is necessary, if only to avoid flipping your shit and ruining the things you built unnecessarily. The rhetoric used here is scarily close to the sort of thing I used to hear post 9-11. When people are scared and angry they do stupid things, like stripping themselves of their own speech protections because a relatively small group of malcontents raised some hell.
It's really not that hard for rational, ethical people to make a narrow set of laws and reasonable consequences for baseline standards. Something like:
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of rape in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of murder in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of slavery in violation of federal law
Note that this means that advocating for a change of the definition of any of these is not part of it, but only advocating to break the law itself, as could be enshrined in legalese. So if someone goes and defines abortion as murder you can still advocate to change that definition, you just can't say "while this is still illegal go ahead and do it anyway" without consequence.
And then you use actually sane consequences.
A few thoughts!
How does this deal with humor and/or satire? I know the standard response on these forums is that humor is used as a shielding device, and that is certainly true, but dark humor is a thing and it's no crime to have a bad sense of humor either. At least, not currently. Look at the UK and the "Nazi Pug" incident as an example. I don't like the guy at all but his situation is totally fucked and a massive government overreach, and the joke was hilarious. Edgy, to use a word no one loves anymore, but funny. And I'm dubious of how you craft a speech law to get around "it's just a joke, bro". At least, in such a way that doesn't trample on speech.
Which brings to the next point, which is that the speech I see complained about the most here is the notorious dogwhistle. In any set of narrowly defined speech laws that would have to remain, no? I don't see a way to narrowly define speech laws that allow extrapolation of meaning in such a way.
With that in mind, what do we gain from this? You can't stop people dogwhistling and any clause seeking to deal with humor is going to be a massive overreach, so that's out too. So now we've overthrown several centuries of tradition and messed with our speech laws--that taboo is broken, setting the precedent for going back in to change more later--and for what?
Nah.
Punishing people who have 'a bad sense of humour' is completely acceptable, where their humour is normalising the above abhorrent topics, eg. rape.
Not doing so also means you're attempting to enforce this law on the intent of the accused, which is rather unknowable.
Better to punish on every offence, no matter the intent, and then increase punishment on repeat offenders.
And once that massive self-inflicted loophole is closed, dog-whistling is actionable because the hate-speech can't pretend to just be a joke.
The only other difference between dog-whistling and normal hate-speech then would be the exact language used, and I'm sure the same law can keep up with whatever specific words are used in the hate-speech.
I get the feeling that as society becomes more educated regarding technology, speech on a global scale will become uncontrollable.
Information security has always been a losing battle. China's firewall will fall, and in addition to everyone learning about Tiananmen square, tools will be created to circumvent all speech control.
Distilled down to the essence we literally cannot stop speech, we cannot revoke the right to communication, unless we turn to grossly inhumane methods like locking them solitary and naked in a cell a'la Marquis de Sade in Quills. If a fascist wants to distribute his propaganda by writing it in crayon on yellow notebook paper in a cell block, I'm happy letting him have that right. Similarly, we ultimately cannot stop sites like 4chan from forming, if somebody wants to go to great lengths to disseminate whatever bullshit they want behind a veil of anonymity, a wealth of technology exists and will continue to exist to enable that.
Political power is bought with, to borrow the blog title, lawyers guns and money. A broad right to free speech does not necessarily mean that you get to keep your high-paying TV anchor position or your highly-monetized YouTube channel or your speaking gigs at major universities. You can speak all you want but the establishment can revoke your access to the privileges of civilization.
(Obviously there needs to be caution exercising such power. Deplatforming can have a chilling effect on speech almost as much as government censorship. There's a real danger in blacklisting, as in the US in the 1950s or China today. I am absolutely not arguing that this is unproblematic.)
Optimistic point of view: Liberalism has largely won the culture war already. Corporations are pretty responsive to calls for private sanctioning of obvious bigots. Even Fox News looks like it might be positioning itself to buck its alt-right hosts if Trump loses the next election.
We might not need to do anything if things keep going our way. Society will do its job.
This is, broadly speaking, my take. Nothing about the current movement has scared me. The biggest events are what? Some pasty dudes with torches, a vehicular homicide and a shooting in New Zealand? I know there’s more and I know I’m being light here but most of the alt right advances are, as I see it, Democrats being bad at politics and letting a reactionary opponent have their 4 years in the sun. That comes with consequences but it will pass.
Liberals won the culture war, and while they were stomping on the corpse it twitched. A death gasp, if you will. It’s not something I’m going to throw away our freedoms over. I get it’s serious but overreactions can have dire consequences.
I'd just like to address this real quick?
This?
This thign doesn't happen.
You don't "win" a culture war. Culture Wars, essentially, do not stop. Culture is this always shifting, always evolving thing. There is no end of history, there is no final state utopia, there is no "finished"
And shit like White Supremacy? It doesn't go away. Not ever, not fully. You have to be on guard for it, you have to be ready to always tamp its fires back down before it kills countless numbers of people.
We're not, as a society, doing that.
We're ignoring it as it spreads and saying everything is fine.
Sure, the quest for progress goes on and on. This is the way of the universe, I’m down with that.
But perspective is necessary, if only to avoid flipping your shit and ruining the things you built unnecessarily. The rhetoric used here is scarily close to the sort of thing I used to hear post 9-11. When people are scared and angry they do stupid things, like stripping themselves of their own speech protections because a relatively small group of malcontents raised some hell.
It's really not that hard for rational, ethical people to make a narrow set of laws and reasonable consequences for baseline standards. Something like:
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of rape in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of murder in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of slavery in violation of federal law
Note that this means that advocating for a change of the definition of any of these is not part of it, but only advocating to break the law itself, as could be enshrined in legalese. So if someone goes and defines abortion as murder you can still advocate to change that definition, you just can't say "while this is still illegal go ahead and do it anyway" without consequence.
And then you use actually sane consequences.
A few thoughts!
How does this deal with humor and/or satire? I know the standard response on these forums is that humor is used as a shielding device, and that is certainly true, but dark humor is a thing and it's no crime to have a bad sense of humor either. At least, not currently. Look at the UK and the "Nazi Pug" incident as an example. I don't like the guy at all but his situation is totally fucked and a massive government overreach, and the joke was hilarious. Edgy, to use a word no one loves anymore, but funny. And I'm dubious of how you craft a speech law to get around "it's just a joke, bro". At least, in such a way that doesn't trample on speech.
Which brings to the next point, which is that the speech I see complained about the most here is the notorious dogwhistle. In any set of narrowly defined speech laws that would have to remain, no? I don't see a way to narrowly define speech laws that allow extrapolation of meaning in such a way.
With that in mind, what do we gain from this? You can't stop people dogwhistling and any clause seeking to deal with humor is going to be a massive overreach, so that's out too. So now we've overthrown several centuries of tradition and messed with our speech laws--that taboo is broken, setting the precedent for going back in to change more later--and for what?
Nah.
Punishing people who have 'a bad sense of humour' is completely acceptable, where their humour is normalising the above abhorrent topics, eg. rape.
Not doing so also means you're attempting to enforce this law on the intent of the accused, which is rather unknowable.
Better to punish on every offence, no matter the intent, and then increase punishment on repeat offenders.
And once that massive self-inflicted loophole is closed, dog-whistling is actionable because the hate-speech can't pretend to just be a joke.
The only other difference between dog-whistling and normal hate-speech then would be the exact language used, and I'm sure the same law can keep up with whatever specific words are used in the hate-speech.
Just to be clear, a religious icon I wore for years is considered a white supremacy dog whistle. Should I be arrested or my religious symbol banned?
"Mr. Shapiro, you called this police shooting victim a thug, which is clearly coded language for n----r"
"No I was referring to his past legal problems"
"No you weren't, 2 years prison and pay this fine"
Should the magic shop in my town with futhark runes adorning the windows be shut down cause lots of folks that like viking stuff are fuckin racist?
How bout my yearly viking feast, am I not allowed to go to that anymore?
Is a racist laying claim to a thing immediate grounds upon which to throw it and everything having to do with it in the memory hole?
I think hate speech laws on existing things that have been co-opted can stop future things from getting co-opted.
As for viking shit, yes while racist people have attachments to it, it's such a broad thing that it wouldn't get outlawed. You're basically suggesting, "Um, racists like owning pets, so are pets going to be outlawed?!"
No, because people are capable of being reasonable.
Should the magic shop in my town with futhark runes adorning the windows be shut down cause lots of folks that like viking stuff are fuckin racist?
How bout my yearly viking feast, am I not allowed to go to that anymore?
Is a racist laying claim to a thing immediate grounds upon which to throw it and everything having to do with it in the memory hole?
I think hate speech laws on existing things that have been co-opted can stop future things from getting co-opted.
As for viking shit, yes while racist people have attachments to it, it's such a broad thing that it wouldn't get outlawed. You're basically suggesting, "Um, racists like owning pets, so are pets going to be outlawed?!"
No, because people are capable of being reasonable.
I hope you can understand why "we'll know the bad speech when we see it" is not a comforting approach.
I think the only way this stuff passes in the US is after it is too late to help, like after a Second Civil War, or after the the racist right has been dead for a generation and can't object anymore.
The laws in the US are meant to be a reflection of society, they're not meant to shape society. The law changes after society changes. Like, weed is going to be legal after a majority of people have been fine with it for a decade.
Jephery on
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"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I'll come back to this thread when I'm not as sleep deprived because I'm probably misreading some shit being said.
Hate speech is bad and I hope people agree on that because hoo boy if there's galaxy braining going on with this...
Hate speech laws exist and work in many countries without turning them into fascist dictatorships. To insist that they always do is the stare the real world in the face and then reject it.
Did you know that anti-nazi laws have caused videos from the youtube series contrapoints to be banned?
Hate speech laws are misused all the fucking time. Such as when France tries to ban the hateful act of being a Muslim woman in public.
I’m pretty sure there’s examples of fraud and threatening speech laws being misused or abused in the past too.
That speaks to the necessity of ensuring said regulation should be crafted carefully and executed in good faith. Not in refusing to bother trying.
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I think if white nationalism was spreading culturally, the president's approval ratings would be going up, but really they're holding steady around ~40%.
While the right has been trying to create a parallel system of education to the public school system and liberal university system, its a big fat joke still. Like, I'm not sure how much of the right's "culture war" is serious or grifting people. It mostly seems like right winger pundits scamming people out of their money, and Trump is the biggest grifter of them all.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Sure, the quest for progress goes on and on. This is the way of the universe, I’m down with that.
But perspective is necessary, if only to avoid flipping your shit and ruining the things you built unnecessarily. The rhetoric used here is scarily close to the sort of thing I used to hear post 9-11. When people are scared and angry they do stupid things, like stripping themselves of their own speech protections because a relatively small group of malcontents raised some hell.
It's really not that hard for rational, ethical people to make a narrow set of laws and reasonable consequences for baseline standards. Something like:
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of rape in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of murder in violation of federal law
* Do not advocate for performing the act of the legal definition of slavery in violation of federal law
Note that this means that advocating for a change of the definition of any of these is not part of it, but only advocating to break the law itself, as could be enshrined in legalese. So if someone goes and defines abortion as murder you can still advocate to change that definition, you just can't say "while this is still illegal go ahead and do it anyway" without consequence.
And then you use actually sane consequences.
“Why do you want to tear down the bedrock of Enlightenment Liberalism”
This seems to be the thing that keeps happening and it is infuriating.
We can prohibit genocidal ideologies without becoming fascist hellscapes. Improving things is possible!
I am utterly baffled at how somehow the operating fear here is “yes but what about the slippery slope” instead of the literal movement that is actively killing people.
the things that are accepted by placing yourself in that 40% have arguably expanded, though, to more and more blatantly include racism, xenophobia, etc.
in the beginning people tried to cutely deny that he meant the things he was saying. now he's doing them.
Yep.
We have an entire thread devoted to how this administration is pursuing a white supremacist-driven immigration system, complete with what amount to camps on the border where we’re stuffing anyone who might be “an illegal.”
But somehow white supremacist speech isn’t a problem and doesn’t lead to a festering rot of the soul of the country
so if what liberals are saying scares you but what conservatives are saying doesn't, you're trusting the wrong people. if it all scares you well, I understand. I don't really want to government silencing political speech and I don't really love platforms doing it either, I think we need to be careful to separate 'stances we take to show conservatives/fascists how inconsistent their supposed worldview is' and 'stances we actually want to take' (ie, it's great to say youtube can ban speech it doesn't like when you're talking to someone that thinks a bakery shouldn't have to serve a gay customer, but is that actually how we want to go about solving this? giving google the keys to the kingdom?)
(in case it's not clear, I don't have anything approaching an answer, just thoughts on how to think about this issue as it's been everpresent of late)
We already knew that they were voting Republican for racist reasons since the Southern Strategy. They've had these attitudes all along, and everyone knew it. We played along for the sake of civility in a post-MLK world.
Now Trump made them break that civility, but it doesn't seem to be spreading out of the racist core of the GOP. They've alienated everyone who thought the GOP had principles and left themselves with only the racists. They've had their moment and they've fizzled.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
While this is true, most Western hate speech laws involve weak sanctions and have spotty enforcement. It's also true that the ones which are narrowly drawn get used infrequently, while the ones that are more broadly drawn do get used more often--but also more often to spotty or ill effect (eg as in France where BDS has been prosecuted as hate speech).
They have not caused a collapse that into fascism, but they also haven't cured intolerance... partially because they just haven't done that much at all. And where they do actually get used, the record is at least mixed.
The claim that there are conceivable circumstances where we could be justified in restricting the freedom of ideas when social collapse is otherwise imminent is not particularly interesting or controversial. All the interesting and controversial questions concern when and how you would recognize that those conditions actually hold and then how precisely you would respond to them.
In the United States, the main people pushing expansive "paradox of tolerance" style arguments were politicians seeking to criminalize the Communist Party. The Smith act (1940) made it illegal to organize attempts to overthrow of the government, and this was initially taken to apply to Communist Party membership in and of itself. In Dennis v. United States (1951) eleven prominent CPUSA figures were convicted on these grounds. The evidence presented was not that they had formed any particular plot, or that they were trying to, but on the inherently violent and anti-governmental elements of Communist political thought, as attested to by the Communist manifesto and other philosophical and political documents.
Dissenting, Black writes:
Dennis was not overturned, but later in Yates (1957) the Court changed course and the Smith act was sharply limited by the decision to distinguish between the academic teaching of a mere belief that the government should be overthrown versus actually organizing for the overthrow of the government, and holding that the former was still protected. There weren't further high profile prosecutions, and the government nonetheless managed to avoid overthrow by communist revolutionaries (even though professors got to wax philosophical to undergraduates about the classless society). Popper's Paradox of Tolerance (1945) did not do a particularly good job of anticipating events as they were about to unfold.
Oh well.
(On a related note, I just finished watching Wild, Wild Country last week, and it is remarkable how the Rajneeshees had the law on their side in a remarkable number of cases, but how little that mattered when their local community and politicians all the way up and down the ladder were closedminded reactionary bigots who were out to get them. And surely this is generally true--it can be harder to effectuate your rights in practice, when you are a despised minority. But despite this general pattern, the claim from earlier in this thread, and from many others, that free speech rights are ~for the powerful, to prey on the weak~ strikes me as simply ignorant of American history. No one more powerful than some blacklisted commies or a bunch of high school kids protesting the war.)
I didn't explain it very well, but I was saying that popper's scenario demonstrates a violation of the 14th amendment by exercise of the first amendment, and the supreme court is ok with this happening, showing their priorities.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The question really is (and I’m not talking about anyone in here mind) how much of censorship hitting the far left is a feature and how much is a bug.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
doesn't have the same kind of impact when the reply is
"Thanks! Now, when we're done encouraging vulnerable, angry white youth to mass murder this particular group, we'll move on to the next one on our list of hate!"
Only if you believe that "slightly restrict" and "demolish" are synonyms with regard to freedom. I do not.
Those are edge cases that make for some interesting moments that we put on the brochure, but they don't reflect the everyday life of our history.
Ask yourself throughout the 300 years of American history, how much freedom did a wife have to criticize her husband? A slave to criticize his master? A queer person to proclaim their love openly?
Did you know that anti-nazi laws have caused videos from the youtube series contrapoints to be banned?
Hate speech laws are misused all the fucking time. Such as when France tries to ban the hateful act of being a Muslim woman in public.
Yes, badly designed regulation or regulations handled badly are bad. But this doesn't invalidate the idea of regulation.
cue banning the nation of islam, disappearing Malcom X's works into the memory hole...
we've already made significant strides without broad censorship, why don't we just continue to do the things that worked for us in the past? Weapons given to the govt to silence speech will be used to silence speech - including the kind you like.
other nations of the world where hate speech laws "work" do suffer reduced freedom and also are generally less heterogeneous than the US as well - to the extent they work, it's a reflection of their homogeneous racial/ethnic culture, not their allegedly successful hate speech laws.
Plus they don't work anyway. Plenty of racism in Canada, plenty of fascism in France, plenty of anti-lgbt rhetoric in the UK...
A few thoughts!
How does this deal with humor and/or satire? I know the standard response on these forums is that humor is used as a shielding device, and that is certainly true, but dark humor is a thing and it's no crime to have a bad sense of humor either. At least, not currently. Look at the UK and the "Nazi Pug" incident as an example. I don't like the guy at all but his situation is totally fucked and a massive government overreach, and the joke was hilarious. Edgy, to use a word no one loves anymore, but funny. And I'm dubious of how you craft a speech law to get around "it's just a joke, bro". At least, in such a way that doesn't trample on speech.
Which brings to the next point, which is that the speech I see complained about the most here is the notorious dogwhistle. In any set of narrowly defined speech laws that would have to remain, no? I don't see a way to narrowly define speech laws that allow extrapolation of meaning in such a way.
With that in mind, what do we gain from this? You can't stop people dogwhistling and any clause seeking to deal with humor is going to be a massive overreach, so that's out too. So now we've overthrown several centuries of tradition and messed with our speech laws--that taboo is broken, setting the precedent for going back in to change more later--and for what?
Think of where we are now, though. Queers can proclaim their love openly. Women's rights have come a tremendous distance and you have left-wing politicians talking about slavery reparations.
Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee things will be perfect. What it does is gives a society an opportunity to improve itself. Which we have done, and continue to do.
And a lot of them enacted anti gun policies that werent naked attempts at disarming vulnerable populations, but we sure went there.
Any argument for hate speech laws has to reckon with who holds power in this country. Even the "good guys" seem perfectly willing to support acton against BDS.
I think categorizing hate speech laws as just another regulation is unreasonable
Remember what JFK said; "we choose to do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard." Granted he was talking about going to the moon and all, but still. Government is not an easy thing.
I think, and this is less about your post specifically as much as about the thread in general, that there's this leap in belief from "society should not be ok with X belief" to "and the government should take action against it" that I have a hard time abiding.
It seems to rely on, at the least, a belief that the government is a balls and strikes calling machine and all you need to do is plug in the right rule set. I entirely agree with the first premise, that there are beliefs that society should not tolerate, but the government is, at least as often as not, the promulgator of those beliefs. And not just the Republicans, though they're obviously far worse about it. Democrats would almost certainly use hate speech laws against Palestinian protesters. The party is still trying to get over its racist beliefs on policing.
Its on all of us as citizens to take action on a personal level. The solution to fascism and other repugnant ideologies is for the rest of us to personally make sure that the people who push those ideas are scared to be in public, not to give a murderous and toxic government the power to decide which ideologies are verboten.
An important thing is this...fetishism of neo-Nazism. Like, couple of years ago Richard Spencer was the hotness, now is Peterson. There's a lot of artificial signal boosting, like when Ben Shapiro was a "leader" of the "Dark Web".
Why Shapiro gets boosted is evident, he's a millionaire/military industrial complex mouth piece. But why Spencer got so much attention on the first place?
I don't disagree that these types of laws can be misued and have been in the past. I was pushing back against the framing that any limitation on speech immediately leads to totalitarianism, when that is demonstrably not the case.
Who does things and how are very relevant to this, I am very opposed to the recent EO Trump signed about stripping funding to colleges if they don't allow outsiders to come and threaten their minority students. I am very curious how this will play out on my campus this next quarter, the alt right shitheads are everywhere, even in good ole Bham Wa. The institution I'm attending has done a decent job of protecting their student body, I'm really afraid this is going to open the floodgates, ostensibly by expanding free speech.
Spencer was handsome, polite, well dressed, and white. That gets you serious treatment from a press corp that doesn't really take its job very seriously.
Nah.
Punishing people who have 'a bad sense of humour' is completely acceptable, where their humour is normalising the above abhorrent topics, eg. rape.
Not doing so also means you're attempting to enforce this law on the intent of the accused, which is rather unknowable.
Better to punish on every offence, no matter the intent, and then increase punishment on repeat offenders.
And once that massive self-inflicted loophole is closed, dog-whistling is actionable because the hate-speech can't pretend to just be a joke.
The only other difference between dog-whistling and normal hate-speech then would be the exact language used, and I'm sure the same law can keep up with whatever specific words are used in the hate-speech.
Just to be clear, a religious icon I wore for years is considered a white supremacy dog whistle. Should I be arrested or my religious symbol banned?
"Mr. Shapiro, you called this police shooting victim a thug, which is clearly coded language for n----r"
"No I was referring to his past legal problems"
"No you weren't, 2 years prison and pay this fine"
How bout my yearly viking feast, am I not allowed to go to that anymore?
Is a racist laying claim to a thing immediate grounds upon which to throw it and everything having to do with it in the memory hole?
As for viking shit, yes while racist people have attachments to it, it's such a broad thing that it wouldn't get outlawed. You're basically suggesting, "Um, racists like owning pets, so are pets going to be outlawed?!"
No, because people are capable of being reasonable.
I hope you can understand why "we'll know the bad speech when we see it" is not a comforting approach.
They'd just start using symbols of their targets as part of their code.
The laws in the US are meant to be a reflection of society, they're not meant to shape society. The law changes after society changes. Like, weed is going to be legal after a majority of people have been fine with it for a decade.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Hate speech is bad and I hope people agree on that because hoo boy if there's galaxy braining going on with this...
I’m pretty sure there’s examples of fraud and threatening speech laws being misused or abused in the past too.
That speaks to the necessity of ensuring said regulation should be crafted carefully and executed in good faith. Not in refusing to bother trying.