Are you seriously advocating free speech for Nazis in 2020
I'm advocating for an equal application of the law. I think that's important. Binds but does not protect etc. If the law needs to be changed, then that's a different discussion.
If the ACLU has limited resources, and I'm sure they do, then how they choose to spend those resources is a valid question.
The right wing can effectively hack the law to vile ends. I do not believe that handing them even more suppressive laws (or interpretations thereof) is going to work. They will be abused to silence the rest of us.
So, asking if I'm seriously advocating for free speech for Nazis in 2020 is akin to asking me if I'm seriously advocating for free healthcare for paedophiles in 2020 because I support a nationalised health system. I mean, I suppose so, but I'm not sure that really conveys the underlying argument all that well.
Stop being a principalist for five seconds and look at the consequences of what you're proposing. Protecting free speech for nazis, by empowering them, is one way to lose free speech for everyone, while protecting pedophiles' right to health care is not going to make other people lose health care.
I'm also quite in favour of hitting nazis in the head with stones and bottles but a lot of people in my family history were awarded medals from the government for just killing people like that so I am probably biased from the outset
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
edited August 2020
"How do you define hate speech in a way that cannot be weaponized by fascists and the far right" is an extremely important question and I feel like folks in here are kind of glossing over it and just saying "yeah but Nazis are bad it's obviously hate speech."
That's not in question. The question is, how do you outlaw (and enforce) the kind of speech Nazis use without opening a window through which fascists can define your own protest speech as "hate speech" and punish you via the legal system.
Here's a recent example. People have brought up multiple times Nazis saying "I want to kill you" as an accurate example of hate speech. But there have been protestors who have said on the record that they want to burn stuff down. Hell, people in this thread have been saying we should "burn it all down."
Counterpoint: one is human lives, one is property damage. Good counterpoint! Except that burning down independent businesses (which has happened) actively harms human lives, and where do we draw the line on what buildings are and are not acceptable to burn down?
How do we define a building that is acceptable to burn in a way that can not also be applied to a building we don't feel is acceptable to burn, in a way that's quantifiably useful for law?
The point of this dipshit exercise is not to go "therefore, Nazis deserve free speech" (because they don't), but that "obviously Nazis don't deserve free speech" is not nearly as cut and try a statement as you think from a legal perspective, and if we're talking about what kinds of speech are or are not illegal you need to come up with very specific parameters and think all of them through because any lawyer who has to argue against it in court will sure as shit have spent hundreds of hours finding the edge case to weaponize your rules.
edit: phraseology
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
The actual answer would be "have a government that doesn't permit Nazis" but that hasn't ever worked, and furthermore we have to assume maximum malfeasance from the government vis a vis application of laws, and so thinking about exactly how a law would outlaw specific things mechanically becomes really important even though it feels like dogshit.
I'm just glad there are people available who are interested in all this fucking philosophising about how to fuck up fascists it's probably valuable I guess
"We need to protect the right of Nazis to protest or else everyone else might lose the right to protest" is an absurd argument when everyone except Nazis has already lost the right to protest. Nazi protests are the only ones where the police don't arrest and tear gas the participants en masse and surreptitiously assassinate the organizers.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
To be fair I also do not trust any government to have broad applicative control over speech.
Which is why you punch nazis.
Pretty much. I'm exceptionally wary of any attempt to legislate speech because lawyers are fucking crafty and the legal system is basically wizard chess where if you can demonstrate something via formal logic, even if it doesn't make sense in the real world, you can get some horrifying applications of laws.
Speech regulation needs to occur via the people making it clear that no, we will not tolerate this shit, go home Nazis or become acquainted with my foot.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Believing in the purity of any concept is absurd for anyone to do. There will always be an exception to everything, even if you can't fathom what the exception will be. It will surprise you one day. But there are exceptions that exist for plenty of things already.
Yes, free speech to be able to criticize and yell at your government.
No, advocating for groups of peoples' murder is not 'free speech.'
Besides if social media taught me anything, it's that anyone claiming to believe in the absolute purity of 'free speech' in all forms is pretty easy to debunk with their own account; they pretty easily get called out on not defending their political rivals on speech matters, or they outright tell people 'no' on other speech matters. "Purity of free speech" advocates are alt-right people hiding under a guise of enlightenment. They don't give a fuck about the branding they are using. They're only interested in covering their hate and the hate of their allies.
it's a waste of time to try to craft an ironclad, perfectly logical, loophole-free law like we're outsmarting an evil genie
the last four years have made clear that the letter of the law means jack, shit, or some combination thereof
sure, "just silence the nazis" wouldn't be a workable policy in the hypothetical world of masturbatory debate club enthusiasts, but it's sure as shit the most practical one for the world we actually live in
"How do you define hate speech in a way that cannot be weaponized by fascists and the far right" is an extremely important question and I feel like folks in here are kind of glossing over it and just saying "yeah but Nazis are bad it's obviously hate speech."
That's not in question. The question is, how do you outlaw (and enforce) the kind of speech Nazis use without opening a window through which fascists can define your own protest speech as "hate speech" and punish you via the legal system.
Here's a recent example. People have brought up multiple times Nazis saying "I want to kill you" as an accurate example of hate speech. But there have been protestors who have said on the record that they want to burn stuff down. Hell, people in this thread have been saying we should "burn it all down."
Counterpoint: one is human lives, one is property damage. Good counterpoint! Except that burning down independent businesses (which has happened) actively harms human lives, and where do we draw the line on what buildings are and are not acceptable to burn down?
How do we define a building that is acceptable to burn in a way that can not also be applied to a building we don't feel is acceptable to burn, in a way that's quantifiably useful for law?
The point of this dipshit exercise is not to go "therefore, Nazis deserve free speech" (because they don't), but that "obviously Nazis don't deserve free speech" is a super fuckin' cavalier statement and if we're talking about what kinds of speech are or are not illegal you need to come up with very specific parameters and think all of them through because any lawyer who has to argue against it in court will sure as shit have spent hundreds of hours finding the edge case to weaponize your rules.
again though there's a functional difference between someone saying "it is my intention to agitate for the murder of you and yours" and in response someone else saying "if you do that, i will use whatever means i can get my hands on to to prevent you from succeeding." it's the same as the difference between murdering people for being black and burning down police stations because that's been shown to be an effective way to draw attention to widespread murder of black folks by fascists. there's not really anything we can do to prevent fascists from drawing false equivalence between these things, and the government has made it extremely clear who they think free speech should apply to, so i don't think there's any way to be morally rigorous here that doesn't end in a win for fascists. they have absolutely no qualms about using Free SpeechTM as a cudgel to do their so-much-for-the-tolerant-left horseshit, and the government is clearly keen to play along, so i see no reason why we should be wringing our hands about it
it's a waste of time to try to craft an ironclad, perfectly logical, loophole-free law like we're outsmarting an evil genie
the last four years have made clear that the letter of the law means jack, shit, or some combination thereof
sure, "just silence the nazis" wouldn't be a workable policy in the hypothetical world of masturbatory debate club enthusiasts, but it's sure as shit the most practical one for the world we actually live in
This literally is what the legal system is, though, which is why trying to use it for our purposes is a waste of fucking time.
Go scream at Nazis and punch them until they're gone forever. That's how we get rid of them. Not by trying to use the system that has been weaponized to protect fascists from day fucking one.
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I clearly explained myself badly here. Let's try again:
If you pass a law banning the shit Nazis say, it will be weaponized to oppress minorities even further. Guaranteed, 100%, probably within weeks of the law going into effect. The system is rigged, it is run by people who think a formal proof is the same as real life, and attempts to use it for our own goals will just result in horrific backfires.
Just go punch Nazis. It will be both faster and less likely to fuck you down the line.
yeah 3clipse I don't know if I just failed at reading comprehension or what but it definitely seemed at first blush like you were arguing for the opposite, my bad
I mean, many countries have outlawed particular types of speech over the course of time; it's not really that difficult to do, you just use the force of the state to monitor and suppress it. The problem isn't that you somehow can't suppress Nazis' speech, it's that the state lacks the will to 1) define it and 2) follow through (of course, this is often because the people in charge benefit by not doing so)
'True threats' are relatively easy to make verboten, but there isn't really an elegant way to make outlaws of the Richard Spencers of the world; the state must engage in the messy business of picking winners among ideologies and most people are loathe to endorse that.
it was the smallest on the list but
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
yeah 3clipse I don't know if I just failed at reading comprehension or what but it definitely seemed at first blush like you were arguing for the opposite, my bad
All good, I also don't think I did a good job explaining what I meant.
Free speech absolutism is something I'm very glad I've never encountered in person. It's bad efuckingnough on here, I can't even picture dealing with it out in the wild.
i think the event has shown that the best way to deal with richard spencer is to cold cock him in the face so that for years he's afraid to go outside, and then after that he displays the kind of sterling judgement that had him talking shit about football in a southern college town in a speech about white supremacy, whereupon he was chased out of town
he's still dangerous, but man what a fantastic object lesson in measured violence at the right time being worth any amount of legal wrangling
Stop being a principalist for five seconds and look at the consequences of what you're proposing. Protecting free speech for nazis, by empowering them, is one way to lose free speech for everyone, while protecting pedophiles' right to health care is not going to make other people lose health care.
I dunno, I can easily imagine that arguments like "Why the hell is my tax money giving paedophiles/those people free health care" might lead to the loss of a public health option in much that same way as "Why do our free speech laws protect those people" might lead to a loss of free speech protections.
But here's the thing,
I do not believe that protecting free speech for everyone necessarily leads to Nazi control. I do not believe it is inevitable that people become Nazis simply because they are exposed to Nazis, because I do not believe that e.g. Nazism has some inescapable logic to it that people are powerless to resist. I do not believe that Nazism is humanity's natural "end state", and so Nazi speech must be suppressed lest nature takes its course.
Is Nazis spewing their Nazi shit one way to lose free speech for everyone? Yes, but so is weakening free speech protection in the first place. Who's deciding what meets the standard of "intolerant"?
As such, I'd lean towards Popper's own statement that suppressing intolerant speech can be most unwise - but we should retain the right to do so.
The point at which that right is exercised is a valid question, and I don't think we're there. Easy for me to say, of course, as I'm not likely to be singled out by Nazis because of my appearance or religion.
But I don't want to drag the thread further off-topic, so I'm going to leave it at that. Please note that I'm not ignoring any responses I'm definitely reading them and I value your input.
I feel like two people are arguing around each other.
Nobody (in this thread) is saying that Nazi hate speech has any value. I don't think anyone disagrees that it's actively harmful. One side is saying hate filled rhetoric, and even just basic iconography has led to untold human suffering. The other side is saying "governments typically enforce abridgements of speech mostly for their benefit, often with extreme violence and prejudice" Minority groups are the most common victims, and I frankly don't see any reason why my government (I live in the US) would be different. In fact, I've got no faith that it would not ultimately be used as a cudgel against the poor and the marginalized.
The discrimination in the treatment between broadly left divercially racial protestors and heavy armed almost entirely white-male dominated far right groups only kind of re-inforces that belief. What happens when you make it illegal and police departments and sherrifs offices just don't care? They have and exercise broad discretion about what crimes they actually choose to go after and which segments of the community they choose to protect... which is, y'know, why calls for reform are aimed at the levels of government with enforce and prosecute law. Maybe at some point if the levers of government are sufficiently restructured I might have more faith that that an "anti-Nazi speech law" wouldn't just end up biting us in the ass even harder.
Proliferation of hate speech is an enormous, enormous, dire problem but I actually don't see any singular great solution for it. Beyond punching Nazis. (which is not an efficient solution but if enough people get on it...)
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
hey legal folks, i heard something that i am really curious to find out if it's true or not
there's word going around that the brownshirt kid that murdered those people in wisconsin might be fucked as far as the law goes. apparently the stand-your-ground law that would've had a decent chance of letting him skate doesn't apply if the person claiming it was committing a crime at the time, and since he was seventeen years old carrying a rifle in a state where you have to be eighteen before you can open carry, it looks like that's the case
is there anything to this? i know if it goes to trial all it'll take is one fascist juror who thinks it's cool to murder protesters to let him walk or maybe just get off on a weapon charge, but it'd be cool if the law acknowledged that it's fuckin' insane to allow you to intentionally put yourself in a position where you have pretext to kill someone and then claim self-defense
Remember when you're hurting Nazis the idea is to hit their soft parts with your hard parts, if you want to hit one in the teeth use an elbow or a knee or a boot instead of your hand
I clearly explained myself badly here. Let's try again:
If you pass a law banning the shit Nazis say, it will be weaponized to oppress minorities even further. Guaranteed, 100%, probably within weeks of the law going into effect. The system is rigged, it is run by people who think a formal proof is the same as real life, and attempts to use it for our own goals will just result in horrific backfires.
Just go punch Nazis. It will be both faster and less likely to fuck you down the line.
Germany outlawed Nazism and Nazi speech and they seem to be doing okay.
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Being a pedophile has nothing to do with having access to health care.
Being a nazi is directly related to the concept of free speech.
Free speech does not, and should not, protect hate speech. Hate speech is violence, plain and simple.
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Stop being a principalist for five seconds and look at the consequences of what you're proposing. Protecting free speech for nazis, by empowering them, is one way to lose free speech for everyone, while protecting pedophiles' right to health care is not going to make other people lose health care.
then an NKVD guy acquainted trotsky's head with an ice axe
hitting hot metal with hammers
That's not in question. The question is, how do you outlaw (and enforce) the kind of speech Nazis use without opening a window through which fascists can define your own protest speech as "hate speech" and punish you via the legal system.
Here's a recent example. People have brought up multiple times Nazis saying "I want to kill you" as an accurate example of hate speech. But there have been protestors who have said on the record that they want to burn stuff down. Hell, people in this thread have been saying we should "burn it all down."
Counterpoint: one is human lives, one is property damage. Good counterpoint! Except that burning down independent businesses (which has happened) actively harms human lives, and where do we draw the line on what buildings are and are not acceptable to burn down?
How do we define a building that is acceptable to burn in a way that can not also be applied to a building we don't feel is acceptable to burn, in a way that's quantifiably useful for law?
The point of this dipshit exercise is not to go "therefore, Nazis deserve free speech" (because they don't), but that "obviously Nazis don't deserve free speech" is not nearly as cut and try a statement as you think from a legal perspective, and if we're talking about what kinds of speech are or are not illegal you need to come up with very specific parameters and think all of them through because any lawyer who has to argue against it in court will sure as shit have spent hundreds of hours finding the edge case to weaponize your rules.
edit: phraseology
Which is why you punch nazis.
Pretty much. I'm exceptionally wary of any attempt to legislate speech because lawyers are fucking crafty and the legal system is basically wizard chess where if you can demonstrate something via formal logic, even if it doesn't make sense in the real world, you can get some horrifying applications of laws.
Speech regulation needs to occur via the people making it clear that no, we will not tolerate this shit, go home Nazis or become acquainted with my foot.
Yes, free speech to be able to criticize and yell at your government.
No, advocating for groups of peoples' murder is not 'free speech.'
Besides if social media taught me anything, it's that anyone claiming to believe in the absolute purity of 'free speech' in all forms is pretty easy to debunk with their own account; they pretty easily get called out on not defending their political rivals on speech matters, or they outright tell people 'no' on other speech matters. "Purity of free speech" advocates are alt-right people hiding under a guise of enlightenment. They don't give a fuck about the branding they are using. They're only interested in covering their hate and the hate of their allies.
the last four years have made clear that the letter of the law means jack, shit, or some combination thereof
sure, "just silence the nazis" wouldn't be a workable policy in the hypothetical world of masturbatory debate club enthusiasts, but it's sure as shit the most practical one for the world we actually live in
again though there's a functional difference between someone saying "it is my intention to agitate for the murder of you and yours" and in response someone else saying "if you do that, i will use whatever means i can get my hands on to to prevent you from succeeding." it's the same as the difference between murdering people for being black and burning down police stations because that's been shown to be an effective way to draw attention to widespread murder of black folks by fascists. there's not really anything we can do to prevent fascists from drawing false equivalence between these things, and the government has made it extremely clear who they think free speech should apply to, so i don't think there's any way to be morally rigorous here that doesn't end in a win for fascists. they have absolutely no qualms about using Free SpeechTM as a cudgel to do their so-much-for-the-tolerant-left horseshit, and the government is clearly keen to play along, so i see no reason why we should be wringing our hands about it
hitting hot metal with hammers
This literally is what the legal system is, though, which is why trying to use it for our purposes is a waste of fucking time.
Go scream at Nazis and punch them until they're gone forever. That's how we get rid of them. Not by trying to use the system that has been weaponized to protect fascists from day fucking one.
any amount of nazis is an unacceptable amount of nazis
yes, even the edgy ironic nazis who are just trying to get a rise out of people, to wit:
hitting hot metal with hammers
If you pass a law banning the shit Nazis say, it will be weaponized to oppress minorities even further. Guaranteed, 100%, probably within weeks of the law going into effect. The system is rigged, it is run by people who think a formal proof is the same as real life, and attempts to use it for our own goals will just result in horrific backfires.
Just go punch Nazis. It will be both faster and less likely to fuck you down the line.
'True threats' are relatively easy to make verboten, but there isn't really an elegant way to make outlaws of the Richard Spencers of the world; the state must engage in the messy business of picking winners among ideologies and most people are loathe to endorse that.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
All good, I also don't think I did a good job explaining what I meant.
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If you punch more than one Nazi per pay period, we can't count it for future pay periods, but we still recommend it.
he's still dangerous, but man what a fantastic object lesson in measured violence at the right time being worth any amount of legal wrangling
anyway here's the gif, i have it bookmarked
hitting hot metal with hammers
I dunno, I can easily imagine that arguments like "Why the hell is my tax money giving paedophiles/those people free health care" might lead to the loss of a public health option in much that same way as "Why do our free speech laws protect those people" might lead to a loss of free speech protections.
But here's the thing,
I do not believe that protecting free speech for everyone necessarily leads to Nazi control. I do not believe it is inevitable that people become Nazis simply because they are exposed to Nazis, because I do not believe that e.g. Nazism has some inescapable logic to it that people are powerless to resist. I do not believe that Nazism is humanity's natural "end state", and so Nazi speech must be suppressed lest nature takes its course.
Is Nazis spewing their Nazi shit one way to lose free speech for everyone? Yes, but so is weakening free speech protection in the first place. Who's deciding what meets the standard of "intolerant"?
As such, I'd lean towards Popper's own statement that suppressing intolerant speech can be most unwise - but we should retain the right to do so.
The point at which that right is exercised is a valid question, and I don't think we're there. Easy for me to say, of course, as I'm not likely to be singled out by Nazis because of my appearance or religion.
But I don't want to drag the thread further off-topic, so I'm going to leave it at that. Please note that I'm not ignoring any responses I'm definitely reading them and I value your input.
Nobody (in this thread) is saying that Nazi hate speech has any value. I don't think anyone disagrees that it's actively harmful. One side is saying hate filled rhetoric, and even just basic iconography has led to untold human suffering. The other side is saying "governments typically enforce abridgements of speech mostly for their benefit, often with extreme violence and prejudice" Minority groups are the most common victims, and I frankly don't see any reason why my government (I live in the US) would be different. In fact, I've got no faith that it would not ultimately be used as a cudgel against the poor and the marginalized.
The discrimination in the treatment between broadly left divercially racial protestors and heavy armed almost entirely white-male dominated far right groups only kind of re-inforces that belief. What happens when you make it illegal and police departments and sherrifs offices just don't care? They have and exercise broad discretion about what crimes they actually choose to go after and which segments of the community they choose to protect... which is, y'know, why calls for reform are aimed at the levels of government with enforce and prosecute law. Maybe at some point if the levers of government are sufficiently restructured I might have more faith that that an "anti-Nazi speech law" wouldn't just end up biting us in the ass even harder.
Proliferation of hate speech is an enormous, enormous, dire problem but I actually don't see any singular great solution for it. Beyond punching Nazis. (which is not an efficient solution but if enough people get on it...)
punches could be transferable so you can punch on behalf of those who cannot or do not have access to nazis
If you cannot locate a Nazi of your own, a team will be by to provide and hold one down for you
did i miss a post where someone was advocating for stricter hate speech laws that outlawed nazi shit?
we were talkin' about the ACLU, lawyers that try cases based on existing law
in principle, nazis are entitled to the exact same protections under free speech law as anyone else
in practice, there will always be a better way for a lawyer to spend their time than voluntarily representing a nazi
http://www.audioentropy.com/
I mean, it’s not food fuck styles.
there's word going around that the brownshirt kid that murdered those people in wisconsin might be fucked as far as the law goes. apparently the stand-your-ground law that would've had a decent chance of letting him skate doesn't apply if the person claiming it was committing a crime at the time, and since he was seventeen years old carrying a rifle in a state where you have to be eighteen before you can open carry, it looks like that's the case
is there anything to this? i know if it goes to trial all it'll take is one fascist juror who thinks it's cool to murder protesters to let him walk or maybe just get off on a weapon charge, but it'd be cool if the law acknowledged that it's fuckin' insane to allow you to intentionally put yourself in a position where you have pretext to kill someone and then claim self-defense
hitting hot metal with hammers
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Germany outlawed Nazism and Nazi speech and they seem to be doing okay.