You are leaving out a key issue, which is agreeing on what is hate speech and what is not. Coming to an agreement on the precise legal location of the line separating good and bad speech is impossible. Someone somewhere is is going to say X is hateful, while someone else somewhere else is going to say that the opposite of X is hateful. Any ability to punish someone for saying X is going to be used to punish someone else for saying the opposite of X.
As a concrete example of this point, consider Fatimah Bouderdaben, a Houston high school student suspended for wearing a âBlack Lives Matterâ t-shirt. Apparently at that school the BLM message is something for which a student can be punished.
While I take your point, is there anyone under the impression that a white person deploying that word in that context is anything but? Wouldnât we all have to be incredibly ignorant of basic American history NOT to understand that? But other speech might not be so clearcut, itâs true. Is bullying hate speech or is that protected? What about political statements like the aforementioned âI am a Lesbianâ⌠the former has a clear impact on the lives of others in a negative fashion that seems to stem from a place of hate. The latter is an affirmative statement of oneâs identity. What about a shirt that stated âI am a Muslimâ or âI am a black manâ or âI am a Jewâ or âI am a Buddhistâ or âI am a Catholicâ?
That is a good example, then. This is obviously something making an affirmative political statement, which, I argue should be protected speech. What about a shirt that praised the KKK? Or for that matter DAESH? Or a white power organization?
Perhaps this is an argument to authority, but our current supreme Court disagrees. Thomas, who I rarely agree with, was quite vocal about this. (If you Google title IX hate speech you will find the cases. Iâd link them here, but it would make my response too verbose).
Eta
Here ya go, second paragraph. This is an unsettled issue.
In this context, I was asking for whatshisface to apologise for his (now deleted) anti-Semitism before I would explain to him, for his benefit, where he had gone wrong.
Dick face had taken the opportunity to attempt to construct a statement which would injure Christians within very narrow parameters (Jesus taking bong hits) and instead just vomited anti-Semitism.
Because this was obvious to everyone following the thread from its inception and through the bad lands of the assholeâs injurious speech toward Jews, I instead demanded an apology from the fuck face, rather than perpetuate what I saw as being his attempt to draw me into conversation as an excuse to continue his vile hate speech. (I mention this in the poll a few comments above the one youâve replied to, and the fact that Iâve flagged his hate speech, so I imagine you scrolled past those)
Youâll also notice that Iâve taken the time to respond quite carefully to another user in this thread who, even though we disagree, has taken the time to attempt to formulate a cogent argument and reply politely to my rebuttals.
In summation, yes, Iâm a bit of a dick, and so are you. It takes one to know one, I guess.
You are conflating a strawman public student newspaper with a strawman private blog. No thank you.
Not in the context the rest of us stayed over here with.
But in the sense that, with you, it will be difficult to argue at all. Iâd bet you are correct there. But not because you are correct overall. Who am I to argue with a stick in the mud about itâs mud-stuckeness
In any event, the point that @miasm was making about individuals vs groups is not very relevant to the issue at hand. Both individuals and groups can be targets of school administrators wanting to punish ideas they donât like.
Definitely unsettled, even 19 years after the Berkeley article you cite. Most of the activity around Title IX is happening at the university level, and the Department of Educationâs Office for Civil Rights (OCR) âDear Colleague Letterâ has made it much more contentious and unsettled. That being said, after a google search I donât see any major court cases that come down on the side of Title IX outlawing hate speech in education.
As to alternatives to The Daily Caller, Iâd suggest looking at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). They skew more towards universities, and look very broadly at free speech in educational settings.
I do think the size of the crowd could apply in the case of inciting a riot (e.g., itâs easier to incite a riot if thereâs more than one person involved). But you still run up against Brandenburg in that the inciting has to be imminent, specific, and likely.
Thus, while the Supreme Court has opened the door to penalizing hate speech when it occurs in the context of another crime, it has generally restricted speech codes per se. In other words, campuses are free to enhance penalties for non-speech crimes such as assault, if they can prove that the assault was motivated by racial, religious or gender bias.[26] They were restricted when it came to hate speech that was not linked to criminal action. All that changed with the decision in Virginia v. Black in 2003. In this case, the Court struck down a Virginia law banning the burning of crosses per se, but upheld laws in California and other states that ban cross-burning that intimidates. In the other words, the Court ruled that action which could be proved to convey an âintent to intimidateâ was not protected by the First Amendment.
True, school administrators can be petty tyrants. At the same time everything youâre espousing can be boiled down to some version of a slippery slope argument to justify permitting racist speech by students on campus. With or without limits on injurious speech, school administrators can still be petty tyrants. If a limit on injurious speech is abused by administrators misreading and misapplying the rule, that blows, but doesnât justify free speech absolutism for students on High School campuses regarding injurious speech.
Apart from its obvious attempt at gloating condescension, I was struck by your comment being quite hypocritical and not at all insightful and wanted to take the opportunity to formulate a response within the context of this rhetorical exchange.
Because that is all that is happening in this space. Your hysterical pearl-clutching notwithstanding, the environment here tends toward the rich tradition of rhetorical philosophy, wherein those who would seek to sharpen their wits, discuss matters of the day in a way in which they hope will bring further enlightenment that might not be achieved without that dialectic. Itâs certainly not a new thing, particularly not something that has occurred, or even peaked, within the last 10-20 years.
I imagine that the long, storied tradition has always attracted sensationalistic gadlys such as your self who would take the opportunity to characterise those conversations as outrage, or attempt to twist the perception of the project into some kind of self-aggrandizing exchange in order to do that exact thing themselves. To stand above the conversation and hand down insult weakly disguised as criticism.
Now, to your point about addictiveness, were it not so monumentally misplaced, we might have something to discuss there but your sensationalist mischaracterisations make that difficult. People do tend to find rhetorical philosophy addictive. Discovery is addictive, especially when you get to do it with your friends. Perhaps even more so when achieved against your enemies.
You go on to make exaggerated, nonsensical claims in order to support your invective. Sounds pithy, I guess.
Ah. It is elitism against which you would strike. Bravo sir! You do us proud. But if you are most elite, where do you strike yourself? I see. In the groin. In a kind of repetitive motion that belies the masturbatory content of your rhetoric.
So, again, what weight might the conditions of a âprotected class of peopleâ and the âmission of the schoolâ, perhaps even âthe location within a more racist environmentâ have in determining whether such injurious speech could be seen as potentially inciting hateful action?
And when multiple people are already echoing the sentiment havenât we already crossed some watershed of gathering momentum in acquisition of an injurious, collective action, which would certainly be more threatening and more likely to incite hateful violence than a lone inciter?
And just to re-re-echo the situational quality, is the inciting not amplified by directly contradicting the schools mission?
Must we wait for actual physical violence to befall someone before we can be sure? Must we encourage the inversion of the schools mission in order to assure ourselves that we didnât step in too soon?
True, but the critical point in Virginia v Black is that the court ruled that the speech itself is not unconstitutional. Rather it is the attempt to intimidate and create a threat of violence:
Virginia v Black: ⌠This Court has long recognized that the government may regulate certain categories of expression consistent with the Constitution. See, e.g., Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U. S. 568, 571-572. For example, the First Amendment permits a State to ban âtrue threats,â e.g., Watts v. United States, 394 U. S. 705, 708 (per curiam), which encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals âŚ
But this is a bit off topic from our sub-discussion about Title IX. I still donât believe any major court cases have surfaced saying that Title IX outlaws certain speech in educational settings.
Okay, I will continue to debate in an honest fashion.
Do you believe snapchatting six people spelling out perhaps the most reviled, loaded term in englishâwhich has a well documented history of violence and intimidationâisnât a threat of violence and intimidation?
Is it just me or is the predilection to suffocate this universal behaviour within the context of US law only making the discussion a boring, legal, race to the case law?
It happened in the US, cool cool, but thereâs a moral base underlying this conversation which has been mostly ignored in favour of this officious, legal method of dealing with real life and itâs kind of frustrating to see the discussion shackled so.
and itâs kind of frustrating to see the discussion shackled so.