Free speech more popular than ever; only racists are less tolerated

boing
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Whenever people complain about “free speech” they go to complaints about famous people who get to speak at conventions, who have large followings on the internet. That is, people who are obviously free to speak and who have their voices consistently heard. If you are getting asked to come on major television news shows to express your personal views, your free speech is hardly in jeopardy. Might as well complain that Bill Gates is going hungry when he runs out of truffles.

Not really. People actually study how messages get repeated and strengthened. If you sit down at a table like CNN did to have a discussion about whether people of Jewish faith or heritage are human beings you are not supporting the idea that they are people, even when everyone agrees. You are supporting the idea that this is a thing worth considering. There’s no debate to be had. Humans are humans regardless of what they believe and regardless of how they were raised. This is similar to how we strengthen fake news stories by refuting them because simply repeating the claim strengthens it.

The idea that the person who says “shut up” is losing the debate is a corrosive idea that originates from schoolyard bullying. The person who become emotional loses. No rational person would ever believe that one side is correct because the person arguing for it is able to stay more calm - how calm someone is able to stay has nothing to do with the logical strength of their position. And people who make decisions largely irrationally are largely going to agree when someone tells a nazi to shut the fuck up (except for the ones who already really wanted to hear what the nazi had to say). Either way, telling a nazi to shut up should have no impact on whether anyone believes the nazi.

The idea that the losing side says, “shut up” is based on the idea that people get upset when they feel they are losing arguments. Certainly some people feel that way, but a lot of people don’t. A lot of people get upset when someone is rambling on about bullshit. A lot of people get upset when someone says they don’t have the right to exist.

I personally get upset when they see people co-opting the idea of being rational to project their feelings of being upset when losing arguments onto everyone else. That doesn’t give any legitimacy to emotional projection.

When people believe that the side that gets angry loses, they practice an argument style that is about getting other people angry instead of about taking coherent positions (or, better yet, trying to actually understand what the other person is saying). You can see the results of that in toxic subreddits. From a logical point of view this is like trying to win a game of one-on-one by having such terrible body odour that the other person quits.

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I am neither a friend nor a supporter of Milo Yiannopolous and I do not waste time reading or listening to anything he says. He is an odious little trolley and attention whore who, after he exhausts the world’s interest in his racist garbage, will fade into irrelevance, obscurity, and will be flushed from the public conversation like the piece of shit that he is.

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How, if nobody is allowed to stop giving him a platform to shout from?

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Luckily, even people with no discernible ethics or core morality have a line that can’t be crossed, in spite of the insistence of some here that ‘free speech should be unlimited’; for the extremist right, its pederasty and Milo crossed that line… which is why he’s left schilling overpriced useless crap for Infowars.

Contrary to the unrealistic absolutist viewpoint about free speech that this thread has been inundated with, CPAC’s decision to withdraw his invite to speak was not a violation of Milo’s first amendment rights, nor is his loss of his book deal.

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Nobody’s stopping the poor dears. They’re merely expressing a desire that they fuck off and do it somewhere else.

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My experience is that when someone says something bigoted in my presence, and I have the opportunity to have a conversation with that person, I lovingly and respectfully, point out truths from everyday life that refute his or her bigoted statements. It isn"t long until he or she is backtracking and affirming egalitarian values and the worth and value of the people he or she had denigrated just minutes before.

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I’m glad you’ve had some success getting people to back down, but I’m not sure if you are suggesting that this approach extends well from a face-to-face interpersonal setting to a debate broadcast to a national audience setting. They are different things that require different tactics.

When you are confronted with a person in your day to day life who is saying bigoted things, all you can do is approach them as an equal because you are their equal. You can do that with compassion or with anger. But when CNN is deciding whether to discuss the humanity of Jews in a panel show, or a university is deciding whether to have a literal hatemonger come to their campus to speak, they are in a total different situation.

I’d also ask whether you have any similar experiences where showing compassion and respect has helped you to convince a person who is angry at nazis that they should change their ways to more compassionate ones. Do you take the approach of listening to their anger, absorbing it, and acknowledging it’s validity as a first step?

Because there are lot of people out there who point out the importance of compassion for white supremacists while side-stepping the importance of compassion for people who are hurt by white supremacists. Your point about why we should “debate” racists totally ignores the emotional burden of doing so for people who are being asked “debate” death threats.

Engaging people with compassion when they are being vile or belligerent or angry requires emotional fortitude. The fact is that people who have spent their whole lives dealing with racism, misogyny, homophobia and other kinds of bigotry directed at them have by necessity developed the emotional fortitude to absorb some of that hate. People who have led largely privileged lives haven’t developed much fortitude at all, and are generally very emotionally fragile when challenged.

So we get out the kids gloves to talk to nazis and we expect the people they are targeting to be the grown-ups in the room. We pile the burdens up on the marginalized and try to make sure nothing disturbs the hateful. This plays out over and over in the media.

I get annoyed when this is characterized as a “debate”. The word “debate” implies that both sides have a point. The point of a rational discussion is to figure out what is right not to prove you are right. I’ve got nothing to prove to white supremacists, and I don’t think CNN has anything to prove about them to the viewers at home.

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"Just stand there quietly, while I set your house on fire... with your kids in it."

That’s the kind of ‘logic’ I hear whenever anyone tries to tell me we owe Nazis and hatemongers a platform for their views, in the name of “free speech.”

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Unfortunately sometimes it’s an “ass-whole.”

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“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the cause of the fire was free speech. The defendant talked so hatefully, the house burst into flames!”

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(The fire in question being preceded by a group of militants explicitly calling for arson whilst distributing Molotov Cocktails to passers-by.)

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Hate-mongering isn’t illegal, but incitement to violence is; and the line between the two is not only dangerously thin, but where that line is placed is determined by people with privilege unlikely to be directly affected by the decisions they make.

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I’d argue that Nazism is one of those forms of hate-mongering that is a call to violence in and of itself. There’s no such thing as nonviolent ethnic cleansing.

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I’d agree with you. This isn’t about “sticks and stones;” words have power.

Any group that thinks gassing people they don’t like in ovens is ‘all good’ is one that automatically loses all standing with civilized society; they are a threat to us all, not just the people they actively target, and they deserve no quarter.

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Which is exactly why we have and need free speech: to speak out, denounce, and educate others about the evil promoted by Richard Spencer and his herd of hatemongering half-wits.

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I’ll add that any group whose programme limits free speech to members of their own race or religion has automatically forfeited any platform offered by a non-governmental institution devoted to liberal-democratic ideals. That still leaves Nazis with plenty of venues to spew their garbage and in no way violates their First Amendment rights.

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Again, I concur. I’ll never feel bad about denying hatemongers a public platform.

I’ll never have a moment’s remorse about any misfortune that befalls them or those who deign to defend them.

I will never be counted among the people who just sat idly by as the threat escalated until it was finally too late:

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Nazi’s in the 1930’s didn’t start out by putting people in mass unmarked graves; they started with manipulative speeches which incited existing resentments of minorities.

The ‘fire’ is metaphorical, no matter how dense some people may pretend to be; but the danger is quite fucking literal, and it’s not “fine.”

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We’ve got a very lengthy thread about the benefits and efficacy of free speech that’s been running for months:

If you have an actual novel case to make for how free speech protects us from naziism, lots of people here would be interested to hear it.

I think we all agree that death threats cross a line (and certainly law agrees with that). I think we all agree incitement to violence crosses a line (and, again, that’s what the law says).

Many of us find it insane that somehow chanting nazi slogans while you march with torches doesn’t cross that line (despite the fact that nazis are an explicitly genocidal group, and, last I checked, genocide was involved both violence and death).

Beyond that, there’s a question of non-genocidal, non-murderous hate speech.

First of all, some of this is simply coded instructions to attack people. Once you establish a clear pattern that whenever person A mentions a woman that woman immediately gets death and rape threats, it starts to look like they are directing those actions. Sort of like a mob boss ordering someone flowers in a cheesy movie.

Secondly, we have a problem with what people have called “stochastic terrorism”. You know there are a certain number of unhinged people out there who will take action, so you say things that play to those people. The people who promoted pizzagate created the situation where a person went into a pizza parlour with a shotgun. The people who promote crisis actor conspiracy theories create situations like this:

Where people went to the site of a mass shooting and told the pastor of the church that his murdered daughter never existed.

Now on one hand, that pastor wasn’t physically injured and the guys vandalizing the church were arrested, so maybe you don’t think the damage done by the speech was sufficient to warrant an kind of response. Or maybe you don’t think the link was sufficient between the speech of the person promoting “crisis actor” conspiracies and the people who acted on them. But to flip that around, I could also point out that there is absolutely no benefit to a “public debate” about whether or not that man’s daughter was murdered in his church.

Everyone agrees there are limits on free speech. From reasons like the prevention of violence to reasons like protecting private profit (check out copyrights!). If you want to say we need to protect free speech, I think you need to have a coherent explanation of what you think the limits of it are, otherwise we’d just be talking in circles.

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Sadly I don’t think all of us do, actually. Some people seem perfectly ‘okay’ with it, perhaps because they aren’t the ones being actively targeted.

We passed that point days ago.

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Indeed.

I admire the tenacity of y’all, but talking forever to a wall will never make it turn into something else.

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