I donāt think Iād use Japan as a pillar of freedom, equality and inclusiveness, though, which is why I used Canada in my example, as those tenants are enshrined in our Charter of Rights andFreedoms.
Regardless, I was just pointing out alternative legal choices, not starting a discussion about which country has the best speech laws.
Before I chime in, Iād like to ask non-Americans what their speech limits are. If possible link to the actual laws and restrictions.
I know Germany has pretty specific anti-Nazi laws. But what about other forms?
@Wanderfound can tell us how Australia is different. Perhaps can you also give examples of when the laws were challenged and their outcomes? I canāt recall off the top of my head who else is from where ever.
Thatās glossing over the critical point in peopleās condemnation of the ACLU with regards to Charlottesville - the ACLU in VA posted that tweet, it starded getting passed around and then the ACLU posted this thread:
This is an obvious spin job to turn anyone criticizing the ACLUās really terrible tweet trying to distance the responsibility of a murder from the group associated with the murder into a broad conversation about protecting all speech. And this is where my personal issues with the most ardent defender of freedom of speech as an idea comes in, the ACLU is in the wrong with their behavior in Charlottesville. Period. They literally spun their way out a egregious mistake that is the opposite of protecting freedom of speech into getting Greenwald and many others to run as fast as they can to their keyboards to avoid discussing the issue whatsoever to quote twitter users and preach to anyone that wants to hear it.
The ACLU, meanwhile, refuses to acknowledge that their are well-funded groups of people abusing their rights to freedom of speech in order to normalize and gather strength for their brand of politics. They are using a combination of popular media they control, pushing into the grey-est of legalities on purpose, and encouraging extremism. These are groups recruiting to their fold using the exact same trajectory and methods of ISIS. The fact that the national ACLU takes a hard line in refusing to acknowledge yet another escalation of violence and terrorism and refuses to even think critically on their own actions and who is working for themā¦ well I think their blind and loud media manipulation defense of their fuck up says enough to anyone willing to think about it for two seconds.
The speech is protected, but any crimes committed in the name of hate are illegal. We have additional punishments for Joe Nazi who sprays his bigotry all over his Wastebook feed.
The ACLUās deleted tweet potentially reduced a first degree murder charge to a second degree murder charge if thereās any truth to the content. Shame on them.
That could equally apply to police and military recruitment.
Thereās a real problem when intelligent people are provoked into abandoning other peoples rights.
Man, take a breath. Youāre rhetoric is becoming indistinguishable from those whose -ends- you clearly oppose. Sadly, means seem to be on the table.
We donāt proscriptively prevent speech. Or association. Or commerce for that matter. All of those things are vectors historically used by supremacists to enforce their will. Theyāre in our Bill of Rights very much because the British (and plenty of hard-assed domestics too) tried to violate these INALIENABLE rights to alienate people, to other them, to oppress and profit from them.
Donāt Pick Their Tools Up.
(and for those who use the flag to tone police, please note the first person who ālikedā this comment was the person it was addressed to.)
Australian criminal law is mostly a power delegated to the states, so there are half a dozen different sets of anti-vilification laws. But theyāre all fairly similar, and there is a Federal equivalent in the case of interstate issues.
The act that applies in my neighbourhood is:
The speech-relevant bit is section 3A: racial vilification.
Later amendments and precedents expanded protection to cover sexuality, gender identity, religion, nationality and ethnicity.
For the informal government explanation, see:
For a national summary, see:
An important feature of these laws is that they are not actually intended to be enforced with any frequency. Prosecutions are very rare.
The chilling effect on speech is the whole point. They are intended to silence hateful bullshit before it is broadcast. Hateful bullshit spoken in private conversation is entirely unaffected, except by indirect cultural influence.
For the most prominent [1] prosecutions, see:
Youāll probably find much to object to in these cases.
For context, however: Bolt is a blatantly racist trolley. The subject of this case was one of the least offensive things heās ever said, and most of the country thought that the complainants, while correct on the facts, were overreacting.
Bolt was forced to take down a blog post (after the Streisand effect distributed it nationally), but he was not otherwise punished or silenced. He spun the resulting publicity into furthering his career as a local Hannity-equivalent.
Nalliah and his Catch the Fire ministries are straight-up genocidal fanatics, and were fond of running anti-Islamic hate seminars. However, his conviction was reversed on appeal.
On both of those, the Wiki article only gives a bare surface description. You need to dig into the details to understand what actually happened.
[1] Prominent because they were controversial and disputed.
Thanks for the long post, Iāll have to digest later.
Something interesting directly related to this topic happened:
And someā¦ massaging from their media dept.
Better than nothing, but:
No apology or admission of error.
Guns are not the problem in this case; Nazis are the problem. Heather Heyer wasnāt killed with a gun, DeAndre Harris was not beaten with a gun.
This is also going to impact folks like Redneck Revolt.
I think itās maybe relevant to this discussion to take a quick look whatās going on in Germany, because itās not a million miles away from the situation in the states. Ads for this website are all over Berlin at the moment:
http://berlin-gegen-nazis.de/en/
(gegen = against. Wir sind viele = we are many)
So youāve got the nazis marching, and the counter-nazis turning up to make life difficult for them. Of course the nazis canāt call themselves nazis (the rest of us are allowed), and they canāt call out specific ethnic groups as the source of their woes or as the targets of their ire, nor allude to the same through nazi symbolism. Seems not unreasonable. What I find interesting is that what the German nazis do out of legal necessity, hiding their hatred behind dog-whistle grievances such as the firebombing of Dresden, the American nazis do anyway for strategic reasons and, I would like to believe, out of shame.
As an aside, a chosen symbol of anti-nazi resistance in Germany is the toilet brush, which I think is just fucking cool beans.
So as much as German nazis would like you to believe that they are oppressed by hate-speech laws, the fact that they are out marching on a regular basis makes it a hard sell. At the same time, such protests and counter-protests have been a long-standing feature of German life. It seems not to be escalated to the same level as what weāre seeing now in the US, though thatās maybe more about effective crowd control than policing of speech laws.
I dunno, personally I tend to think that while hate-speech laws are fine and proper, not dissimilar to restrictions against incitement to violence that I believe also exist in the US (right?), they are a bit of a distraction that arenāt likely to change much of anything in the short term one way or another. I suspect that comparing Germany and the US in this way is probably a bit of a Rorschach test for oneās own beliefs about freedom of speech, but maybe itās interesting anyway.
I just wanted to pop in to say that I really appreciate it that despite the heated topic, weāve managed to stay mostly cordial and on topic, while avoiding personal attacks. Lots of good points and counterpoints and some really good information and resources here. In the words of Bill S. Preston Esq, thank you for all being excellent to one another.
Sort of exist in the US.
I think most people think it exists while the legality is far murkier.
That gets me thinkingā¦ It seems like suppression (of anything) eventually leads to eruptionā¦just a fact of life, of human nature?? (The pendulum must swing?) Whereas allowing things kind of takes the wind out of peopleās sailsāi.e., then itās not so fun anymoreā¦
I remember someone telling me that with kids, if you tell them āYou can do anything you wantā [allowing] theyāll become listless and not be able to think of anything to doābut draw a circle on the ground and tell them āYou can do anything you want as long as you stay inside this circleā [suppression, of a sort] and suddenly theyāll become extremely creative, actively doing all kinds of things, especially doing everything they can think of to push at the limits of the circle, to see how much they can get away withā¦
When you make something illegal with the full-weight of elected society and presumably the populace behind it, itās a more effective societal shaming versus governments literally erecting statues to long-dead bigots and losers out of protest of being decent human beings. By allowing equal weight in arguments when one side is genocidal (they are nazis; nazi ideology is genocidal, hence anyone who espouses it is supportive of genocide, full stop) and the other is opposed to such, you automatically give credence to the genocidal argument by creating false equivalency.
As far as crowd control goes, yes, itās a lot easier to control crowds when the naziās arenāt your off-duty co-workers.
Hear hear. Free speech is not an absolute when there is danger of losing it altogether.
āGoodā and ābadā are only subjective when they are close together. When ābadā descends to murdering innocent people and promoting genocide, then itās pretty obvious itās objectively being ābad,ā based on lots of historical evidence.
I will agree that humans have trouble seeing the fact that sometimes there is overlap and sometimes there isnāt. Here, I think itās really obvious thereās no overlap.
Missing key word: speech.
Iām sorry; I forgot we are splitting hairs here.
āViolent speech by fascistsā so often immediately leads to āviolent violence by fascistsā that the two are inexorably intertwined. A bomb threat is ājustā speech, but itās illegal and needs to be dealt with swiftly due to the possibility of deaths. The protests by the fascists in Charlottesville was ājustā speech, but then one person died, and many were injured. One followed the other pretty quickly.
Now, you might say that āwell, it doesnāt happen every time.ā Well, some bomb threats are fake. But the perpetrator is still breaking the law by doing it, and itās not considered an abridgement of free speech to outlaw it.
