I understand the inclination to drive distasteful ideas out of sight.
However, locking people up instead of openly critiquing or debunking their ideas that you find distasteful is likely to have better results and be more influential.
Incarceration by the authorities for something as slippery as ideas or speech will always turn out to be a perversion of the spirit of the intended effect.
Aah yes the super liberal Dutch. Along with the horrors of the slave trade and the Dutch East India Company you forgot to mention that to this day they house the diamond trade monopoly. There is absolutely no clean mined diamond. They are all blood diamonds.
Speaking of slipperiness…
I cringe because when someone’s utopian vision is locking people up over subjective enforcement of the non-crime of a verbal offense, they clearly lack the ability to foresee how quickly and inevitably that will turn into a wild abuse of power and force.
And maybe the reason “hate speech” doesn’t show up in crime stats is because speech is not a crime and it’s ludicrous to categorize it as one. Where to even begin with how many ways that kind of an absurd qualification could be abused and contorted.
I don’t know what to make of the rest of that antithetical point regarding conflation of incarceration rates VS free speech rights. The fact is that America already has far too many reasons to lock a person away unjustly. To rally in favor of giving the authorities yet another reason, based on subjective enforcement against unpopular ideas, is nuts.That concept is already well defined as “Orwellian” for a reason.
Heh, exactly.
See also: almost any huge law passed to do things for a good intention.
A lack of water infrastructure is something that one should judge a nation’s morals on?
As far as the farms go, the White “land owners” originally took the land without compensation, so why not?
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I think it’s you slipping down that slope.
The water situation in Cape Town is a symbol of the government’s corruption and failure to address the staggering class inequality in SA.
The seizing of farms is a horrible strategy that has been tried before. In Zimbabwe it lead to a collapse of the agricultural sector and rampant suffering. Now almost half of Zimbabwe suffers from malnutrition, the economy is in ruins, the currency is worthless, and suffering is widespread. There is no indication that SA wouldn’t suffer the same fate.
And sees the right to free speech as one right among others each of which can impose limits on the others, not as a primordial right over and above all others.
Here’s the problem with this discussion, you aren’t talking about reality but some imagined ideal. Hate speech is a crime in South Africa. There is a criminal law against it. I was talking about South African crime stats, so the fact that it doesn’t show up there is a meaningful fact about the real world, not a comment on your ideology.
In the real world the lack of American-style free speech in South Africa is currently resulting in one person going to prison. Not the collapse of their society or their descent into totalitarianism, but a person going to prison. Scotland has anti-hate-speech laws and hasn’t yet collapsed into totalitarianism. Canada has those laws, Australia does. Where are the 1984-esque governments in those countries?
Basically I’d just like to hear an actual example of these dire consequences you say result from this. A person going to prison unjustly is a serious issue. But if we are going to compare a nation where criminalizing hate speech is considered a reasonable limit on free speech (say Germany) to the one where it it isn’t (the US) what, other than a religious fervor for free speech, would lead us to believe that hate speech laws actually (not in theory, in real life) led to oppression?
No need to use BBs huge platform to disseminate hate speech.
/shrug
And I’d agree with you, normally.
But then again, we’re talking about the same people that brought us “The War On Terror/Drugs/Software Piracy/Etc”. And suddenly armored personnel carriers, full-auto weapons and illegal surveillance/searches are being used in daily domestic law enforcement in US cities.
So yeah, I’m squarely against giving those same people the legitimacy to police our speech. When it comes to those government types, every slope is slippery and every hammer needs a nail. If you want Jeff Sessions being the gatekeeper of what you’re allowed to say, that’s cool, but I’m going to remain flagrantly opposed
That sounds like a neoliberal power trip fantasy. Civilizations have long put effort and resources into organizing things so that nobody goes telling the 8 year old choirboy that he should have killed the priest with his bare hands or whatever. It’s common sense that the least practical solution is for each person to defend themselves at all times, just as it’s ridiculous to say that if you want a road to a hospital pay for them yourself but don’t use my taxes.
Basically, living in community has loads of disadvantages, but communal defense from aggression stemming from both within and without is one of the biggest benefits.
Nazis never stopped punching, when given the chance, they just generally prefer to do it in large numbers against much smaller numbers, usually in back alleys with no one around, because they are fucking cowards.
How is a justification for self-defense against violent people romanticizing street fighting? It’s the nazis who romanticize such things, not those who stand against them.
What’s the problem? I thought you liked people being armed? Or is it the half-shaved heads that you find so offensive… I mean, I know that people who have partial shaved heads are like, the REAL problem here, not the conintued problem of racist skinheads who actively seek out people to put into the hospital or kill, but yes, let’s talk about them punk inspired hair cuts, shall we?
These people are also not cornering Jews and black people for funsies either. Neo-nazis do this shit on the regular. There is a whole thing about laces, where once you kill one of the undesirables, you get to wear red laces, because murder comes cheap to these assholes.
Nothing wrong with playing dress-up, as long as you’re not trying to fool people into believing you’re actually someone you’re not. You wouldn’t know anything about such pathetic behaviour, of course…
Well, you know how it is, they’re not Real Americans™ and are therefore “undeserving” of bearing arms. As we saw in CA in the 1960s, some 2nd Amendment absolutists get very nervous when minorities and poor people with an urban sensibility start arming themselves against fascists or the police or guard labour for the wealthy (sometimes all three are one and the same!).
I think we are approaching equality for #6. Just not the result that was intended.
