And the modern antifa, unlike the Communist thugs of Weimar Germany, don’t make initiating violence a part of their organisational policy, aren’t trying to take over the government, and aren’t supported by foreign governments. None of those things can be said about the modern fascists, and all the false-equivalency “gotchas” in the Libertarian playbook won’t change that.
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I don’t think it could be argued that hate speech laws lead to oppression. But they can be a tool for oppression. Especially if it so happens that a minority is in power.
There’s no necessity that anyone punch anyone, except in self-defense, and the act of punching infringes upon another’s freedom, so it’s hardly an individual right. We have verbal means of expressing disapproval, until such time that we start equating hurt feelings with physical assault—because anyone can play that game. People who kick around ridiculous terms like “white genocide” now wield actual political power in the United States, and I’d hate to have to live by their definition of hate speech.
Yes they do. And how did they come to wield that power? Why didn’t good speech defeat bad speech? Why is it that the country with the best free speech protections is also the country where the white surpemacists are in ascendency?
The thing about telling other people to just manage their emotions in response to hate speech is that emotions are basically the motivator for all human action, so it can easily be reversed. Why do we even need free speech? When you want to say something, why don’t you just manage that desire and keep your mouth shut? Is it not fair to ask a white supremacist to bear to pain of keeping their thoughts to themselves so that another person doesn’t have to bear the pain of hearing implicit threats to their lives? Instead of asking the non-assholes to grow up and stop being so fragile, maybe we should ask the assholes to grow up and stop being such assholes.
And, honestly, when I hear people draw some giant line between hurtful talk and hurtful punches I just can’t get my head around it. Maybe your life experience is that physical violence is terrifying and words don’t matter, but I’d rather take a punch than have to explain why racists are protesting my parent’s funeral to my child.
Suicide is far more common than murder. Depression is far more of a drain on society than simple assault is.
Hate speech is doing more damage than a few people getting punched. It’s simple statistical fact that right now we have a larger, deadlier crisis with emotions than we do with physical violence. Pretending that isn’t a thing is burying your head in the sand.
People who live with hate speech live with the threat of violence. I have no right to ask that I be shielded from a threat of violence while other people in my democratic society live under it. Society is healthier if people who are the targets of hate speech believe someone is willing to stand up for them. It’s sad that someone is a masked vigilante instead of an elected official.
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Not to mention, you said nothing about how likely your scenario would have been, which is the only thing that @Hipshot seems to be critiquing.
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Helll yeah that’s what I’m talking about! Community self-defense! I don’t mean to alarm you, but if you extrapolate this concept out, you may already be an anarchist.
It’s all about solidary, mutual aid, and voluntary association. It’s why autonomists are the most - arguably the only - effective aid workers after natural disasters. All relationships are power relations, because the logic of capital totalizes everything. Nothing is outside the society of the spectacle.
Do you mean De Beers? That is not a Dutch company right?
Or did you mean something else?
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If you want hate speech to be legal (and to be clear, I don’t want it to be illegal) you’re going to have to accept that it has violent real world consequences and that people will defend themselves from it. Just because you have the privilege of not experiencing its consequences doesn’t mean that they aren’t real. I know several POC that have gotten into serious legal trouble from defending themselves from fascists and I’ve been beaten up for kissing boys. This wouldn’t happen without hate speech. You don’t get to tell me it has no consequences. Before you deploy your notable rhetorical skills, ask yourself this: Would I say that out loud on the sidewalk in Englewood?
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Let me parse this . . . I do think that RR are not playing dress up. You don’t wanna fuck with them.
Free expression doesn’t guarantee that good ideas will triumph over bad, but neither can any amount of censorship inoculate a democracy against racism and demagoguery.
Trump didn’t need the n-word to get his point across. People understood birtherism. They knew what “Make America Great Again” meant. The general public kidded itself that racism had gone away because it was no longer in the open, but his supporters read the signals and acted upon their hated of women and minorities nonetheless. Now he has all the executive powers at his disposal that Democrats felt much too safe granting Obama.
(And America certainly isn’t only country where far-fight parties are gaining ascendancy).
I agree with you. I agree that we should tell these people that what they’re doing is despicable. I believe that they should be shunned and disgraced, and that we should confront hate speech wherever we see it as a matter of personal decency and social responsibility. I don’t, however, trust governments to decide which forms of speech are too ugly or dangerous to be expressed, and I’m not sure why anyone does.
Yes, words can be extremely damaging, but no less so if you’re in prison, or tied to a stake. We stopped suppressing one another’s ideas through force because we recognized that it only led to endless cycles of recrimination. If we pick up those tools again, they’ll eventually be used against us, not instead of the damaging language, but in addition to it.
We’ve (mostly) deescalated from violence to verbal abuse, and from verbal abuse we can hopefully deescalate to reasoned differences of opinion based upon mutual respect. Why put the gun back on the table?
I don’t buy the “If we restrict hate speech we will pave the way for restricting other ‘political opinions’”. It has an air of truthiness, but does it work that way in reality? We need to check reality to find out.
If you think that Germany and Scotland are on the path to becoming oppressive regimes because they have anti-hate-speech laws you can say so, but I think it will be hard to point to real world reasons to think that’s happening. If you’ve seen a democracy use the logic of restricting hate speech to restrict participation in a non-hateful political party, then that would be a useful example of how things can go wrong. But right now it would be hard to say that countries with hate speech laws are becoming oppressive or a police states faster than the US is.
i’m concerned about the precedents set up by the Obama administration and handed to the Trump administration. Like an executive drone strike list with no oversight. At the other end of the spectrum I’m not especially worried about the Trump administration abusing homicide laws as they seem no more ripe for abuse than any other law. I think that it is unfounded placing restrictions on speech at the drone-strike end of the abusability spectrum rather than the homicide end, and I won’t be convinced by rhetoric, only by evidence or historical example.
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I don’t believe that hate speech laws, as they are currently applied, are all that significant. They’re hardly filling up prisons, and there are certainly more egregious examples of democracies violating free expression (e.g., the US Alien and Sedition Acts) without sliding down a slippery slope to repression. On the other hand, there are countries with constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression that have, by stages, rescinded it—Turkey, Russia, etc—so it’s also not something that we should take for granted.
When you propose to limit expression based upon hurtfulness, you’re proposing to lower the threshold for curtailing that right in order to (I would argue) force people to express their hatred through a veil of plausible deniability. You want the criteria to become more subjective, and to the extent that it is so, it becomes much easier to litigate against freedom of expression. There’s no historical example of battlefield nuclear weapons triggering a global thermonuclear war, but we can recognize that there’s risk involved in blurring those lines, just as there’s risk inherent in applying too-subjective criteria to how the government defines our basic liberties.
As I say, hate crime laws as they currently exist don’t bother me much, but if we really start throwing each other in prison over “verbal assault,” I can definitely picture that spiraling out of control. I haven’t seen the video, but I’d also question the proportionality of putting someone in prison for two years for a racist rant addressed to an authority figure.
I don’t know of any diamond monopoly run from Holland, if you have any other info on that I’m very interested.
If it turns out you were mistaken about this, no worries, I know a different company that is arguably worse. If you want to talk about a Dutch company that has been, and is currently still doing horrible things in the world you should have a look at Shell:
It’s mostly a oil company, although it has recently been focusing on gas a bit more. It is doing some token efforts towards sustainable energy but that is mostly a image thing, not a real effort. They are a massive polluter.
Besides this it also wants to drill for oil in the artic (Remember how hard it was to close that pipe that broke in the gulf of Mexico? Now imagine the same kind of set up, in the even more inhospitable artic, much deeper).
Has by it’s own (leaked) account managed to infiltrate into all levels of the Nigerian government and is wreaking havoc on the environment there while very effectively minimizing the amount of profit from their drilling that goes to the Nigerians. Human rights issues abound.
They made a surprisingly accurate movie explaining the problems and effects of climate change in 1991, that they kept hidden until it recently leaked. Meanwhile doing nothing to stop their producing of massive amounts of pollution while they did design their drilling platforms to withstand the expected rising sea levels and more explosive weather.
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Actually legal suppression of speech has a fairly effective track record, which is why it’s nearly universal (the U.S. being an odd exception.)
Firstly, vocalizing a belief helps reinforce it in the mind of the holder. Secondly, recruitment to those beliefs becomes more difficult. Thirdly, the human brain tends to confuse the state’s legal authority with moral authority. Simply banning the expression of beliefs makes them morally less palatable.
People don’t get beliefs from on high - they are passed culturally. And if you can suppress or damage cultural transmission, then it’s much harder for these beliefs to be transmitted to the next generation.
Of course, the choice of what speech to ban is rather arbitrary. While I’m fine with the Canadian government banning certain types of hate speech, I could imagine people arguing that in the absence of the 1st amendment, the quality of governance in the US is such that the speech most likely to be banned would be criticism of the government or speech likely to cause instability or unrest.
Personally I don’t believe it, but given the trust of people here in the US government, I could see them not wanting to arm the government with a weapon that they feel would be used against them.
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Of course I was just talking about emancipation. It’s arguable if people of color have equal protection under the law in anything but name even now
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