Not wanting hate speech to be spread around = not authoritarian.
Not allowing hate speech in your home or business = not authoritarian.
Using the power of the law to disallow hate speech = authoritarian.
Using the law to curb hate speech sounds like a good idea, until you see the sitting president threatening to sue to prevent a book from coming out. Already there is opposition who are labeling far left doctrine as hate speech. History is full of examples where criticism of the government has been labeled as unacceptable and punishable by the law.
Putting up with the WBC and other groups is the price I am willing to pay to help ensure that the government can’t ever overstep it’s bounds through arbitrary labeling. The ACLU seems to share this opinion.
ETA - also tolerating their legal existence, doesn’t mean they aren’t still met with resistance and counter protest.
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Allowing hate speech to flourish out of some misguided notion of “free speech” is allowing it to exist and perpetuate, which is the same as supporting it. Society is real life. If a society chooses to not perpetuate hate speech, and instead chooses to mitigate as best it can the spread of hate speech, then it will be better for it.
Every time you state this, you ignore the rest of the sentence: The violence is implicit. There is no other path for the speech to affect or create that is not an act of violence. That is the context of hate speech. It is not a debatable issue with multiple possibilities. Ignoring that and treating “free speech” as this blanket get out of being a bad person card is without merit.
“Expressing hate speech doesn’t make you a racist,” and you talk about me diluting language. Gimme a break.
Having done so and then to turn around and say “It doesn’t affect me, in my personal view, so why are you complaining” is the definition of self-absorbed attitude, regardless of your personal experience.
How is this equivalent to hate speech law, and where is the connection between government suppression of speech and restrictions on hate speech? What is the exact method that hate speech laws will be utilized outside of a court setting of establishing precedence to allow the suppression of speech that is not hate speech?
Slippery slopes, slippery slopes everywhere.
And they’re the same gutless scum who thought the march on Charlottesville was a grand idea. Screw them. Centrist liberals are worthless.
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And the future will be full of more such examples. The question is, are countries that outlaw hate speech more likely to make criticism of the government punishable by law? Is the slope actually slippery in that direction?
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That’s a good question. The answer is (IMHO): I don’t think having such laws make them MORE likely to go in that direction. However, all it takes is a couple political movements for a government to be elected that wants to abuse such power and now they have the tools to be able to do so.
It is also important to remember that just because nations have outlawed certain speech and symbols, doesn’t mean they have gotten rid of the people practice hate. Neo Nazis, white supremacists, and nationalists are still a thing in Europe, even if they can’t walk around with swastikas on their arm in some places.
Like many things, I would like to see the causes of these issues approached, not the visible symptoms. It is like painting over mold on the wall, the mold is still there, growing, and even more of it is behind the wall. But just like mold, and hate, there often isn’t an easy way to get rid of it.
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Any basis of perceived commonality.
If you’re together to talk about your shared interest ,or simply experiencing the same casual human condition and learn about your differences, that’s contact that is over and over associated with positive changes to racial attitudes. If you open with your differences, you’re just stereotype enemy others.
This [potentially] explains why the results of contact theory experiments have been mixed, which is consistent with recent results that empathy is highly predicated on perceived attractiveness and self-similarity, and the latter is much easier to manipulate in a general way.
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Which all sounds laudable on its face. Yet when you interrogate this “shared humanity” closely, I believe it’s actually coercive harmony as described by Laura Nader.
Look at the context of your first usage I cited where you state that “upfront confrontational behavior undermines shared humanity” (emphasis added). Confrontational positions adopted by marginalized groups are adopted as a mechanism of self-defense. Confontational positions are most often adopted after a long period of coping with oppression by other means: acquiescence, migration, and on and on. There is a reason for an oppressed group, or members of an oppressed group, to come to behave confrontationally, even offensively. That reason is a history of the oppressed group being forced to cede it’s humanity to survive.
so, I am not sure what in your model any oppressed group is to gain in a “shared humanity” as described, but I see a lot to lose.
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Shared humanity only works if the other side assumes you’re truly human. It’s hard to have a shared humanity when this is the basis of dispute. And I know that you might think it’s unlikely for people to dehumanize each other but look at history of all the genocides, mass enslavements, and general deprivation of life and liberty. This isn’t an exceptional case of human behavior but rather the inherent state of things: a true war of all against all.
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I’m just not sure it’s really a new tool. Making laws against unwanted behaviour is a pretty old tool. The new tool would be things like NSA programs that extensively monitor citizen speech. If they do go full fascism, they won’t be prosecuting people for an analogue of hate speech, they’ll be prosecuting people for an analogue of treason or terrorism; those are the laws that I’d be worried about getting out of hand.
I really have no idea about the effectiveness of those laws at preventing those acts. I think there might be some value simply in keeping hate groups illicit. I’d want any policy to be well researched to ensure that it achieves what it’s trying to. I don’t think such laws to be excluded as a possibility because of ideology or faith in free speech as a solution to all problems. Whether any particular law is effective is going to depend on a very large number of factors, and I think anyone interested in putting in such a law has a lot of jurisdictions to review to see what works and what doesn’t.
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I believe that with only the tiniest incidental exceptions, all negotiations over shared norms and enforcement of those norms are inherently coercive activity; exercising social pressure on individuals to accept not-their-preference for a shared consensus (or dictate, or whatever ugly way the norm happens). You can scoot around the who and how, but it’s always coercion.
Second, the argument you cite depends on and fails to make any case that confrontational behaviors actually produce favorable results. Are you arguing for this as an effective engine of social progress?
There’s [usually] a difference between being assertive about your needs, and going out of your way to other yourself.
It is absolutely true that there is a long ugly history of tribal-style dehumanization leading to atrocities, my argument is that a focus on difference and social othering is primarily a tool for dehumanization.
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The problem with your argument is that you assume the people who are discussing their identity on the left are trying to be exclusionary. The reality is that many of us can’t escape our identity. For example, I’m transgender and I have to deal with the fact that society doesn’t universally tolerate my existence. It can be small things such as longer than normal looks to big things like outright harassment and/or physical violence. The world never lets me forget that I am transgender and that I don’t deserve to live even in seclusion away from the rest of humanity. So when we talk about our identity in relation to humanity we’re discussing such matters in which our identity is a hazard and the reasons why it’s a hazard even when we avoid mentioning it to others. Mind you, it’s more complex but that’s how I see it.
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But a focus on difference and social othering is the only way to address problems that still exist because of difference and social othering.
It still seems to me like you’re insisting that women, people of color, disabled people and so on pretend when dealing with privileged people that they don’t occupy such categories – that such categories are irrelevant to them, when they’re obviously not.
Edit: @armozel I’m sorry to hear about those difficulties (though of course not surprised). Thank you though for providing a concrete example.
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From the non-violent confrontations by King to the violent confrontation in reserve of Malcolm X, yes confrontation works.
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It’s not about “focusing” on social othering, it’s acknowledging the existence of it, instead of being in denial, and allowing for programs that mitigate it when it happens. We’re not going to be rid of racial ideology any time soon, this defensive action of “who smelt it dealt it” racism is pure denial; the problem isn’t the racism as much as it is acknowledging how that racism is utilized in concert with capital, social and monetary.
There is one trap that these discussions get trapped in; “curing” racism. I’ve not met any perfect people who have transcended racism, and no group has immunized themselves from racial ideology. The difference is that white racial identity benefits from the historic accumulation of capital and state power, and so white racial identity has had a higher ceiling on what it can accomplish. The job of people who are aware of the false ideology of white supremacy isn’t to start a fundraiser to find a cure for racism, it’s to use their capital and state power more responsibly, with a fraction more awareness of how that power can be misused. Responsible actions may include reparations, that may include purposely trying to elect people from groups that have been under-represented, but it doesn’t include this tautological boondoggles and denial.
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I think my argument is being taken as far, far stronger and more universal than I intend it. I’m suggesting that when one has the ability to avoid othering themselves, it is is an opportunity, not that anyone is obligated to ignore their own or other’s observable properties or social situation.
Where interaction takes a form with some proximity or some distance we don’t always get, you can ‘sneak up’ on people with things that are usually apparent, and establish relationships that break down differences, whether it’s because you’re thrown together into a situation that elevates other priorities and builds commonality, or because we’re on the internet and no one knows you’re a dog unless and until you decide.
I hate to work by personal anecdote, but I’m mixed race and as a kid could pass as either parents’ ethnicity depending on who I was standing with and where I was. I’d like to think that gave me some appreciation for the weird interplay of essential and constructed identity, and I’m sure it colors the way I think about it. I also grew up non-religious in the bible belt, which made my teen years a fun education in picking battles.
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We are actually mostly in agreement, I’m just arguing that
- We do have those intersectional obligations to address in our interventions. The use of the Southern Baptist church as a central point in American black cultural identity has been very powerful… and also not so good for the non-straight. These interactions happen all over the place, and pretending ‘doing justice’ always excuses them is not viable.
- We should not spoil opportunities to build bridges and coordinate actions between communities because we limit ourselves to only a lens of central identity.
Sometimes this is as simple as being mindful of our messaging to not create conflicts, as with the relatively-recent problems between labor and women’s interest around parental leave.
Ed: I already invoked one of the canonical examples of both problems in this thread, the discussion in Mapping the Margins about the Thomas/Hill situation becoming a referendum on “Do you hate blacks or do you hate women?” because of an over-dependence on the identity model and disregard for externalities.
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We shall be misunderstood and demonized in our time, but perhaps our children and neighbors will remember us fondly.
Do you mean permanently? If so, this saddens me immensely.
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It isn’t a new tool per se, but a new law codifies that tool.
You’re right there is already some scary stuff in the past and today with the level of surveillance on citizens with little to no oversight. Sooo, yeah. When they are already abusing the power they have, one must forgive me if I don’t trust them with more power, even if the reasoning for it is for “good”. Most of the erosion of civil liberties is under the pretense of protecting the great good.
I imagine they do scrub social media, and it probably errs on the side of caution. I imagine it is harder to get ones ideas out in the mainstream. But there has always been underground and private channels for this stuff, even before the internet.
Though we are condemning Google and Facebook and others for bending to the will of the Chinese government who wish to block hate speech - as it relates to certain issues. Issue that we currently take for granted being able to criticize robustly.
Back in the day me and my punk buddies had a saying, “hate the haters”, meaning, no tolerance for anyone who hates on anyone else. Did that include us? No, because we hated on the haters. We liked everyone else.
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