This would be an exercise in pure hypocrisy. It would be enforced by governments, who basically make their living by threatening people with violence. But they get a pass, because they’re special.
Violence and speech are distinct, and need to be treated as such. Being intimidated is simply a losing proposition. Like in other areas of life, talk is cheap.
It all hinges upon the idea of “performative speech”, that talking about sex is a form of real sex, talking about violence is a form of real violence. People seem to also emotionally “get off” on talking about money and celebrity, but these don’t directly materialize either. The idea that speech is the act it represents has always been about hoping to control speech, and it also “conveniently” ignores most everything about communication, information, and rhetoric.
Like, look, I know any such “banned from internet” laws wouldn’t be handled in any way that would be sensible, but when you basically take a “How far are you willing to go, HUH?”, against the sort of people I’d be willing to go essentially all the way against in restraining, well, it’s not an effective argument.
But when you continually use the same nonsense argument that essentially boils down to “Well, the government murders people, so we shouldn’t take legal action against ANY murderers as long as the government is allowed to murder.”, which works for pretty much EVERY crime, and then throw in what is essentially blaming victims for being intimidated when violent fascists stalk them, well, there’s nothing really I can say to that. Any possible conversation is over before it has begun. We can’t stop all violent people right now, so may as well have wholesale slaughter in the streets!
My contribution was part of the meta-debate. Hypothetically, assuming someone managed to convinced you that a frank and open discussion of when and how to “kill popobawa4u in his/her sleep” was a discussion worth suppressing in some way, *what mechanism of suppression will you prefer? Personally I prefer a democratic legislature supervised by a strong constitutional court coupled with private internet services/media/discussion facilitators whose ethos is to be as neutral and non-censoring as allowed by law. If the answer is “let them plan however much they want”, the meta-question does not arise.
But bear in mind that if “publicly talking about killing p.” rightfully earns someone a little bit of extra police surveillance or a visit by a friendly neighborhood police officer, then that is already a kind of censorship.
No. If you threaten to kill people and you mean it, you deserve to go straight to jail. If you threaten to kill people and they think you mean it but you really don’t, we might talk about fines & warnings, but that’s negotiable. Jail time if you made the threat in order to extort an advaantage for yourself.
On the other hand, if you threaten to kill people and its obvious to any reasonable person that it’s a joke, it’s a joke even if it’s in bad taste and an unreasonable person got scared.
All this has nothing to do with the internet.
Banning someone from using the internet has far more severe consequences today than it did ten years ago, but it still has no consequences on my grandmother. It’s impossible to tell how severe a punishment that will be in another ten years. Instant job loss and societal death? Might as well make things simpler by sending them to jail.
I’m very sceptical in general of arrangements like “if you don’t comply with arbitrary punishment X, you will go to jail.” It ends up sending people to jail who didn’t actually deserve jail time, because they were somehow unable to comply with an arbitrary restriction, and on the other hand it can help people escape jail who really deserve it.
Either Orpheus and Euridice deserved to be reunited, or they didn’t. It certainly wasn’t just to force Euridice to return to the underworld because Orpheus turned around at the wrong moment. That injustice still rankles after all this time…
This is fair and I can agree to this. I was trying to sound “reasonable” but not making much sense. Unfortunately any resolution is completely unlikely, with stalkers and harassers only being punished in the single-digits so far, and existing in far, far greater numbers.
Talking about something and undertaking the actions aren’t the same. Discussing how and why to kill me aren’t the same as the intent of doing it. And I have had crowds discuss in person killing me, which were obvious attempts to intimidate me from expressing controversial ideas. Even telling me to die, or discussing that I should die are hardly threatening acts.
The ultimate logical regress is that if I feel threatened that somebody discusses potential harm to me, how would they possibly be prosecuted or stopped, when testimony requires having the same conversation in a courtroom? If and when people cannot legally discuss the legality of their own actions, then there is no way for people to decide what is ethical. It becomes classist, where an only an “approved”, “trusted” party can discuss such matters.
But that is a real thing.
Imagine someone points a gun at you. And then this person performs a speech act and informs you of his sincerely held belief that he will shoot you dead unless you voluntarily hand over all your money now.
Unless you take your chances and try to prove that he doesn’t mean what he says or that you can draw faster than he can shoot, NO ACTUAL VIOLENCE will be involved.
We call this person a robber, and punish him accordingly. We don’t call him a “nice person who gets a lot of cash donations from random strangers in dark alleys”.
It is however true that we must distinguish between different severities. A child whose toy gun is mistaken for real is not the same as a robber who robs people by threatening them with a realistic-looking toy gun, and that robber is not the same as a robber who shoots his real gun first and asks for money later.
Of course not. A threat is not the same thing as an action. But threats can be used for coercion, so we sometimes need ways to defend against threats.
If it was “obvious”, then it wasn’t a “credible” threat. And I completely agree that “obviously empty” threats shouldn’t be punished like “credible threats”.
I don’t follow. If you threaten to / plan to / actually kill someone, “He deserved to die” is not an admissible defense in court either way. And I also can’t imagine a situation where someone would want to say in court that “yes, I intend to murder this person”.
And if you don’t live in a death-penalty country that engages in drone warfare, the “ruling class” doesn’t need to discuss those matters either, so the law can be uniformly enforced.
Changes to the law do need to be discussed in general terms; otherwise you might get in trouble for saying “I want the law against death threats to be repealed, because I’m going to kill you and I really think you should know beforehand.”
Single digits? Really? Is that the current US number? I’m sure Austria is beyond the single-digit range, and we’ve only got 8 million people. People are still calling for more, but I’m not sure how much farther down that slippery slope I want us to slide. Our spot on the big slippery slope of censorship looks very comfortable to me, so I wouldn’t mind America joining us, but I don’t want our laws to get any stricter.
Ok, I really don’t know what you are saying, there!
That’s why I called into question the reality of “performative speech”. Murder is prosecuted as murder. Threats are prosecuted as threats. But discussing acts which may be unlawful is not the same as performing them. Talking in the abstract about killing me is not a crime, because it doesn’t actually do anything.
All of the other things I read people complaining about with regards to online harassment are already covered by existing laws. If there is a real shortcoming there, it is that of selective enforcement. Threats are already a crime, and should be prosecuted as such. (And no, posting a scary picture you don’t like is not a threat.) Harassment is a very real problem, and it is difficult to get police to act upon it. But if we can’t get police to do their job, I very much doubt that passing more legislation is going to change how they do things.
If it seems this way, it could be because you are deliberately conflating speech with acts. The important thing to distinguish would be precisely what they are the victim of. What is being done to them? But even when crimes are committed, I am opposed to encouraging people to feel victimized, because this does not do anything to help them. If somebody does something horrible to a person can be a deplorable criminal act. But victimhood is an identity. It is not what was done to you, but who you are. My experience has been that framing it this way neither assists getting justice, nor therapy for the person wronged.
FWIW I have had people try to kill me quite a few times. By drowning me, strangling, kicking me in the head, and trying to run me down with cars. I have also had many, many more people threaten to kill me, or otherwise hope to intimidate me by talking about it. So when I say that “Being intimidated is simply a losing proposition.”, this comes from my own personal experience. I know I have been wronged, but adopting the state of mind of being a victim still seems counter-productive, even after all I have been through. Sympathy is a bottomless pit, and ultimately less compassionate than calm confrontation.
@Glaurung has it - the poisonous elements come boiling out of their nests like angry, wanker hornets, at the slightest pretext. It is easy to pootle about there much of the time, pretending that because you subscribe to r/stuffi’minterestedin or r/cuteanimals or whatever, that Reddit is fine, and then once or twice a month you’re knee-deep in internet sewage and remember oh yeah, this is Reddit, the Mos Eisley of the World Wide Nets.
I think there is a big difference between talking about celebrities and threatening to come to someone’s house and kill or rape them… especially when that’s backed up with evidence that the person has personal information, such as one’s home address or work address. It’s a pretty fine line between threatening speech and action. Where do we draw the line between someone is just being an ass to someone is making a threat.
and words can hurt people. Maybe you think it shouldn’t, and that it’s silly to get one’s feelings hurt or to be afraid for one’s life because of what they do on the internet, but that doesn’t change the reality for people who have killed themselves because of online harassment and stalking.
Reddit will present you content without your input. Facebook and Tumblr require you to set up your own feeds by friending and following people, and only advertises other feeds that match yours into your feed. Reddit has /all which will have a mix of anything popular, and the defaults when you sign up. And Reddit is segmented by groups, rather than individuals, so each of Reddit’s feeds is a collective voice instead of an individual one. So you don’t quite get the kind of echo chambering anywhere else.
Tumblr actually has some major problems with this, in that I have been recommended posts from racist, homophobic, sexist priests, from pro-rape MRAs, GGers calling for violence against women, and the like. Tumblr’s system is fucked and the staff is really honestly composed of awful people for allowing it as they have, and for doing some of the things they’ve done. I have a mutual who’s black who literally got a post put on her dash from a fucking Nazi’s white supremacist ranting due to tumblr’s recommendation system.
The transdimensional entity manifesting in isometric spacetime as Antinous is not the same transdimensional entity manifesting in isometric spacetime as Falcor.
