>Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
I get what you’re saying and agree with you, but please don’t compare gay people and neo-nazi. They’re not same or even similar.
I get what you’re saying and agree with you, but please don’t compare gay people and neo-nazi. They’re not same or even similar.
When your speech impinges on the safety or rights of another citizen, you are not covered by free speech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
Free speech is not carte blanche to invite violence or call for a genocide. Please watch the recent vice documentary to hear what and how the Charlottesville white supremacists prepared for. It's truly vile and genocidal.
If you want to see a society who has been much more firm holding against racist nonsense, see Germany who has legislated against Nazi symbols and propoganda. Do you see why allowing indimidation and hateful violence run rampant is a bad idea?
That said, Schenck is an awful example of them, considering:
- it does not advance your argument at all - Schenck was an anti-war protester who was trying to distribute flyers. Where's the "impinging on safety or rights of another citizen" there?
- it has been rejected and abandoned as a doctrine, most notably via Brandenburg vs Ohio.
(See https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...)
Even in the US, freedom of speech is not unlimited. Perhaps we're finally learning that the freedom from discrimination trumps the freedom to preach discrimination.
It's about time we lost our naivety. Our European brethren learned this lesson during WWII.
Essentially any political viewpoint can be described in such a way as to fail this test. Do you really want to set the standard that if the execution of a viewpoint has a negative impact on some group, it's OK to use violence against anyone who holds that viewpoint? I guarantee you this won't play out how you want.
> Our European brethren learned this lesson during WWII.
The US has strong protections on free speech and other fundamental rights because "our European brethren" didn't, and therefore treated their colonies so poorly as to almost universally engender armed insurrection. Nothing much changed in this regard then or in WWII, so I'm not really sure what "lesson" you think you're referring to; that Germany should have more aggressively censored anti-incumbent sentiment in the aftermath of WWI? Yes, what a lovely lesson.
> Essentially any political viewpoint can be described in such a way as to fail this test.
I think it's an essential question about where to draw the line. Obviously there must be limits to speech: You can't shout 'kill all the X' to a group of people with baseball bats threatening a group of X (or commit slander or yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, etc.). Generally, it's almost always hard to find a clear, simple rule that applies effectively in all cases of reality - morality and law are like algorithms in that respect. That's why we have judges, juries, and sophisticated laws.
But here's a proposed, relatively functional solution that is simple: Draw the line at intolerance - the only thing we should not tolerate is intolerance itself. A few reasons: 1) Intolerance is a parasite on the rule of tolerance and free speech; it tries to stop others from having those rights. 2) It violates the basic social contract: You tolerate and respect me, and I'll do the same for you. If you break that contract, why should I keep tolerating you? 3) Look up the "Paradox of tolerance".
> if the execution of a viewpoint has a negative impact on some group, it's OK to use violence against anyone who holds that viewpoint
I didn't see anyone mention violence.
The law should be codified hypocrisy?
By this logic, we should we be allowed to steal from people who believe in communism because they don't believe that property rights are morally justified. If they don't believe in private property, why should they get it?
Here's a better idea: don't start shit, and if someone starts shit with you, you can do whatever needs to be done to protect your rights. This has the advantages of A) not being absurdly hypocritical and B) not violating people's rights in an effort to preempt behavior you think might hypothetically emerge from the expression of those rights.
> I didn't see anyone mention violence.
How do you propose to enforce censorship laws? Ask nicely?
The reason you don't go down the path of Europe in this regard is because Europeans are already losing representation, and democracy fails when people aren't free to speak their minds and express their ideas, love it or hate it. That's how a truly free society actually works.
And even though I happen to life in a country where anybody waving a swastika in the last 70 years went to jail, I can still criticise the Government in any way I want.
In fact, the Economist, not usually suspected to harbour communists, considers most of Europe to be more democratic than the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...
What does that mean?
In my particular part of Europe we have rather more political representation than we did even 20 years ago.
It's not uncommon for religious people to think that the principles of their religion are so obvious and universal.
This seems like a very similar attitude. But really, you're just used to it. That's all.
As a person who was not born into western culture, I find the concept sort of weird in some way. Although I do accept it as a given in western cultures, I can't see it as either obvious nor universal.
Ratified by 48 nations, no votes against and 8 abstentions.
http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/inde...
Everyone assumes for granted that there are limits to that. Your freedom ends where mine begins.
What does this even mean? Free speech is severely limited to the point that I can be fined for singing most songs in a public place. What I can say to or about people is limited, and I can be charged with various crimes based on the content of that speech. What I say to a child can be interpreted as abuse just based on its explicitness. In many circumstances, I'm not allowed to tell anyone any significant news about what's going on within a company that I work for or have any connection to, for fear that they might profit.
"Free speech" is about the government restraining people from political speech, and even that's been heavily restricted at different times - currently speech can be interpreted as giving material support to terrorists, conceivably opening one up for indefinite detention. We've jailed people for treason for anti-war speech.
Free speech is not about anybody being forced to help you say whatever you want to say. You can't just literally translate the phrase, it's a shorthand. If you want to fight for businesses losing control of their platform in proportion to their size, I'd be glad to support you. Expropriate and renationalize, I say. If Cloudflare is a public utility, I'd demand that Nazis have the opportunity to use it as freely as everyone else.
As for the rest, 1) there's no indication that Cloudflare can prevent them from thinking what they would like, and 2) non-discrimination is not a moral principle; if we didn't discriminate, we wouldn't need more than one word, or to learn our left from our right. Our norms are against certain types of discrimination, not the basic idea of distinguishing between things. There are differences between Nazis and Jews, for example. If we couldn't see them, we wouldn't be able to understand why some people wanted to murder other people, or discriminate accordingly when deciding who we should do business with.
Nazism is not a political position, it is a death cult. Nazis are murderers or would-be murderers who want me and everyone I love or care about dead. They are actively conspiring to make that a reality, sometimes achieving some fraction of it. Incitement to mass murder is not and should never be protected speech.
They are also actively conspiring to eliminate free speech, freedom of conscience and non-discrimination. Protecting the direct efforts to destroy those moral principles, in the name of preserving them, is an obvious contradiction and an obvious failure to uphold those values.
None of this is hypothetical or theoretical. We know what happened the last time they achieved real power. We know that they have escalated their violence as they have gained allies in power today.
We should protect the free exchange of ideas. We should not protect or give a platform to a conspiracy to mass murder.
In a democracy, the majority has limitless power. They can vote to oppress or kill the minority, which survives only due to the majority's good will and whim. Democracy is the angry mob. 'Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner', goes a saying.
The solution is constitutional democracy, which includes rules protecting the minority, via civil rights. In the U.S., these rules are the Bill of Rights. The rule of law also is essential.
But it's very clear that even those rights and laws are not sufficient: In the U.S., slavery, segregation, lynchings of blacks, and oppression of other politically vulnerable groups, including women and LGBTQ, has continued in varying degrees for over 200 years despite the Bill of Rights and rule of law.
The politically vulnerable groups - the groups the majority can oppress and kill and destroy - need additional protection. (That's why when people try to make some logical inference that oppression of white males is the same thing, they miss the core factor: White males are not politically vulnerable to the majority;, they are the majority (in terms of power); a quick look at a group photo of the people in power in every domain of American and European life will show you that.
Remember the last time that popular sentiment regarded a group of rich, influential people as not needing those should-be-universal protections because of their privileged position? And then decided that this group was the cause of all their problems? Let's not let that happen again.
It’s a constitutional republic. And there is a difference.
As far as protected classes; the U.S. Constitution makes each individual a protected class. The protection of individual liberty is the cornerstone of the United States. (Or at least it was.)
This idea that some groups need more protection is ludicrous. We are saying that some people are less equal than others. What is needed is a consistent and impartial application of the law – which, granted, was not always the case. But, the philosophical concept of protected class goes against the concept of equality.
Committing a crime against a gay person IS A CRIME. That exact same crime against a non gay person IS A CRIME. The idea that either one of those should be punished differently is more Animal Farm than US Constitution.
This idea of the thought police is obscene and the very opposite of John Locke.
A man should not be punished for thoughts. A man should not be punished because of his motivations. A man should only be punished for his actions.
> A man should not be punished because of his motivations. A man should only be punished for his actions.
To nitpick a little: The law absolutely looks at motivations. For example, pre-meditated murder (1st degree murder) is a worse crime than non-pre-meditated murder (2nd degree), which is worse than unintentional murder (3rd degree).
I agree with you, but many people do not, making it a political statement. Things get very complicated as soon as you abandon the bright line test of "you must serve the whole public."
Let me change it to an example more dear to my own heart:
> Don't wanna hire old programmers or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
I certainly didn't choose to be an old programmer! It seems to have just happened, maybe by some law of nature. But I'm not offended by being mentioned in the same sentence with pro-Nazi sites. It's pretty obvious that no comparison is being made between the two.
> comparing two well-known instances
> from different parts of the political
> spectrum
Did they?
Nazism didn't go through some kind of Martin Luther style academic and cultural reformation in the last 80 years. Neo-Nazis are the same as the original Nazis. They have the same ideology & the same ambitions. They're literally incompatible with Western liberalism & enlightenment.
Neo-Nazis are just late-stage Third Reich acolytes, sympathizers, and insurrectionists. They're still trying to fight a war that they lost to terms of unconditional surrender. It's frankly shocking that they're given the deference of being just yet another political voice in the diverse landscape of voices. They are not. Very, very few modern political movements were defeated explicitly at the tip of a spear instead of the stroke of a pen. Nazism is in scarce company in that regard.
There's no point at all to engage any of it as though Nazism is the same as normal political speech. Allowing for ideological recidivism and re-litigating WWII sort of defeats the purpose of having fought that war and conquered them to begin with.
It would make way, way more sense to consider them enemies of the state and deal with them as such.