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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

So, of I understand this correctly, it's not the message they consider not to be free speech but the (inciting of) violence.

I'm all for free speech, but for some messages there's just no context in which they ever become anything but harmful, and maybe dogmatically clinging to free speech isn't the best way to approach things. Then again, it can be a slippery slope towards thought police, so maybe it's best to leave the judging of those messages to social pressure.

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  maybe it's best to leave the judging of those messages to social pressure.

I REALLY hope that that's a joke. Social pressures brought you ACTUAL Nazi Germany and ACTUAL Communist revolutions in multiple countries. Scary...

absolutely not. all of those ACTUAL horrible situations involved gross disdain for 1st Amendment principles

I think the Supreme Court has ruled on similar questions, in that there's a distinction between how the "speech" is intended and how it is construed. For instance, someone waving a nazi flag might feel to me like an incitement to violence, while to them it might feel like an expression of free speech, with no intention to incite violence. In that sense it would be protected speech, despite how I feel.

So the question becomes how do you determine if someone is intending to incite violence? They might say they are only wanting to express their first amendment rights (and perhaps their second amendment rights at the same time), while actually just intending to incite violence. Even pretending that none of the neonazi protesters in Charlottesville threw the first punch, I think a lot of the quotes from Charlottesville indicated that many of them were on the wrong side of that line, and were seeking to incite.

> For instance, someone waving a nazi flag might feel to me like an incitement to violence, while to them it might feel like an expression of free speech, with no intention to incite violence.

Disregarding how you both feel about it, waving a nazi flag legitimizes and strengthens an inherently violent ideology of ethnic cleansing.

Intent - real or pretend - doesn't matter.

Neat. Curious to hear your position on waving Communist and Jewish flags.

Is Jewishness "an inherently violent ideology of ethnic cleansing"?

For that matter, is Communism? Marxist-Leninist governments don't have a great track record, but there are plenty of individual pacifist hippie commies; the ideology of common ownership of production is not inherently violent and racist like Nazism and the Klan are.

I'm sure not all Jews condone the ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank and Gaza. But I kinda think some people see the Israeli flag in the same light as Jews see the Nazi flag. And yes, I am speaking as a Jewish man.

You might want to check your Russian History, particularly Stalin's era, to examine the violence inherent to the ideology of common ownership, when applied Soviet style. Scholars debate on whether he killed 8 million or 60 million...

If anyone is after anything on the topic, please try The Court of the Red Czar or The Young Stalin. Both by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Ironically a Jew with interesting views on Zionism and an excellent history of Jerusalem. The Radio New Zealand interview with him below covers his views on Zionism briefly.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/...

The bar at King's College Cambridge used to have a hammer-and-sicle on the wall for years. If the authorities removed it the students would repaint it. All good clean fun.

It eventually got taken down for good after increasing numbers of students from eastern Europe came to the college and pointed out that, to them, it was just as oppressive a symbol as the swastika.

Really this all should have got sorted out around the time of the Spanish Civil War; actual capital-C Communism is too tied up in Stalinism to be trusted any more.

Of course, plenty of people are happy to label their enemies as "communist" for supporting basic reasonable non-Stalinist things like universal healthcare. So the fact that someone is labelled a communist by their enemies, especially in America, means almost nothing.

It is worrisome that you are not horrified by what you just said. YOUR view of what is and isn't "inherently violent" is your rule? What of people who view this differently?

You DO know that the Nazi party of Germany was democratically elected right? It did plenty of good for plenty of innocent people who simply lived in Germany at the time.

Also, you know, by your logic almost ANY flag shouldn't be waved. All countries have been to horrible wars and killed aplenty.

Yes they were elected, but it wasn't democracy that lead to the events that followed and so I don't think this is a very fair argument you make. It might be true that Nazi rule benefited many at a particular point in time but I don't think many who lived through the period would argue that Nazi rule was net positive for Germany.

I have been stuck for a while on trying to identify terms for being "inside an argument" versus "outside an argument".

Here, you are outside my argument, and from that perspective I have trouble disagreeing with you.

But inside the argument, I am correct (or "technically correct" from your perspective), and you are wrong - meaning, the Supreme Court, the American view consistent with the 1st amendment - that is more in alignment with my argument.

But I feel like I remember there being a set of academic terms that refer to each of our perspectives. Being inside vs outside the argument. Does anyone know?

And there's also the (very American) question of when "technically correct" is no longer correct anyway, like when being lawful is unjust, and civil disobedience is called for - oftentimes accepted by history (MLK's civil disobedience, boycotts, shutting down roads, etc) - a good example from this week is the perspective of the protesters who tore down that statue, and the perspective of the very long line of people who are seeking to turn themselves in to (falsely) confess.

The Supreme Court DID rule on this very issue, back in 1977 [1], where the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party's right to march through a primarily Jewish neighborhood. The Court ruled that the Nazi uniform and swastika are not "fighting words".

Regardless - I've always said that free speech is allowing speech that we hate or disagree with. Once we started banning speech that is "offensive", we have started down a path of legal and social precedence that we will never be able to recover from.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

I've always liked how the Yale professor put it when confronted by a student in that controversy over censoring Halloween constumes:

"I stand behind free speech, yes I do."

"Even when it's offensive?"

"Even when it's offensive -- ESPECIALLY when it's offensive."

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