Yes. The moment we brought up the chant of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". The brain can break the same way your legs or arms can and the "just tough it out" answer is not an answer at all.
No one would suggest you should just not visit a neighborhood if people there attacked you. The proof that the web should be a special case because "muh, free speech above all" is very flimsy.
I would absolutely suggest that. I'd advise you right now not to e.g. take a trip to the south side of Chicago. What are you suggesting? That the government has an obligation to proactively prevent crime? How is that to be done? Martial law?
You can't have the freedoms you enjoy and complete safety. It's the price we pay, and it's worth it.
For the sake of the person's safety that should be suggested, but where does one draw the line at such suggestions? College aged women are safer if they don't drink alcohol, so should that be the official statement of a university? What about saying that if they stay with a male guardian, they will be safer than if they don't? If that statement is true, should it be an official policy statement made to increase safety?
If they're under 21 probably, yeah. At 21 and above, like always, you have to be careful of what situations you put yourself in. That's not victim blaming, it's reality. Malicious people will always exist and women will always be at a physical disadvantage.
>What about saying that if they stay with a male guardian, they will be safer than if they don't? If that statement is true, should it be an official policy statement made to increase safety?
No, it should not be a rule because the government should not limit a woman's right to travel as they see fit. Don't you see the problem with this line of thinking? Safety at the cost of freedom is a mistake.
Sorry for the confusion, I didn't mean for it to exist as an actual rule, just as an recommendation by the institution in question. Such as a campus police department giving out safety tips.
The actual details are nuanced and the general line is 'freedom to swing your arms ends at my face' from general reciprocity and sustainability - freedom to cause harm unilaterally (distinct from self-defense) damages overall freedom as well in the same sense that a power vacuum can lead to less freedom as the strong dominate.
http://nixle.us/AMTQ6?fbclid=IwAR1pRErR6-CuOjvULJWJDSSKLISJ_...
So far this person hasn't committed any violent acts and I'm willing to stipulate that his stated grievance is founded in fact, though it may or may not have been his actual motivation. Have his free speech rights been infringed?
I'm trying to figure out if you're suggesting that police be withdrawn from places likely to have crime. It certainly aligns with the idea that the police should ignore direct verbal or written threats to people's safety.
I have no idea how you arrived at that. The point is that we already have laws against violence and harassment. What is being successful is to limit freedom in an attempt to _proactively_ prevent such crime. That's where you get into trouble.
More harm than good comes from protecting people from the big bad world. History has shown time and time again that no one can be trusted with the power to control our thoughts and movements.
There's a reason, many actually, for freedom of speech. And all those reasons are more important than your feelings.
To be fair that's exactly what happens. People warn not to go into the crime/high gang activity areas of my city all the time.
Just because someone might get hurt playing sports, should sports be banned from universities? Everyone should be punished because someone might get hurt?
Why limit it to universities? People's feelings get hurt in everyday life. If someone asks a woman out and she refuses, it might hurt the guy's feelings. Should women be forced to date every guy who asks them out since there is a chance some guys' "brains might break" due the rejection?
Coddling and infantilizing people is the worst thing you can do. Especially for a university where you are supposed to have "your brain broken" by being exposed to new and offensive ideas.
I grew up protestant and went to university and took philosophy classes that "broke my brain" and were initially offensive to me as a christian. Should I sue my university?
If we followed your logic, everything would be banned because anything can "break a brain". Flat earthers could shut down physics departments because the spherical model of earth "breaks their brains".
Certain activities are banned in sports. People playing American football wear helmets; you can't stamp on your opponent's head during wrestling; you can't do high tackles in rugby.
And certain activities are banned in speech, even in the US. In this case credible threats of violence were made and the University (wrongly) said that they couldn't block those because of 1st ammendment.
If there is a credible threat, that's a matter for the police, not the university. If instead of a website, someone mailed the threats, should the university ban the mailman, the postal system and all mail?
Also, when it comes to something as important as free speech and open access, I'd rather err on the side of more free speech rather than less.
One thing that is interesting is how so many foreigners are so supportive of limiting speech in the US. Can I ask why you are so heavily invested in supporting censorship in the US, especially since you aren't american?
> One thing that is interesting is how so many foreigners are so supportive of limiting speech in the US. Can I ask why you are so heavily invested in supporting censorship in the US, especially since you aren't american?
A more interesting thing is how few Americans bother to read the original court documents to understand what's really going on and who then leap to yelling CENSORSHIP even if that isn't what's happening.
And we care because we are americans and we don't like censorship and we don't want to live in an oppressive and censored environment. I was just curious as to why you care as a foreigner. I wasn't trying to offend you. Just curious.
You'd have to ask UMW.
It's not clear to me how the university would block only threats in the future without restraining potentially legitimate speech.
They have other reasons for not wanting to block websites, and they should have used those.
“Dandy’s about to kill a bitch . . . or two”
“Can we euthanize whoever caused this bullshit?”
Those must have been some philosophy classes.
Recently, there's a cultural idiom that offense is completely in the eye of the beholder. What people often feel uncomfortable with is not banning hate speech, but reclassifying milder and milder forms of offense as intolerable. To extend your analogy, bumping into someone intentionally on the street makes you a jerk, but not criminally so. It's assault in only the loosest interpretation. People that have done this probably don't need to go to trial for it.
Hate speech is most certainly not illegal in the US. In Europe (and elsewhere) some forms of hate speech are illegal.
That’s not quite right either. “We should violently overthrow the government/eliminate xyz people” is protected by the First Amendment. “Everyone get your guns and storm the federal building/kill these people right now” is not. (The exact line is obviously hard to discern.)
On the other hand, I'm not aware of any laws in the US criminalizing threats of genocide and so on, which is kind of a problem because we have numerous historical examples of such rhetoric being normalized and then actualized when some (as yet undetermined) threshold conditions are met, and once that train leaves the station it's a one-way trip. Defenders of such rhetoric should think twice about whether they really wish to snatch up this monkey's paw.
Almost any political ideology calls for unsanctioned violence at some point—where society deviates sufficiently from the moral principles of the ideology. For example, it is within the current Western consensus that one can or even should resist at least some kinds of dictatorship through violence. And more fundamentally, political ideology is about violence—how and to what ends society should use violence (e.g. what counts as a crime?—what are the valid bases for civil judgments?—both questions ultimately ask when it is okay to use violence to secure compliance).
Any restriction on political speech because it “encourages violence” is therefore actually a thinly-veiled restriction on particular ideologies for being objectionable. Such a restriction is not viewpoint neutral and almost impossible to legally sustain.
There is no question that free speech can threaten the political status quo, for better or for worse. All political power requires some measure of consent from the governed, and changing ideas can threaten that consent. The principle of free speech is that the ideas upon which such consent is given are not themselves matters for coercion, but for free discussion and debate. That is a radical notion, even a dangerous notion, but one at the heart of the American project.
In the US, the “direct incitement to violence” exception to freedom of speech has nothing to do with hate speech, except perhaps incidentally. Any direct incitement to violence is not protected speech, whether hateful or not.