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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue it is. From the article:

>Canada criminalizes hate speech, Germany bans Holocaust denial, and the United States permits both — yet no one seriously believes that America is a free society while the other two have somehow collapsed into illiberalism.

Freedom isn't a boolean true/false. In my view America is more free than those countries when it comes to speech due to our more liberal definition of what constitutes free speech. I don't think that banning those forms of speech will trigger a collapse into illiberalism, but I would see banning that speech as an erosion of our rights.

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My ideological priors:

1) I believe the US constitution should be amended to ban racist speech and membership of explicitly racist political parties. There should be a lengthy and precise amendment stipulating that the US government considers human beings to belong to only one race, Homo sapiens sapiens, and that any racialist understanding of human diversity (claiming whites and blacks are separate races, for example) is pseuedoscience, although not necessarily criminal. While racialism is not criminalized, anyone using racialist "science" to falsely claim intellectual or behavioral differences between different ethnic groups has committed a serious crime. Blacks, Native Americans, and Jews should be explicitly protected. This would mean that Charles Murray and Andrew Sullivan would go to jail. Likewise, anyone who uses provably false assertions about history to deny the occurrence of racist violence or genocide has committed a serious crime. This would mean David Irving would go to jail if he set foot in the US. Note that my amendment is specifically about race and not ethnicity.

2) I respect that most anti-racists disagree with me and I acknowledge that the "thoughtcrime" problem with my proposed amendment is very real. I am aware that the amendment in point 1 could very easily criminalize legitimate anthropological research, and so on. But our laws against human subject research risks criminalizing legitimate research in medicine (and certainly creates heavy barriers for researchers). So in my view I think the risk pales in comparison to the danger posed by Holocaust/slavery/etc denial.

But I think your view of "freedom" is a bit shallow - specifically conflating "freedom" and "rights" is a problem. For instance: people used to have the "freedom" to resolve disputes with a duel to the death. The government constrained this freedom but it is difficult to believe that anyone's rights were violated. Likewise, only true zealots seriously believe that "a right to bear arms" is "a right to bear whatever weapon you want." The government constrains your freedom to own missiles and automatic weaponry but this is not a constraint of your rights.

Similarly, I just plain disagree that people have the right to express racist views or endorse Nazism. Given that racist conduct and expression can be defined fairly precisely, even given that bigoted or ethnically prejudiced conduct cannot, I think such an exception to free speech rights is legally workable. More philosophically, racism is so uniquely dangerous, and so indefensible intellectually, and so useless for anything other than spreading hatred and violence, that it should be an explicit exception to our understanding of free speech laws and our natural rights around self-expression. Again, I am not accusing people who disagree with me of indifference to racism.

I have a seriouse question on this, I would like to understand your logic, you say:

> While racialism is not criminalized, anyone using racialist "science" to falsely claim intellectual or behavioral differences between different ethnic groups has committed a serious crime.

Would you apply this standard to Farrakhan and his teaching that the white man was created from a evil witch-doctor and thus are inherently evil and have no souls?

Second you state.

> I just plain disagree that people have the right to express racist views or endorse Nazism.

What if I said, I hate the fact that the Nazis committed genocide, but we have to admit that they where very good at executing a national vision that pulled their nation out of a depression and turned them into an industrial powerhouse in just a few short years?

I would like to get your thought on it, as the above statement is a factually true statement, but it is an endorsement that they where effective economically and politically. Would you say that I don't have the right to state an established fact due to the fact that it may have racial or ethnic implications.

What about other facts based on numerical data like the rate of absentee fathers in the black community or the statistically high prevalence of high SAT scores by Asians. Would facts be limited in your view.

I am not trying to counter, correct or mock your position, I honestly don't understand it, I don't understand the desire to limit speech due to the follow on implications and I would like to know how you mentally walk thru those questions and come to the conclusion that we as a society would be better if we just could not say some things.

> Would you apply this standard to Farrakhan and his teaching that the white man was created from a evil witch-doctor and thus are inherently evil and have no souls?

Yes, as the law would clearly state: any expression of belief of racial behavioral/cognitive differences between ethnic groups is a crime.

> What if I said, I hate the fact that the Nazis committed genocide, but we have to admit that they where very good at executing a national vision that pulled their nation out of a depression and turned them into an industrial powerhouse in just a few short years?

No that would not be illegal because that is not an endorsement of Nazism or Holocaust denial. I will grant that it's an unnecessarily trollish and downright misleading way of describing the economy in Nazi Germany but it would not be a crime.

> What about other facts based on numerical data like the rate of absentee fathers in the black community or the statistically high prevalence of high SAT scores by Asians. Would facts be limited in your view.

No because these data can be understood in terms of ethnic groups without resorting to the pseudoscience of racialism.

Thank you for responding, I am genuinely curious how other people see the world.

If you want to read a bit about how I got here - as of about 10 years ago I was nowhere near this radical - I would strongly recommend "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life" by Barbara E. Fields and Karen J. Fields, which deeply analyzes the historical and socio-anthropological development of racialist ideology. The blurb from the link[1]:

"Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call 'racecraft.' And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

"That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions."

[1]https://www.versobooks.com/books/1645-racecraft Kate Mann's "Down Girl" takes a conceptually similar view and analysis of misogyny and sexism: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-girl-9780190604...

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