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Comment by ixacto | Hacker News Reader

Freedom of expression/free speech doesn’t mean freedom not to be offended or that you have to agree with the views.

If we do not support even the most offensive speech then we risk a very slippery slope leading to censorship and 1984.

Should teachers be allowed to say anything they want to students, regardless if it offends them? If a student asks a teacher not to call them something that offends them, is the teacher required to stop using the slur?

Yes they should offend their students because history is offensive.

We should also teach about the Holocaust and read the uncensored version of huckleberry Finn, even though it may be offensive.

People (students) will be offended but they will learn how history has changed, be able to think for themselves, and not fall into ideological line. If this scares the left/right establishments that is a great thing.

Living in a 1-party state would suck.

The question wasn't whether the teacher was allowed to talk about things that might upset a subset of students. In some cases, like talking about the Holocaust or slavery in the US that will not be possible to avoid entirely. The question was this:

> If a student asks a teacher not to call them something that offends them, is the teacher required to stop using the slur?

If a teacher calls a student a slur, or otherwise directly addresses the student using a slur/derogatory term, should this teacher stop doing this? Stop moving the goalpost.

There's no historical reason to think that not supporting extreme speech will lead to fascism. There are historical reasons to think that curbing extremist speech protects democracy (see the Weimar Republic).

Why focus only on fascism? What about authoritarianism? Look at the USSR and the modern CCP.

Because the west and especially the US has, very specifically, a fascism problem.

It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules here because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of what their ideology happens to be. See [1] for more explanation.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Sorry, just saw this. Will do.

There are also historical reasons to think that tyranny has to suppress free speech in order to survive. So even if extreme speech can lead to tyranny, free speech can lead you back out - if you can keep the tyranny from destroying the free speech.

That's an "if" so big I don't know what your point is.

My point is to keep track of the order of cause and effect. Unlimited free speech may create a tyranny. But tyranny always at least tries to limit free speech. So when you see a limiting of free speech, you should ask "Is this really in defense of liberty? Or is it just tyranny trying to preserve and extend itself?"

Note that tyranny trying to preserve and extend itself almost always says that it's in defense of liberty...

"Is this person defending free speech in favor of liberty? Or because his anti-liberty extremism won't be tolerated otherwise?".

It works both ways so this isn't a practical way of looking at implementation of free speech. You can't keep a system that doesn't protect itself free forever - propaganda travels faster and further than truth, and I doubt the founding fathers wrote the first amendment with mass media in mind.

You can start the argument of who gets to decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't, and in the current political climate (at least in the USA) the answer to that is obviously nobody. Ideally those decisions would be made during a time of cultural unity, where a whole nation can say "These are our values that we want to write in stone", like Germany did with the new constitution in the 20th century where it put well-defined limits on what kind of speech should be forbidden.

It's doubtful if that kind of unity is even possible in the USA anymore, so I'm worried that, on a long enough time-scale, unfettered free speech will inevitably lead to tyranny of a kind because there is no system in place to protect it.

> Unlimited free speech may create a tyranny.

Citation required.

The usual citation is the Paradox of Tolerance but that posited a right to protect against people using fists or pistols, rather than ideas, to debate and premised it on the right of self-defense from physical harm.

tetranomiga's claim, not mine. I merely acknowledged that I wasn't claiming to refute it.

> There are historical reasons to think that curbing extremist speech protects democracy (see the Weimar Republic).

You think the Weimar Republic is a point in favor of that claim?

In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate‐speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti‐Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti‐Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti‐Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.

In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews.

Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, points out that cases were regularly brought against individuals on account of anti‐Semitic speech in the years leading up to Hitler’s takeover of power in 1933. “Remarkably, pre‐Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti‐hate law,” he writes. “Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti‐Semitic speech…

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/may/june-2015/war-free-ex...

This is a great comment. It seems to me that some in the US far right and left wings have an analogous view of using the political system as a way to garner publicity rather than governing. It's less obvious in the court cases. Many of the people associated with the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol folded pretty rapidly once they were indicted.

I did not know that, thanks for pointing out.

> In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times.

Streicher and his fellow editors were already active members of the NSDAP (Nazi party) during the 1920s. Streicher and other editors were taken to court, yes, but the assertion that it was for the content of his magazine and not actions like the Hitlerputsch is not something I can find support for in any source.

> Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, points out that cases were regularly brought against individuals on account of anti‐Semitic speech in the years leading up to Hitler’s takeover of power in 1933.

Antisemitism was alive and well in the Weimar Republic, the claim that people were taken to court for antisemitic speech is another one that I can't find a source for. People were taken to court for violence against Jews, as they were still full German citizens in the Weimar Republic. I looked up the passages of the Weimar Republic constitution around religion and freedom of assembly and there is nothing about hate speech or similar kinds of discrimination. One of the major causes of increasing violence against Jews was Der Stürmer and similar publications, because they could be circulated without impunity.

In fact, I looked up Alan Borovoy's quote, he said:

> During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech.

I find this number of 200 interesting, because 200 is roughly the same number as Jewish cemeteries that were desecrated between 1923 and 1933, and makes me suspicious that he's taking court cases about desecration and equating them with hate-speech - which are obviously not the same things.

> In einer regelrechten Schändungswelle wurden zwischen 1923 und 1932 fast 200 Fälle registriert [1]

Sorry it's in German, but it should be easy to translate. In any case, the passages you posted have no substance other than a quote from one guy that from anything I can see seems to be conflating two different things to support his argument.

[1] https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Antisemi...

What exactly is extreme speech? I don’t recall for advocating for illegal speech.

Everything up to imminently calling for violence in the US is protected so if that is what you are saying then I’d agree with you.

However what is “hate” or “intolerant” depends on the person and identity group. E.g. “All lives matter, marriage is between a man and a woman, men can’t get pregnant, Muhammad was a pedophole, flipping the bird to a police officer” all would offend different groups of people but are protected speech.

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