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I’m generally in favour of some limits on speech. I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example. It’s obviously very complicated and something people are going to argue a lot about. BUT this case has made me change my opinion. Things much worse than this are tweeted every day and this is the one that gets prosecuted. It’s blatantly politically motivated (‘national hero’, British soldier etc) and in terms of awful things people tweet…it’s not actually that bad. Suddenly I find myself agreeing with the people arguing these restrictions are a slippery slope.

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Aside from me absolutely being in favor of even offensive and racist speech out of general principles, you'd be surprised (or not) by how easily "racism" can be redefined to include all kinds of things that are very, very dubiously racist by any normal definition. There are extremely woke people who consider even questioning any of their arguments about race or class as a racist act. There are cases where a person making clear cut criticisms of islam as a religion is labeled racist because of its general association with the arabic world, and so forth. The list goes on.

The number of people and public figures I've seen labeled as so called fascists or racists when their own clearly stated postures are emphatically not racist by any rational notion is large. Once some authority gains the right to prohibit racist speech, it's very, very easy for their definition of racism to shift as well.

Out of many criticisms of the U.S. that the country deserves, its mostly rigid protection of free speech rights in a formal sense is one good thing, and it hasn't led to a hell of bigotry, or at least no more so than have weaker protections for free speech in other countries.

> Out of many criticisms of the U.S. that the country deserves, its mostly rigid protection of free speech rights in a formal sense is one good thing, and it hasn't led to a hell of bigotry, or at least no more so than have weaker protections for free speech in other countries.

Depends on how you measure it. The US has some pretty notable racial issues, even compared to other Anglosphere countries. I wouldn't put that down to freedom of speech laws, but it's also not a very good defense of those laws to say that it's affected the level of bigotry in the US.

But is racism actually worse in the US? I feel like in many other western nations it's just more socially acceptable, and not so controversial.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by racism. Interpersonal racism seems to fly under dogwhistles moreso than outright statements now that it's socially unacceptable (in most places), where e.g. casual racism against Romania people is still pretty common in Europe. Judging from economic outcomes, though, I'd say the US is still pretty racist, even if being individually racist is mostly condemned (though I think it's fair to say from the Trump presidency that there was still quite a lot just bubbling under the surface).

That's fair, though I understand economic outcomes are very sticky across generations (IIRC descendants of Irish immigrants, for example, remain significantly poorer than other white people). Even if we could wave a magic wand today and eliminate racism altogether, I'd expect this inertia to result in black families having significantly less wealth on average than white families for many years to come.

It's true that economic status is sticky (or in other words, social mobility is limited), but with black people in the US it goes beyond that into underfunding, predatory policing, gentrification etc that serve to compound existing inequities. While I think that we should aim to uplift poor people more generally through economic reform, in the specific case of black people in the US there are still definite institutional thumbs on the scale.

There's no such thing as racism against Romanians, since it's not a race, but it could be xenophobia. Or maybe you're making a confusion with Romani (Roma, gypsies) people.

"romania people" is a misspelling halfway in between, so I wish you wouldn't assume they meant the wrong one.

Autocorrect - I meant Romani.

Your comment has been flagged by government moderators for racism. Expect your automated punishment shortly.

> Judging from economic outcomes, though, I'd say the US is still pretty racist

I know what you're implying there, but your logic also says the US is racist against whites since they're poorer than Asians. Is it? Or is your logic wrong?

Many countries, including many in Europe have some very serious, heavy racial issues that are both more ingrained than those of the U.S and in quite a few cases more violent or openly discriminatory. The U.S. however is generally at or close to the center of global media familiarity and attention, so naturally, the theme of its own racial issues is disproportionately magnified.

How many major countries are overtly ethnically homogeneous in the world, willfully closed or hostile to anything even resembling the mass immigration from all corners that the U.S has welcomed for many decades with only moderate tension?

How many people in European states will openly speak of certain groups, like gypsies, muslims and so forth with extremely derogatory words, but barely be called out on it by anybody? I've seen it many times, and go back to my point above, that in the U.S. the same things would and do simply get more intense media attention.

The U.S absolutely does have a number of very serious racial conflicts simmering at all times, but all things considered, I'd say the country does a remarkably good job of usually keeping them from getting worse, regardless of its high tolerance for free speech of even the most offensive kind.

What European countries?

Every single one with a Roma population, likely.

Anecdotally, I remember having discussions with Danish family in the 90s, about racially-related issues in America, and in the shape that they took, I recognized how woefully unprepared they were to really look at their own racist attitudes (e.g. vis a vis Turks and immigration). When I returned in 2019, and had a chat with a gentleman supervising a number of different immigrants on some sort of work-integration program... well, I wasn't much impressed with his expressed attitude towards the workers.

France. Big time.

France? The discourse around islam is insane there, and you have an almost neo-nazi party like the FN getting 30%+ of the votes regularly there. There is no shame in talking about forced expulsion of legitimate immigrants there too( "Remigration" ).

Any of them with nearly as much ethnic diversity as the United States.

> How many people in European states will openly speak of certain groups, like gypsies, muslims and so forth with extremely derogatory words, but barely be called out on it by anybody?

It might be hard to find statistics, but I think we shouldn't just give up and rely on anecdotes. For example, a 2017-2019 Pew Research Center survey[0] found that people in the U.S. were somewhat more willing to accept Muslims as neighbors and family members than the Western European median.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/08/in-the-u-s-...

I think the important comparison there, and something I often keep in mind, is that the US is a lot more diverse racially, even with its segregation, than a lot of other countries in the world. It's a lot easier for a country that's 90% the same race to not have open and prevalent racial issues, since there will be entire cities/areas where you won't even meet someone of a different race.

It's easier to be morally upstanding about you presume you and your fellow citizens would handle a potentially racist situation when it's hypothetical and not just a fact of life.

None of this is meant to excuse any of the awful stuff in the US, but to point out that there's a lot of confounding factors. It was a lot easier for Europe to take the high ground on abolishing slavery early on when they were century old empires who could still fill their coffers by exploiting people in Asia and Africa directly instead of importing them.

> even compared to other Anglosphere countries

lol. I find it hard to not laugh at that. Having done business in US, UK, and varrious places in Europe, my first exposure to business culture outside of the US left me utterly shocked about the high levels of blatant and unabashed racism that was ubiquitous outside of the US.

It often involved racial groups that weren't legible to me as an American but was was particularly striking in how unprofessional it was. In the US someone might quietly dislike some race or another, but in a professional context someone explaining a project delay with "You know those <race> can't be trusted to get anything right." would be shocking, but I encountered statements like that outside of the US a dozen times across multiple countries.

Yeah, honestly it just shows how little americans know about the outside world. That there is even a discourse around racism in the US shows that people care enough about the issue. Outside the anglosphere, it is so normalized and institutionalized that it's not even a controversial issue. And when it is, it would be for issues that are way outside of the normal anglo overton window on racism. For example, it's generally accepted in france that you can't go to university if you wear a headscarf. It's not even a debate anymore really.

Same goes for roma people, you won't ever really get any discussion on the racial dynamics or the socioeconomic circumstances that lead to the higher crime rates etc. It does not matter, the only discussion is around how much discrimination is maybe too much. The discrimination itself isnt even an issue.

This is exactly why we need free speech. It's a pragmatic position. Of course I would like to live in a world where people don't spew vitriol. But for the reasons you outline that cannot happen except in an authoritarian society.

As an illustrative point both Russia and China have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. They just added enough caveats that it's worthless.

> except in an authoritarian society.

I would point out that governments in authoritarian societies have a habit of labelling certain groups of people as enemies (either because those groups challenge them politically, or because it's convenient to have a scapegoat to blame the government's own failures on), so in practice you end up with just as much, if not more, vitriol spewed in authoritarian societies.

Yet you can't say "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in public schools because the judiciary lost their minds at the idea of marijuana use and its illegality. There certainly is/was bigotry when it comes to marijuana, its users, and speech around it.

I have been called a racist for voicing my opposition to efforts to repeal constitutional prohibitions against racism. These lunatics somehow make up definitions that absolve themselves of their racism and condemn the anti-racists.

These racist maniacs would absolutely have me censored and punished for my views, and their putrid racist ideology is infecting academia, entertainment, "news", politics, and even the law. So no you certainly can't rely on "reasonableness" or the social standard of the day to bound the limits of speech.

>>"I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example. "

Why not,and who gets to make the determination?

I'm an atheist, and having so many blasphemy and religion protection laws in liberal democracies misused (or rather, used exactly as they are truly intended) so horribly has really taught me what poorly defined restrictions on speech mean in the real world.

As for racist speech, I really truly believe that censoring does not ever serve its intended purpose. You are only breeding further resentment, driving the expression under ground,and giving people new reason to hate and feel oppressed.

Racism is wrong and dangerous, and giving oxygen to it helps propagate and give validity to it.

Censoring it might keep the racists to their ugly selves, but that's OK with me.

I agree with first claim.

We clearly disagree on the second so can you elaborate? I believe formal legal censorship of an expression GIVES it oxygen and will subsequently increase it.

My understanding is that studies show deplatforming actually works if the goal is to remove the broader cultural influence of a group. That is to say, if there is a group on platform A who are then group-banned from platform A, when they move to platform B the group is actually smaller in size and has less influence. If this happens from platform B to platform C the group continues to become smaller and have less influence. The same papers I read also pointed out that the people who follow the group across platforms become more and more entrenched though, which is also interesting.

Or you know, occasionally you accidentally create a new front in the culture war which is far more expansive and destructive than the side effects of the original problem.

If this were true, "heretical" movements (Christians in the Roman Empire, Protestants in the 16th century, Liberals in the 19th century, Nationalists in multi-national empires of the early 20th century) would have never prevailed, because they were "deplatformed" by the powers-that-be with vigor. In fact, they were often even decapitated, not just deplatformed. But they were often successful in the end anyway.

Brute force (and deplatforming is brute force) isn't an automatic recipe for victory in a war of ideas.

>>"Censoring it might keep the racists to their ugly selves, but that's OK with me. "

I used to think of "Racism" and "Racist" as binary . You either ARE or are NOT a racist (and "I am definitely not!":). Life, and people smarter than myself, have thoroughly convinced me that it is a spectrum instead. The most open-minded, liberal, self-aware, "un-racist" people I've met realize there are impulses, tendencies, biases in all of us. Kind of like some of the smartest and most knowledgeable people are humble and aware of their gaps of knowledge. Thinking racism is binary and "I'm not it", blinds you to many aspects of it.

I remember a poor but enlightening joke a long time ago: "Those driving slower than myself are idiots; those driving faster are maniacs". I feel we may have similar personal line on racism spectrum: Those more close-minded than myself are "Racists!!!" those more open minded are "Woke!!!".

Which is to say - I don't think there's an easy, small, easily identifiable group that we should just lock up. We can start at the bottom of spectrum and quickly agree that "well these people are definitely racist", but pretty soon we'll get to the delta between our two lines, and then who gets to decide who is locked up / what should be censored? Whoever we eliminate, whoever we lock up, there's going to now be the next person/group/opinion that is now at the new bottom and needs locking up.

Who gets to define what is racism and what isn't? And how broadly do we apply this logic? Racism is wrong and dangerous so we can censor. What about sexism? Ageism? Heightism? Extend this out and anything that can be potentially offensive to anyone shouldn't be allowed.

> and giving oxygen to it helps propagate and give validity to it.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If you actually care about fighting racism, you have to be able to see it. You have to be able to understand it. You have to be able to track it. Driving racist rhetoric underground, making it hard to follow what groups are being targeted or what lies are being told, making it more difficult to identify who is involved in racist groups, what their numbers are, and who is listening to them doesn't help fight racism. Racism exists, and we need to face it. We can't just hide it away so that we can feel better or pretend the problem is solved.

You can't fight an enemy you aren't allowed to see.

"Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

And so today I learnt another great MLK quote, thank you!

> As for racist speech, I really truly believe that censoring does not ever serve its intended purpose.

What is censoring for you?

I don't see a single Western democracy that is not "censoring" or restricting the rights of individuals to some extent. It's just to a different extent. E.g. the US has speed limits on highways, but Germany hasn't. You must not deny the holocaust in Germany, but you can do so in the US.

The argument that there is no grey area seems flawed to me. Instead, can we, as a society, discuss productively where we draw the line?

Yes, absolutely :)

I agree with grayness, I just happen to draw my line fairly, for lack of better word, liberally - and specifically so that we Can, to your point, discuss ideas productively as a society - something that censorship explicitly and by definition prevents! I am a proponent of marketplace of ideas and open discussion.

To your example, I do not see German laws making denial of holocaust as even remotely effective. I believe they are in fact counter productive - I've met people who use them to confirm the notion of "Jewish conspiracy". I do not agree with these people! But I'd rather have them spew their nonsense in the open, and be able to freely tell them they're wrong, unhindered by naive and ineffective at best attempts at censorship.

(speed driving laws are not censorship in any way that I've seen the word defined. Not every law is censorship, not every action is speech/communication).

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning - why would some negative effects of an intervention automatically invalidate the positive effects? If you don't think there are plenty of positive effects, feel free to speak to somebody from the German Jewish community and see how they think about it.

Which is my point - in a democracy restrictions to the rights of individuals are there to protect the rights of others. This rationale is shared by many restrictions to individual rights, hence the speed limit example.

> E.g. the US has speed limits on highways, but Germany hasn't.

A speed limit is a censure not a censor by any means whatsoever.

> "censoring" or restricting the rights of individuals to some extent.

Censorship is not any restriction but restrictions on books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc.

Agree with your definition of censorship.

> A speed limit is a censure not a censor by any means whatsoever.

My point is there is a reason every single Western democracy has restrictions to free speech. And these restriction come from the same rationale as a speed limit, say, that is to balance the rights of individuals with the rights of all other members of society.

That is an excellent point. Thank you for the clarification.

There is merit to the idea of the 'paradox of intolerance.' If we tolerate someone explicitly being intolerant, what have we achieved except changed who is allowed to be intolerant?

“There is merit to the idea of the 'paradox of intolerance.'”

no there isn’t

I disagree with restrictions on speech for the following reason:

- If you limit what people are allowed to write or say, you are effectively limiting what others are allowed to read or hear.

- Censorship means delegating a censor.

- That censor would then be able to determine what I am allowed to read or hear. There is nobody I trust besides myself to do that. I definitely don't trust any government body to do that.

Also if you're going to enforce laws against racist speech dispassionately, you will ban every major religious text. The Torah, Bible, and Qur'an have parts that advocate for all kinds of racist, sexist, homophobic, and generally terrible behavior. The UK government doesn't try to censor these books, so it's obvious that their censorship laws are simply a way for law enforcement to persecute people they dislike.

> I disagree with restrictions on speech for the following reason:

I've never once met a true free speech absolutist. We accept restrictions on speech all the time. We restrict companies from outright lying about their products. We (sometimes) hold people accountable for lying under oath. We even compel certain speech by forcing companies to disclose ingredients and allergens. Even for government some material is justifiably classified and shouldn't be publicly shared. I should not be allowed to make direct calls for violence against others, phone in fake bomb threats, or yell "fire" in a theater.

There are good reasons to limit/place restrictions on speech. It's the same with every right we have. There will be instances that call for restriction. It falls on us to make sure that we preserve freedom as much as we can while still enacting sane restrictions.

Laws against racist speech do more harm than good. They hinder our efforts to understand and confront racism and they are so broadly defined that they are easily abused. That doesn't mean other restrictions on speech are't a good idea though.

> We restrict companies from outright lying about their products.

These sorts of lies are usually covered under existing fraud laws. When such laws don't exist, companies use accreditation firms. Long before OSHA, Underwriters Laboratories tested the safety of various building materials and electrical devices. Customers and insurers preferred UL-approved products because it meant a lower risk of harm. If a manufacturer changed their product to be less safe, they'd lose their UL certification and a lot of revenue.

> We (sometimes) hold people accountable for lying under oath.

Yes and we hold people accountable for trying to pass counterfeit money or writing bad checks. These sorts of situations are special because all parties agree on the rules at the start of the transaction. By the same token I'm against unprovoked violence but fine with sports like boxing.

> We even compel certain speech by forcing companies to disclose ingredients and allergens.

I'd be fine abolishing such laws. Companies that didn't list their ingredients would probably lose significant business (since many people have allergies). Companies that lied about their ingredients could be charged with fraud (either in civil or criminal court). And again, in places where such laws don't exist, accreditation firms do the job. That said, we don't require ingredient labeling at bake sales and those seem to do fine.

> I should not be allowed to make direct calls for violence against others, phone in fake bomb threats, or yell "fire" in a theater.

The "fire in a crowded theater" hypothetical is from a supreme court case where socialists were imprisoned for distributing leaflets that protested conscription in the first world war.[1] It has since been overturned, and it is an excellent example of why any restriction on speech ends up being abused by those in power.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

> These sorts of lies are usually covered under existing fraud laws.

In those cases the laws dealing with fraud are still imposing a restriction on what people are allowed to say. Same with trademark and copyright laws. It's a good thing that companies aren't allowed to simply lie about having a UL certification for example.

> These sorts of situations are special because all parties agree on the rules at the start of the transaction

True, but only depending on the situation and what you consider to be a transaction. If a law is passed that makes it illegal to offend someone on twitter, anyone who uses twitter "agreed to the rules" too right? You don't always have a choice. If you give false information to police for example you haven't agreed to anything explicitly but they'll still come after you if they find out.

> I'd be fine abolishing such laws

I don't think you find broad support for that.

> Companies that didn't list their ingredients would probably lose significant business

You might think that, but history shows you'd be wrong. Gerber and Beech-Nut sold baby food that contained dangerous levels of arsenic mercury and lead. DuPont knowingly poisoned people while trying to hide that fact from authorities. Johnson & Johnson also lied and hid their knowledge that their product would harm their customers. Lenovo has repeatedly shipped malware infested systems to consumers which opened them up to everything from privacy leaks to remote code execution. None of those companies went out of business. You couldn't count the number of companies who are currently, and/or have previously and often repeatedly caused harm to their customers yet continue to operate successfully. Even when the consequences were deaths, including the deaths of children. "Voting with our wallets" is a proven failure as a means to regulate the dangerous and harmful actions of corporations.

The "fire in a crowded theater" example still holds. It wasn't overturned as much as it was refined to limit its use to what it was originally intended for because it was being abused. The risk of abuse is always present. We need to be careful to keep an eye on every case where freedom of speech is restricted to make sure it was appropriate, but just because someone can misuse something to violate our rights doesn't mean that thing shouldn't exist. Nearly every law or power police and government have are at risk of being abused. The answer isn't anarchy but oversight.

I never understood why "slippery slope" was listed among other logical fallacies. It is exactly the opposite.

When the UK brought in laws around lockdowns and handling covid people here were complaining that it was a slippery slope and the government would never give up those restrictions yet they did exactly that and those laws are no longer in play.

In that case the slippery slope argument was a fallacy.

There was indeed a slippery slope from "2 weeks to flatten the curve" to extended lockdowns.

I don't think those policies necessarily were a net benefit, either, particularly in the case of mask mandates for children, which weren't shown as effective enough to warrant damaging the mental health of children.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Something taking longer than expected doesn't mean it's a slippery slope.

Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.

> Something taking longer than expected doesn't mean it's a slippery slope.

> Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.

That is wrong.

What you mentioned is the very definition of a slippery slope, where the conditional relationships of the hypothetical syllogism do not hold.

We've established - quite clearly - that in an emergency the government can lock everything down for 2 years and that lip service to liberty or human rights means nothing. Emergencies happen every 2-3 years. Why won't we see similar anti-liberty measures again in the next 20 years? 'We' 'know' it 'works'. It isn't even clear that we'll be spared another pandemic through that timeframe, the world is quite small these days and it doesn't look like we're winding back on the interconnected globe.

Furthermore we've not proven that the laws have been given up; the impacts of the anti-liberty legislation in the wake of 9/11 took almost a decade to sink in and enter the public discourse. The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table. Probably help protect children and/or fight Russians or something. Worked in China, great impacts on crime, etcetera, etcetera.

>Furthermore we've not proven that the laws have been given up

They expired on 25th March 2022 barring a small number of administrative issues which have been extended.

> Emergencies happen every 2-3 years.

The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago. True, with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on. And yes, the restrictions worked against that type of emergency - an airborne virus of pandemic proportions.

It's a fallacy to claim that now that we know all that and the laws have expired, next time there's an emergency of any kind governments will just impose lockdowns and do contact tracing. There's simply no basis for such an outrageous claim.

> The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table.

Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.

>Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.

This but unironically. Do you not see the surveillance implications of having your p̵a̵p̵e̵r̵s̵ vaccine passports scanned everywhere you go?

> The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago.

Past performance isn't an indicator of future performance. International travel is more common and faster these days. Plus whether or not you buy the idea that COVID in particular came from a lab, the fact that it reasonably could have is enough to predict that viruses will in the near future. That wasn't as big a risk over the last century.

We literally need 1 lab, anywhere in the world, to combine lax standards with dangerous research. That isn't going to be a once-per-century event, it'll be relatively common. The world is a big place.

> and the laws have expired

So I'll readily admit that I haven't paid any attention to laws in the UK which is what we're discussing today. But "oh they've all expired" is an optomistic take. A lot of laws and policies can go through a parliament in a 2 year emergency where mass lockdowns are an option on the table.

So I'm not pointing to a specific example but I'm not backing away from the claim yet either. It is likely that many of the changes made haven't been rolled back, and that a lot of new powers still exist ready to be used in the next emergency. Sure they aren't locking down right now, great. But they've opened a lot of Pandora's boxes about how much power a government is expected to wield as a routine matter. What just happened in the west was some sort of bizzaro story from the tales out of the USSR or China. It isn't a the prologue to a series of great government policies, it is a dark cloud of what might be coming. We can't afford for these ideas to take root; freedom pretty much alawys outperforms in the medium term and I'd rather live free with some risk than watch people be imprisoned for their own good.

> with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on

Shouldn't the null hypothesis be that a lack of animal habitats means fewer animals and less chance of zoonotic diseases emerging? I know it's tempting to blame all the world's problems on climate change, but we need to be careful not to exaggerate things and give climate change denialists weak arguments to attack.

> Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.

You may not feel that these systems have been, or would ever be, used against you, but unfortunately people in other countries might not be so lucky[0][1], and bad uses of technology have a way of spreading internationally.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/cybergulag-rus...

[1] https://theconversation.com/chinas-surveillance-creep-how-bi...

It isn't so much the destruction of habitats in itself as human encroachment of rising density increasing the odds of both contact and exposure as well as transmission to larger human society. Ebola is a horrifying and contagious disease but it is limited in its spread to rural areas where it quickly burns itself out by being too lethal.

I know you're lying. you know you're lying. you know I know you're lying.

Yet we continue as if nothing is off.

This is society, where politeness is codified in law.

My go-to example is all the talk from conservatives about how allowing same-sex marriage would lead to people marrying animals.

“this is gonna be a totally different country than it is right now. Laws that you think are in stone -- they're gonna evaporate, man. You'll be able to marry a goat -- you mark my words!” - Bill O'Reilly

Slippery slope isn’t automatically a fallacy. It’s a fallacy if you don’t articulate why A would lead to B.

The government using an anti-CSAM filter to further restrict, say, copyright infringements has precedent, so could be a valid slippery slope.

The idea people pushed that marriage equality would lead to people being able to legally marry their animals was fallacious because nobody could articulate a logical jump from same sec couples to interspecies.

Your last sentence seems to itself refute the point it is trying to make.

You refer to "marriage equality", not "same-sex marriage". So you presumably think that the justification for allowing same-sex marriage is not some consideration of whether recognizing same-sex marriages in particular is beneficial, but rather that the justification is that they must be allowed for "equality". That justification easily generalizes to any other case where someone wants to enter into a "marriage" that is not currently recognized.

[ Note: Personally, I think the state should have nothing whatever to do with marriage, obviating the entire issue. ]

Marriage equality is generally implied (if not expressly stated) that it is about humans. Functionally speaking, there's no evidence to show that people who like people of the same sex might move on to toasters. The movement was always about people. The lack of specificity was because the context was obvious, not because it was nebulous.

The next point along the slippery slope would more likely be forcing states to accept polygamous marriages of more than 2 people. Another point on the slope might be allowing siblings to marry (especially if they are the same sex so there is no danger of inbreeding).

Perhaps the reason why marrying toasters is unlikely to be anywhere on the slope is that, from the government's perspective, a marriage is a legal contract entered into by the parties. It's not clear what a one-sided legal contract with a toaster would look like, beyond the mere recognition of property ownership.

One possible extension, though, could be marrying a corporation, since they have legal personhood. Perhaps that right will be moot once polygamy becomes legal, or alternatively someone will try to make polygamy legal by attempting to marry a corporation owned by their two intended spouses.

It's not down the slope though, because nothing about being LGBT is "closer" to polygamy than existing marriage. They're not related in practice, function, or advocacy.

A slippery slope exists when there is a functional reason why one would cause the other. It's a fallacy when they're simply related by irrelevant association (in this case, their prohibition). Legalizing one thing for a good reason does not cause people to lose their minds and legalize dumb things.

> nothing about being LGBT is "closer" to polygamy than existing marriage.

Well, except that a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other. If the law still said that a man can only marry a woman, and a woman can only marry a man, then polygamy would be impossible without defining the number of people in a marriage.

(I suppose that technically marriage could be defined to be non-transitive, such that a man's two wives weren't married to each other, for example, but that would seem like an arbitrary and discriminatory restriction. Also, the government could give legal recognition to more than 2 sexes, but that seems like a point on a different slippery slope.)

Anyway, I think that for a lot of people, the insistence that marriage should be between one man and one woman was some combination of "it's always been that way", "that's how you create a child", and "that's the only type of marriage my religion allows", but SCOTUS set the precedent that none of those are legally sufficient to prevent a redefinition of marriage.

So it's not that one type of monogamous marriage is "closer" to polygamy than another type of monogamous marriage. The court doesn't have to take into account the wishes or definitions of already-married couples, and instead looks at what grounds the government has for refusing to grant legal recognition for plaintiffs who believe they are married to each other. I haven't looked at the specific rulings and legal arguments, but my impression is that states would now have fewer grounds for opposing a further, more expansive, redefinition.

>a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other

I never heard of that idea before, but I didn't really know anything about how it is in fact defined where it is legal and customary.

I found something that describes the "Law of Marriage Act of 1971" of Tanzania:

"Under Section 10(1) of the Act, a marriage is defined as “the voluntary union of a man and a woman, intended to last for their joint lives,” and may either be monogamous or polygamous (or potentially polygamous). Further, under Section 57, no wife in a polygamous marriage holds a superior position in matrimonial homes than any other wife."

I read that as saying that polygamy consists of a set of bilateral relationships having one person in common, and not a complete graph of all possible relationships between the individuals.

The paper I found that in seems to be about issues arising in divorce in Tanzania.

The problem is stated as:

"Because non-divorcing co-wives cannot be a party to divorce proceedings, and only parties can claim a stake in marital assets, the LMA currently offers no means for non-divorcing co-wives to claim a stake in marital property"

This sounds to me like wives are not considered to have a relationship to each other, and that has social implications which are important.

One can't overgeneralize based on this one source and one country, but it tends to make me more confident in my guess that "non-transitive" is the norm.

Thanks for researching that. I agree that, in practice, societies which allow polygamy probably have non-transitive marriages, and they could theoretically allow women to have two husbands so as not to give men more rights than women.

In an alternate reality where the US constitution happened to define marriage as between "a man and a woman", I could imagine activists pushing for states to allow polygamy so that two men or two women could "indirectly" marry, and pressuring the government to avoid the issues experienced in Tanzania by writing laws and policies which effectively treat the connection between the leaf nodes as equal to their connection to the root node when considering questions of divorce, taxation, inheritance, parenthood, etc.

Look, if you stop considering slippery slope to be a fallacy, next thing you'll start making straw men arguments.

It is a bit of a tricky one; there are a lot of valid and reasonable arguments in the same mental area as slippery slopes.

But the argument that must be rejected is "this is a step in the direction of X, therefore it is equivalent to supporting X", which is a common argument and a bad one. Arguments in that form should be rejected.

A "slippery slope" argument that something is dangerous is, imho, similar to use a corellation to argue that there is a direct causal link between two observations. Neither are sufficient to prove such claims. But, both _may_, depending on other information, be evidence supporting the claims, even if they do not prove the claim outright.

In other words, slippery slope areguments (like correlation arguments) are fallacies if they are claimed as definitive proofs for a claim being made, but are not fallacies if used as supporting evidence for a claim or if arguing that the claim should be considered a possibility that may need to be considered or investigated.

In bayesian reasoning, both can be used as evidence for some claim, that creates a new set of (posterior) probabilities for a set of mutually exclusive claims based on a set of prior probabilities.

For instance, lets say you are concerned that some president may end up as a dictator. In a democracy, the prior probability may be relatively small. Then, lets assume the country abolishes term grants more power to the president in some time of emergency. In that case, one could argue using a sliding slope argument that the risk that the posterior probability of the president ending up as a dictator had increased after being granted more powers.

Logical fallacies are only fallacies when they are presented as if the conclusion follows by logical necessity from the argument, as in a mathematical proof.

Often "logical fallacy" is taking to mean "bad argument", but that not necessarily the case. A slippery slope argument can be a reasonable and valid argument, it is only a fallacy when presented as if A by logical necessity leads to B. But most debate arguments does not claim to be logical proofs in the first case. "Anytime A have been done in the past it has inevitably lead to B, therefore it will happen again". This might be a very good argument, but it is just not a logical proof that A will always and inevitably lead to B.

This is a point I wish more people would understand. There are logical fallacies that always make for a bad argument and logical fallacies that are reasonable but not logical proofs.

For example correlation causation is one that needs to be treated with care, but correlation is often investigated further by scientists to find causation. It does not prove it exists, but it does indicate an area fruitful to research further.

But the texas sharp shooter fallacy and cherry picking data does not make for a good argument nor serve as a useful indicator of where one might dig for further information.

It even has a name!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

Slippery slope is a logical fallacy, and not a rhetorical one. Logic and rhetoric follow different rules. Logic is purely binary - If I say "Burgers are unhealthy", and you can find one example that fits the definition of a hamburger that is made of plants and not full of fats, you have disproven my logic. Rhetorically, though, the point will stand as most burgers are "sometimes food".

One great way of thinking about it in modern terms is thus: Rhetoric is Bayesian. You're operating on probabilities. There's a ton of things that are likely to happen but not guaranteed. There's a ton of questions to which there is a large field of possibilities, and one action can cause opposite effects in different cases.

One of the best examples in modern times is "Appeal to authority:" This Doctor say X is true, therefore X must be true. Even large groups of doctors have gotten important things wrong[1]. Thus, a logical fallacy - X says Y is enough to create a predicate as the beginning of a chain of logic, but it is not "Proof" within a logical chain. "X says Y. X is a Doctor. Therefore Y" is fallacious logic. Nonetheless, you should listen to doctors, because rhetorically they probably know what they're talking about on medical issues.

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

Scot Adams. Full stop.

The problem with banning things like "racism" is that words change meaning over time. Maybe some time in the future, any reference to "White Privlege" may be considered racist, for instance.

Or that these days even people of color saying the n word is condemned, whereas just a few years ago (months?) it was sort of accepted.

Making that into a legal doctrine would be quite tricky.

John McWhorter wrote an article discussing the word.

e.g. The head of the NAACP used the word in 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/john-mcwhorter-n-...

Well "white privledge" IS racist. So that's already the case. Just some people don't consider it that way.

The distinction between what is and what is considered so is rather important.

It depends. Judging people's lived experienced based on their skin color may be racism under the MLK definition, but the far left has created a new definition of racism that allows one to discriminate against others based on the color of their skin, for paler colors of skin.

Only if you're defining both terms to mean something different than in the contexts in which they normally are used.

Privilege is concept that certain attributes a person has confer relative advantages in the ways they interact with the world and the outcomes thereof. Acknowledging that is not and cannot be bigotry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_privilege

Unless you're saying that white privilege is a consequence of racism, which would be correct, but not really relevant to the discussion here.

It is used as a racist rhetorical cudgel however, a "shut up your opinion doesn't matter because of your race" to mark someone as wrong without addressing their point at all.

Related the concept is so terribly named it seems meant to raise conflict. Privledge implies that it should be optional. It invites the previously mentioned abuse.

priv·i·lege

noun

a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

It's named perfectly fine, it's just people willfully misinterpret it.

As far as being a "racist rhetorical cudgel", I'm sorry if you've felt that way, but the majority of times I've seen it used, it's to point out that a person's privilege does work to invalidate their opinion on a matter.

Most often, this is when someone is claiming that some form of discrimination doesn't exist, or isn't that bad, or that it happens the same to everyone and the people complaining should just get over it.

Privilege affects one's lived experience in ways that it's difficult to notice, because you have only your own lived experience to rely on. As a man, I was privileged not to experience harassment, and like many men I thought my female friends were exaggerating how bad it was. Then I took a series of subway rides with a friend who was harassed every time, and later got personally harassed by a creepy coworker. My privilege blinded me to the reality of the situation.

The same thing applies to race. I see a lot of white people who never personally witness racism making these broad statements about how, for example, you should just do what the police say and you'll be fine, when they've never had a cop drag them out of a car for no reason because they look like someone who might deal drugs. Because of their differences in societal privilege, their lived experience of dealing with cops has been wildly different, and the people with privilege shouldn't be talking over the people pointing out issues.

It can't be racist if you have no power [1].

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

Let's redefine racism, nice play

This is just blatantly untrue. Some piss-poor unemployed KKK member yelling racial slurs at the TV during the 2012 election is still a racist, despite having infinitesmal power - especially institutional power! - compared to the person he is being racist towards. I doubt there's a single person who would doubt that. Would you?

Sounds like something a white would say. Perhaps you suffer from the "white fragility" cited by the wikipedia article [1]?

[1] https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116

    White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and in-
    sulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protec-
    tion builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering
    the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility.
    White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress be-
    comes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include
    the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such
    as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behav-
    iors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.

And that sounds like something a racist would say. Seriously, "a white"? Does my race matter to you because you judge the validity of arguments by the skin color of the people making them?

Also, while I haven't read DiAngelo's greater oeuvre, that's a pretty poor quote to pull. The symptoms (anger and fear particularly) and strategies he gives of a white person experiencing "white fragility" could just as easily be applied to a black person experiencing racism! Which honestly is in accord with my wider experience with the anti-racist movement. Its most ardent supporters tend to say things that, as a non-American (and non-European before you make that assumption), are almost indistinguishable to me from white supremacy. I find myself agreeing greatly with John McWhorter (https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...) over Ibram X. Kendi.

You touch it with a needle.

This is the reason justice system has the concept of prescription. You cannot be prosecuted for something that wasn´t deem unlawful in the past and even if there was already a law about it we can't condemn you if we failed to do so within a not distant past. It pretty much cover you in case meaning change over time.

The OK hand sign is racist now. There's rumbles of milk being racist.

The scary thing that should terrify everyone is we are going to come to a point where being called racist no longer matters or nobody cares, and then your gonna see REAL racism come back with a fury and force you wont like.

Wait, milk?

People of European decent tend to be much better at digesting milk (lactose) as adults and there's a meme that if you can't chug a bottle of milk you have to get out. Or something silly like that. Turns out groups of people with ancestry in east Africa have the gene for lactose as well.

So, milk could become a symbol of this if used within that context. People are paranoid enough today that if a picture of someone enjoying a glass of a milk was published, they could assume it was a signal of this. And it could be, to be sure.

These are just pranks made by 4chan and their ilk.

The circle of life on this sort of thing, I think, goes something like:

Come up with a contrived reason milk could be considered racist, film a video or whatever about chugging milk while making a racist screed, get criticized for being a weirdo, and then some reactionary clickbait site can have the headline "Internet user called 'racist' for drinking milk."

It is dumb, don't worry about it.

Didn't 4chan also create the OK hand sign racist as well? Now there are people who genuinely believe the OK sign is racist.

It is essentially the same prank, I believe the milk one is the even more absurd followup.

They spread the rumor that the OK symbol is racist.

Some people go to racist rallies and make the gesture.

Is it now a racist gesture? A gesture can't really be racist I don't think, it is the intent behind it. In the case of OK, it doesn't provide much extra information, right? If somebody is making it at a racist rally I guess it is a bit redundant. If somebody makes it while scuba diving I guess they are really indicating "OK."

The OK gesture was an effective pick because, it has mostly been supplanted by thumbs up to indicate all's good anyway. So it doesn't have much counter-pressure. I don't think milk consumption is going anywhere.

While intent should be what matters, that isn't the case for many people. There was a man who was cracking his knuckles and somebody took a picture of him. Apparently his hand was close to the OK sign and he was fired. It is getting to the point where intention does not matter.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

Apparently? Here's an article titled "Milk, a symbol of neo-Nazi hate" published "August 31, 2017" (not April 1):

https://theconversation.com/milk-a-symbol-of-neo-nazi-hate-8...

The OK sign is only racist if it's being used by racists to signal to other racists that they are racist. This remains true if you replace "The OK sign" with any other innocuous act or item.

These kinds of statements are the result of a wretched game of Telephone. "White supremacists are using the OK sign as an identifying signal" became "Crazy leftists say the OK sign is racist". It's an effective recruiting tool on the uninformed.

You said what I was trying to say a lot more succinctly.

While I am not condoning banning speech, your examples above compile into a pretty disingenuous take. While I'm sure an example could be found if you looked hard enough, I have never once heard of anyone crying 'racist' about normal people making the normal OK hand sign innocently.

I have, however, heard the term 'racist' accurately used to describe people making an inverted OK sign when said people happen to be standing at a Proud Boys rally, or by people who otherwise spend their time hanging out with, or trolling as, white supremacists. [^1]

Same deal with milk. It's only racist when it's being used as a symbol by people who are intentionally being racist:

> "One slide Dr. Novembre has folded into his recent talks depicts a group of white nationalists chugging milk at a 2017 gathering to draw attention to a genetic trait known to be more common in white people than others — the ability to digest lactose as adults." [^2]

That doesn't mean "milk is racist", or that drinking milk is racist; it means unabashed racists seem to enjoy co-opting common symbols as code for their secret clubs.

[^1]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...

[^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-sci...

> While I'm sure an example could be found if you looked hard enough, I have never once heard of anyone crying 'racist' about normal people making the normal OK hand sign innocently.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

That could definitely happen. That would be kind of similar to how being called "communist" lost most of its power from overuse. In a generation or two, maybe even "nazi" will no longer be seen as an insult in parts of society.

> Maybe some time in the future, any reference to "White Privlege" may be considered racist, for instance.

Who says that's not already the case outside of the coastal cities?

> "You shouldn't be able to tweet racist messages"

This seems right on the surface, but the problem is that it's really hard to determine what a racist message is. For instance, if black people want to discuss their frustration with white people in honest language, it might sound pretty racist. But I'm not sure any of us would want to curtail that. FB had this exact problem not too long ago..

https://revealnews.org/article/how-activists-of-color-lose-b...

> if black people want to discuss their frustration with white people in honest language, it might sound pretty racist

Because it is.

Agreed. And this is exactly why we shouldn’t ban it.

“I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example.”

we live in a world where saying “all lives matter” makes you adolf hitler 2.0. crime statistics are banned on twitter. if you say “its ok to be white” you will be called a nazi, and fired from your job. THAT’S racism.

Speech laws also requires the court to make a judgement on the intent of the perpetrator, the exact same expression can either be legal or illegal depending on intent.

Shooting someone can be illegal or legal based on the intent of the perpetrator, establishing the state of mind of someone accused of a crime isn't exactly a legal novelty

True, but the intent here is very subjective, the court basically has to fantasize about the perpetrators intent. And what it usually comes down to is if the perpetrator is "good" person or not. Speech laws invites courts to be subjective in their rulings.

Isn’t that the entire point of mens rea in law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

Slippery slopes aren't really a type of fallacy. Much in the same way that conspiracies are often real.

Outside of limited cases where speech can be linked to physical harm, it should be legal and unrestricted.

And companies should embrace the spirit of freedom of speech in choosing not to restrict it on their platforms. (Or they could be forced as common carriers)

If you believe that people should be punished for being offensive, like making racist remarks, then I don't understand your issue here.

Just imagine if the deceased guy was your grandpa or someone you care about a lot, would you not feel hurt by that tweet?

I think racist comments, for example, would already be covered under the Public Order Act 1986

It looks like they might be. This seems to be the relevant part of the Act:

(1) A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if—

(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or

(b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.

(2) An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the written material is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and are not heard or seen except by other persons in that or another dwelling.

--------

However, it looks as though you might get away with saying some very nasty racist things in public if you were careful with your vocabulary, tone of voice and so on.

Is there any protection for people with Tourette's or mentally ill people, I wonder?

Someone with Asperger's who requires a carer was prosecuted after they loudly questioned a PCSO's sex in a public place.

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/teen-prosecute...

So if that is anything to go by, it is "No".

The article doesn't say Armstrong requires a carer.

> The court heard Armstrong, who acts as a carer for a man he considers his father, had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and suffered from anxiety and depression.

Also, Asperger's is not really an excuse to say hurtful things. I have ADHD, which is related to both Asperger's and autism, and I would never say something like that. It's not so cut and dry to say "oh, they have <x>, so they're excused".

Apart from both being NPF, having some symptoms that can be misinterpreted as similar, and high levels of comorbidities, ADHD is not related to autism.

We with ADHD absolutely do not have the same issues of interpersonal understanding, so of course you wouldn't because you wouldn't have that impulse in the first place.

From what I know I'd say autism (light or not) can definitely be an excuse for saying hurtful things, due to limitations in getting why something "merely factual" could be hurtful.

The slope is slippery because, given enough time, lawyers are always be able to form a causal effect chain from human action A to undesirable outcome B.

This implies all such causal chains, regardless of their nature, will always be accepted as valid. If that were true, no lawyer would ever lose a case.

It's the same argument that people make when they say, because any word can be claimed to mean anything, any so-called hate speech crime can be used to make any arbitrary speech illegal, simply by labeling any form of speech "hate speech."

It's the 'perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless void' model of society that assumes societies are not made up of humans with brains already aware that people can lie and attempt to game the system, and that no one will ever be willing or able to correct flaws in the system. Even in the case of OP, I doubt the UK could take any arbitrary tweet and sentence someone under the same law.

That said, I think the laws in the UK in this regard are going too far - but a slippery slope implies an irreversible process. These laws exist because the people of the UK want them to. If they wanted otherwise, they could change the laws to reflect that. That isn't a slippery slope.

Okay, buddy, we have this thing called the Internet now. It's a magical place where you can be anonymous and say whatever the fuck you want. The cat has left the bag.

All restrictive speech laws do now is push dissidents underground into radicalizing echochambers like 4chan, while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?

It's odd that you seem to find restricting speech and pushing dissidents underground into radicalizing echo chambers to be a problem, while not being at all concerned about those dissidents' capacity to radicalize orders of magnitude more people and form even bigger echo chambers when given free rein on the biggest platforms the internet has to offer.

The entire point is to slow the ability of dissidents to spread their message, because despite what believers in free speech maximalism claim, truth doesn't always out. "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on" was a meme well before the internet gave lies the speed of light.

>while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?

I've already commented that I reject the slippery slope argument. If the people of the UK find their free speech laws go too far, they can change those laws.

I find your views so illogical that I can only conclude that you're trolling.

If you are in favour of limits on speech then you should not have a problem with this. Everything is offensive to someone. We should all go to prison!

It’s more that it should be clearly defined what counts as ‘limits on speech’.

“Nazi glorification” is fairly specific. “Grossly offensive” is not.

If nobody is aware that it’s prosecutable that you are happy someone is dead (a perfectly valid opinion), then you shouldn’t prosecute people for it.

Just like how speed limits necessitate the arrest of everyone who drives.

...over the speed limit, yes. The point of parent's post is that the offensive nature of a statement or speech in general is subjective and can change with whims and the time. A speed limit is objective and quantifiable; if you go over the speed limit stated you get fined, there's no room for interpretation

Speed limits are not objective at all - Germany infamously does not have speed limits on highways.

And yes, speed limit laws, do change over time.

And no, you can't be punished for having broken a speed limit in the past, that is not in effect today.

Parent's comparison seems rather apt.

They obviously meant speed is quantifiable. You can measure speed and say "you violated the limit".

Yes, but it doesn't strengthen the argument.

If society A says the speed limit is X and society B it's Y and society C it's infinite. What's the point that speed is objectively measurable?

That making a rule even makes sense. It is not an argument as to what amount is sensible, just that "amount" is sensible.

You’re missing the point.

Society A and society B won’t disagree on whether something is moving at 150km/hr.

Well, they might if a physicist gets involved and starts complaining that no one has defined their point of reference.

Your comparison would be true if the speed limit differentiated on the intent on the speeder, e.g. person A can drive over the speed limit but not person B because person B has the wrong intent.

Ambulance, firefighters, etc.

They can do that because of regulation, not intent.

It is more like this, person A is in a hurry and is allowed to drive over the speed limit because person A is good person, but person B, who also is in a hurry, is a scumbag and therefore person B is not allowed to drive over the speed limit. It is very similar to how woke culture works.

In the UK it does. If you are speeding because you are an appropriately trained person performing emergency response duties then it's not illegal.

It is not comparable, see this comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877026

We can objectively measure speed.

Please detail how we can objectively measure “offense”.

Almost literally every person is "in favour of limits on speech" to some extent, so this kind of reductionism contributes nothing (and I'd argue generally makes the signal-to-noise ratio even worse).

There are huge numbers of interesting questions around how we treat freedom of speech in a civilised society. What restrictions can we collectively accept? How do we ensure that individual rights to speech are protected? How do we protect people from harassment or abuse, and how does this balance against the fundamental right to be offensive? Discussion about these is way more interesting than hot takes about how we're all going to prison for being mean on Twitter. And worst of all it detracts from the serious conversation to be had about how grossly inappropriate the reaction in this specific case is.

I 100% agree with you. There is strong indication we are heading towards a more volatile world, and we need to collectively discuss these questions.

I'd like to add that most posters here on HN are arguing conditional on living in a Western democracy. And most Western democracies have set different restrictions - but all do have some restrictions. E.g. it's illegal to deny the holocaust in Germany.

By that logic if you are in favour of actionable threats being illegal you should have no problem with this. It's just speech after all.

I'm also in favour of limits on speech, but I draw the line at threats and sustained harassment. I don't think the tweet in the article rises to that level, and I don't think I'm a hypocrite for allowing that tweet but not allowing threats.

I do understand there are benefits to the all-or-nothing approach to free speech though.

> I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages

I just got kicked off the main lemmy.ml server because I had the audacity to challenge the current Ukraine invasion and say that the Russians were fuck ups who broke what they touch (which I honestly believe, and I feel history backs me up on this). Was accused of being "a nasty racist" and instantly banned site wide. Was this right? I think not. Was I racist for this statement? Also, I think not. The Russians aren't even a race, so I just don't see it. Nevertheless, this is an example of the sort of free speech that is silenced by this attitude and I don't think the pro-Kremlin echo chamber in there is better off for it. Please be careful what you support, there are plenty of people out there who will use it for their own ends, regardless of how you meant it.

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