Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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Speech has consequences. Often indirect, sometimes quite direct. As such, maximising the liberty of the largest number of people is fundamentally incompatible with protecting all speech equally.

Popper's Paradox of Tolerance [1] is a more direct expression of this:

> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.

Sometimes, that intolerance of intolerance can be sufficiently dealt with by society merely expressing disagreement, but if the intolerance expressed involves direct abuse and threats, for example, by people undeterred by their opponent merely countering their speech with speech, the only non-violent means of preventing the harm, including limiting the liberty of the victims, may be through the application of legal restrictions.

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

That's complete and utter nonsense.

Being "intolerant of the intolerant"? Does that include your own intolerance?

People are completely within their rights to be intolerant. Nothing gives you or the government the right to decide who/what I should like or want to associate with. Nothing gives you the right to persecute me for wrongthink.

People are completely within their rights to be intolerant up to the point where their intolerance does harm to others.

The preservation of liberty gives us all a right, and many would say an obligation, to persecute you when what you engage in puts others at severe danger of being stripped of liberty, or, worse, of life.

Not even the US allows unfettered speech for that reason, even as much as it goes further than most places in allowing harm to others.

> "People are completely within their rights to be intolerant up to the point where their intolerance does harm to others."

We're talking about speech. Speech is not "harm". Nobody cares about your hurt feelings.

The limitations on speech in the U.S. occur when the speech directly results in ACTUAL harm (again, not just hurt feelings). That's why the U.S. has the most expansive speech protection of any country in the world. I can deny the Holocaust as much as I want. I can call mock "trans" people as much as I want. Because, again, your hurt feelings don't matter when you're talking about protecting speech.

So you agree speech can cause actual harm, in other words, and hence the disagreement is only over where the line goes with respect to actual harm.

Germany has drawn in by considering the risk posed of another authoritarian regime as an unacceptable actual harm of allowing certain kinds of extremist speech, other countries consider the reduced feeling of safety and security or mental health consequences of harassment and abuse to be actual harm.

The US de facto considers things like many forms of defamation or false claims to be actual harm given that it renders a free speech defence moot in many circumstances, so it is clear that even in the US this actual harm does not need to be physical or direct.

I don't necessarily think Germany has gotten the balance right, but it's incredibly arrogant to think the US interpretation of harm is the only reasonable one.

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