On one hand I'm all for free speech and I believe it's important to be able to civilly disagree with things.
On the other hand, how do we avoid nazi-at-the-bar problems?
On the other hand, how do we avoid nazi-at-the-bar problems?
If you're all for free speech, the "nazi at the bar" problem isn't a problem because free speech would allow you to battle it out in a propaganda (the neutral definition) war.
I don't think a whole lot of people are actually pro free speech, but I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that.
I strongly disagree. Support for freedom of speech means being anti-censorship. It's perfectly coherent to believe that particular speech does harm, and also should not be censored.
Suppose you and I are top medical researchers, and we disagree about the best way to treat a disease. It's perfectly coherent for me to believe that your speech is killing people by promoting a treatment which is suboptimal/counterproductive, and also believe that your speech should not be censored.
Are people free to make untrue statements?
Are people free to make “falsified” statements?
Are statements inducements?
Yes
Yes
No
I wonder if a good modern analogy for Semmelweis would be if we did a study on crystal healing or Reiki, and the crystal healing/Reiki was found to vastly outperform placebo pills. (Actually something like this sort of did happen with parapsychology. The effect sizes were pretty small I believe, though.)
Obviously in hindsight, other docs still should've listened to Semmelweis. What I'm trying to get at here is that sussing out the truth can actually be a pretty tricky thing. Even if the docs had somewhat good reason to accuse Semmelweis of spreading medical misinfo, it was still a catastrophic mistake in retrospect.
I don't necessarily mean to indict the scientists of Semmelweis's day too much. I mean, they fucked up, to be sure. However it's understandable (somewhat) why they didn't listen to him.
But a society that allows those presently in power to censor information they consider to be false is a society that helps cement its present ways of doing things for eternity. I don't think that's a good thing.
A modern example of this might be the plaque theory of Alzheimer's disease. I don't know enough to know whether this is a fair description of the state of the science, but there is certainly a growing view that, a "cabal" of believers in this theory suppressed alternative views for a long time. It may end up being that the cabal is right! But it seems to me like there's enough uncertainty that a diversity of viewpoints should probably be heard.
One indicator of the quality (or lack thereof) of a society is how easy is to damage one's reputation without evidence. That's why the whole "Believe women" movement is complete and utter bullshit.
This problem has always existed, and the social standing of person A and the social standing of person B typically determined the outcome. Platforms such as Twitter where an unfounded claim can be spread so rapidly and to such a vast number of people are also a modern thing. There's no easy answer, but having the state as arbiter of truth is never the solution.
Note too the benefits of allowing/supporting the right of [insert disliked political group] to speak: 1) You find out who is in that group when they speak (as opposed to them remaining anonymous/hidden online) and potentially address them directly 2) You might be able to question them to find out what led them to that position to prevent more people from going in that direction 3) You can be aware of the message that they are trying to send and counter it with more speech
In contrast, doing something like banning support for the Communist party is likely to lead to 1) more sympathy for Communism as an oppressed outgroup; 2) a lack of understanding of how extensive support for Communism is and what might be causing it; 3) the use of "Communism" as something that people can use to denounce each other as part of petty/unrelated feuds.
I don't understand in real life how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths without the recommended treatment being resolvable in a single conversation (research so inconclusive on either as to make both treatments suspect imo). Why would either professional be presenting a treatment as "recommended" without the strong caveat of "but others of my caliber think this recommended treatment will kill you." If said caveat isn't included, surely we don't want doctors going around giving such blatantly misinformative advice?
And again why is the "free speech " blanket always cast so wide as to include this? We aren't allowed to not have Nazis around without risking restricting medical debate? Smacks of slippery slope.
I came up with the example myself. You and I actually discussed it here on HN the other week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998494
I wasn't using that example to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis". I was using it to counter the sentence I quoted: "If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech." There's an important distinction to be made between speech I think causes harm, and speech I think should be censored. That's all I wanted to say with my thought experiment.
I actually do not believe all speech should be always be protected. I agree with the MIT statement that harassment shouldn't be protected. And it seems to me that e.g. expressing support for Hitler could credibly be regarded as harassment. (Same for e.g. labeling someone as a "Nazi" because they say the US should have stronger border security.) More details on my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34135283
It's happening right now (has been for 2 years) with COVID vaccines. Also permanent gender surgery performed on minors -- doctors performing them say they are saving lives, opponents say they are mutilating children below the age of consent.
Ignaz Semmelweiss's life is the perfect example of this phenomenon in action, with extreme consequences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
He realized doctors were killing their patients by not washing their hands and cleaning their instruments. He devised simple solutions to this problem. The doctors of his day laughed him out of the room and had him committed to an insane asylum where he was effectively tortured to death.
The consensus of medical practitioners at the time was that he was a crank. But he was right. Should he have been imprisoned? Certainly the doctors of his day would have had him banned from social media for "misinformation" if they could have, and they did far worse.
We abide by the principle of free expression not because it causes the least harm in every instance, but because it causes the least harm in expectation. The value of minority viewpoints that are right about important things that the majority is wrong about will always outweigh the harm of harmful speech, in aggregate. And one thing is clear from all of human history: We are not responsible enough to tell the difference ex ante.
I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.
Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications (I'm not sure how well this constitutionally works for private companies). This obviously doesn't count credible threats, telling people to riot or be violent, etc.
Basically you have a right to offend people short of targeted harassment.
*This is obviously an oversimplification but I'm giving the HN the benefit of the doubt here, however misguided that may be.
I hear this a lot, and it's not actually true. That's what the first amendment means. The first amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not define the concept of free speech as a whole, it just protects a form of it.
It annoys me when people assert that being silenced by a private entity doesn't actually limit freedom of speech, because they argue that the freedom isn't being restricted unless a government is doing it. I'm not necessarily for unrestricted free speech (because it often ends up being loud and obnoxious, and often silences other speech when it becomes a shouting contest, especially on the internet), but this very specific interpretation that the US Constitution's first amendment actually defines free speech has always bugged me as something logically unsound.
Because speech doesn’t cause physical harm or loss to others.
Nope, that is trivially wrong with the obvious counter examples being slander and libel.
How would that be distinguished from "cancellation", exactly?
The war of ideas is a game where the goal is to get the most amount of people to adopt that idea. No part of this is removing someone's ability to speak, but they may not be listened to by the masses that don't like their ideas.
*no nazis or similar.
Seems entirely reasonable and this whole "it isn't free if there isn't anarchy" sounds very naive.
That's called "not actually being for free speech".
I don't know about you all, but personally I'm interested in participating in civil society most of the time. I don't want to have to get into a violent debate with swearing with fucking nazis, the same I don't want to breath toxic fumes or drive a car to work. I vote for bus stops, I vote for carbon taxes, and I similarly want to leverage our societal mechanisms to not have to act as an individual agent in the ideological war against fascism every single day.
I've learned that obnoxious nazis have an advantage by violating the peace treaty terms of civil society and tolerance, because by definition they don't hold themselves by such rules. Meanwhile those of us that are just trying to live our lives still have these rules and values and are hesitant to abandon them to deal with the nazi for many reasons, not the least of which being we don't want to sink to their level. Not to mention, it's exhausting. For whatever reason the nazis get their rocks off to it, and thus it's less exhausting and more exhilarating. Fine. But the whole point of society is to rubber-band away things like that to create a community of people who at some basic level maintain a level of civility.
When nazis show up, they violate the civility, they violate the peace treaty, and the solution shouldn't be "let them keep walking in and doing it and re-doing the fuck-off debate every time," but rather, close and lock the doors to them, because they've already told us who they are and what they're about.
An oversimplified example: your carpet shop has a rule: no shoes on in the shop. You come in with shoes, you get thrown out. A guy shows up with a shirt on that says "My value is to track as much mud on as many carpets as I can in my life." Do you let him in the door?
Is he wearing shoes?
The problem isn't that there's a line at which it becomes ok to remove yourself from, or them, forcibly.
The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things, which is why so many people disagree with you.
> The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things,
It's being applied to the intolerant, as intended. There are intolerable philosophies being openly discussed on mass media (tucker Carlson restating great replacement theory, matt walsh calling for police to kick down the doors of drag performers). Openly white nationalist and fascist people are showing up in towns to harass and intimidate people. In this environment, when the system is failing to not tolerate these intolerant beliefs, or in the case of white nationalism especially, actively enforcing the intolerant "right" to promote their viewpoint, the peace treaty of tolerance has been broken, and those of us you'd describe of "tolerant" stop applying the rules of civil society to the people breaking them in front of all of our faces.
And at WORST the outcomes for these intolerants is they have to change venues for a university talk, or, get a Twitter ban, for which capitalist society handsomely rewards them with talk show appearances and podcast shows.
It has a name and using that name allows for more succinct communication. It's also a way for those who are unfamiliar with the paradox of tolerance to realize it's a thing so they can look further into it if they so choose.
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For the rest, it's just a lot of rationalization for why you think you should be able to prevent people from saying things. And you try to hang it on the paradox of tolerance as a justification.
But it's not really, the lesson from the paradox of tolerance isn't that the tolerant must become absolutely intolerant to protect themselves, it's that they cannot be absolutely tolerant.
The line where intolerance needs to kick in for protection shouldn't be "someone said a thing", but should instead be "someone did a thing". Those like yourself who try to use the paradox of tolerance to rationalize your views are treating tolerance/intolerance as a binary rather than a spectrum.
And finally,
I'm a minority myself and have been called racial epithets. I remember the KKK coming into a nearby town and holding a rally back in the 90's. People were pissed off, but even then I defended their right to have the rally. My recommendation to everyone was just don't go. Imagine if they held a KKK rally and no one showed up, how hilarious would that be?
I would be no more ok with minorities attacking KKK members than I would be with KKK members attacking minorities. There's an equilibrium and fairness there that doesn't exist with words. If it's not ok for KKK members to tell a black person they're inferior, is it not ok for a black person to tell a KKK member they're inferior?
This obviously won't convince you as you're not thinking rationally, but that doesn't make the above any less true.
You're trying to say "people I agree with".
One could set up a dress code or any other arbitrary policy as a proxy to refuse entry to any group, without explicitly doing so.
I suspect you're not happy with that either, and that's my point.
Not in the US you can't. If a policy, even when applied equally, unduly affects a protected class, it's unconsitutional.
For example, if a restaurant enacts a "no headwear" policy it's still unconstitutional because by and large this is primarily going to affect the muslim population (and a segment of the jewish population), but will have very little effect on anyone else.
If the policy was instead "no headwear with words on it" the policy would NOT be unconstitutional because it does NOT unduly affect a specific group of people.
There are other exceptions, of course, generally around security. You can imagine a bank not allowing the full covering of ones face for security reasons even if that does appear to target people who wear burka's day to day.
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so long story short is that it's not super simple, but in the US you absolutely cannot try and get around it by proxy and there is established law on how to identify this.
I don't care about the US, and I don't think the laws there should be an example for the rest of the world.
That’s getting darned close to precognitive law enforcement…
The problem with deciding that ‘nazis’ don’t deserve free speech is that you won’t always get to decide who is a ‘nazi’ or what ‘nazi’ speech looks like.
Note that the parties that are arguing hardest for free speech are exactly the ones that are the subject of discussion. You might wonder if they have a stake in the outcome of that debate. Personally, I'm not at all concerned that 'the state' will meaningfully abridge my speech (in part because there is no history of them doing that without a very good reason and in part because NL never had absolute free speech to begin with though we do have the concept of 'freedom of opinion'). But I am concerned with the speed with which wannabe Nazi groups and actual Nazi groups are able to convert people en masse to their cause, including voting them into public office where they are already doing damage. If you haven't noticed that then you're forgiven but realize that in many countries this is not just a theoretical debate but harsh reality.
Stalin-ism should not be a case study so you can do it right the next time, it should be a warning that you can't, even with the best of intentions.
I hope we can take some lesson from Neville Chamberlain; that some ideologies are not worth arguing or negotiating over.
And British, Canadian and many other countries besides.
you mean like dumping tea into the ocean to protest taxes and standing up a militia to rebel in order to establish a new government?
we definitely wouldn't want that to happen!
A 10 second detour through Wikipedia to have a look at what Nazism is would have saved you typing that out.
Yes, it does protect nazis. It is also our best bet against nazis, and a great many Minister-of-Truth-wannabes have a hard time understanding it.
If they can build rockets—Paperclip, https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip
> 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf ... Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which eventually propelled two dozen American astronauts to the Moon.
If I were writing the statement, I probably would've added "intimidation" in that sentence. Then I'd kick the nazi out if they're using slurs, or if they self-identify as a nazi (e.g. wearing a swastika).
It gets tricky though, because if you add "intimidation" then someone can say "people who disagree with me are intimidating me". (I suppose they can also say "people who disagree with me are harassing me" with the current policy.)
My basic approach for dealing with this problem would be to utilize the fact/value distinction. Free expression of fact statements is much more important than free expression of value statements, because knowing the truth is important.
The threshold for censoring a value statement, like "The lives of <X people> don't matter" or "<X people> should be enslaved", should generally be lower. If someone claims that such a statement intimidates or harasses them, their claim will often be credible.
But for a fact statement, if someone's notion of "harassment" is so broad as to make it impossible to express a particular factual claim without engaging in "harassment", I'd say they're not complaining in good faith.
It's OK to argue that a particular delivery of a factual claim constitutes harassment (e.g. if the delivery is peppered with slurs). But the complainer should always be able to re-express the factual claim in a way that makes it no longer "harassment" to them.
In France we do limit free speech legally, especially around anti semitism and walk a fine line. For instance a man said "Islam is the stupidest religion on Earth" and was found innocent in court: he can insult a religion or a God, as long as he didnt call for people to be hung. But another said "Heil Israel" in a comedy piece to mock, in his view, how Israel was behaving like its former oppressor. He was censored and it started a long list of sentences in court as he persevered on that line of thought. He's considered by his supporters as a victim of political correctness.
It's hard to decide what to do: on one hand, it's interesting to express views that challenge common acceptance, on the other, it's not a big cost to shut up and move on when society decides the cost of letting you speak is too great a threat considering our history.
To avoid that Nazi at the bar "problem", first decide what the problem is: that people speak or that people listen. If you cant accept they speak, you must define limits to speech (that s the French model and we are clear some things simply cant be said, period, so shut up and move on). If you can, then you must educate your population so that merely listening to hate speech doesnt trigger hate. That's been the american model, and we never believed it can actually work: after all, you elected a man who was against elections, for instance.
Free speech in a bar, or any other business environment, though is out of place. Because the primary goal of a business is to make money, and creating disharmony and antagonism seldome leads to better business.
In other words free speech is useful, but there's a time and a place.
Bars for example like to attack a hermogenous crowd. Happy people drink more, break less. If 10% of the patrons start spouting off racism, or mysogeny, or whatever, then the rest won't fight it, they'll just leave. If it happens a couple more times they'll stop coming back.
So bars are typically quick to remove people, or ban people, with a history of strife. You don't have to go as far as Nazis, all you need is a few guys being obnoxious about, say, eating meat.
Free speech is not "saying whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want." there's a time and a place. A university campus is a great place, and also (for typical college age people) a good time.
So in this case, would complete free speech be out of place by your metrics?
In the case of MIT, which is a 501(c)(3), but also sits on a multi-billion 'endowment'.
I might steer clear of Berkley as being too hippy, and choose Alabama or Mississippi instead.
But I also expect that a business in the business of sharing ideas is open to new ideas. If I want to discuss a gun-free society at Alabama State, then i might be in the minority. As a professor my students won't appreciate it in my physics lecture, but I might form a student group against guns etc.
So yes a university is a business, but the business of ideas, and censoring some ideas seems like that makes it a bad business.
My understanding of the situation is that most universities accept federal funds, which have a bunch of strings attached. One of these strings is allowing freedom of speech. This is why communists couldn't be banned from campuses back in the 50s and 60s, or the speech codes of the 80s and 90s failed.
This doesn't apply to universities like Harvard or Brigham Young that take zero federal funds, but the vast majority of them aren't going to pass up the money.
This “Nazis are everywhere” thing is a manifestation of busybody administrators and isn’t a real problem. Even if it were, it doesn’t require Byzantine declarations about approved speech.
People need to grow up and not get offended so easily.
It doesn't, but this brings up an interesting question. Is it legitimate to limit speech to prevent social change? I'm sure there were a lot of pro-segregationists that would have loved to prevent the social changes of the 60s and 70s. Would you legitimize their attempts, in exchange for having more tools to fight nazis?
To put it another way, the problem of Nazis is not a problem of free speech. It's a problem of people who are actively violating other people's boundaries.
Nazis love it when you make it about speech because then everyone starts arguing tautologies instead of investigating and prosecuting criminal behavior.
(1) people are innocent until proven guilty
(2) if one group is judge, jury, and executioner that's a problem
(3) authoritarians seek to quell dissent by censoring
(4) removal/ejection/ostracism from group is censorship
(5) contrary to your assertion removal/ejection/ostracism is a form of engagement
(6) in fact within the realm of free speech r/e/o is the most extreme form of engagement
(7) this is because it is the quashing of that ejected person's ability to freely express themselves
> The first has guaranteed results, the second is uncertain.
(8) hard disagree, the first is guaranteed to generate all sorts of backlash (perhaps not the results wished for)
(9) the second is guaranteed to generate debate, exactly what authoritarians and the censorious dislike
(10) ps: (quibble) the “Nazis” were terminated with extreme prejudice in 1945, any variants thereof nowadays are neo-Nazis
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All the above is transparently obvious to me. It concerns me that in a so-called liberal society many clearly are either unwilling or are unable to see that everything I have outline is true in all cases. The fruits of this ignorance are all around us.
to my mind i made a very reasonable defense of "free speech even for speech i find objectionable and disagree with but ultimately must tolerate in the interests of the inviolable principle of freedom of expression for all not just for my bubble" – that's the position i'm arguing for and nothing more.
"at all costs" != "free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]"
"at all costs" goes far further and is not something i am arguing for
> is unlikely to work.
i'll go one stronger – “free speech at all costs” cannot work. but that's fine because that's not what i'm arguing for. what i'm arguing for ("free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]") must work because that's the foundation a free society is built on. otherwise, all bets are off and the spoils go to those most willing to use covert and/or draconian measures to achieve their ends
I've read my grandmothers' diary, she had quite a bit to say about the previous time people underestimated the size of that maximum mass. There are very large numbers of people that will be happy to sustain such a dumb ideology if it is presented to them in such a way that it presses the right buttons. Fear is a very powerful motivator, as are frustration and jealousy and clever people will be more than happy to take advantage of these facts to push their revolting ideologies.
More effective than fear of government punishment is shame. Few care about pissing off the government in this country so that seems like a non-starter.
But, well, there's still a neo-Nazi march in Berlin pretty much every year. And it's larger than Charlottesville one was.
Oh, we have plenty of evidence that some things can stop Nazism. The question is if you want to dedicate another couple of 10's of thousands of acres to war graves.
But most Western countries still have actual, real communist parties so you can't paint completely crazy pictures of them, because their members will simply raise their hand and say "no we're not like that at all".
Although of course, attempts are made to associate broader and broader statements with extremism, such that even having an immigration policy at all is interpreted as racism, so the number of supposed racists is dramatically inflated.
If the right similarly broadened it’s interpretation of statements, 80-90% of the country could be claimed to be communists, for supporting the most minimal state assistance of the poor, which almost everyone does support at some level.
Citation badly needed. Really.