Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Sure, speech can be harmful and hurtful, to the point that someone should get punished for it. But the law has generally done very good job of reminding us that this tends to be a VERY NARROW possibility, i.e. the harm has to be very specific and directed and measurable.
Here in the US, yes. In the rest of the world (like, EU) they aren't very specific.
For example in Germany the first amendment protects dignity. An ideal law nobody can really fully adhere to. It works because there is a societal consensus about its meaning. Nothing the law can really determine. I believe this consensus will not really survive the 21st century. Perspectives will be too different. Dignity in religious communities means something entirely different than in a secular society, and even in that values will diverge more and more.
A lot of these laws are ancient and many were intended to protect monarchy from vulgar peasants, so I am a bit surprised "progressive" forces seem to have found their love for it.
In the interest of civil liberties, these laws would need to be changed at some point. They basically allow authority to selectively punish anyone under almost any pretense.
There are real biases and Injustice, but it doesn't a disservice do any reasonable debate to make such exaggerating claims
https://www.theblackcenter.org/
This is blatantly unconstitutional, but no one has challenged it in court and no one will. Other examples abound, such as racial discrimination in Ivy League admissions (now challenged in court, but for its impact on Asians mainly) and observed differences across race in admitted med students' MCAT scores.
Teddy Roosevelt once said that, "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism" and, "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." Well, here we are. Separate schools, separate standards, separate funding, separate public investment, except for the one largest demographic group... all driving my country into further conflict and disunity.
But you're doubling down not just on that people aren't aware of it but that it's a dead letter. That's wrong. You're confusing the government's spending power with discrimination in employment.
That is not repealing our civil rights law, the FEHA, or amending it to remove protections for white people, who are, by the way, only a plurality here. Even if we had, the federal law, Title VII, still protects everyone. The question isn't who you are, it's whether you were discriminated against on that basis.
Personally, I am really glad the rest of the country hates us and thinks we're shit so they don't come here, but it gets annoying when people just make stuff up. No, the place is far from perfect, but it's nothing like what people imagine. Even in San Francisco, they recalled the prosecutor who wouldn't do anything and San Francisco is probably the most extreme. People think that must mean every city around it is the same. Other than Berkeley, sometimes, they just aren't. In fact most of us go, thank god I don't live in San Francisco, which, by the way isn't the second biggest city in the state. San Jose has more people than San Francisco and so does San Diego. San Diego is much, much more purple. It's almost like 40m people are different.
They sure seem happy to take our tax dollars though.
Not having children is a life decision that's harmful to the society the same way suicide is harmful to the society.
Childfree groups should be treated as suicide cults.
The law does not only care about causality. It is also cares free speech, reasonable interpretation, and comparative responsibility.
I could craft and publish an argument School shootings are in fact a positive good a we should have more of them. I am legally in the clear, even If someone finds my argument convincing and goes and shoots up a school because of it.
In short, "reasonable" means nothing until the people in power tell you what it means.
When it comes to this example, it is a lot more clear. I can write a book on why you should shoot up schools and it would be protected. Reasonable does not come in to that part of the question.
Not really. The boundaries of "reasonable" are... wait for... it reasonableness.
I.e. if a jury or a judge isn't reasonable, then an appeals court can overturn it. A judge or jury is not given free reign to determine anything to be reasonable.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michelle-carter-found-g...
Sheesh indeed my friend, sheesh indeed.
If I killed someone, I can't be like "Whats the problem? Nature kills people all the time. Why are you so sentimental?"
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test
> The test determined that the government may prohibit speech advocating the use of force or crime if the speech satisfies both elements of the two-part test:
> The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,”
> AND
> The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
[snip]
> The Supreme Court in Hess v. Indiana (1973) applied the Brandenburg test to a case in which Gregory Hess, an Indiana University protester, said, “We’ll take the fucking street later (or again)." The Supreme Court ruled that Hess’s profanity was protected under the Brandenburg test, as the speech “amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time.” The Court held that “since there was no evidence, or rational inference from the import of the language, that his words were intended to produce, and likely to produce, imminent disorder, those words could not be punished by the State on the ground that they had a ‘tendency to lead to violence.’”
> In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.(1982), Charles Evers threatened violence against those who refused to boycott white businesses. The Supreme Court applied the Brandenburg test and found that the speech was protected: “Strong and effective extemporaneous rhetoric cannot be nicely channeled in purely dulcet phrases. An advocate must be free to stimulate his audience with spontaneous and emotional appeals for unity and action in a common cause. When such appeals do not incite lawless action, they must be regarded as protected speech.”
And because I also see this doctrine over-applied online:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fighting_words
> In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court redefined the scope of the fighting words doctrine to mean words that are "a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs." There, the Court held that the burning of a United States flag, which was considered symbolic speech, did not constitute fighting words.
> In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), the Supreme Court found that the "First Amendment prevents government from punishing speech and expressive conduct because it disapproves of the ideas expressed." Even if the words are considered to be fighting words, the First Amendment will still protect the speech if the speech restriction is based on viewpoint discrimination.
The page I linked to links to multiple law review articles on the subject:
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
http://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=28...
Suffice it to say: If someone online claims a speech act isn't protected due to the fighting words exemption, no it isn't.
Theoretically, how much outrage do I need to manufacture to get the legal system to ignore the Brandenburg test and prosecute today's flavor of thought villain?
Edit: to wit, the parent post claim in ridiculous action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34811787
Edit 2: and just to clarify my point, once these loopholes get found, people jump on them and aggressively exploit them. Look around this thread for the kinds of rhetoric people that oppose free speech are using. What would they have subbed in 15 or 50 years ago?
what fact is that? who enforces the "can't" ?
Regardless, does that remove the offense?
I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
"Kill x people" is fine and protected. "Kill x people at y date at z mall" is not.
Note:
>Hess uttered, "We'll take the fucking street later" or "We'll take the fucking street again." Hess was convicted in Indiana state court of disorderly conduct.
>The Supreme Court reversed Hess's conviction because Hess' statement, at worst, "amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time." In contrast to such an indefinite future time, the Court emphasized the word imminent in the "imminent lawless action" test of Brandenburg. Because the evidence did not show that Hess' speech was intended and likely to produce "imminent disorder", the state could not punish Hess' speech.[3][4]
Whether such laws are commonly enforced … well we know from modified motorcycles that they’re not.
Employee X gets fired for publicly stating that their employers products are trash, said employee sues, nothing about what they said was illegal.
And the law generally recognize this. It is not protected to intentionally harm the company if the intention is purely to cause harm. It is protected if the intent is to warn the public about a harmful product (Whistleblowing), or to protect fellow employees for harm. When those cases do end up in court, what judges and juries will focus on is on intent as the deciding factor once harm has been agreed/established.
People saying “we should limit it to what the law says” don’t make a ton of sense… because the law says that Twitter limiting speech is perfectly acceptable.
The first amendment doesn’t even apply in civil cases. Everything you listed aren’t exceptions to free speech, they are positive constructions as to the kinds of speech that you can make a civil claim of injury over. As such, they are not exhaustive.
Now it was okay for me to say because I was telling you it was illegal to say "I want to kill the President of the United States of America", because I wasn't saying it, I was telling you it was illegal to say it, like a public service.
But it is not illegal to say "with a mortar launcher", because that's it's own sentence. It's an incomplete sentence but it may have nothing to do with the sentence before that. So that's perfectly fine, perfectly legal.
It's incredibly illegal, extremely illegal to go on the internet and say something like "The best place to fire a mortar launcher at the White House would be from the roof of the Rockerfeller Hewitt building, because of minimal security and you'd have a clear line of sight to the President's bedroom." That's insanely illegal, ridiculously illegal, recklessly illegal, horribly illegal, extremely felonious, super illegal because they will come to your house in the middle of the night and they will lock you up. Extremely against the law
One thing that is technically legal to say is "We have a group that meets Friday's at midnight under the Brooklyn bridge and the password is sic semper tyranus"
This does not match my recollection. As I recall things, Rushdie was vigorously defended by the left, which at the time quite liked the idea of freedom of speech. At least in the UK, can't speak for anywhere else.
Nothing against Rushdie btw. I loved the Satanic Verses. But institutional journalism (which provides the fundamental model most people use to understand Anglo politics) has conflated the terms left and liberal. And while I respect the drift of language as natural and intrinsic to culture, this misplacement has created a silly situation in which hypocracy, action and in-action are misattributed. Because these are two groups (overlapping in some cases) but distinct in a fundamental way.
In fact, I would say articles such as this are entirely flawed in that they don't grasp this distinction because they take institutional journalism's political narrative way past its power to describe reality.
Edit: BTW, this affects conservatives and "the Right" as well. Most of the people that rise to the top of the Rupblican and Tory parties are effectively "liberal". Most would not abolish civil liberties, equality before the law, etc. Just about everyone elected to government in both the UK and the US in all parties sit on a spectrum of liberalism. Mostly they just disagree about what year the government needed to stop doing things to create a "liberal" society.
However, that's based on my memory from the "buzz" around the book and the fatwa when I was a high school senior. I could easily be misremembering or maybe took too strong an impression from a specific op-ed or talk show. Finding copies of coverage as it was happening is a little tricky.
By your insane logic, we should put kids out on the street by themselves to catch child predators.
Sometimes the safety of the threatened party is more important than finding out who wants to harm them.
Also we put fake kids online and young-looking cops to lure predators all the time for that exact reason.
As long as there are people wishing to "behead those who offend Muhammad", there should be an offensive Muhammad cartoon on every street light.
There should also be an international institute of holy text destruction. Build a big armored building where once a day, mass-market copies of all holy text's in common circulation in the world are unceremoniously set on fire and live-streamed.
Because if you can't deal with that without trying to kill someone, you have no place in modern society (not to mention that contextually, burning a holy text - and a flag for that matter - is considered the correct way to dispose of it).
"Salman Rushdie’s rights as an author are absolute and ought to be inalienable. A free society does not ban books. . . . But it is preposterous to pretend that the first principle governing the publication of Satanic Verses is the last word on the subject. . . . Mr Rushdie is entitled to abuse the religion in which he was reared and must be protected against those who want to intimidate him into silence. [Guess the conjunction] But the idea that we all have a duty to applaud his calculated assault is a novel interpretation of the liberal obligation."
Society-wide we've also got a huge problem with victim-blaming when it comes to crime, and we are only just starting to make in-roads on it. We've just done another round on this with "somehow NATO is causing Russia to invade Ukraine in a campaign of murder, rape and destruction".
I'm sure other commentators came up with much more heavily caveated and reluctant defences of the Satanic Verses than that one, but that one seems fully in agreement with most ideals of free speech tbh, actually more so than the "Speech is violence? Not..." article author's insinuation that criticising the book or acknowledging it was offensive was incompatible with liberalism...
It simply says he shouldn't be applauded for being provacative. Being a victim of injustice is not itself a virtue.
If you'd like to prove me wrong, feel free. I was quite open that this is based on my memory of events and I didn't assert it as cold hard fact. If I'm shown evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to believe differently. I look forward to your extensive research.
[1] Some of which might be available online, much of which in the form of talk-show commentary and TV news, etc., is unlikely to be and may not even be preserved.
But yes he hardly qualifies as liberal-minded.
I did. Its not a good book. Rushdie is a fucking boring writer.
0. https://pitchfork.com/news/barack-obama-shares-2022-summer-p...
Prior to 9/11 the feminist movement and the left generally was fairly openly hostile about Islamic fundamentalism (and probably Islam generally), the Iranian regime, in the same way as it was around Christian fundamentalism, etc.
e.g. I vaguely remember a feminist convention of some kind, I think in Toronto, late 90s? when a pro-Iranian women's group showed up and had a table, and it caused a big stir and a far left socialist feminist group of some sort went over and vandalized their table and tried to evict them, etc.
But after the American/Republican reaction to 9/11 and the wave of brutal Islamaphobia ("clash of civilization" crap), acts of violence against immigrant Arab populations, invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. many people on the left took principled positions on this that I think were on the whole more nuanced and were sympathetic to most Muslims in the context of the times; to try to denounce the imperialism colonialism, Christian nationalism, etc. that was flooding the culture.
I think burning a Koran or whatever in a post-9/11 era is a lot different from pre/9-11. At least in the first 10 years of the millenium doing something like that is a clear and explicit racist and bigoted act. Rushdie, tho, that's more complicated.
I think this has been a hard line to straddle. And many since took far more un-nuanced positions; idiots like George Galloway have taken their so-called anti-imperialism from this time and turned it into an outright pro-Putin, pro-Assad, reactionary politics which is in no way left wing or socialist, but ... at some point originated from there?
It's worth pointing out that post the post-9/11 point Hitchens himself pivoted from "left" (with a good critique of liberalism) to neo-conservative hawk. And he did so in a pretty ugly way.
Its just "liberalism in one country", or "great power liberalism" i.e. in the US context the constitution doesn't apply to our enemies, which regardless of whether or not it is moral or wise in modern times, it is certainly an accurate reading of the text and intent of the constitution.
Neoconservatism for instance is almost always framed as defending liberal societies against illiberal societies, as an ideology its adherents hold liberalism in very high regard. The common arguments against neoconservatism are that they hold liberalism in too high of regard/violently high regard, and of course that you cannot be truly liberal if you are illiberal in fighting illiberalism. I still remember that Poppins quote being used by neocons to justify ugly wars, before it became popular with young Democrats during the Trump years.
Jacobin had a reasonably decent article about this recently. https://jacobin.com/2022/09/christopher-hitchens-essays-left...
But yes I understand you're meaning liberal in the European/classical sense more than the American sense. US politics are wacked.
In any case, it's all hypocrisy. Conservative or liberal alike in the US and other western countries will all mostly fold in behind oppressive governments and very illiberal policies the moment their nation state and established financial order is threatened. We got a taste of that after 9/11, but we will likely see far worse in the future.
I’m free to say, “i hate <thing>”, and you’re free to refuse to associate with me as a result of that. It’s so simple. The government can’t, but you can.
As long as we all agree with that, then yeah freedom of speech is great, you just don’t get to stop applying it when you feel satisfied.
I think free speech is a noble goal but can only really exist when we don’t live in a zero sum world. Until then:
> "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more or less." Alice responded to Humpty Dumpty, "The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things?" Humpty Dumpty retorted: "The question is, which is to be master? That's all."
Suppose at some point gay marriage is overturned, and some conservative group goes to a gay baker and commissions a cake saying "Hooray no more gay marriage! God is good!". Should they be compelled to bake that cake since they can't discriminate on the basis of religion?
You might disagree with that logic, but the ruling had to do with free speech, not public accommodations. Commissioning a custom work is not a public accommodation.
The baker was happy to sell them a cake. They had many cakes in the store that they could have bought.
The baker did not want to be compelled to create a custom cake (which he considered his artistic expression), to depict something he didn't agree with.
Imagine forcing an Islamic baker to write "Mohammad was a dirty pedophile" on a cake. Same thing.
There are so many “exceptions” to free speech, but acting like it’s all or nothing seems silly.
>Guarantee of rights and freedoms – section 1
> >1. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
>...
>The rights and freedoms in the Charter are not absolute. They can be limited to protect other rights or important national values. For example, freedom of expression may be limited by laws against hate propaganda or child pornography.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...
If the state - any state - regards you as deplorable, then it is totally irrelevant that some piece of paper somewhere might claim you are entitled to some rights. In practice this won't matter. The state will crush you, and the mob will cheer.
The fact is that we don't have neutral institutions. Even theoretically it would be extremely unlikely, and in practice it won't happen, chiefly because it would involve people in the in-group making comittiments to deplorable people in the out-group.
This might be approximately possible in a united cohesive high-trust society... but that bond of kinship simply doesn't exist anywhere in the West today
Anyone can strive to objectivity. Even if you can never reach it, the quality between someone who tries and someone who gives up is tremendous.
May I recommend you check out ground.news and use the bias checker to see what you're missing out on?
My reaction was that even if at the margin physical violence isn’t as easy to pin down as you imagine, I don’t understand making the term violence so broad that it loses its meaning. If everything is violent then nothing is.
The difficulty is knowing what the intent was. Usually there are ways of "non-violent" communication. But it seems a lot of it is subjective.
By far it seems the most restrictive places are primary and secondary schools.
It's not a coincidence that the postmodern thoughts that underpin a lot of this bullshit simply does away with intent, declaring it to be completely useless, and saying that the only thing that can be used to judge a message is how it affected the recipient.
Combine that with "words are violence", and you can manufacture physical abuse out of thin air.
It's really not the way forward for progressivism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam#Semantic_externa...
Please make the connection between the disregard of intent and any rigorous definition of "post-moderism". Genuinely I don't see it.
I think the degradation of intent is more at the hands of those who have used it as a shield than anyone else. We've seen entire regions of the world thrown into chaos without consequence. Why, because the responsible parties didn't intend the chaos. At a certain point it gets a little thin.
What's imporant here is scale. Yeah, if you say something that rubs someone the wrong way, they should be able to have a conversation with you about your intentions and weigh those in their judgement. But what if it keeps happening. How long does someone else need to value your intent? 10 times? 100 times? Forever?
And of course when we get to things that affect people's lives on a much more material basis, maybe its good that we stop counting intent for so much. Maybe what we need is for decision makers to get a little more cautios because they will actually feel some consequences if they really screw up a lot of people's lives.
The closest thing I can imagine for any kind of defense of your statement is that postmodernism will not let the declared or conscious intent of the speaker absolutely constrain a text. The logical distinctions between "not absolutely constraining" and "declaring it to be completely useless" should be clear. And the idea that people don't always declare their intent accurately should also be uncontroversial.
Really, postmodernism is essentially very big elaboration on the principles underlying Sinclair's observation "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I've always held that position firmly. The trouble is, people are turning out to be a lot more programmable than I thought they (we) were. You could almost say that we're becoming more like machines at the same time that machines are becoming more like us. To the extent that's true, the part of the old saying that goes "... but words will never hurt me" can be seen as less valid.
In a very similar way, when Group A starts calling Group B "terrorist," it's really an announcement that Group A is going to be compromising their own professed ethics and processes to destroy Group B. It's an announcement of martial law, not a label that reliably describes any particular behavior by "terrorist" groups.
Speech- and thought-violence rhetoric is just empty rationalization and crybully rhetoric from the powerless, but it's often a prelude to a brutal crackdown when it comes from the powerful.
Compared to the actual act of rape? No. That kind of thinking just devalues the victim.
That said, specific threats aren't normally examples of protected speech. Extreme cases make bad law.
In my view, the status quo, where most speech is fair game until it rises to the level of coercive threats, is about right.
Numerous rape victims have objected to subsequent threats of additional rape, and would probably not take kindly to your inference that they're somehow devaluing themselves. You commented above that you think many participants in this debate lack experience of physical violence, and to be frank I am inclined to wonder the same of you in this instance.
This is correct, also because such speech is quite often a precursor to actual violence. View it as more than a thing in isolation, without consequence.
In a political context, violent rhetoric about a particular group of people is predictably followed by actual violence towards members of that group. Hate speech is very much a part of hate crimes. They're not separable.
Is hitting someone who is trying to hurt a loved to try to get them to stop violent? Yes, 100%. Is it morally justified, even good? Again yes (IMO).
I don't understand this need to try to redefine words. While language certainly evolves, this sort of redefinition just feels different to me somehow.
Definitions of words matter.
I wish I could understand where you're coming from. I genuinely do.
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That's why I said "generally." I'm not setting out to invalidate or disrespect any individual's experience.
It's likely that we'd have no trouble finding Holocaust survivors who would equate Nazi rhetoric with violence, for instance. They would agree with your position, given that such rhetoric arguably facilitated violence against them that would not otherwise have occurred. German law reflects this point of view.
But my position has traditionally been that prior restraint empowers the bad guys to an even greater extent. You don't want Nazis spreading messages of hate and violence... but you really don't want them telling you what you can say, if/when they come to power again.
> People who equate speech with violence have generally never known physical violence.
Just wondering if that meets the standard or not. Not that I think all speech is violence though.
I just think you setup a strawman.
Getting punched in the face is primal, it gets into that part of your brain that we’re all wisely told to suppress, the animalistic nature of us upright apes.
It’s… well, nobody has ever said anything to me online that has caused me to feel even a fraction of what I’ve felt getting punched in the face.
I don’t know how or even if that contributes to the conversation, but I think it’s worth saying.
Getting punched in the face is a good start.
It's less clear cut in the real world. To some extent one must be willing to tolerate negative incoming messages, or otherwise one would never leave one's home ot risk any interaction at all. On the other hand, to argue that no speech act can ever have a violent component by definition is facile; much speech as a prelude the violence, and a lack of specificity in space, manner, or time just as easily be designed to stoke fear by strategically using uncertainty to render its object paranoid and exhaust their defensive capability in advance.
Much of this discourse at present is purely strategic, and often wildly disingenuous. Many people who speak in lofty terms about free speech (not specifying anyone in particular here) are notably silent when it comes to people harrassing librarians or allegations that drag shows = groomers + pedophilia and therefore are legitimate targets for physical or terroristic violence (bomb threats and the like that are sufficiently credible to provoke a police response).
They do promote a police response because making a bomb threat is illegal in itself. Harassment is illegal in itself
You don't need to redefine a bunch of words and do a bunch of mental gymnastics to make something that's already illegal illegal
Now, imagine that the bad actors you're referring to have come to power, and because you've nerfed 1A, they now have the power of prior restraint over your speech, and that of their victims.
Still think it's a net win?
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The big problem I have with what you wrote is "much speech (is) a prelude (to) violence," used in a context that seemingly justifies equating the speech with the violence that ensues. This is an argument for prior restraint. No?
To avoid their society devolving into "rule by overt threat of violence", people typically agree that someone who says "I will shoot John Doe between the 3rd and 4th ribs with the FAL I have in my attic using this .308 round at 2:13 pm tomorrow as he walks his kids to school like he does every day except Tuesday, unless he pays me $500" should be able to be stopped, violently if necessary, before they have a chance to actualize their speech.
Arguing whether that speech is, in-of-itself, violence comes down to the messy semantics of trying to define violence. The fact that it is unacceptable is relatively unanimously agreed upon. So the question isn't "Can speech be unacceptable?" it's "What kind of speech is unacceptable?".
The example I gave was a specific, actionable, and credible threat against an individual, by the individual that intended to carry out the threatened violence. I'll assume most readers would mark that as "acceptably provoking punishment". Where it gets messy is when you start shaving off qualifiers. For example, someone stating "I'm going to kill all the programmers, and here's how" is potentially making a credible and actionable threat, but against a non-specific group of people. Is that worthy of punishment? What about someone with a large audience saying "It is our moral obligation to eliminate the programmers by any means necessary", maybe wink-winking and nudge-nudging at a guillotine in the background. It's not specific, and they're not saying THEY are going to be the ones to commit the violence, but it's still a little hinky.
In my opinion, that last one is probably the source of most discourse around "is speech violence". Most everyone is okay with suppressing more overt threats than that. It's when you get to that line that people break down into the camps of "people using their influence to benefit by threatening violence in a plausibly deniable way" warranting (self)defense or not.
So saying "but my free speech" or "it's just speech" isn't really a compelling point. We all agree that some kinds of violent speech should be suppressed. The question is simply where the line gets drawn.
Not that simple. First you have to decide who gets to draw it.
Nothing says liberal and intellectual like unquestioningly handing off decision making to some authority figure.
I am just pushing pack on the idea that just because something happens regularly or frequently, it is normalized. There are 350 Americans and 5+ billion people on the internet.
You could probably run a news story every day about a mother who murdered their child, but that doesn't mean infanticide is normalized. It doesn't even mean infanticide is a serious problem.
This is bad consensus-building. It is not a reflection of reality, but an attempt to strongarm the reader into agreeing with a false claim by exploiting people's willingness to accept confident claims at face value.
I know plenty of people with extreme views, but "coercion by threat of violence should be legal" is not one I've heard before. It certainly is a consensus, and your denial of such is in dubious faith.
Speech alone -> the level of threat that would constitute assault in most common law jurisdictions is tantamount to AI-boxing, and while I don't consider that quite crackpot enough to dismiss out of hand, the implications are absolutely not anywhere near "we all agree" levels of consensus.
The only thing criminal committed is the speech.
My "false consensus building" was the assertion that the vast majority of people are okay with that speech being criminalized. Call it "violent speech", or "speech about violence" or "speech threatening but not directly constituting violence", but at the end of the day, we're talking about speech, criminalized speech, criminalized speech that damn near everyone is in agreement should be criminalized.
And yet you would be hard-pressed to find a jurisdiction that has ever done so, because that's not really how people make credible threats of violence for extortion.
We have a lot of case law around extortion.
> The only thing criminal committed is the speech.
It is, in many jurisdictions, not illegal to drive. Yet it is generally illegal to drive while underage. Clearly, the only thing criminal committed is being below the driving age.
And that's one which people who consider themselves ardent defenders of free speech frequently miss. I mean, the linked article concludes with a quote insisting that people's speech should "stop short of demanding that the offender be punished or required to make restitution"... earlier in the piece the same author is quoted criticising "campaigns of vilification" and people being "pressed to recant" as the sort of speech which violates principles of liberalism.
That's absolutely drawing a line and putting a whole lot of non-violent, First Amendment-protected speech the wrong side of it, in the style of Popper's paradox-of-tolerance but with the line for what liberalism shouldn't tolerate in a slightly different place. In general, I'm quite amenable to their argument that publicly vilifying certain people in certain ways for things they've said is harmful to the pursuit of science, but I can't see any qualitative difference between that and the argument that certain people ranting about certain minorities might be harmful to individuals (and by dint of its effects on those individuals, also to the pursuit of science). The latter argument has a better evidence base than the argument that non-violent picketing of Milo Yiannopoulos puts the benefits of science at risk, and I don't think the slippery slope between disinviting Milo from Berkeley and fatwas against people accused of blasphemy is any steeper than that between being intolerant of fatwas but also intolerant of bullying and racism.
Judging people based on the content of their speech is one thing, but judging people on their willingness to even listen to offensive speech is another
Everyday on the internet I see trans people threatened, disrespected, or legislated out of existence... then the ensuing backlash in which people try to reassert the rights of trans people... and then the backlash to the backlash is always "these woke libs trying to cancel us are the real n@zis". It's exhausting. Infuriating.
Some speech suppresses the speech of others. And some people don't want to be taught that they are hateful. If you make declarative statements that villainize minority groups, you make others fear for their safety and it silences voices. That is a form of "violent speech", though that term sucks. Free speech isn't just about saying anything you want, it's also about maximizing the number of voices at the table, and to do that you can't just let people get away with saying vile shit.
Isn't this exactly what you're trying to do here?
> Free speech isn't just about saying anything you want, it's also about maximizing the number of voices at the table
Free speech is "about" whatever is in the first amendment
> it's also about maximizing the number of voices at the table
Ahh yes, because the people who try to redefine "free speech" like what you're doing are definitely well known for promoting this /s
It is very odd to assert that the morality of speech is completely, correctly, and undeniably established in a document written 250 years ago that defines the laws of only one country.
Where are you getting this morality business from?
Free speech is how it's defined in law, in the USA that's the 1st
Talking about "morality of speech" is just noise and deserves the quotation marks
Why the fuck do I care what the laws in Australia are when I don't live in Australia. you should see how govts interpret the "morality" or "offending" clauses in nation-states like India and Egypt to give themselves more power and arrest dissidents.
Lol, USAian moment, how about the other 7.7 billion of us?
Granted that there is an overreaction happening but that seems largely in response to a rather hostile approach from that community. “If you deadname me I’ll have you banned”. “If you refuse to use my pronouns I’ll have you fired.” “If you say that there are only two genders I’ll drag you”.
This is no way to solve problems in a free society. Let’s trans people be trans. And let people who think there are only two genders think that. Forcing a set of beliefs or values on people is exactly what we should be trying to avoid.
is my drag not free speech too? If one insults me (or says something to me I consider insulting), I should be allowed to insult them right back, right?
Nobody's rights extend to government banning speech that isn't supportive. No speech suppresses anybody else's.
Free speech isn't about "free speech for people who say things I support".
I'm tired of authoritarians pretending to be liberal.
Well, yeah, if that’s what you choose to do.
That’s the whole point: you can choose to absorb the information, or not. You can choose to take offense, or not.
Not in the United States.
Matal v Tam
>>Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express "the thought that we hate."
----
remember, at one point it was considered 'harmful' be a majority whites for us browns/blacks to express our civil rights. Just because a majority goes "this is bad" doesn't mean it necessarily is.
No, it doesn't.
> it's also about maximizing the number of voices at the table
No, it's about making sure people can spew a continuous stream of whatever hateful crap they feel like day in and day out every day for their whole life. One of the big reasons I'm a fan of things like universal income/healthcare is because currently employment is too critical to surviving which forces people to censor their speech. Hopefully the social safety net can improve to the point where someone can be almost comically offensive every day without fear of starving.
> If you make declarative statements that villainize minority groups, you make others fear for their safety and it silences voices
That's an acceptable tradeoff for a free society.
Everyday on the internet I see White people threatened, disrespected, or legislated out of existence... then the ensuing backlash in which people try to reassert the rights of White people... and then the backlash to the backlash is always "these neo-Nazi cons trying to cancel us are the real gulag runners". It's exhausting. Infuriating.
Some speech suppresses the speech of others. And some people don't want to be taught that they are hateful. If you make declarative statements that villainize majority groups, you make others fear for their safety and it silences voices. That is a form of "violent speech", though that term sucks. Free speech isn't just about saying anything you want, it's also about maximizing the number of voices at the table, and to do that you can't just let people get away with saying vile shit.
I'm not sure what point you think you are demonstrating past that.
This is an /r/selfawarewolves tier post.
WHOOSH! No you don't.
>You think you are demonstrating that the post you are mocking is meaningless because you can artificially insert other words to it in an arbitrary fashion that renders it meaningless?
They're not arbitrary, nor were they inserted.
>Shocking that you are being smarmy about it,
IMAX-level projection.
>I guess that comes with the territory of not realizing the pie is in your own face.
/r/selfawarewolves gold.
It is an argument, and it's not a rhetorical fallacy.
>There really is no good reason for you to conduct yourself this way.
Maybe I was being a bit much.
I'd recommend that you use your own words to communicate your point, not others'. It's not doing you the favors you seem to think it is, especially if you are taking the position that you have contributed an argument to the discussion.
nuance is dead and internet comment sections killed it
nuance is dead and internet comment sections killed it
This is an /r/selfawarewolves tier post.
The easiest way of doing so is to maximise the number of humans on the planet. Those who engage, and promote reproduction organ destruction whether surgical or chemical, do the exact opposite and decrease the number of voices -- in the long run to zero.
Promoters of sex-deception and concomitant fertility destruction, typically seem to communicate in a way that is (1) a refusal to address substantial points, (2) adversarial hyperbole, and (3) refusal to engage in any kind rational argument that could lead to mutually beneficial truth-seeking and learning.
I'm sure that you agree that the quoted sentence above confirms those patterns? Can I invite you to reflect on why we see this pattern?
People have been saying mean things about other groups for millennia, as long as its just words, its fine. I'm a jew, I see the neo nazi groups with banners or Kanye ranting and just laugh. Who cares? Now if they want to come at me with physical violence then that's something else. I'll respond in kind. I don't see many jews running around screaming that speech is violence, we just get on with it. Same for black people dealing with those same white supremacists.
"don't let words affect you". Exactly! I am all for us as adults just not letting the words of people we will never meet affect us. I've sat down and had beers with open anti Semites and people with swastika tattoos while being very open about being a jew. Its fine, I had a good talk with them, nobody changed anyone's mind but we parted on good terms. I hope they find happiness. I in no way want them prosecuted for their beliefs or speech.
Trans people are for some reason the only large visible group yelling that speech is violence and saying mean things about them should be illegal. And its primarily M2F trans people (in my experience), I don't really see F2M people doing it. I wonder if there is something related to the giving up of male physical strength that leads to demanding that society now protect you in all ways including your feelings. You're trans, cool, get on with it. Stop asking for special treatment.
The only Nazis are actual Nazis.
Let the downvotes commence.
Do you really think it would be avoided simply by more people taking "don't let words affect you" to heart [ * ]?
[ * ] (assuming, quite unreasonably, that that's actually something that could happen at a societal level)
Yes because the Nazis were butthurt bitches and used their perceived victimisation as an excuse to met out horrible torture, violence and dehumanisation.
Hitler tried to have a guy in Italy bought to heel for making his dog do a Nazi salute FFS.
No, let’s just ignore all the times this has happened in history and all the times other groups had raised similar points (their possible merits aside), pretend this is a new problem, and blame MTF folks for it.
Beware isolated standards of rigor, folks.
You're acting as though the likely outcome of neo-nazi groups is some skinhead trying to fight you. What actually happens is neo-nazi groups radicalize angry young men who then go out a gun down a whole bunch of people at a synagogue.
>Trans people are for some reason the only large visible group yelling that speech is violence and saying mean things about them should be illegal.
This is simply nonsense. Pretty much every group in the country has a contingent that wants speech against them regulated
"What actually happens is neo-nazi groups radicalize angry young men who then go out a gun down a whole bunch of people at a synagogue." Sometimes. Are you willing to ban Islam since so often it's ideals are corrupted and lead to groups like Isis or the Taliban? The only way to eliminate violence based on ideals is to eliminate free will. 1984 here we come.
That's not true. Nazi ideology is banned in Germany, and they are a far healthier democracy than the United States.
> I just think that the consequences of suppression of speech are worse.
So if a group of people were plotting to kill you, you'd only want the State (i.e. the police) to step in after they had gone through with their plot?
> Sometimes. Are you willing to ban Islam since so often it's ideals are corrupted and lead to groups like Isis or the Taliban?
You're making up things that I 'believe'. I don't personally think that nazi ideology should be banned.
I was merely pointing out that your fantasy of 'responding in kind' is nonsense. The end result of these hate ideologies is mass shootings and terrorism, not street fights you can be prepared for or defend yourself against.
"I was merely pointing out that your fantasy of 'responding in kind' is nonsense". Cool, I still support near absolute free speech.
Nazis are banned in Germany as a result of WW2 and was part of their rehabilitation. Who do we give the power of deciding what speech is banned in modern day America? Biden? Trump? Desantis? Elizabeth Warren? The supreme court? I agree Nazis are bad, I just don't think anyone in the United States should have the power to ban ideas.
Yes it is, because the State decided to censor and restrict 'free speech' in that case.
>I think you are smart enough to understand the difference between free speech and plotting a murder.
Sure, I'm very open to my belief we should censor and punish some speech. I just wanted to establish that you do support censorship and you do believe that sometimes saying 'don't let those words affect you' isn't an appropriate reaction.
>Who do we give the power of deciding what speech is banned in modern day America?
That power already resides with Congress and then hypothetically the Supreme Court. Functioning democracies can have conversations and then decide when, where, and how to restrict speech. We've been doing that for 250 years.
>I just don't think anyone in the United States should have the power to ban ideas.
We've already established that you think the government can and should restrict ideas. 'Free speech absolutist' are rarely actually absolutist.
"I just wanted to establish that you do support censorship and you do believe that sometimes saying 'don't let those words affect you' isn't an appropriate reaction." I do think its an appropriate reaction. Again large difference between saying something mean about a group of people and calling for their murder. I think anti-trans people are bad, just like I think the same of anti anything people. I just think banning speech is worse.
I support government restricted speech in the context of preventing physical harm, that's pretty much it. You are right that congress creates the laws but in most cases the supreme court is going to prevent things that are overruled by the 1st. As it should be.
My main point is that saying speech is violence makes no sense. People should stop letting anonymous figures on the internet rile them up and affect them and just get on with their lives. We spend 99% of our time worrying about things that in reality have no effect on our lives. If JewHater99@twitter thinks jews control the media, who cares? Stop worrying about pointless nonsense.
You're whole premise is that the government shouldn't regulate speech, as it "leads to dictatorship"
>In other posts I specifically say: "My beliefs regarding freedom of speech is that is should be just shy of absolute. Only limit should be believable threats of violence."
That's fine if that's what you believe. 'Believable threats of violence' is a completely ambiguous and meaningless term in regards to actual regulation and laws.
>e. People should stop letting anonymous figures on the internet rile them up and affect them and just get on with their lives.
The focus is on people who have their loved ones massacred because of people who were riled up online.
>If JewHater99@twitter thinks jews control the media, who cares?
Well, the family members of the people JewHater99 ends up massacring might.
That's not what I've said and you know it. It really seems like you don't actually understand the position you think youre arguing against.
"What actually happens is neo-nazi groups radicalize angry young men who then go out a gun down a whole bunch of people at a synagogue."
"The end result of these hate ideologies is mass shootings and terrorism"
"Well, the family members of the people JewHater99 ends up massacring might"
this in an incredibly disingenuous take. Who is trying to make saying antitrans things should be illegal? last i checked trans people were still trying to access affirming medical care and not be attacked in the streets. If you are referring to like pronouns/names, I still think you are being disingenuous. I think right to self determination is a meaningful thing to fight for, you can argue that one persons request to be called by their chosen name impedes on your speech but i think you're wrong.
> I don't really see F2M people doing it
This is actually a really interesting phenomena! It does have to do with existing double standards in how society treats men and women. The fact is a lot of trans men either have an easier time passing bc masculine aesthetics are easier to adopt or they are dismissed because they aren't seen as a threat by people who think a penis is the thing that makes you dangerous. Of course trans men have their own battles but they largely aren't being branded as a sex offender for existing in the way that trans women are. Also they absolutely are fighting for the same rights, it may seem quieter because the popular culture war talking point is specifically about drag queens. I don't think the media has figured out how to villainize trans men.
> Stop asking for special treatment.
Every minority group fighting for their rights has been told this
Come on, did you read the post I was responding to? My post was a response to another post. Op appeared to want it to be made illegal. Calling speech violence implies that certain speech should be illegal as inflicting violence on others is illegal.
"Every minority group fighting for their rights has been told this" The recent movement against trans is wholly due to the movements attempt to bring kids into it. Keep it out of schools and respect parental rights and I guarantee the focus on this goes away.
The only reason the focus is on drag queens is because kids are being taken to highly sexualized shows. Stop doing that and no one cares about drag queens anymore.
NSFW
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1603512564628987922?...
> The recent movement against trans is wholly due to the movements attempt to bring kids into it
Frankly this is a lie. The root of your issue with trans people is that you think they are gross. It's circular logic to say that trans adults shouldn't exist because it will encourage my kid to grow up to be a trans adult. It's like saying that you don't want to live around Atheists because you want your kid to be Christian, fine enough but you can't stop people from being a thing you don't like, and your ability to stop your child from being it probably wanes earlier than you'd like.
> Stop doing that and no one cares about drag queens anymore.
no yall will find another reason to demonize trans people because you actually don't care about safety you care about your delicate sensibilities. It's a witch hunt and drag shows are the current "spell"
Where is the line with where one persons existence affects children? Sure your libsoftiktok "citation" is an example of an entertainer being too lewd for the audience but in no way does an entire demographic need to take the fall for a cherry-picked example of lewdness. Also who gets to decide what is too lewd? Do you want to give the government that power? Should it be illegal to show your kid an R rated movie? Is it the parents responsibility or the production team of the movie? Or are movies and movie likers at large to blame? Is a trans person going to the grocery store a danger to your kids? Is telling kids that trans people exist a danger? Where is the line between telling kids that its ok that some people in the world are trans and turning kids trans?
IDK Maybe we should also not tell our kids anything about "traditional" gender norms lest we anger any indignant parents who might agree/disagree that girls should have aspirations beyond motherhood.
> as long as they just live their lives like everyone else
The way you live your life and your opinions around what to teach kids about gender are a cultural choice. You make the active decision every day to teach kids that boys cant wear dresses, or that girls and boys need to be separated in sports. You can justify those beliefs all you want but at the end of the day, you are saying that your perspective is right and that trans people are wrong. So no you are not asking them to "live their life like I do" because you don't want them to advertise a lifestyle different from yours
As far as "The way you live your life and your opinions around what to teach kids about gender are a cultural choice." Yup, and as a parent I make choices for my kids every day based on what I think is right for their success and happiness. I don't wish trans people ill at all indeed I wish them good lives but I very much don't want my kids to be trans as it's a much harder life. For a variety of reasons. Plus I want my boys to be boys. That's my preference. But I'm not looking to make that choice for any adult. Adult being the key word.
As soon as the trans community says yes sexual drag shows for kids is wrong and schools lying to parents is wrong and discussing sexuality in school is wrong then I'm all good.
> I very much don't want my kids to be trans as it's a much harder life.
How cowardly. Why do you think its a harder life? Might it be because trans people are hated by society? Might that be because people continue to perpetuate myths that they are corrupting education?
> That's my preference
then dont teach my kids that there is only one way to live your life. Do you also want your kids to reach 18 and be surprised by the existence of trans people when they finally leave your shelter? How do you think they'll react after being taught that "boys should be boys"?
Because equal rights are the goal, not special treatment.
It is the means by which a man can forcibly impregnate a woman. This is a very real risk to women, and is one reason why so many women are deeply uncomfortable with males imposing themselves in spaces where women are vulnerable, like bathrooms and locker rooms.
Any enforcement of bathroom norms sounds more dystopian than this fiction of rampant trans sexual assault. Do you want genital checks at the bathroom door? Maybe you want to have a security detail watching people piss. Do you want trans people to be reported to the authorities for using an enclosed stall alone?
At the same time, I think most speech that comes across this way is the product of ignorance or unmet emotional needs, and if you listen to people that say hateful things they will often weaken their view as soon as they realize you plan to actually listen to them and understand how they feel. Because of this, I recognize my instinct to start a fight as a result of how I feel, and not necessarily a productive course of action, and often results in worse outcomes (people doubling down, taking an angry response as justification of their action, etc). I also find that this builds trust, which is necessary for good faith conversation.
My real problem with 'speech as violence' comes down to the difference between moralizing and compassion; I believe that compassion will produce better outcomes. Further if it is about morality you have to decide the correct morality, and it is impossible to get actual agreement on that. If you did you would have someone disagreeing to test if you would allow them to think differently than you without attacking them.
There are indeed people that say vile shit to hurt others intentionally, for various reasons from demotivating someone competing with them, to sadism, to bullying (which I find is often someone who believes 'bad people should be punished' and that someone has done something 'socially bad' so that it is 'up to them to correct it'). For example, When a sibling of mine wore something that might be associated with being gay, he received harsh criticism from another sibling I knew cared about him. The criticizing sibling had been bullied, and believed his statements would dissuade what he saw as a social misstep. It was a failure of compassion. The form of the criticism was also exactly what the criticized sibling had thought about himself.
I've also found that sometimes when my first thought was 'wow this person is a terrible person', it turned out that they thought that other people thought there were a terrible person, and so they stopped trying to do things that might prevent that effect, causing more people to think it, causing them to care less, or possibly even say provocative things with resent. If you listen to such a person and sympathize with them - however hard it may be, even if you don't agree with them, it can completely break the script they are expecting to hear, and lacking a prepared response, you may get an actually vulnerable one.
Really, I think as soon as morals come up, and rightness or wrongness, empathy has failed. And it is hard because empathizing with people that have different backgrounds and views is really hard. People will talk about empathy all day long, but I rarely see anyone really willing to empathize with someone who is narcissistic or abusive, someone who lacks all social skills as an adult and is smug that they are well paid in spite of it, or someone who believes radially different on any topic to really care about. Can any of us sympathize really with someone who thinks learning programming is a waste of time and we should all learn 'real skills' like how to read a balance sheet or run a meeting? Or someone that believes SOAP is the greatest thing that has even happened and people complaining about it just don't get it? That JavaScript is the most consistently designed language that has even existed and should have monuments built in its honor? That open-source software is a communist fad that harms markets and shouldn't be legal?
For me, when someone plays music from their phone speakers on public transport it is very difficult for me to sympathize. When someone cuts my spouse off in traffic, they immediate cuss up a storm. When a relative makes a political statement that is a bit tasteless and you know they just skimmed a news article and have no idea what they are talking about, it can be difficult.
But I think people get it backwards when they think it is difficult and it is all these peoples fault. Fault is a moral determination. Really, it is imaginary. It is a fiction that helps society run smoothly.
I will share, to aid my point, an error I have made. The first is that when I was in HS, I littered soda cans, mostly to emphasize that I didn't care about rules or anything (what a silly time that was). Then one day I saw someone picking up trash, including something I had dropped that had blown aside. When I saw that, I felt really hurt, guilty and sad. To know that I had done that. To this day, I pick up every piece of trash I come across and carry it until I see a trash can. It was a bad thing to do, but if the person picking up the trash had come up to me and yelled at me, telling me I was a lazy piece of shit, that I didn't care about anyone else, etc. I think I would have had a very different experience, and a very different response.
I sincerely believe, and hope, that many of these individuals who make these comments have the potential to be the ones that later go to the greatest efforts to repair damage they see themselves as causing. But for this to happen, I think they need to feel it as guilt (internally and based on empathy), instead of as shame (externally, and based on moral error). And for that to happen they need to feel heard, and they need to be engaged with emotionally.
> Free speech isn't just about saying anything you want, it's also about maximizing the number of voices at the table
Would you agree to having blatantly, but shall we say genteel Nazi or white supremacist academics on campus? You would likely answer in the negative based on what you've written because you would, I infer, see their works as violent and threatening speech, speech that might also reduce the number of voices at the table. But that would make what is acceptable speech depend on what people find violent and threatening. But which people? Which table? In the case of gender theory, you acknowledge this concerns a minority. Are you suggesting that a minority of people who find criticism "violent" is enough to shutdown criticism? If not, are you suggesting that a majority of people who find criticism "violent" is enough to shutdown criticism? Is either of those acceptable? What exactly are you proposing here because it certainly seems like you are manipulatively trying to force your own speech norms on everyone else through the use of grievance. Should your sense of grievance become the basis of law or social norms? Imagine what would happen if we treated that kind of norm consistently. We couldn't, could we, and not just for practical reasons, but in principle.
I would go further. Liberalism as the philosophical and even theological position that informs the constitution and the very founding of the United States is truly very fatally flawed. The very notion of liberal neutrality is extremely problematic. There is no such thing as a neutral position. And so what liberalism effectively does, in an intellectually dishonest way, is it presents its own position as neutral and therefore beyond criticism. "Oh, yes, well, liberalism can accommodate everything, it can tolerate all positions, and allows the brotherhood of man to live together in harmony". Yes, all positions...that subordinate themselves to liberal norms and conform to its rather fleshy expectations. Liberalism is a definite position and its tyranny rests to a great degree on the pretense of this public neutrality, that all else is a private footnote added to the purity of this accommodating 'neutrality'. At least the mullahs are more honest.
(Btw, D. C. Schindler talks more about this in his book "The Politics of the Real" [0]. The arguments require some philosophical sophistication, but that's the point. Liberalism isn't the obvious truth. It's just the water we western fish have been swimming in and have formed habituated biases toward and favorable but vague associations with. There is much that is untenable with the liberal project, and as with many intellectual errors, it can take time for the abstract consequences to manifest in all their concrete and ugly glory.)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Real-D-C-Schindler/dp/173650...
Also your tangent on liberalism is gibberish
Why?
>Some speech suppresses the speech of others.
No speech can ever suppress that of others, except in the literal sense of talking over someone.
>it's also about maximizing the number of voices at the table
So, how do you feel about the developers of Hogwarts Legacy? How do you feel about those who post on Reddit or Facebook that they are playing it? How do you feel about game reviewers publishing evaluations?
>and to do that you can't just let people get away with saying vile shit
I think I got the answers to my questions.
why are you compelled to respond to me? why do you listen to anyone? why speak at all?
> No speech can ever suppress that of others
Only if you believe that no one has ever changed their behavior after recieving a death threat. Or if you want a more subtle example, try talking to a minority group about microaggressions and what situations they feel safe to speak freely in. If you are in a minority group but don't feel oppressed in that way, I'm sure you have a peer who does.
> how do you feel about the developers of Hogwarts Legacy?
Truly a nonsequitor but since you asked nicely: the developers were paid to do a job, no shame in that. JKR is a bigot who filled that world with inescapable racism and the design lead ran a youtube channel that pushed some bigotted views about feminism and "sjws". Im too exhausted to care who plays it although personally think its easier on the conscience to not. Reviews are fine, but if you wanna talk about separating art and artist and media crit's place in that, its a long nuanced discussion
I think that's my main frustration. No discussion of free speech is ever allowed to be nuanced. Disagreeing with Free Speech absolutism is impossible to argue with because to say that "sometimes bigotry should be discouraged" is seen as an affront to the idea of speech itself.
That is weakness and the 2nd amendment is a tool to fight back and secure ones self against death threats.
Get strapped, stand up and say "try it mother fucker".
Defy your oppressor, or be crushed under their tyranny.
Decades passed. The church lost most of its mainstream power. Raytheon began marketing itself as a diverse workplace. Goldman Sachs marched in parades with rainbow flags. The question of gay marriage was settled. As society liberalized, liberals found themselves usurping the role of cultural hall monitor. It became disadvantageous for liberals to defend controversial speech, so new rationales had to be created to prevent the spread of anti-liberal ideas.
People were given the ability to seek out an unlimited reservoir of offensive content and decided they like it.
They like being outraged, They like feeling the martyr, They like to hate.
The overwhelming majority of offensive content is sought out and distributed by the offended.
Im sure there are detailed biological and social descriptions of why, but at the end of day, it is because people want to be offended.
It is quite a sad state of affairs.
Appeals to democracy, rule of law, freedom of association, freedom of speech, equal rights, human rights, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, bodily autonomy etc. - all of these things vanish like a mist if the left decide that they hate you, and you deserve it.
speech inciting violence is unacceptable. Speech isn't by it's nature violent--although it might be called forceful--and I would refrain from ever calling speech violent.
(and even speech inciting violence turns out to be acceptable to a majority of people in conditions where you say you want to kill (for example) a pedophile or a racist, or when you're writing a Declaration of Independence or a French National Anthem (La Marseillaise) because everybody agrees, the Tree of Liberty must periodically be watered by the blood of tyrants!)
my comment is a little bit all over the place, but what I'm trying to say is, you should never agree to call speech violence but always put in the word "incite/ment"; and at the same time it's difficult to make any broad or universal statements about speech without discovering it's a complex subject. Humans are good at imagination or conceptualizing hypotheticals, and we have the capacity for violence, so it's very difficult to say what someone can and can't say, usually the listener understands implicitly but sometimes the person listening does not have your interstests at heart, has their own motives, or is plain nutso.
Repeatedly using slurs is abusive, but what if the majority of people don't see it as a slur? If your answer is "then it's not a slur", then what do you think of the frequent use of the N-word in the first half of the 20th century?
Is it abusive to repeatedly and baselessly accuse an entire group of child abuse ("grooming")?
If you repeatedly attend community gatherings to repeat speech that is deliberately offensive to that community, does that rise to the level of abuse?
These are reasonable questions that we tend to just skip over when we talk about "cancel culture" and those who are characterized, fairly or unfairly, as victims of it.
From the perspective of the article, hurtful speech (abuse), is and always will be subject to the interpretation of the listener. As such it will always change with time and context.
Anything can be interpreted as abusive speech at any time. It is not a consensus definition.
Agreed
Also, in practice, you could reasonably argue that there generally isn't much academic freedom in most fields, since most research is grant-funded, and that is controlled by (usually) governments.
I don't dislike professors or teachers at state schools, but I understand that they work in an institution that effectively does not offer academic freedom. If you are a professor, you can work at any other institution in the country, other than the 50-100 or so that are run by states, and you will have all the academic freedom you want. If this country goes to a major war, a large number of those professors are likely going to be told to work on something war-related, because they are agents of the state.
If you are a teacher, who was actually targeted by the education control bills in FL, you arguably don't have enough training to have really have earned academic freedom. Until about 5 minutes ago, nobody argued that they did have academic freedom. Curricula are there for a reason.
FWIW, I think you're off by an order of magnitude, more or less.
This and other examples here:
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-s...
This was one in Canada recently.
"If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time?
It is possible."
https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identi...
Simple question do we agree we don't need a middle school teacher explaining in graphic detail how to have sex? Or maybe "alternative" theory like flat earth?
If not I don't know how we reach a common ground if we agree though maybe just maybe we can agree that teacher shouldn't be teaching certain things at certain ages and not call that "censorship". You might disagree what ages or things but still.
A teacher isn't there to instill their values or beliefs into a child but to teach the curriculum.
What age do you think is reasonable for schools to be teaching sex? Explicitly, how to use a condom, and the inaccuracies of porn.
I'm not going to play along with your attempt to deflect from your failure to answer. The specific age we choose doesn't really matter that much in the context of our discussion and you know that.
It is applied by political partisans to attack their enemies and not applied to themselves or their allies.
It's cynical, crass, mass political power put into action. Reluctant participants are dragged along under the implied threat that they will be targeted because "inaction is complicity" or some similar slogan.
A line that many people still can't handle.
The US legal system also provides many avenues for punishing people based on their speech.
Most legal systems and most religions follow similar rules.
I don’t expect the government to step in when someone says something hateful, but I do pay attention to which groups allow that kind of behavior in their associations and which don’t.
We all do have a right to leave the rooms hateful people are in, and the people in charge of those rooms (as long as its not the government) are free to control how their space gets used.
Should we also restrict private, yet powerful, organizations from similar actions?
Clearly the article was considering various non-governmental institutions as places where liberal intellectualism are traditionally important and whether or not they should continue to have those values.
But in reality there is no such distinction and I think in our information age that's become quite obvious. There's nothing privileged about speech, it need not even be human in origin any more. Speech acts are just a means to effect change in the world, it's information in a network directed towards certain ends akin to Klausewitz pointing out that war is just politics by other means. Violence and speech but more generally action and speech are materially the same thing, one is kinetic and the other isn't, but the goal is identical.
I think the same is true in regards to money. Speech has entirely been commoditized and it's produced the same conflict under liberal frameworks that violence has. If speech is reach then it is just power and doesn't live in some lofty magical mental space.
So the title is right, in liberal societies speech cannot be violence but this is just an instrumental claim to make liberalism work. In the same sense how John Locke had to adopt a Tabula Rasa/Blank Slate view of individuals to justify Natural Rights, which scientifically turns out to be just wrong.
In fact if we want to be intellectually honest speech should be recognized as a legitimate form of violence.
If you ever decide to do violence you’re going to be a lot more effective if you have a mob at your back.
To be clear I’m not calling for mob violence. I’m Just being intellectually honest. Speech is an effective tool in the execution of violence.
Whatever else your politics we can all agree that “Go to the capital and fight like hell” led to a mob attacking, entering and committing violence at the capital. It was certainly more effective than the speaker showing up personally with his fists up.
Was the speech itself violence? No. Did it directly encourage violence and then that violence happened? Yes. In that sense was it an effective orchestration of violence? Yep.
Edit: Why disagree?
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/suing-e...
Things like insults, shaming, and verbal abuse are part of emotional abuse in divorce cases. These need not be evidence of actions or character. These can be used for an at fault divorce. What is consided to br an insult or shaming can vary greatly on perspective. Not to mention, the court may not stick ro just these examples and could include other things that makes the other person feel bad - "I hate this meal. Why do you always make this?"
https://www.jerkinsfamilylaw.com/emotional-abuse-and-divorce...
When it comes to public universities, there is a legitimate question, since a publicly funded university may be considered a state actor. But when it comes to private services like social media where it seem most of the controversy lies, they're free to set any rules they want. And unsurprisingly, their terms of service generally give them broad discretion on who they let use their service.
Considering this is repeated a couple times by the author, it seems they are talking about a general statement and not a narrow circumstance, even if they're using a specific example. It's important to point out that the statement above is not universally true, or if it is, then our laws are immoral.
"Again, those are legal principles that have been enshrined in law for a long time."
“When we do become offended, as we all will, we must settle for responding with criticism or contempt, and stop short of demanding that the offender be punished or required to make restitution,”
It seems to me that restitution and punishment would include those leveled by the legal system. Simply because something has be law for a long time does not make it off limits to discussion, especially if it's application/interpretation has changed over that time.
First off, they are. but if you are saying: loose your job and ability to make a living, losing your ability to speak in public, fuck me give me those charges then!
you are backing tyrannical ideas while trying to pretend you are just being reasonable.
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are primarily owned and controlled by individuals and private companies rather than by the government or public institutions.
None of the things mentioned above are related to capitalism's coverage of free speech. It seems that your intention is to suppress those who hold differing opinions, and you are using the assumption that the silenced individuals support capitalism to justify your actions.
Seriously though, do you not see how private ownership of communication services impacts the question of who is allowed to use those services? And that if there were a truly public service, how that would dramatically change the situation with respect to First Amendment rights?
For the record, I'm a huge fan of capitalism. But it surprises me how many people don't understand that it has drawbacks, and that we should be honest with ourselves about those drawbacks. It's ok to say that you're pro-capitalism but that you also think that the Internet (or at least some of it) should be a public utility, for instance.
Your employer declining to continue your employment: freedom of association
Advocating for a university to not host your talk: freedom of speech
A university not hosting your talk: freedom of association
and so on.
One more nail in the coffin for Internet anonymity.
In essence, what I'm saying is that a card-carrying member of some radical movement (whichever movement you or I hate the most) perhaps should be shunned by people in all kinds of social activities because of their beliefs, but IMHO as long as they aren't breaking the law, they still should have the right to be a part of the society and receive core services which require interaction with it, namely, public services, education, jobs, housing, etc.
We have drawn a line in sand upon crossing which people are excluded from society, and that line is criminal law if determined in due process. And before crossing that line people should have the right to not be discriminated in employment. If most of your coworkers hate you because you come from the "opposing outgroup" where there's mutual hate and perhaps a history of violence between your "tribes" - too bad for them, both you and them should still have the right to work there.
Right. I can't think of anyone I have come across in liberal media. But you can always dig someone up that takes any given position.
> While there is indeed no right to not be offended, there is also no right to be listened to, and no right to artificially amplify your speech on someone else's dime. We live in a world where the mechanisms of mass communication are held in private hands---there is no digital public square, regardless of what techno-libertarians might have you believe.
All correct. The people who want it to be one way or the other (depending on their political leanings) usually are conflating constitutional protections from the government as being applicable to/from everyone and everything else.
If you're screaming on Twitter that (some racial group) is bad, and people tell you to shut up, they are allowed to do so under the first amendment. You're allowed to do so under the first amendment. Twitter can totally ban you based on what they deem acceptable behavior, because the first amendment doesn't regulate private companies (just the government).
If you're calling for the extermination of that particular group, the government can charge you under US Code for inciting violence:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373
...But you have to prove intent, which is notoriously hard to do, and notoriously easy to get off scott-free from. ("I was being bombastic, I didn't think anyone would LITERALLY try and exterminate said group")
This is a really obvious idea that people seem to have a lot of trouble understanding, especially when the framing of the conversation drifts toward "cancel culture".
When you prevent somebody from being on a platform, you also prevent others from hearing what that person has to say.
As for amplification, it is not amplification to show me your tweets with #stabledifussion when that is what I search for - it is the entire point of Twitter.
And no, to be amplification, Twitter would have to boost certain tweets artificially. It is very unartificial when I get results for searching. Otherwise it is also boosting if I use the municipal library to checkout a book, or buy it on Amazon, at which point amplification is meaningless.
Libraries are also amplification, but they are generally public. When a book is banned from a library, it potentially violates the First Amendment. Twitter is not public, so when a user is banned from Twitter, the First Amendment does not apply.
If and when we have a government-operated Twitter, it will have to offer equal access to everyone, and it will have to tolerate any speech that falls under First Amendment protection. But until then, you'll have to live with the possibility that the private services you use will kick you off because they don't like what you say.
Well, they're literally doing this in the UK - people have and are being arrested for offensive speech.
Not “literally” the same as assault charges though - “public order” laws have a long sordid history of their own.
But since you ask, I am not okay with it in many contexts and my confidence estimates are applied to individual situations rather than being general. I have had experience of being attacked by mobs, both online and physically. I have scars from being kicked in the head and stabbed in the leg during such an attack. I've separately been arrested and jailed on specious charges over political activity (more than once) and obtained dismissal of charges in court. And I have been the target of both verbal and physical violence on many, many occasions, often both on the same occasion. So I come at this question with very extensive first hand knowledge of how such arguments can play out.
So now, would you care to respond to the question I asked: how do you think coordinated speech in a marketplace of ideas differs from coordination of buying or selling in response to price signals?
If you go after the person, you are not participating in any marketplace of ideas, you're now the one committing the violence.
Seems to be about the idea to me.
Or just like, new regulations on the giant corporations operating these services? No need to go as far as communism.
If you choose to never do anything in response to the things people say that's your perogative, I on the other hand can listen just fine to other people and my response to the things they say might be to tell them to stop saying it. "I don't believe you should be allowed to say this without consequence" is also a thing one can say.
Never found it convincing for some reason.
There’s a reason for the “ah you see, the cops have to follow the rules taps forehead” trope.
It’s genuinely hard to maintain a truly tolerant liberal democracy in the face of determined adversaries that can skillfully use the system against itself.
Now, that is no reason to take sloppy shortcuts like saying this or that opinion should be banned, but it is absolutely worth keeping in mind.
The Nazi party was in power for over a decade before the first gas chamber was built. If they had been stopped at the broadcasting hate propaganda stage millions of lives would have been saved, and a war requiring the collective military capacity of the rest of the hemisphere wouldn't have been necessary.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the 20th century is that the broadcasting of the right words for long enough and to enough people can cause destruction and death orders of magnitude greater than any single weapon of war.
> Jesus is not the son of God. All nonbelievers are evil and going to hell. Pornography is morally acceptable. Women should be forced to wear hijabs. American veterans who fought in Iraq are war criminals. The detainees at Guantánamo Bay deserved to be tortured. Capitalism is inherently exploitative, and all wealthy people are morally compromised. Communism is an evil, totalitarian ideology that killed millions of people.
The biggest problem with this analysis is that it treats the speech as separate from the power and reach of the person saying them, downplaying the utterances as just information detached from the real world context in which they are used.
On any given day, you can probably find a mentally ill person on the streets shouting a number of those things, but people aren't listening.
When someone with significant influence, as Yiannapolis was, starts spurting bigotries and abusive speech, the scrutiny on their speech should be greater.
That was mostly overturned in 1969, though the history of it is interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
I'm really uncomfortable with the way twitter mobs dictate what is and isn't free speech and I was looking for a more democratic, test of time driven solution.
But the Muslim clerics issued their own violent speech. Their speech could have led to the assassination of a human being. Does that speech owe anything to the injured (read: dead) party? Should we allow speech to incite people to kill, "because intellectual liberalism?"
The answer, enshrined into law in most nations, is: no. We don't let you get away with killing people by incitement of violence. Your speech has consequences, and in many cases, you will be held accountable; if not by the law, then by vigilante justice. (This isn't an argument, it's a fact proved by the opposing argument)
You can choose to make the distinction that if you don't see physical harm, that that's not real harm, and thus, doesn't matter. But certain speech can in fact cause physical harm. The consequences of certain speech, by certain people, in certain contexts, can be debilitating, physically painful, nauseating, and drive people insane, even to suicide. In many cases it simply isn't a choice; your body just reacts to stimuli.
The simplest example is kids who kill themselves from incessant traumatic bullying. Even if you think those kids should "toughen up" and "just deal with it", that's not how the brain works. Some people in society are more vulnerable to suggestion and more likely to self-harm than others, and a non-stop barrage of hate and intimidation puts them in a traumatic state. The feeling of anguish is so much they commit suicide to stop the pain. Speech does do real harm, both directly and indirectly.
So, where does that leave us? Arguing over to what degree "verbal harm" counts as "real harm"? Waiting for someone to die, then deciding who, if anyone, gets the blame? This is a pointless morass, because the whole problem can be avoided by just not fucking with people intentionally. Just like with other crimes, sometimes people do harm by accident, and we deal with that in many ways. But when people do harm intentionally, that's a much more serious matter.
Thus we don't need this pointless philosophical diatribe to justify our ability to cause harm at will. If you're going to be a dick, then be a dick. But don't pretend you're doing it to defend some high-minded ideal. You're doing it because you're a dick, and there is no defense for that.
The next step to wrongthink might be hearing.
End thread. Please never open it again.
Freedom of speech is a concept and idea, the government doesn’t have the right nor ability to police or grant anyone an intrinsic freedom they already have. All the government can do is lend some of its protections to help prevent others from trying to stop you from speaking freely. But as a society if we say that your right to free speech only exists in government buildings. Well… that’s not anything at all.
It's not a good look to start your article on how speech is not violence with a concrete example of someone using speech as violence. Or to then keep referring back to it, but only to chastise liberals and leftists for being mildly critical of Rushdie, rather than the actual god damned supreme leader of Iran who called for his death.
Fatwas are exactly the sort of thing I'd point at if I wanted to say that speech is violence. And there are plenty of examples of fatwas in the western world now. Hell, we coined the word "stochastic terrorism" to refer to them, because apparently you're not allowed to call a fatwa a fatwa unless it comes from the Champagne region of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling murder.
To be perfectly clear: we can't have a liberal intellectual society in the Arab world[0] for as long as people like the Ayatollahs have power and a platform. Likewise, speech-shaped violence in the Western[1] world harms liberal values way more than left-wingers saying offensive speech is violence. In fact, the reason why left-wingers are up in arms about offensive equals violent is specifically because a lot of that offensive speech comes with implicit fatwas built-in.
Bonus inaccuracy nit:
>The Roman Catholic Church considered the idea of heliocentricity to be harmful in the 16th century
No, they considered insulting the pope to be harmful. The academic establishment wanted heliocentricity dead, because Galileo was a mathematician - the lowest rung of the academic hierarchy at the time. They silenced Galileo by convincing the Catholics that they had been insulted by a book he published on the topic of heliocentricity.
[0] Iran is majority Shia Muslim but this isn't specific to one sect.
[1] As in, "countries with liberal constitutions and rule of law". Western countries are not literally the westmost parts of the planet.
> The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwā calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to kill the writer without delay, for which the assassin would receive a bounty of $1 million.
This is called "putting a hit out" on someone.
I laughed, but it's important to point out that fatwas are not a formal Islamic method of putting out a hit on someone. A (likely inexhaustive) list of major fatwas declared over the past few centuries includes edicts like, "You should get vaccines," and, "Don't smoke cigarettes," and, "Coke and Pepsi are fine, actually." A lot of them are objectionable from a Western humanist's point of view, but they're not all (or even mostly) concerned with unaliving someone.
I imagine tht this lack of understanding is kind of a crucial disconnect, frustrating the West's efforts to help to curb human rights abuses in Islamic regions.
>In fact, the reason why left-wingers are up in arms about offensive equals violent is specifically because a lot of that offensive speech comes with implicit [threats against life and limb] built-in.
Important to emphasize. People are surprised when good ol' boy speech gets you self-defensively cold-cocked, not understanding that such speech is often part-and-parcel of attempted assault and murder. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Richard_Collins_III) It's not speech that proceeds violence, it is speech as subject to violence's predicate, a sort of kiai.
Person B: "How so?"
Person A: proceeds to beat Person B until he stops talking
Also group A has the power to subdue group B by other means than violence.
I don't know, maybe we could all get together and collectively decide with some kind of voting mechanism??? Or, if voting every time is too onerous, we could elect a "representative" to stand in for our views? Just a thought!
Look at coronavirus and the lock step nature of journalism when people said the truth about distancing not being effective, keep the schools open, etc. people were banned from Twitter, YouTube pulled down videos and / or bd special pop ups to tell you to be wary about this person’s point of view.
We could even go one step further and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and they could decide what is and isn't true. We would have an office, let's call it General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press. Главлит in short.
How many of these must we suffer through? Why do none of these people grasp the concept that when you speak to other people, they do not have to passively absorb your words?
This author, like many others, could use the sage advice my father gave me in 5th grade when I taunted and made fun of another student and got beat up for it: "Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash."
Say a stupid/offending/violent thing and you’ll face consequences from
1) other people listening in the form of shunning/shouting/lost opportunities/laughing.
2) the government in form of fines or even imprisonment.
People on both sides get all hot and bothered when they receive 1) and complain that they have freedom of speech or that their opponents are bigots. This should mostly be ignored, like you said: "Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash."
Some people however want their opponents to face 2) and that is very dangerous. That is literally fascism and this sentiment exists on both sides as well.
It’s 2) we need to defend against and pretending that we’re only talking about 1) is a fatal misunderstanding.
I have genuinely never seen anyone calling for 2) outside of nations run by theocracies and dictators, with the exception of the UK.
The real debate about free speech is about finding the right balance between harms caused by speech and harms caused by censorship.
It's about the distinction between highly protected forms of speech like journalism, ideas, and protests/strikes, and undesirable speech such as incitements to hatred, slander/harassment, spam, and predatory speech.
As a society you have to figure out which kinds of speech is deserving of broad platforms (talks at universities, interviews on national TV), which kind of speech should be downranked but not banned, and which kind should result in outright de-platforming or even prosecution.
The "speech is violence" rhetoric just means that speech has actual consequences and that we should look at these consequences instead of unthinkingly taking an absolutist free speech position. Free speech is never an absolute, and as anybody who has spent a lot of time online knows, there cannot be free speech without moderation (i.e. censorship).
It's why the first amendment is their to recognize speech should not be limited because if it ever is, it will never stop being so.
To use one current example: The people pushing the idea of trans people as "groomers" is violence. It is not an intellectual debate, it's not necessary to entertain in order to preserve free thought, etc.
The goal of that speech is to other trans people and it endangers them. Tolerance of that kind of speech ensures that trans people cannot participate equally in society when there's no consequences for trying to stoke hate and encourage stochastic terrorism.
At some point, if we cannot agree that things like that are unacceptable I don't see how we ever move forward.
Why should prefixing a proposal with the phrase "trans" suddenly allow one to invalidate other people's rights?
And before you say that is extreme, hypothetical or doesn't count because it comes from a position of power my own ancestors were driven out of their homes in 4 states and had an extermination order issued against them by the state of Missouri based on people abusing free speech against them.
> should it be acceptable to "other" people by calling them Christofacist?
Yes. The whole point even in your example is freedom of religion. Denying anyone freedom of or from religion is inherently wrong from both a religious perspective and a secular perspective.
If someone is behaving in that manner, then they should be called out by both people inside and outside of their religion.
> Or suggesting that we should #killallmen?
I would agree that this is bad. I think most people across most political belief's - including the vast majority of leftists I know - would call this bad.
> Why should prefixing a proposal with the phrase "trans" suddenly allow one to invalidate other people's rights?
It doesn't, though the phrase "To those on top, equality feels like oppression" comes to mind.
> It doesn't, though the phrase "To those on top, equality feels like oppression" comes to mind.
The rights of women to enjoy female-only spaces, for their safety and dignity, is being invalidated in the name of so-called "trans rights", whereby a subset of males who demand access to such spaces, entirely disregarding women's boundaries, are being granted access.
This isn't equality, this is male dominance over women.
And yet again, same as it always is, this is oppression of women to meet the demands and desires of males.
https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/02/15/you-are-oppressing-u...
Actual data disagreeing with your position on this specific situation:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-018-0335-z (https://sci-hub.st/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007...)
That aside, I was more referring to people's ability to just... live their life.
Whether being murdered like Brianna Ghey a few days ago, or "just" being unable to access relevant medical care, there's lots of issues with things that cis people can just take for granted.
From an ethical perspective? You'd be hard pressed to argue that point.
Normalization of ridiculous rhetoric like calling LGBT folks groomers is leading towards more and more hate crimes towards those people, as well as helping push for regulations against adults being able to opt into their own health care and make decisions about their bodies[0].
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/new-bill-ban-gender-confirming-car...
Society as a whole, via the sort of discourse that we're having now.
Freedom of speech comes with other people having the right/responsibility to also have freedom of association and reject the sort of speech that is found to be intolerable.
Note that in this specific instance, it is not a case of legally unavailable speech, but a case which is more likely to result in ostracism of those who use it - which is the system working as intended.
I never heard that one before, but it sounds awful similar to the idea that men are all at risk of being pedophiles and should not be allowed to work in places near children.
The idea that all men are inherently dangerous and need to be removed in certain areas and contexts is a fairly common held viewed. Is it that any less of violence than people who view trans people as inherently dangerous? Personally I view both believes to be intolerant and discriminating, but I doubt I will live long enough to see a society where we can move beyond such views.
What a completely deranged take. It's easy to conceive of a thought experiment that absolutely destroys this perspective.
Imagine that I've applied lidocaine to my face and you punch me. Then someone points out that because I didn't feel pain, that "It's ok to punch other people in the face."
The author's argument makes about as much sense, ie: none.
Your entire strawman is invalidated because the author wrote "hurt", not "pained". Even if you didn't feel pain, a punch still hurts (injures) your body. QED.
Hurt: To cause physical damage or pain to (an individual or a body part); injure.[0]
>What a completely deranged take.
Reread your comment over again if you want a completely deranged take.
It's very, very easy to communicate in ways that encourage and incite violence(be it direct physical violence or denial of the means to live a dignified life), especially against groups against whom such violence is already normalized. Not all speech that does incite violence is intended to, but this fact also lends plausible deniability to people who do explicitly want violence but know that it's socially unacceptable to call for it directly. There is the danger of being overzealous with what speech to limit, but at the same time, it's undeniable that a lot of money and attention is flowing to ever-bolder provocateurs whose only possible goal is to escalate existing tensions and iniquities to violence in service of their political aims. Taking such people at their word on their intentions is dangerous, and those who do so have no right to act surprised and claim innocence when actions and rhetoric escalate past the point they're comfortable with.
Then you should defeat them in the marketplace of ideas and be able to counter their facillous words. To suggest otherwise is to stand in a position where you claim that some people are incapable of intelligently reasoning about something and that another superior individual should be able to police what they hear.
If someone says racist hateful things you're argument is that people should not be allowed to listen to it because it is a "bad thing" and other people who aren't as wise as you shoudlnt be allowed to hear it because they might act violently.
The market place of idea struggles in my close friend group where we have sort of a tradition to do these kind of debates, despite us being very close since almost a decade, and educated above our national average.
It's a nice enough idea, but i dont see how to make it work in a space where money amplifies speech, and some types of speeches have been a negative to specific groups of people throughout history.
The obvious long term solution is more education but that requires money, so the obvious short term solution is censorship
Some people cannot be trusted with certain ideas so a more superior individual must control what they can hear.
Do you realize how patronizing and condescending you sound about your friends by the way when you clearly imply your ideas are well reasoned and factual and theirs are the result of psychology manipulation?
Some people cannot be trusted with certains ideas so a more superior indivdual or organisation must control what they can do
Or must we abandon policing since we can all exchange on the marketplace of ideas ?
My idea is since i control 40 gunmans and you control 0, you owe me money despite nothing having ever happened between us. No violence was ever implied.
Not saying that speech = action, but i cannot see how you can argue for police to exist but speech to be free as speech in itself must lead to actions, or why else would we speak in public ?
How do I defeat someone "in the marketplace of ideas" when the person inciting violence is backed by a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate, an undemocratic government, or a police union/sheriff gang?
> If someone says racist hateful things you're argument is that people should not be allowed to listen to it because it is a "bad thing" and other people who aren't as wise as you shoudlnt be allowed to hear it because they might act violently.
It's not about being "wise", it's about incentives. Plenty of people directly and benefit from violence against marginalized groups, and it's in their interest to accept and encourage the normalization of violence against those groups. Media provocateurs have an impeccable sense of what they need to say and what ideas they're communicating when they speak. Plausibly deniable provocation works so well precisely because the target audience understand the real message perfectly.
Violence. I would not bet against escalating physical violence in the coming decade or two in the US along political lines.
I guess you can argue that. But most people I see bringing up "stochastic terrorism" suddenly say that those types of violence don't count. It's not just that this outlook is controversial - I've yet to meet anyone who has applied it consistently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shootin...
That is not violence, not sure why you put some weasel statements in.
Take this example:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-...
"At least three people have died by suicide after becoming targets of Kiwi Farms harassment campaigns, according to Vice. In 2016, the family of a trans person who died by suicide, Lizzy Waite, was harassed by Kiwi Farms trolls for weeks after her death. She had posted a suicide note on Facebook."
"Sorrenti, known to fans of her streaming channel as “Keffals,” says that when her front door opened on Aug. 5 the first thing she saw was a police officer’s gun pointed at her face. It was just the beginning of a weekslong campaign of stalking, threats and violence against Sorrenti that ended up making her flee the country."
When we talk about violent forms of speech, this is what we mean. Actual crimes.
Note that this website was, in the end, taken down. But the users have moved on to other spaces where they organize harassment campaigns, such as Libs of Tiktok.
That is not what I have seen - what about all the MDs and scientists that warned about possible side-effects of the vaccine, but since their opinions were not approved by the government, were kicked off twitter/facebook etc?
How about the NYPost being de-platformed for reporting on the hunter biden laptop story? a story which has now been admitted to being true?
It turns out hate speech means speech somebody hates.
My reddit account was permanently suspended for upvoting vaccine skepticism.
If we're talking about actual crimes getting prosecuted, then what's the issue here? All I see is the law doing it's job
Somebody got swatted. Ok. We're talking about speech here, not swatting