Killing people is bad, so we have quite specific rules for when it’s acceptable to kill someone. What are your rules for when it is okay to censor ideas?
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to how to respond to “bad” speech. Do the right thing as best we can. Occasionally that will involve “extreme” tools like boycotts or even (much more rarely) doxxing.
If you want to nitpick, this isn’t true. At the micro level, we have courts that decide case-by-case whether a killing is acceptable, and the decisions have been violently disputed since forever. At higher levels, the discretion given to police and the military varies tremendously from that given civilians.
This is true for everything in societies, from jaywalking to porn. Even the Constitution appears to be a jello-like substance when trying to pin it down.
‘Conservatism’ is not a coherent ideology like communism. It’s an overarching term for a whole group of ideas. All modern democracies have conservative parties; they regularly attain power democratically, run those countries without notable extremism, threats to freedom, or creating widespread poverty, and give up power democratically. (The US is an unfortunate outlier in this respect.) It is not comparable to communism.
And please note that I am not in favour of censoring, firing, or blacklisting communists. I’d just like the same courtesy to be extended to conservatives, and any other group that disagrees with progressive dogma. And to any group that disagrees with other dogma, too: I don’t think sex researchers should be cancelled because self-righteous mobs want to virtue signal about how strongly they disapprove of paedophilia.
It already has. The last few attempted cancellations I saw failed. People just assume it’s a nothingburger now.
If you think my quoting “A change is gonna come” was in reference to cancel culture, then it’s our communication that has truly failed.
We don’t ask juries to make it up as they go along, and decide what is acceptable based purely on vibes (imagine how biased they’d be if they did!) There are laws about when killing is legal, and the job of the jury is to decide whether a given case satisfies the conditions defined in those laws or not. Eg whether there was really a threat to someone’s life, or it was reasonable to believe there was.
And the police and military also have rules about when it is and isn’t acceptable to use lethal force, and can be prosecuted if they break them egregiously enough. I daresay @iiandyiiii could tell us these rules, since he was in the navy.
This is a very real example to me. I own a lovely little tablecloth that my grandmother made when she was a child. It is covered with hundreds of little swastikas, that she hand embroidered as a child. When it was an innocent “good luck” symbol that happened to be fairly easy to embroider.
I leave it in my drawer, with the other table cloths, and don’t ever use it. Because … Yeah, partly I’m afraid I’ll offend someone, partly i wonder what they’ll think of me, and partly i don’t want to have to explain my tablecloth. I self-censor. Censorship is sometimes good and appropriate.
Right, that’s the Supreme Court’s job.
Accurate.
Having an unelected court deciding things is great when the decisions go your way, and terrible when they don’t. And the alternative is to let your elected representatives decide.
There’s really no way around the fact that public opinion matters. Living as I do in a country without a codified constitution, where - in theory at least - any right can disappear with the next election, makes that crystal clear. Because all those rules and laws and checks and balances are only as good as the people enforcing them. They are exactly as important and powerful as you collectively believe them to be.
You can surely understand why I might take a dim view of someone who said “there are no hard and fast rules for when it is acceptable to kill someone”?
Not because every situation is black and white and easily decided, but because having no rules or guidelines at all is so open to abuse. What would happen if an army had no rules about killing prisoners, or unarmed civilians?
Having rules helps people know what is acceptable, and it reduces bias by mandating the same punishment for the same crime regardless of who committed it. It also creates a standard of evidence, which is something mob justice almost invariably lacks.
I think there is a benefit to sitting down and thinking about what you find acceptable and what unacceptable, and examining your own biases here.
I’m struggling awfully hard to see how this is remotely relevant to anything I’ve said. Speech isn’t murder.
If you think you have a good idea for what the “rules” should be about responding to objectionable speech, I’m listening.
I still don’t know what I’ve said, specifically, that you actually object to.
That’s certainly how it works in the US. /s
By some of the definitions in this thread, choosing not to fund movies based upon the ideas it encourages is a form of censorship.
Yes, but that’s a broader topic.
People say that happens, but money trumps ethics. If there’s a way to make money, someone will fund it. I mean, consider Tom Cruise at the height of his jumping up and down on couches or Mel Gibson.
Fair enough. I guess I’m lumping forms of preventing free expression as a means of contrast.
That depends on your motive. If you, like most rational people, find the swastika offensive, then yes. That is censorship. If your goal is to prevent the defacing of your property and/or the potential loss of value to your property, then no.
This is a bit of an odd stance coming from someone who was attempting to assign a concrete definition to a term.
But I would submit that this does more than create confusion. It’s the source of much of the conflict. Any conversation about censorship can only bear fruit if we start with the understanding that 1) everyone supports some kind of censorship, 2) censorship is oftentimes necessary and 3) censorship is not inherently evil.
I think we can all agree, or at least I hope we can all agree, that child pornography should be censored. A common response I get when I say that is “that’s not censorship”.
The point being, the vast majority of the people I engage with who are opposed to censorship are trying to redefine the term to fit their viewpoint when the reality is that they aren’t opposed to censorship at all. They are opposed to censorship being applied in a specific context.
(closely related to this topic is the fact that, in most cases, the First Amendment only applies to government censorship)
It isn’t censorship because the SCotUS has ruled that child pornography is not speech, it’s obscenity, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment.
“Censorship” and “speech” are not defined by the US Supreme Court, outside of their authority vis a vis US law.
If you’re arguing that the sentence “child pornography is censored” is incorrect… I think you’re using some very specialized definitions for those words. Perhaps useful when talking about current application of the law, but not that useful otherwise.
Thank you for helping to elaborate my point.
The fact that the SCOTUS labeled this an “obscenity” is what makes it censorship.
Notice that the word “censor” does not appear in the First Amendment.
Neither does obscenity. The framers certainly understood - and meant - the First Amendment to apply to political speech. They were motivated by the laws of Europe, which barred attacks on the government and especially against monarchs: what was called seditious libel. Attacks against political figures therefore became immediately almost the sole purpose of 18th century newspapers; not until today has the news reached those heights of invective and lies. (Lincoln a possible exception.)
John Adams responded with the blatantly unconstitutional Alien and Seditious Acts, which were revoked as soon as Jefferson took office. Only in wartime did they appear again. Very little actual censorship is practiced by the government today, with active harm the excuse as in child porn and national security secrets. The US has no laws against hate speech, although actions motivated by hate are prosecuted as hate crimes.
Looking at the history of the First Amendment is the reason I caution against confusing government censorship and private cancel culture. Utterly different domains with different intentions, procedures, and consequences.
“Freedom of Speech” is a shorthand for a specific Enlightenment era / natural rights / humanist belief, and should be understood to be nothing more nor less than that.
As example, from John Milton’s Areopagitica:
Or, in short, the goal is to seek truth.
If the truth is that age limits of varying kinds are harmful to society, then people should be free to make that case, so that we might one day arrive at that truth among society.
If people are free to make that case, and no one is buying it, though, then age limits are free to be imposed as law and enforced through society. But still, people are free to continue making the case. There’s no saying, ever, for sure that there isn’t some argument that would sway everyone, that merely needs to be found. Just, that you do need to successfully sell people on your argument, and pass laws, before engaging in criminalized behavior. Minus that, and you’re just a criminal and creep.
Average Reading Level Consensus
Score: 23.8 [ = grade level ]
U.S. Grade Level: College Graduate
Reading Level: Extremely Difficult
Age Range: 23+
That’s just how I roll, baby.