Given the anger over the Citizens United decision, I wouldn’t call free speech a “liberal ideal”, at least not in our modern liberal-vs-conservative political spectrum.
It’s sad, but true, that a lot of very oppressive ideas are popular enough to win elections. It is entirely possible for a free election to have the result of ending free elections.
And the loudest. Loud counts for a lot.
I would think it’s a dumb idea, but it is well within their right to do so. Free speech can only be violated by the government. I wouldn’t, for instance, have standing to sue SD for infringing my free speech. I’d think itd be a dumb idea because there is no rational reason to ban all liberal ideas. Banning people advocating for murder or using the forum to make other people suffer would have plenty of rational support, though.
Everyone is entitled to express their ideas. That doesn’t mean everyone is entitled to a television audience.
Most of the people on this board have better ideas than Milo Yiannopoulos has. But nobody here is being invited to appear with Bill Maher. I think it’s reasonable to expect that the media, which only has the ability to present a limited number of views, makes an effort to present the best views. Every hour on television time that’s given to an idiot like Yiannopoulos is an hour that isn’t given to somebody else. So it’s right to ask which of them deserved that hour more.
Right to ask whom? And who gets to decide? It’s not a zero-sum game, not in this day and age with all the TV channels and all the other media outlets that are available.
This is another case where you, the viewer, votes with your dollar, either by tuning in or tuning out of such a program. You can also write letters of protest to the advertisers and the network executives and to Dear Abby if you want.
Sometimes idiots are given air time. I’d rather live in a society where that is possible than one in which it is not, even though in each individual case I would rather the idiots remained unheard.
You are completely off base on that but so are lots of other very smart people. Free Speech has little to do with the government. It is an ideal recognized as a fundamental human right by the Constitution but it wasn’t created by the Constitution. It is just a simple recognition that it exists and is sacrosanct. That same right exists in public spaces outside of government influence as well.
As I am free speech fundamentalist. I believe that neo-nazi’s, Black Panthers, KKK members, the Westboro Baptist Church, communists, socialists, Trekies or even some random crazy person should be allowed to speak in whatever forum is available that doesn’t violate other freedoms. I don’t think they should be “shouted down” either as is the new regressive leftist trend. That is simple thuggery and has nothing to do with free speech.
Here is a recent example of very liberal Middlebury College students “shouting down” (more like shutting down followed by borderline assault) with invited speaker Charles Murray. He wrote the infamous book The Bell Curve a couple of decades ago but his invited talk had nothing to do with that but the close-minded students there will never know that because they shut down his entire speech and confronted him as a group in the parking group in the parking lot and attacked his car.
It didn’t matter what he was going to say. Murray was trying to engage in free speech and the people that asked him to be there wanted to hear what he had to say even if they didn’t agree with it. However, the gangsta “progressives” (neo-Puritans) want nothing to do with the free exchange of ideas that don’t fit with their orthodoxy so they engaged in disturbance of the peace and assault among many other possible charges because they can’t stand to hear anything that doesn’t fit neatly into their cult.
As my grandmother always told me, there is a very simple solution if someone is saying something that you don’t want to hear. Don’t listen to them. You don’t have to turn into a deranged chimp every time someone says something that you don’t agree with. If you don’t want to hear a speech, don’t go.
Well, let me put it this way: I don’t think that a community organizing to protest against a speaker is as terrible an attack on free speech as others do.
Reddit is sort of a poor example right now because they’ve already shut down entire subs for hate-related reasons, and they’re a private business and can do whatever they want with their bandwidth.
Assuming, of course, you believe that money is speech. But that’s sort of a different debate.
But often, the issue isn’t YOU hearing the speech. It’s, say, your ten year old nephew who enjoys that guy on YouTube, so he looks up the guy’s Twitter, and sees a bunch of white supremacist stuff. If you were to then lead a protest that resulted in that guy losing business and subscribers, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
ETA: I also think that this POV assumes that the only people who absorb the kind of speech we’re talking about are those who were going to believe it anyway. I disagree. I also think it underestimates the emotions brought up when you know that a guy a couple of blocks down is telling people you’re genetically inferior to him and advocating your murder (or even just, say, taking away your health care because someone like you is obviously too lazy for anyone else to care what happens to you), especially if you feel you’ve been wronged by those in power in society already.
Again, I think a lot of this comes down to whether you think that merely giving a voice or providing an audience for certain points of view does anything to legitimize or normalize that point of view. Because if you do, then you’re going to have a LOT of problems with, say, the genocide guy. If you don’t, then I can see why such would be less objectionable.
Yes, but the protections against infringement of Free Speech found in the Bill of Rights are protections against government infringement, not private infringement.
Including the right for one person to speak over another.
And that’s the rub: these people who are “shouting down” feel that others’ freedoms are in jeopardy by the people they are shouting down getting a forum that tacitly legitimizes their ideas. They feel that even when the speech itself does not directly infringe anyone’s freedoms, its legitimization, and the gradual legitimization of slightly more extreme ideas, will cause a slow creep towards eventually directly infringing other’s freedoms. This same sort of gradualism is part of what allowed Hitler to rise to power.
Effectively, they feel that the criteria some people use to say your above condition of “violating other freedoms” is flawed. Of tangential interest to me is that it used to be considered the height of masculinity to assault anyone who talked bad about your loved ones. “Free Speech” didn’t matter as the assault was seen as a consequence of the other’s free speech choice.
And some would consider that view naive. If someone’s speech is all about not being pleasant to your ears, then not listening to them is of course the way to go. But if you feel that someone’s speech or the ideas their speech legitimize are putting you and your loved ones in danger, then simply not listening is irrational. It would be like simply not listening to someone who was talking of planning to burn down your house. Whether you or I agree with their assessment in any given case or their general framework is up to us to decide.
We all have speech we want to shutdown. You want to shutdown speech that is shutting down others’ speech. This is of course circular, but I’m going to presume you feel justified in desiring such because you are qualifying these two instances of speech differently. The people whose speech you desire to shut down also see different instances of speech not being equal, thus inviting different responses.
The problem with trying to delegitimize ideas is that the ideas don’t go away they just find worse spokespeople.
For instance immigration. In Europe it was decided that any criticism of mass immigration was racist. So respectable parties refused to discuss it. The crazy populist parties took up the issue of mass immigration and now are seeing surges of popularity throughout the continent.
Trump did the same here. No one else wanted to touch immigration so he rode it to the White House.
So you’d put a limit on people’s ability to sing and chant aloud?
(Obviously, I’m quipping, but the principle is real: even you favor some limits on the right of expression.)
(Also…progressives…neo-Puritans? Get real! The Tea Party Republicans are today’s Puritans, trying to suppress sexual content and trying to enforce religious content in speech, both public and private. Next time you try for a metaphor, choose one that makes half an ounce of real sense.)
There is no question of “giving” someone a voice nor “providing” an audience. The discussion is whether to (somehow) deny someone their voice and prevent them getting an audience.
I keep asking but I haven’t seen an answer yet: what steps would you take to resolve what you see as this problem, i.e. the spread of “harmful” ideas? I can think of three possible points to your posts in this thread: 1) you want to fret about the fact that horrible people can say horrible things and other people can hear them; or 2) you want to point out how difficult free speech can be to deal with in real life; or 3) you actually want to change our current practices around free speech. If it is #3, I wish you would lay out your proposals so we can discuss them.
Trying to suppress speech about a certain topic may create a Streisand Effect, especially if it’s done in an explicit/topic-specific way.
Yes, but this shouting down is counterproductive; it makes the shouters seem radical, and the speaker seem reasonable. When a crowd shouts down and harasses, let’s say, a hypothetical alt-right speaker, it gives many people the impression that the alt-right is reasonable and mature and the crowd is rioting and unreasonable - all the more so if it’s a violent protest.
It doesn’t win over the speaker.
It doesn’t win over a third-party audience.
It may embolden the shouters themselves, but the overall effect is to lose hearts, minds, and votes.
To some degree, yes, but to some degree, no. It further polarizes matters, and drives away moderates and people who are undecided, but it’s a powerful recruiting tool, and useful in fund-raising.
You’re not wrong; I just think you’re not giving full credit to irrationality and unreasonableness as useful political tools. Radicals don’t care if they cut themselves on the sharp edges of their tools, so long as the other side gets cut worse.
I highlighted the two critically important words in the opening post. These are what the bulk of the current day debate about Freedom Of Speech are hinged on.
The definition of “allowing” first. “Allowing” has been taken to mean anything from “not shooting the person saying whatever,” to “spending time and money to actively assist the speaker to say what they want to a large audience.”
Now “deserve.” That’s also been stretched to mean anything from “proven to have merit already,” to “it is possible to use existing words to say it.”
I personally go along mostly, with the people who recognize that Freedom of Speech can’t be dealt with in isolation. By it’s nature, it is dependent on other freedoms and other greater concepts and understandings. Many of the Communists of the Soviet Union, genuinely thought THEIR people had total Freedom of Speech, based on the idea that they could say anything in praise of Communism and the current ruling officials that they wanted to, without restraint. No difference between them, and the more Right wing folks who think everyone should be free to praise patriotism and the American Way.
I see it as a dynamic phenomenon, constantly in motion. It will always require a case-by-case judgment, to decide what should or should not be done.
Biggest recent BAD decision I’ve seen made about Speech: the idea that hiding who paid you to say something, is a form of protected speech.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who gets to determine which ideas are worth debating? What happens when an idea that you hold and cherish gets relegated to the “bad” side by whatever authority is currently in power?
Is the reality of the Holocaust worth defending against dishonest claims that it did not happen or was not as terrible as it is described in legitimate history? If the reality is worth defending, then the idea is worth debating because there is going to be someone out there who is attacking or denying the historical record. The only way to avoid the debate is to silence the proponents of the other side–turning them into martyrs who can cite their own suppression as evidence that their “truth” is not accepted.
What solution do you propose to prevent debate? Silencing the proponents of the “wrong” side? Outlawing the discussion?
What happens when a topic arises in which you find yourself on the side in opposition to power?
You may be correct that it is counterproductive, but you may also be wrong. What is most likely is that it is counterproductive in some respects and productive in other respects. If a speaker is shouted down, is anyone really going to change their opinion about the speaker, the protesters, or the idea the speaker was going to speak about? Or are people just going to stick with their previous positions?
I can only speak for myself, but the most I get out of these sorts of altercations is curiosity why the protesters exhibited such behavior. And if my reaction is the reaction of some others, then I imagine that is what the indirect goal of these sorts of altercations are. And if they feel they are furthering the protection of someone/society in general be preventing the legitimizing of an idea they feel is dangerous to legitimize, then I imagine they even more feel like their actions were productive.
Based on what you typed, I think you may be using a different criteria for whether their actions are productive or counterproductive than they are.
I answered in post 27, but I guess I should be clearer: I think that protests, boycotts, and such, organized by citizens in response to people such as Milo (and heck, liberal ones if you can swing the numbers) and their beliefs, is an understandable and appropriate response in many, if not most, cases in which it is actually done, and does nothing appreciably harmful to the ideas of free speech in this country.