Who “filtered out” Fred Phelps and his gang? No one, until Phelps, of his own accord, dropped dead. Who filtered out the KKK, the racists, and the segregationists? Eventually, the government. Because no one else could.
That would be a terrific argument except that in a properly constituted democracy, government IS the people. If you believe it isn’t, and the government is really the enemy of the people instead of the guardian of their freedoms, then you’ve got much bigger things to worry about than hate speech laws and slippery slopes.
This is just trying to whitewash over the differences. Hess committed neither defamation nor perjury. He told the truth and he didn’t lie. What Sweden is doing is something new–basically, akin to negligence for speech. We can argue over whether that’s a good thing, but pretending it isn’t a new concept is false.
No disagreement here.
In the court of public opinion, they are not equal. But I don’t want a judge making that call for me, and it’s a brand new legal idea that the truth of a statement isn’t relevant when determining its legality. It’s my god-given right to listen to idiots, or just people who fly close to the sun when blathering about politics. If a country requires research before publicly stating an opinion, it’s going to have chilling effects on free speech. What Sweden is basically saying is that you can’t state a belief based on your own thoughts–someone else must research before you can talk. That’s Orwellian.
Historically, arresting people just for expressing ideas has a terrible track record – both morally, and pragmatically… it doesn’t work. Arresting people for expressing ideas does not curtail the expression of the ideas. Other than ‘execution for disparaging Dear Leader’, when has forcefully sanctioning the expression of ideas ever actually curtailed the expression of these ideas? Historically (and again, barring North Korea types of extremism) it seems to have had the exact opposite effect.
That’s a completely bizarre interpretation of what “telling the truth” means, which is not a difficult concept and not hard to distinguish from the meaning of “maliciously making shit up”. The intent of the accused person – mens rea – is a key principle in law. That is what matters here. There’s nothing new here at all.
The Swedish court is saying absolutely no such thing. This “research” thing is entirely your own invention to try to obfuscate the straightforward concept of what it means to know something and tell the truth about it.
The Dope has rules against hate speech and saying certain words in certain contexts and will ban you for not complying. We should all migrate to a board that respects freedom of expression, like 4chan.
This place seems to like Godwinning lately, so I’ll go first. If the Weimar Republic had arrested Hitler and pals for hate speech they could have saved themselves a whole heap of trouble. The “free market of ideas” didn’t do jack. Quite the opposite.
What sort of punishment? Fines? Imprisonment? Shutting the paper down? If that happened maybe they’d still be alive. Sounds to me like the judicial system failed in their duty to protect the citizens.
If you think that would fall under hate speech you are mistaken, as are others who don’t seem to understand the scope and limitation of such laws. In Canada hate speech laws are primarily concerned with those who promote genocide and closely related concepts of hateful violence against a group, and even then have a host of exclusions. You can in general say all the nasty things you want about various identifiable groups without legal consequence. If you start a campaign to kill them all, then it’s different.
Well, this, for example, seems to have worked out quite well. A Hitler admirer, virulent anti-Semite, an active promoter of genocide against Jews, and national security risk was duly deported, and subsequently arrested abroad. Do you think this was a national loss for Canada in some way? Again, it’s about a lot more than just “expressing ideas”.
I am not an advocate or supporter of anti-hate speech laws. I find the arguments submitted to support them to be unpersuasive. However, 47 responses into this thread, no evidence has been offered to support the claim that those laws have actually “covered up” any truth.
The one explicit case offered, that of the anti-Islamic bigot Michael Hess, does not actually demonstrate the claim. Hess did not publish a paper that asserted that the change in immigration laws had introduced an element to the population that had actually resulted in more rapes. He simply made a declaration of hatred that “those people” were bad and came from places where all of them were bad. Without supporting anti-hate speech laws, I certainly would consider his actual words to incite animosity between different groups. Had he actually wanted to “expose” a problem in the nation of Sweden, no evidence has been submitted indicating that a calm presentation of facts regarding the varying attitudes and actions of native Swedes and of immigrants and the children of immigrants would have resulted in any sort of sanctions, lawsuits, or accusations of criminal behavior.
But that’s part of the problem about this and similar threads: there is no common understanding of hate speech laws and what they prohibit. There can be considerable variation from country to country. A statement like the title of this thread is meaningless and not capable of debate, because it’s undefined and open to idiosyncratic meanings of “hate speech laws” which vary with each poster’s views.
On a related note, I just came across thisarticle on the UK version of Huffington Post, where a very stupid women is caught on tape saying racist (but not genocidal) things about black people. Police, apparently, are investigating, but the article doesn’t say what crime they’re looking into. This is more or less exactly the sort of language wolfpup says hate speech laws don’t target, so either there’s some other crime going on here that I’m just not seeing, or wolfpup’s view of jurisprudence is very Canada-centric.
(Note: I haven’t watched the video, so if she says something like, “You people act like this because you used to be slaves. Also, I have fifty keys of uncut heroin in my backpack,” consider this post withdrawn.)
Those are valid points, and I admit that my comments were made with what I’m familiar with – namely the Canadian laws – in mind, and I may well not agree with laws that perhaps take it a step or two further. Believe it or not, I have argued strongly against some of the absurdities of political correctness that pervade some of our institutions on both sides of the border and both sides of the ocean. But I don’t think that’s inconsistent with egregiously extreme and genuinely dangerous bigots like the neo-Nazi in my example being found in violation of carefully limited hate laws and being removed from our midst.
It bothers me that malevolent bigots like Fred Phelps were experts at playing the Constitutional card to make themselves legally invulnerable as they carried out their hateful practices, apparently designed to be as mercilessly offensive as possible. Phelps knew exactly what buttons to push, and where not to tread, and he played the game with consummate skill. I don’t believe this is necessary for a free society; there is surely a middle ground that protects against unreasonable government intrusion on speech but would still have landed Phelps in jail where he belonged, which would probably have happened in most other countries. It bothers me equally that people have been exonerated for burning crosses on black families’ lawns on the grounds of “free expression”, and that IIRC the SCOTUS cautioned against bans on such symbols lest the KKK be deprived of some sort of historic institutional legacy apparently represented by burning crosses and fond memories of lynching black people from lamp posts. I mean really, surely there is room here for some common sense, entrenched as balanced constitutional principles?
When allegations are made of something that might be a crime, police have to investigate. The fact that they’re investigating doesn’t mean they’ve concluded there’s probable cause; just the opposite. A complaint has been made and they’re required to investigate, especially if there are conflicting accounts of just what was said.
I don’t see any significant difference. If the government is allowed to fine or imprison a person for saying something without knowing whether it’s true, that can’t fail to have a chilling effect on speech. Who, after all, gets to decide how much research a person must do before he’s allowed to mouth off? Who decides which sources are good enough sources to constitute real research? How could the Swedish court ruling not be interpreted as giving the government wide powers to stop speech from a large number of people on a considerable number of topics?
But that wouldn’t have happened for exactly the reason you point out: Phelps knew exactly where the line was, and how close he could get to it without bringing down the law on him. If you move the line back, he just toes the new line.
I also think there was some value is having someone as openly evil as Phelps on the anti-gay side of the debate. He was, in many ways, the logical endpoint of homophobic ideology, stripped of any pretense of civility. He was, ultimately, what the anti-gay rights movement is at its core: raw, snarling, unthinking hatred. I think it was, ultimately, immensely valuable for the gay rights movement to have him as an example of what the other side really was, deep down - and people ran from that.
I’m… not entirely sure that’s a thing that’s ever happened. Or at least, not since the bad old days before the Civil Rights Act, and certainly never on a federal level. Burning a cross on someone else’s lawn would, at the very least, be vandalism and trespass, and it wouldn’t take much to convince a jury that it was a death threat, as well.
Not sure where that stuff about “traditions of lynching” comes from.
But you yourself have insisted that it would be wrong for Canada to prosecute Arabs and Muslims for quoting hadiths and portions of Hamas’ charter universally regarded throughout the Arab and Muslim world as endorsements for the slaughter of Jews.
You’ve also been delighted with the prosecution of whites who engaged in Holocaust Denial while insisting that it would be outrageous to prosecute Arab political leaders who engaged in Holocaust denial while also being outraged that the US Supreme Court struck down a law mandating the prosecution of people for having Nazi flags in the privacy of their own homes.
I don’t mention this as a way to attack you, but merely to point out that your arguments don’t come across as intellectually consistent nor terribly well thought out.
Beyond that, speaking as a Muslim, I can say that for all of it’s problems the US with it’s lack of hate speech laws seems to have done a vastly better job combatting anti-Muslim bigotry than Europe has done with it’s hate speech laws which regularly prosecute speech you insist would be protected speech.
If anything hate speech laws seem to promote what one wag called “censorship envy” where people demand to know why in France people can be prosecuted for making the “Quanelle” gesture(which I’m sure you feel should be protected speech) while vilifying the Prophet, which most French Muslims feel is at least as disgusting, goes unpunished, or of course your own view that Hamas declarations calling for the slaughter of Jews on the Day of Judgement is protected speech while white people displaying Swastikas in the privacy of their homes is not.
Yes, but unfortunately it seems Sweden & numerous European countries are closer to the Soviet Totalitarian model than the enlightenment model. The US is far more liberal and open than Europe in that respect.