You and the first amendment would not get along very well.
So, your gut tells you that if a group of people have a grievance, they need to shut up about it, but if an individual wants to force you to provide him with a platform to spew his hate speech, you need to give it to him?
That would be because that’s the definition.
So, you would want to censure free speech, if it is in the form of protest against an individual that you want to hear?
Good luck, I know what it’s like o have much on your plate.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees both the rights of free speech and free assembly. There is no restriction regarding exercising both of these rights at the same time.
Think of the groups in history that you would be against with this philosophy:
Um… Buddy, if you think the merit of the idea has mattered in quite some time, I feel the need to remind you that we’re talking about people like Robert Spencer and Milo Yiannopolous. If the merit of the ideas at play mattered, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because universities (and CPAC) wouldn’t have invited the human embodiment of a cross between 4chan, the youtube comments section, and an slaughterhouse runoff pipe to speak. And wouldn’t that be a nice world to live in.
When we like or dislike someone/something it is on a spectrum and not an either/or thing.
Your decision making does not take into account just how passionate people can feel about certain topics. What if your daughter had escaped a religious cult where she had been abused but your sons are really keen on hearing what the cult leader has to say and wants him to come over for dinner? Will you give your daughter that speech above?
Or, what if your guest speaker spends the time telling your sons what sluts your daughters are, and how they shouldn’t be respected, and if they get raped, well, they shouldn’t be such sluts.
I am sure your sons will appreciate it, but was it really a platform you should have given?
He says, does and writes things to cause a reaction. Early in his career he attacked gamers. Then gamergate came along. And he saw an opportunity to make money so he began to celebrate gamers. He is an opportunist. He is a capitalist. He doesn’t believe a word he says. Which is why most of the stuff he says is contradictory nonsense. He has no moral fibre.
The Straightdope has a straightforward policy on dealing with trolls. It denies them a platform. If they troll they get banned. Threads and posts get deleted. And it works. Genuine posters, no matter how extreme their views, are allowed to post here. We have both open racists and communists posting here.
Budget Player Cadet has posted about some of the hit pieces Milo has written for Breitbart. I’ve gone through several of them debunking them: and they are composed of exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies. And these people that Milo targeted: they are nobodies. If you follow their twitter feeds they spend most of their time talking about Overwatch and playing with their dogs. Milo elevated these “nobodies” to infamous status. He declared them “guilty” and his pack of raging followers harass them to this day. Some of them moved across country because they got doxxed and they needed to start fresh. Milo is responsible for destroying these peoples lives.
No reputable newspaper would hire Milo. If Milo were on these boards he would have been banned in an hour. If he acted the way he acted on twitter in the workplace he would have been fired on the spot. He is a serial harasser who harassed for no other reason than the lolz.
So I want everyone to get a bit of perspective here. The Milo protests were not just aimed at “shutting Milo down.” They were aimed at the Universities, at the Campuses, at the people who extended the invitation to Milo to talk. Why are you giving a serial harasser a platform? There are millions of people that you could have given the opportunity to speak. There are millions of people you chose not to ask speak in favour of the person who called Leslie Jones a “Black Dude.”
When Twitter finally shut down Milo’s account the waves of harassment anecdotally (based on the accounts that I follow) went down as well. Denying him a platform worked. The people that Milo targeted are still gobsmacked at what finally bought Milo down. Out of all the horrible, cruel, nasty things Milo has done or said, he was bought down because he trolled a bit too far. His “outrageousness” just too outrageous for his ultra-conservative followers. People no longer invite Milo to speak. And that hasn’t hurt free-speech one bit.
Sad that people on this board are still denying that the violent protesters are wrong. Universities are not disinvited get people because they are afraid a peaceful protest with some dope smoking drum banging hippies may occur. Universities are banning people, illegally, because of the real threat of violence.
At some point, pro free speech people are going to respond in kind.
…people support legal protesting. Not violent protesting.
Can you name the people that are supporting violent protesting please? Call them out, so that we can shame them. Boooo. Hisssss. Stop being so vague. Please be specific.
Yes, please, keep defending the rights of literal neo-nazis to have access to specific, prestigious platforms. I’m sure this ends real well for both you and society. Speaking as someone living in Germany, I can safely say that we have both a free and open democracy and common-sense protections that prevent fascists from taking hold, such as refusing to protect dangerous, violent, anti-democratic ideologies the same way we protect other ideologies. Because, as we learned the hard way, “debate” doesn’t quite fucking cut it when it comes to nazis and preventing their shitty, dangerous, genocidal ideas from gaining power. And every single time a “pro free speech” person decides to go to bat for Richard “peaceful ethnic cleansing” Spencer, they lose credibility.
Well, from the perspective of this American poster, as I said before, more people might buy the principle thing if it didn’t have a suspicious tendency to only show up for some people when “alt right” speech is being discussed, and not, say, flag burning or kneeling during the national anthem. As it is, if you’re exclusively defending Nazis and fascists when their free speech isn’t heard, well, people are gonna wonder.
Ohh the scary neo-Nazis! Well, I’m fine with them speaking. Just as I’m fine with nutty religious people speaking. And no, people don’t lose credibility advocating freedom of speech you dimwit. People lose credibility when they are hysterical hypocrites.
Plus if you paid attention in history class you’d remember the Nazis, communists, etc didn’t rise to power by debating their opponents. They rose to power through violence, intimidation, and the violation of the rights of others. Ironic isn’t it.
And what’s with antifa types dressing as they were doing live action D&D? Dude had a trash can lid for a shield. Lol. x.com
That’s because it’s contentious. Damn, people are slow on this board. If the topic wasn’t contentious there wouldn’t need to be any advocacy for free speech.
“Oh look! A beautiful bird!”
That is an example of speech no one will critique and thus needs no defending.
You are putting forth a catch-22 style argument and it’s transparently dishonest.
I’d have the same advocacy if alt-left or other nutty groups on the left were invited to speak and goons from the right burned down the university and beat people. But since those actions are from folks on the left then that’s who I’m going to criticize.
There’s nothing hypocritical about expecting your right to speak to end where you start saying, “Maybe we should talk more about whether black genocide is a good idea, and if so, how we would do it”. The specific quote is not directly from Richard Spencer, but it was published in a magazine he runs. It’s entirely possible to have both free speech and reasonable limits on what you can say in the public sphere. Especially if we’re talking about a venue like a goddamn university.
Or, to put it another way, many western democracies - in fact, most western democracies - have specific laws against denying the holocaust. Is France a country without free speech? Germany? Belgium? Austria? Australia?
They didn’t debate. They had no use for debate. But they sure as hell spoke. Hitler won over a third of the german electorate before the Machtergreifung - in a pluralistic system like they had in Weimar, that’s a pretty substantial number. And they rose to that level of power in no small part because they were able to spread their ideas, and because debate and discussion were worthless tools against prejudice and hatred. Nowadays, in Germany, if a party goes in that direction, we ban that party. Because we are not repeating that mistake. The country is better off for it. The fact that the overton window is fixed firmly in a position against fascism by law is a good thing.
Okay, let’s try something different. What if, instead of being a fascist douchebag, Richard Spencer was, instead, an ISIS recruiter? Never committed a terrorist attack. Never hurt anyone. Just casually espoused the idea that we should debate whether or not the correct path is just murdering all the infidels via beheading, and recommended that people join his jihadi crusade and blow up buildings. Does free speech still apply there? And if so: what the fuck is wrong with you?
Honestly, if you think that most of Europe, and indeed most first-world democracies don’t have free speech, then I think you need to revise your expectations of free speech down a bit. This is like arguing that America doesn’t have free speech because of harassment laws. Yeah, we made it illegal to deny quite possibly the single greatest and most well-documented atrocity in the history of humanity. So. Fucking. What? Free speech is not an end unto itself. It is a means to an end. A way of ensuring a just, free society. And your freeze peach bullshit is not helping that end.
I never critiqued either. I actually posted support of Kaepernic, iirc. I’m not a fan of forced patriotism. So what’s your point? You think because I advocate for freedom of speech I’m a nutty authoritarian? What a twisted world we live in.