Yeah, Breitbart News is the flagship of the modern American conservative movement. Establishment Republicanism pandered to white racists since the Southern Strategy and have been taken over by it.
White supremacy calls for the subjugation of minorities. Communism does not. You’re conflating it with despotic regimes. The U.S. murdered tens of thousand of civilians this century. Should I talk to the Iraqis fleeing democracy?
What in God’s name The Fuck?
"And no child should ever be afraid. To go outside. And play. Or be with their parents. And have a good time."
How would you describe The Traditionalist Worker’s Party, who were at Charlottesville
or Identity Evropa
https://www.identityevropa.com/#home
or Vanguard America
https://bloodandsoil.org/ (nice url, not-Nazi-guys!)
or League of the South
Bit Nazi, eh?
The fact that the murder and enslavement is more equal makes it less immoral?
Yes, they were brought by the white supremacists. I believe that the “X” represents a cross of some sort used by neo-Nazis and white supremacists for some time.
Very Nazi, but not THE Nazi Party, anymore than American Communists are Stalin or Mao’s party.
I dare say these “Nazi” parties have more in common with Nathan Bedford Forrest’s views than Hitler’s.
Not wanting to pick on you, but the lie pisses me off so much. Why do you keep doing it?
This is not and has never been about speech we don’t like. Speech you don’t like is stuff like “Ghostbusters 2017 is a good movie.”
We are discussing speech that promotes evil actions. We’re talking about people who support genocide and murder and violence. The more we allow them to continue supporting these things, the more likely we have this one guy who drives his car into people. If enough people advocate for something, eventually someone will be a “true believer” and actually do it.
That’s the issue here. You can be a free speech absolutist all you want, but this lie that this is just about “suppression of speech we don’t like.” It’s about suppression of genuinely dangerous speech. As in, speech that leads to actual dangerous things happening.
Yes, there’s a slippery slope if you apply it to everything, but no one is. The proposed limit is on advocating for certain illegal acts of violence.
And this idea that limiting freedom of speech is inherently bad has to stop, too. There can and must be reasonable limits. We can discuss where they should be, but we cannot claim they shouldn’t exist, because that world (which we don’t live in) is a dystopia where you have false ads, people’s reputations destroyed, people killed by pranks, no perjury laws, no fraud laws, and so on.
I personally think it sounds like a good compromise: you can claim that a race is inferior, and advocate for policies that hurt them, but you cannot advocate violence towards them. Seems a good place we could all agree on. If not as a permanent goal, at least a step towards it.
I know that the courts might see it differently, but ignoring them for a moment and just airing my own thoughts, I think it’s possible to protect controversial speech and yet being a little more selective in adjudicating the right venues and manner of expressing it. If somebody wants to advocate the merits of Nazism in an academic lecture forum or TV interview where his ideas can be rebutted and challenged directly, that’s one thing. But having large masses of people marching through public streets out in the open is just asking for trouble and I really think the courts (and frankly the ACLU, an organization I basically respect) have gone to ridiculous lengths to protect this sort of thing.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with that interpretation, but that’s how I see it. I don’t want to criminalize or otherwise police bad thoughts just because we don’t like what’s in someone’s head. But there’s a difference between having bad thoughts and expressing them in a way that’s unlikely to hurt someone, and creating an environment in which emotions are certain to run high and the likelihood of physical confrontation is inevitable.
“Yeah, they’re Nazis, but not actual Hitler ones.”
Well that’s OK then! :dubious:
Nothing false in his equivalency. The Venezuela shows under other framings
There’s a lot of speech that promotes evil actions. Think about what you’re saying. We can’t allow people to support things? That’s going right at people’s beliefs. People have the right to believe whatever they want, no matter how hateful. What they cannot do is commit hateful actions, or incite others to do so. That’s what we punish, not the beliefs or expression of those beliefs.
There’s a lot of dangerous speech too. If it does actually lead to dangerous things happening, we can punish it. I’m not even approaching free speech absolutism here. Right now I’m just taking the side of our actual laws and Constitution. Speech itself is very hard to punish. Almost impossible unless actual harm is done, as in violence, damage to someone’s reputation, threats, etc. In the absence of real harm, it really is just “speech we don’t like”.
That’s already illegal. I’m uncertain as to what acts of violence were being advocated at this rally though. I’m sure that many of those people WANT to commit genocide or drive certain people out, but I don’t recall much express advocacy of that.
I think current law gets it about right. As a general rule, you can punish the harm speech causes, but you cannot punish speech where harm is only theoretical, or where the harm is strictly to people’s sensibilities.
It is something we can all agree on and I’d say that’s where it stops. And it applies to ALL calls for violence, whether or not a minority is the subject of the threat. This also happens to be current law.
Or the reality of the experience of the Tatar, the Tchechen, the Kalmyks…
I think that’s a very persuasive argument. The one flaw I see is that you can’t really take into account what those who don’t like your speech will do. If they choose violence, that’s on them and I don’t want to get into endorsing a heckler’s veto.
But yeah, if you’re talking about people who have a proven record of getting violent at protests, I can see denying them the right to assemble. But that is also going to be used against Occupy Wall Street and immigration protests, and anti-police protests.
You do realize you’re telling me I was stupid to say we should do all we can legally to fight Nazis, right? How the goddamned fuck do you have a problem with that?
It’s one thing to be like adaher, who is apparently a free speech absolutist. But I’m pretty sure even he is for using legal means to stop Nazism. How fucked up do you have to be to think otherwise?
I have to think you just had a brain fart. And apparently don’t know we’ve been starting sentences with coordinating conjunctions since the dawn of modern English. Shakespeare did it. The heightened English of the King James Bible did it.
It’s like telling people not to end a sentence with a preposition, or other made up nonsense.
That’s an intriguing claim. So back it up. Give me the logic for how allowing these sorts of things is good for you, or, presumably, us.
All you did in your reply was treat “freedom of speech” as sacrosanct. Apparently the current restrictions on freedom of speech in this country are okay, but no further.
That doesn’t indicate why it is useful to me. Other countries do have hate speech laws. Why are they a bad thing? How do they hurt the people there?
This is the unquestioning assumption I ask people to actually question. Not “is the basic concept of freedom of speech a good one?” Of course it is. But let’s take it off this vaunted shelf that cannot be touched and really discuss what should be done. Let’s get back to the foundations.
Let’s stop using “freedom of speech” as the trump card that ends everything. All rights are limited. Where should the limits on the right to freedom of speech be? If the status quo, then why is it superior to what other countries do?
I’m not very sympathetic to the Occupy movement for the reasons you alluded to, but there is still a difference between the ideas that they represent and those of the neo-confederates. In the case of Occupy, their ideas are not inherently violent. Arguing for a more equitable society, that rich people pay more taxes, that government regulate businesses better, and otherwise provide for common welfare is not ideology that threatens the fabric of stable society. Where Occupy goes wrong is in their tactics, and there are ways to deal with those tactics that people on both sides of the political spectrum can agree on. Few liberals I know of would disagree that blocking interstate traffic is inherently dangerous and that people who do this sort of thing ought to be tossed in the clink, even if we might sympathize with their message.
The neo-confederate message is quite different. You cannot march with Nazi and Confederate flags and claim that you’re promoting peace. Promoting ideas of one group’s superiority over another, one group’s right to dominate others is not, as history has shown, an innocuous message. There is no peaceful ways to subjugate everyone else; that requires violence to carry into effect. Nazis didn’t subjugate Jews with peace. It wasn’t peace that allowed Whites to enslave Black Americans. It was violence. Any message that advocates such a regime is inherently violent speech. People need to cut the bullshit.
It’s superior because it allows more range of discussion. Speech actually does involve slippery slopes. Britain is arresting people for Twitter comments.
Ah. So antifas are assholes but Nazis are not? Glad you clarified your position.
I join in your atheistic prayer. But to frame it in octopusian terms, it’s no surprise that things are escalating. Jews objecting to being exterminated by Nazis was bound to lead to something like this.