No. Definitions have changed. For example, Britain joined the European Single Market (ESM) in 1973. In 1975 a referendum was held. Labour, in their 1974 manifesto, promised that if Britain voted to leave the ESM then, if Labour won the subsequent General Election, they’d use that result as grounds to take Britain out of the ESM.
At the time, nobody - and I mean absolutely nobody - would’ve thought a vote for Leave in and of itself would make one a racist or a fascist. Tony Benn campaigned to leave in ‘75.
Fast forward to 2016 and it’s a completely different story. The popular perception among many Remainers in Britain is that (in the words of one of my Remainer colleagues) “If you voted for Brexit you’re either racist or you’re thick”. This sentiment is absolutely everywhere, and has been ever since the Brexit vote.
This isn’t a case of the world wising up to something that was actually racist all along. This is a case of something that factually wasn’t racist in 1975, being considered profoundly racist by about half the country in 2016.
So, yes. The definitions have changed. Ten years ago, if you told me “Bob’s a racist”, I would’ve known exactly what you meant. Today, if you told me “Bob’s a racist”, I genuinely wouldn’t have a clue. Does he follow Britain First on Facebook? Or did he just vote Leave? I’ve no way of knowing from the description given.
No it’s not. The very existence of that sovereignty is because of their Native American ethnicity.
I don’t mean hiring quotas, I mean things like targetted recruitment to college,
Right there in the sentence right after what you quoted. You asked if hate speech only counted if it’s against race (hoping to score some kind of cheap shot gotchya under cloak of feminism, I guess?) I pointed out several bigotries that were not about race that I believe attract hate speech.
No, I have actual experience of hate speech legislation doing exactly what is intended. Racists in South Africa are a fuckload less vocal and visible than they were. The system works.
What has this country come to when segregationists are now viewed as racists instead of states’ rights constitutionalists? Damn changing definitions!!
ETA: and by the way, the founder of UKIP, Alan Sked, who I personally know, left the party twenty years ago because he said it had been hijacked by racists. That sob-story about mean things being said about Farage and his ilk is another terrible argument in this thread.
I see nothing wrong with your colleague’s assessment.
And all that racistLeavecampaigninghad nothing to do with this change in perception, I’m sure…
Leave is seen as more racist now because it is more racist now. In '75 it was about different issues. Mostly economic. You can’t argue that anymore. Not with a straight face.
That *could *be because campaigners for Brexit have consistenly pushed a xenophobic rhetoric and used explicitly racist imagery that’s a literal carbon copy of Third Reich propaganda. Or, you know, because candidates for UKIP areliteral alt-right figureheads. I mean, it could be that. But maybe it’s just Remainers and the Left being so gosh darned irrational and crazy.
Sacrifice means someone may get their feels hurt. Sort of like folks posting in this thread have used misogynistic slurs in the pit, iirc. That hurts feelings. Using cunt, which is a gendered insult, could be considered so-called ‘hate speech’ by the standards of the board but that was celebrated.
Sacrifice isn’t a literal drag someone up on a pyramid and carve out his heart. No, the sacrifice is that some people will be offended vs. empowering the state further and further. And that is a sacrifice worth making.
Sure you can. We see exactly what he’s alluding to on this very board. People are called Nazi or racist or whatever when they advocate for free speech. Think about that. Advocating for individual liberty and a check on state power is now equated, in an intellectually dishonest fashion, with Nazis. It’d be funny if it weren’t having an actual impact in the real world.
You’re equivocating. The opposite of “Hate speech” isn’t “PC language” - you can absolutely broadcast a message of utter hate wrapped in perfectly innocent-sounding language, ask Richard Spencer, Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon for tips on that - and the problem with hate speech isn’t that it might hurt peoples’ fucking fee-fees. It’s that it gets people killed.
There are laws against violence. Hate speech laws can make it where if you discuss immigration or crime statistics or quote rap lyrics you can go to jail.
Once you empower the state it’s very difficult to reverse that. You are worried about what, exactly? A few bad words leading to violence that may result in a few dead? That’s the hypothetical?
Well, history shows what powerful institutions do when they have absolute power. Including the power to label speech blasphemous, treasonous, ‘hate speech’, etc. When the state, the church, or other powerful institutions can shut down speech, confiscate weaponry, run kangaroo courts, etc. you have genocides. You have not 5 or 6 dead you have 10s of millions dead.
In an ideal world where governments and other institutions haven’t been the most deadly concentration of power in history you are correct. It would be very nice to legislate niceness. But in the real world, the reigns of power attract the narcissistic, the psychopathic, and the power hungry. Once they get power the so-called tools used to protect the people can be tools used to oppress the people.
I’m not sure why these historical lessons, like the failures of socialism, fail to make an impression on the people of today. Everybody is so worried about the so-called Nazis. Why? Nazis were bad, yes, but they are just a subset of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism/statism is the big threat, regardless of what facade it wears in order to sell itself to the gullible masses.
And no, being sentenced to jail for 30 days because someone recorded a person using a racial slur is not a strawman. Being expelled from a public university for unPC speech is not a strawman. These are real events. And if you don’t think the government in the US doesn’t currently abuse the power it currently has you haven’t been reading the news.
Furthermore, what is it about the US that resulted in a country that has somewhat effective checks and balances, jury trials, right to not incriminate oneself, prohibition on most forms of slavery, freedom to defend one’s self, freedom to publish, freedom to speak, property rights, etc? The answer is the idea that people possess intrinsic rights and that sovereignty of government is derived from the consent of the governed. These are profound ideas but they aren’t inevitable. If people don’t work very hard to maintain the fiction that humans have intrinsic rights and that the state isn’t supreme you will end up with more and more of the world a police state like China.
And China’s impact is being vastly underestimated. They are potentially more dangerous than Germany or the Soviet Union ever was.
Now, I understand the concern you feel and that Miller feels and that other people who have been or are currently marginalized feel. However, clairobscur and the other free speech advocates are 100% right in that empowering the state or the state sanctioned mob is ultimately much more destructive.
There was/is a discussion in ATMB about transgenderism and whether or not a certain comment was hate speech. In a country where hate speech is criminalized the penalty isn’t a warning on a message board of a 100 or so. The penalty is jail or fines. Perhaps jail was called for with the comment. How about discussing gender and sports? Jail for that? Opposition to quotas in university or jobs? Jail? Want limits to immigration? Jail? Reading Genesis aloud in a church or other religious building? Jail for that?
These aren’t strawmen. There are over 1 million Uighurs in real concentration camps in China being ‘reeducated’ as we type because of their religion/ethnicity. There is nothing magical stopping the West from becoming classically illiberal.
I just want to echo what other posters have said: my concern with hate speech isn’t that it makes me feel bad, my concern is that it makes my country physically unsafe for me to live in.
That’s not quite true. The Supreme Court recognizes that tribal sovereignty predates the U.S. government. And they didn’t base any of that recognition on the fact that those tribes were Native Americans.
Remember, I’m arguing that the definition of racist has expanded so much since 1975 that, for about half of the UK, the mere act of voting Leave when considered in isolation is proof enough that someone is a racist.
Why wasn’t it proof enough in 1975? It couldn’t possibly have been because the 1975 Leave campaign was less racist than the 2016 Leave campaign. After all, Enoch Powell was leading the Leave campaign in ‘75. And Enoch Powell, on his best day, was a thousand times more racist than Nigel Farage.
Yes, there were economic reasons to vote Leave in ‘75. But there were economic reasons to vote Leave in 2016, too. So why is it that a Leaver who voted Out in 1975 for economic reasons would be taken at his word, while Leavers who voted Out in 2016 for economic reasons are told to stop hiding behind dog whistles and just confess their racism?
The act is the same, the reason behind the act is the same, the social context surrounding the act is, if anything, markedly less racist, but the significance of the act is (for about half the country) entirely different.
The only explanation is that the definition of ‘racist’ has expanded to include things it previously didn’t.