In the specific case of a magazine that wants the publicity, sure, they likely benefit from it. In the case of someone who wasn’t deliberately doing this to get publicity, not so much.
It takes a lot in Canada to being charged with hate speech crimes - it’s a very rare occurrence - but I’m not particularly convinced the law has done Canada any good.
Question – would this recquire a Constitutional amendment? Or would it be like fraud laws and libel and things like that?
I’m not advocating for a change. I’m exploring the legal and constitutional issues that would need to be adressed by the proposal.
Yes, but it has to be a realistic threat of imminent unlawful activity. Blogging as a keyboard warrior, urging that members of a group be killed, is not likely to reach that legal standard, but it can deliver that message to a huge audience
I wouldn’t put myself in that category, but clearly the answer is that the existence of legal prohibitions don’t necessarily rid society of abhorrent acts; but do seek to remedy the wrongs that have been done.
I don’t know if hate speech laws have an overall effect on racism within a society. But if I were to compare the level of racism within US society to the levels of racism I have perceived in other countries generally similar to my own, which also have some flavor of hate speech law… well, I’ll just say that our protection of hate speech sure as hell isn’t cure to racism either.
For example, it’s rather shocking when I think about it as to the lengths we Americans commonly go to embrace “I’m just gonna look the other way when racism rears its head because that’s the noble sort of thing that white people do” sort of thinking.
Like for example, it is disgusting that any veneration occurs for Lee or Davis or the other horrible racists who killed hundreds of thousands in the name of race and chattel slavery. Of course, the respect paid to these criminals is dressed up as “they were just fighting for their state, which is where loyalty rested in their days!” That’s a paper-thin veneer of wrapping racism in honor, just as fifty years ago people wrapped pure racism in “states rights.”
You are unfortunately conflating the various stupid provincial human rights laws and the tribunals that administer them with Canada’s criminal hate speech laws. I addressed this very misleading practice in post #255. I strongly support the criminalization of extreme forms of hate speech such as Canada has done in federal law while at the same time believing that many of the human rights laws are bullshit and some of the rulings of the quasi-judicial human rights tribunals are a farce of political correctness that are in many cases unconstitutional and wouldn’t stand up in a real court. Moreover, their rulings are all civil proceedings and not criminal prosecutions. Among your supposedly numerous examples, you’ve actually cited only one single criminal prosecution under federal hate speech law, that of white supremacist Jean-Sebastien Presseault, who was a dangerous lunatic – among the charges he faced was threatening the judge who was hearing his case! And contrary to your claim that these sorts of charges are commonplace, Presseault was only the second person ever convicted of hate speech under s.319. Indeed, the hate speech laws are so specific and restrictive that special approval of the Attorney General is required just to be able to lay charges.
First of all I think it’s misleading to try to represent supporters of hate speech laws as some sort of fringe minority. That may indeed be true for US-based posters who have become conditioned to the American dogma of absolutism, but most democracies in the world do have hate speech laws, and most significantly, all of the 10 top-rated countries in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index have such laws. The US, with its absolutist approach to free speech, ranks poorly both on that index and on the Human Freedom Index (see my posts #255 and #259), so clearly that approach isn’t working – an absolutist dedication to free speech at best either doesn’t correlate with a free society or correlates negatively because it makes the wrong kinds of tradeoffs.
Secondly, that hate speech laws don’t prevent xenophobia actually supports a major point I was making and undermines one of the main arguments against hate speech laws. It’s not the purpose of hate speech laws to try to shape the culture of society or turn us all into politically correct do-gooders, in much the same way as it’s not the purpose of the rest of the criminal code to do that. No one would argue that the criminal code is useless because some people are still rude and obnoxious jerks. The purpose of hate speech laws, like other criminal laws, is to prohibit and penalize the most vile, extreme, and often violent behavior that threatens peaceful social order.
Found the case I was thinking of: Brandenburg v Ohio, where the Supreme Court overturned convictions of Klan members because advocating violence as a means of political reform was protected speech, provided it did not occur in a situation where there was an immediate or imminent threat of violence.
So no, sitting at a keyboard advocating that members of a group be killed is not caught by existing criminal offences of inciting violence, unless the facts of the particular case show that posting g results in an imminent likelihood of unlawful conduct.
Where do you stand on hate speech which is not incitement? Do you feel there should be laws against it? Or should hate speech only be illegal when it crosses the line into incitement?
For what it’s worth, my answer to that last question is yes. I don’t feel hate speech alone should be illegal unless it’s an incitement to commit crimes.
Sam, I think you’ve kind of lost the plot. You’re supposed to be arguing that hate crime laws end up screwing over people who don’t deserve to be screwed over. Arguing that hate crime laws screw over utter pieces of shit like David Ahenakew is the entire point of hate crime laws.
Canada?
Yeah, that’s a lot easier to say when you’re not the one being targeted by the Klan. I’m not super comfortable with you using my physical safety as a teaching moment for your kids.
The other question you should ask yourself is, how do we prevent the worst government you can think of from getting power? That’s one of the bigger arguments in favor of hate speech laws - that they might be able to prevent racist demagogues from gaining a foothold in the first place.
I don’t support hate speech laws anymore than I support libel laws. I just think there can be reasonable legislation to deter social harm in that area. Hate crime laws aren’t intended to rid us of racism. It is to curb some of the worst social ramifications of propagandizing racism.
Exactly. That’s how public universities get away with speech codes and other unconstitutional punishments. They know that most can’t afford to fight or don’t want the further notoriety that fighting will acquire.
That’s how the police act with asset forfeiture and unlawful arrests. That’s how plea deals work to some extent. Most people can’t afford to fight the state and hope to prevail.
Really? Which hate speech laws were these, and where?
So, people that yell fire in a crowded theatre, those kind of assholes?
Why is this a valid argument, but “you have to trust people to be smart enough to know how to craft limited hate speech laws” is not?
No it isn’t. As I noted earlier, the US ranks far behind comparable modern democracies in both the Human Freedom Index and the World Press Freedom Index, and most if not all of the countries ahead of it who enjoy greater freedoms and more peaceful societies have hate speech laws.
Would that be the same general public who widely believed that Obama was born in Kenya – at least widely enough for Donald Trump to get lots of political traction? Would that be the same general public who widely believe that climate change is a hoax, who in the early 60s believed that if Medicare was enacted it would be the end of freedom in America, and in more recent years believed that Obamacare would euthanize their grandmothers? The general public about whom H.L. Mencken reportedly said no one ever went broke underestimating their intelligence?
Or look at it another way. Look at who your current president is and how he got there. That would be the guy who at last count has told a gullible general public 13,435 lies since inauguration, yet his supporters claim he has never lied – not even once. And 13,435 lies later (and counting) he stands a good chance of being re-elected by your much-vaunted general public.
This is the general public that you want to put all your faith in?
You know what’s really scary? This kind of travesty:
IIRC, a racist who burned a cross on a black family’s lawn was also deemed to be exercising “protected speech”. This kind of dangerous absolutism does absolutely nothing to advance worthwhile freedoms, while it does a great deal to endanger public safety. Meanwhile, in civilized countries laws against hate speech continue to be enforced (example just from today) with no discernible impact on liberties.
World Freedom Index?
Done by a Libertarian org that ranks Hong Kong:rolleyes: (has anyone been following the news?) as the most free nation (tied).
But the USA does rank 17th out of over 160 nations, along with Sweden.
Indeed, that is a* discernible impact on liberties*. That is *exactly *what it is. It’s just liberties you dont agree with.
You appear to have the two indexes completely muddled. The US ranks #48 on the World Press Freedom Index and #17 on the well-respected Human Freedom Index. And it’s not done by a “libertarian org”, it’s a collaboration of the Cato Institute (US libertarian), the Fraser Institute (Canadian conservative) and the Liberales Institut (German liberal), so it’s pretty well-balanced. And other indexes tell a similar story – for example, the US ranks at #25 on the democracy index, behind most western democracies, and is rated as a “flawed democracy”. So free speech absolutism is both endangering society and not doing what it’s touted to do; if that’s the price you’re paying for “freedom”, you’re being ripped off.
Damn right I don’t agree with it, but the thing is, the premise of hate speech prohibitions is that there are certain views that are so vile that objectively no civilized person should or would agree with them. This would include things like advocating genocide, or advocating violence against minorities defined by race, ethnicity, or gender-related attributes, or dehumanizing those minorities in a vile and hateful fashion by suggesting that they’re something less than human, because those views are fundamentally inconsistent with a civilized and peaceful society. This is the basic sticking point in hate speech debates, that opponents of hate speech laws refuse to recognize the primacy of peace and social order. The result of this – as shown in all those country rankings – is that you get less peace and social order than other societies with no corresponding benefit, except the ability for hateful sociopaths and demagogues to spout hate (one of them even got elected president) and for some reason opponents of hate speech laws believe that this is a good thing.
This is extremely important to remember. Any police officer or Crown prosecutor cannot willy-nilly lay hate speech charges; those must be approved first by the federal Attorney-General. Even then, they are not guaranteed to succeed: Ernst Zundel ultimately walked, for example.
I seem to recall a discussion here on the SDMB in about 2006 or so, that involved Ezra Levant (publisher of the Western Standard magazine, which published the Mohammad cartoons). One post linked to a YouTube video of Mr. Levant sitting in the Tribunal boardroom, blasting the adjudicator about his Charter s. 2(b) rights as a publisher, then getting up and walking out, basically leaving the adjudicator going, “WTF?”
Ezra Levant is a lawyer himself, so I doubt he spent much, if anything, on “lawyers costing thousands of dollars.” Human Rights Tribunals and Commissions are set up for self-represented people, and charge no filing fees, so Mr. Levant had no need for an army of lawyers or a bucketful of money. Besides, the original complainant withdrew the complaint once it gained publicity, because it was embarrassing to him and his cause once the Canadian public was alerted to it, and further, that his complaint had no merit under Canadian law of any sort.
I’m no fan of Ezra Levant, but his matter proves one thing: that “hate speech” in Canadian law does not include “hurt feelings” and “it goes against my religion.” Canada’s and Alberta’s approach in the Ezra Levant matter may be a model for the United States to consider.
It is not clearly obvious to me how preventing speech which offends or insults generically remedies past wrongs. I don’t follow that one bit. Remedying past wrongs is done by positive proactive actions and by equal protections implemented, not by what is not said in the future.
I also don’t know if hate speech laws have any overall effect on racism (or any other -ism) within a society. And also doubt that unfettered free speech is a vaccine against it. The burden of proof though, when the suggestion is greater legal limits on rights and freedoms, is that those limits will provide such a degree of harms prevention or good achieved as to be justified. It is a pretty big burden of proof to achieve, should be, as the power to limit can so easily be abused by those in power at any time.
As far as the quaint notion of unlimited free speech in America goes, I’m pretty sure that if the person reading the weather report on the morning radio called for “a metric shit-ton of snow” or that it was going to “rain like a motherfucker” then that person or the station itself would pay a fine to the government via the FCC.
Once again, there is no country, America inclusive, that actually practices free speech absolutism. Speech is legally restrained everywhere, including in America. The question is which speech is protected and which is not. What is sufficient harm to others from speech as to warrant its not being protected speech?
Brandenburg has been mentioned several times (including in the transcript I linked to) in which speech was limited when it might incite immediate physical harm to others.
I’ve also highlighted Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986), also mentioned in the transcript I linked to, which notes that offensive speech (sexual harassment in this case) which resulted in a hostile employment environment for women in this case was NOT protected speech. No incitement of immediate physical harm was required, the harm of a hostile work environment for a member of the group was enough.
“The most vile, extreme, and often violent behavior that threatens peaceful social order” are already prohibited and penalized.
Not talking about hate crimes here, but specifically hate speech and more broadly expanded power of those in power to limit speech by expanding the concept of harms that justify speech becoming not protected speech to speech that simply offends specific groups.
I am very much against free speech absolutism and for a consideration having speech being not protected when the speech in question causes certain harms, but I believe that being offensive speech is a not a sufficient harm in and of itself to move speech into the not protected realm. When there is a direct link to speech restricting the rights of others, that’s a place to think about it. Such as in the Meritor case.
It is exclusively about the propagandizing of views strongly objected to itself based on the belief that the propaganda itself causes harms worth restricting or minimally set the stage for such harms.