Beating someone up is not “speech” and is obviously already illegal, so I am not sure what the hell it has to do with the subject of restrictions on speech.
… Banning, which is to say robbing someone of their power to speak, is the ultimate violence on a message board where the only possible exercise of individual will is speech. So your saying that societal norms aren’t enforced through coercive power because see, the mods “only” delete you from existence is kind of silly :p. Besides, banning only works to a point, and up to a certain level of disruptive deviation from norms. It doesn’t work to counter, e.g. persistent DDOS attacks. At which points the boards’ powers that be may avail themselves of the government, its laws, and its police to make it stop.
Also, you’re equivocating. We weren’t talking about societal norms and social structures. We were talking about states, and laws. The state, aka the final arbiter and adjudicator when soft power hasn’t sufficed to prevent deviancy from what is “acceptable”, doesn’t “shun” you for such non-compliance with the rules of society.
Not via laws, but thanks to laws. Ok, I’m convinced :p.
And if you think the civil rights movement achieved societal change without any force or threat of violence… You know those famous picture of the Little Rock Nine entering freshly desegrated schools ? You might notice a lot of soldiers with guns in the pictures, standing between them and racist crowds, racist local state officials too. Eisenhower even had to strip the Arkansas governor of his control over the state’s nat guard. Similarly, the gay rights movement only started gaining any sort of traction, and the gay community only achieved a kind of society-wide “queer consciounsess” after Stonewall, a literal brick-throwing riot. A “mob”, in your sneering words.
And here’s the interesting thing : if you go to the Wiki page on the riots, the narrative of the events is titled “violence breaks out” at the point where gays started fighting back against the police. Not before. But coercive arrest is violence, quite directly. The paragraphs just before the “violence breaks out” title mentions cops “kicking”, “pushing”, “shoving” patrons, a woman “hit over the head with a baton”. The context-establishing paragraphs also mention that police raids on gay bars were common and routine at the time. But that’s not considered “violence breaking out” on the part of the state - because that particular violent actor is normalized and accepted, and its violence is implicitly condoned. It lies within the expected norm. It is only when the subjects of state violence start fighting back that, narratively, “violence breaks out”. That’s unironically fascinating to me.
But anyway, and speaking of protected speech, I wanted to ask you something about something you said earlier. You said that, in your opinion, the knowing distribution of false propaganda shouldn’t be protected speech. What do you mean by that, in practical terms ? If we can hypothetically agree that’s what bad faith actors like Andy Ngo are doing, how do you propose society should address such speech or prevent such speech ? Are you suggesting “fake news” laws ?
Yes. And it is a lesser-used resort in less fashy societies. But it still is a resort. As I was saying earlier, fundamentally all of politics is about deciding when violence can or should be used, and when it shouldn’t.
Social shunning and tut-tuting is all well and good - polite society does it to virulent far-right shitheads all the time, and has been for as long as I’ve been alive. Yet the proportional number of virulent far-right shitheads among us has also steadily grown throughout. And within *their *growing spheres and bubbles of speech, away from “normies” like you or I, trust me, use of the n-word or typing it in full is only the tamest of beginnings…
I remember the vigorous debates about “should Jean-Marie Le Pen ever be invited to TV shows ?” back when I was a teenager. I remember when even mainstream journalists were using words like “the brown[shirt] plague” to refer to the Front National. And I remember when we were collectively shocked and appaled by their achieving double digits in elections, when Béruriers Noirs were screaming “never 10% again !” in concerts or the consternation when the very first FN mayor was elected in Orange.
Flash forward to now. Marine Le Pen is routinely invited on TV, and nobody questions it nor the legitimacy of platforming her to let her spew her poison. She publishes smiling selfies with east european straight-up nazis, flashing the “OK” sign which is of course a white power sign, and when eyebrows are raised back home she indignantly exclaims that it is “the international sign of SCUBA divers !”. And the mainstream goes “ah, ok then, carry on”. Her political party - the platform of which hasn’t changed a tiny bit since the days of her father, only the level of polish and dogwhistling of the language has - is now routinely up to 20%+ in national elections and a strict majority in a large number of localities. Mainstream figures on the right, even in the so-called center, routinely trot out FN talking points that would have been met with shocked gasps and triggered instant street protests in my youth. It’s all very normal and polished and nobody says bougnoule at all.
It is a tiny bit concerning.
So, what do ?
Not *source *of law. Expression of law. The source of laws (in a democracy) is a shared consensus and social contract achieved through discourse, vote, all that jazz. But when we have agreed on what the laws should be, we then enforce them through power.
And I don’t think it’s really in question that, yes, “mob action” as you call it is sometimes justifiable - or at the very least, sometimes justified in the collective narrative. If you’re American, your country was born out of “mob action” - violent opposition to the state, in defiance of its laws & norms. Starting with mobs throwing bricks at redcoats and snowballing from there. My own country had of course its number of revolutions, the first of which is still put on the national pedestal and harkened back to all the time.
So if we can accept that, e.g. the War of Independance was justified, or justifiable, and a good thing even ; then we have legitimized the validity or legitimacy of some individually decided violence on some grounds. And from that point, well, where back to negociating when it is, when it isn’t… politics.
I agree with most of that post, but that part jarred me in comparison to the rest. The whole idea of free speech IMO is to avoid censorship particularly of descriptive statements, according what the majority of the public (or ‘the govt’, it doesn’t really matter for this purpose how responsive to majority will you think the govt is) views as ‘false’. If there were really a way to comprehensively determine in advance, of argument and rebuttal, what was ‘false’, then we wouldn’t have to worry about speech rights. The basic reason we worry about it is that it’s not obvious in advance in important cases what is ‘false’. Argument among ideas is generally needed to establish what’s true and false, where it can be determined at all.
Some things are obviously false, of course. But the whole reason for speech rights is the cases where it’s not, even though some or most people think it is. The back and forth on Ngo, Proud Boys, Antifa etc illustrates that clearly to me. Lots of statements made on this thread about what’s ‘true’ and ‘false’ between or among those players that I’m far less than 100% sure of, and I do not accept the right of 50%+1 of my fellow citizens to make that decision for me.
Also I asterisked descriptive because I’m a 99.9% 1st amendment absolutist on speech which purports to describe the state of the world, as opposed to prescribe what should happen to X person or Y group. In rare cases one really absolutely solidly amounts to the other, that’s the 0.1%. Libel/slander against individuals is a separate category. But saying the Holocaust didn’t happen should absolutely be protected speech in my view, not because it might not have happened, it happened. But unless the law specifically listed a very limited number of cases (some countries do wrt that event for example) it’s open to simply proclaiming, as various posts on this thread, that actually quite debatable statements IMO are absolutely ‘true’ or ‘false’, and their truth/falsehood becoming law if 50%+1 agree. And even if you do specify a very limited number of topics, you’ll have problems at the margins of those topics. My example, the Holocaust, is a relatively discreet event which either happened or not basically (again, it did). Specifically sensitive topics in the US are likely to be much more vague, eg. a special exemption allowing govt censorship of claims that a racial group is superior/inferior. What actually constitutes saying that? It’s pointless to ban the simple sentence “X group is inferior” because you can effectively say something similar myriad other ways. But allowing myriad other ways to be censored according to majority vote of what ‘constructively’ amounts to ‘X group is inferior’ is a less free society, and I don’t see a compelling reason to adopt a less free society at this point. One might have to choose a less free society when that’s the only way to preserve basic order and survival, but I don’t see the US as being anywhere near there. Other countries can do as they like, obviously.
On prescriptive statements, ‘here’s what we should do to person X or group Y’, the US system does allow censorship, prior restraint, civil and criminal action for statements that exceed a certain, case law determined, threshold of specificity and imminence of threat. I don’t see that that system is basically broken so I wouldn’t basically change it. But it’s by nature drawing a line in a grey area, so might be adjusted. It’s not something you can say you are close to absolutely for or against IMO as censoring descriptive ‘false’ information.
And this is where I stop going down this specific rabbit hole.
I do see your points. Still -
I was thinking of the sorts of things that were being alleged in this discussion, and could take it even a step farther - should a deep fake video, presented as showing a member of a group (not identifiable as an individual and thus covered by slander or libel) murdering someone, be able to be presented by someone who created it for its use as propaganda against that group, be covered as protected speech?
shrug suit yourself. If you want to restrict your concept of violence to “my fist in your face” that’s fine ; but it’s a rather narrow, unexplored understanding of the nature of violence or its expressions IMO. One that implicitly negates useful concepts like economic violence, structural violence, slow violence, collective violence, symbolic violence etc…
My current position on ‘deep fakes’ is that society is just going to have to adapt to the idea that ‘video evidence’ is no longer worth shit by itself. Even now, the potential for selective editing in non-fake man-in-street cellphone video means it should be viewed very skeptically IMO, or at least until there’s time for additional more complete versions to surface. That’s illustrated in any number of cause celebre ‘caught on video’ events in media/internet in recent years.
And I assume society will adapt. But I’m not 100% sure, and I could conceive of deep fakes even if not aimed at specific individuals as being another discreet exception to the rule ‘no govt action v descriptive speech’, along with the relatively rare cases where the descriptive/prescriptive boundary is truly obscure. But usually it’s not. Usually it’s a bootstrap with pro-censorship people claiming that descriptive takes on the world they really don’t like (and which sometimes are absolutely false, but often that’s a matter of opinion) are the same thing as calls for violence, when they’re not really.
Also another traditional dividing line in US treatment of speech has been written word v other. Vs live speech and v ‘use of the public airwaves’, which is where video used to be pretty exclusively disseminated. Now that video is a democratized mass tool of expression one can’t rule out the existing system of case law adapting to that new situation, potentially even legislation. But still for speech limiting legislation, I’d generally risk the supposed ills of greater freedom of expression over the potential unintended consequences of speech restriction. It’s a very high bar to get over for me to be in favor of any such law in the US. And if the question is making it illegal to ‘knowingly write and distribute “false” information describing the world’ I’d say pretty much just, ‘no’.
I think I can sign on to your general framework, inclusive of the option for discreet exceptions. My discomfort is including as “protected speech” the creation and knowing propagation of false and/or falsified “evidence” presented as real with intent to deceive.
My sense is that we are in broad agreement:
The degree to which speech is protected in the United States as “free speech” has real risks and harms. There are costs associated with the freedom.
Free speech is not an absolute thing anywhere inclusive of the United States; it is balanced against those harms. It is naive to take a fully absolutist view or one that presumes “the marketplace of ideas” will always result in the best ideas winning; sometime the bad guys win and market better. Sometimes them even selling a smallish demographic on their ideas can have significant antisocial and criminal consequences.
SCOTUS rulings have set pretty high standards for what levels of harms move speech outside of the protected encampment, based on level of incitement, imminence of threat, and magnitude of infringement of the rights of others (e.g. speech against a group in a workplace creating a hostile environment). Legislation that goes beyond those established lines would likely fail without an amendment, and such legislation would also be very unlikely to actually accomplish very much reduction of those harms. OTOH actually delivering on the ability to reduce the size of the protected encampment runs significant risks of unintended consequences.
Individuals and groups can use speech in fully public venues to object to other speech; both forms are protected. Neither has a right to be allowed in private venues, be they social media venues, or college lecture halls, or otherwise. That’s up to the “owner” of the venues who may respond according to their perceived self-interests as users of their venues will vote with their feet, eyeballs, and earpans, along with their own speech in reaction.
Does that seem broadly what you’d agree with?
Anecdote is not data.
What I see are rightwingers who are actually wearing swastikas, quoting Nazis, (Steve Bannon) , wearing Nazi emblems, (Iron Cross, the SS lightning bolts, etc----Milo Yiannapolos used these to make fashion statements) openly in public whining about getting called out for it. The “you call everybody a Nazi” thing is pretty weird on the rightwing, considering another popular argument of theirs is that the Nazis were actually socialists. Because, of course, hatemongering bigots who invented ways to make genocide efficient can be trusted to …tell the truth while they are attempting to gain political power?
There is also the fact that at least one actual Nazi has run for office. As a Republican, of course.
Relevant (turn subtitles on).
Anecdotes are data.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/12/25/data/
He offered only his experience, using a common rightwing trope designed to deflect attention from the fact that Nazis are, in fact, attracted to the right wing, marching in Trump hats.
The rightwingers that Trump defended after Charlottesville included Nazis.https://www.google.com/amp/s/psmag.com/.amp/ideas/the-far-right-doesnt-want-to-beat-the-left-it-wants-to-eliminate-it
They did and do not march for Hillary or Bernie or Kamala Harris. Richard Spencer was just revealed to be a ranting racist in an audio tape. Arthur Jones—a Nazi----ran as a Republican.
The conclusion that the rightwing’s policies are attracting Nazis and are attractive to bigots is not an inaccurate one at all. The GOP has as its head a man who denounces all Mexicans as “rapists”, sought to ban Muslims from the US, declared African nations to be “shithole countries”, and for years declared that the first African American president must be a foreigner born on Kenyan soil. Sarcastic, maybe, but not in bad faith at all. Add to that Trump’s open threats of violence against his detractors and the unflattering picture of the rightwing that forms is neither inaccurate nor unfair.
I am not arguing that point, just trying to correct the common mistake that anecdotes are not data. Because they are.
What’s your excuse when little old ladies in walkers are threatened with violence by masked Antifa thugs over politics? Orangemanbad! made them do it?
Not much need for excuse for what exists in your imagination. I’ve certainly held Antifa to account in this thread for some things, and there are some who embrace that label more prone to use violence to respond to what they perceive as threats than others, no excuses should be made for those few … but terrorizing little old ladies in walkers is not on that list.
If you are going to assert I’m lying at least be correct with your assertion.
Context ?
(Also, I don’t get the obsession with the masks.
It’s certainly legal to wear a mask. It’s smart to wear one when you’re protesting people who are known to single people out of a protest crowd for the purpose of doxxing them, “tuning them up” or worse *after *the demo. And it certainly helps should the cops start getting all profligate and distributive with the tear gas - I’ve seen people wearing some type of mouth & nose cover in pretty much every demo crowd, right *or *left.
So what gives ?)
?
I see nothing there that is violent or shows threatening violence. I see chanting a slogan and blocking the pathway (the protest is trying to gain attention by preventing foot and vehicular traffic by passively blocking it?) ironically to your point with the protester being very careful not to touch the other person and attentively placing their feet up to a line from which they don’t move just so they can’t be charged with a basketball foul.
So no accusation of lying made, just noting your very active imagination.
Just as much so the older couple does not behave in any way that seem as if they feel threatened in any way.
Obnoxious speech maybe. Worst thing is pointing a finger towards the man’s face. Not an Antifa fan but comparing this video clip to those espousing Nazi philosophies and making actual threats of violence sometimes acted on?
Quite imaginative.