If it were only in that country. Support for censorship is growing everywhere. People aren’t accepting anymore to read or hear something that offends them, and the “elites”, when they aren’t already promoting more restrictions to speech, seem to have given up on defending the concept of free speech.
You think that a sarcastic or satirical intent would allow you to get away with a prosecution for publishing racist speech?
Who gets to decide what is satirical and sarcastic and what is not?What make you think that people will accept that “satire” is a valid excuse for speech that appears hateful. Most certainly, there are many people who think that hate speech is totally unacceptable, even with a humorous intent.
Are you sure that you are yourself perfectly objective, and don’t tend to assume an evil intent for speech coming form the “enemy” side, and a satirical intent for speech coming from the “good” side?
And even assuming that you’re absolutely sure that the court will correctly interpret your statement as satirical, and you won’t be sentenced, are you so willing to go through the hassle and expense of fighting your case in court? Are you interested in seeing all papers with a “Kobal2 prosecuted for racist speech” “Racist statement by Kobal2 : SOS Racisme will be civil party” in their headlines? If you’re, say, a TV anchor, do you think that your employer won’t fire you in case of significant controversy, even if he’s himself convinced that it was satire?Or would you rather shut up and shelve your satire as, currently, more and more people do with everything that can be perceived as offensive, regardless how stupid you would have to be to not notice the satirical intent?
And by the way, I mentioned above the French law that now mandates that companies like Facebook and such delete within 24 hours any instance of hate speech or face huge fines. Do you think that they’ll waste a quarter of a second wondering if it’s satire or not and risk paying some millions euros in fine if they’re deemed wrong, or that they’ll rather delete immediately anything that can, even remotely be construed as racism? Even though this would be done by a private company, it would be a direct consequence of “hate speech” laws.
Bullshit. Jeong was doing racist tweets long before anyone “harassed” her. And even if she wasn’t, that doesn’t make her tweets magically not racist. Racism in response to racism is still racism.
Of course not. But that’s why my personal definition of “hate speech” is much narrower than simply “is racist/prejudiced” or “is disparaging of X” ; and further my opinion that any hate speech prosecution should have to prove a continuous, habitual pattern of engaging in hate speech rather than punctual, context-free statements or sound bytes.
Because e.g. my bantering with Jewish friends and jokingly responding to their mockery of something I enjoy with “yeah well you guys made up the Holocaust so shut up !” or similar (which would be over the top and ridiculous and something my friends and people who know me realize it is not something I actually believe) is very different from someone saying it in earnest, over and over again in every aspect of their lives, or writing books about the evils of Them Jooz and not distancing themselves from neonazis etc…
Actually yes. I would expect my co-workers and people who’ve actually met me to support my sarcastic ass against bad faith accusations levied against me by random trolls seeking to silence, not my sarcastic “hate speech”, but what I actually say and believe and support.
Which is why Sarah Jeong still has a job and James Gunn got un-fired.
I don’t really see that happening. Most of the media I consume is satirical and un-PC as hell. Most people have no problem with un-PC language as long as the person isn’t being *actually *shitty, is at least a little self-aware etc…
Nonsense. Flipping racist diatribes around to lampoon and lampshade how ridiculous they are isn’t an expression of racism.
Bullshit. Much of the time she wasn’t doing anything like that, she was just saying straight up racist shit like “fuck white women lol” or “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” or “White men are such bullshit”.
Now, that’s not lampooning or lamp-shading anything. That’s just fucking racism. You can try to spin it as some kind of exquisitely meta-textual trope splitting satire if you like, but don’t expect anyone else to take you seriously.
Hate speech should be tied to actual plausible threat of violence.
I’m OK with tying that to historic plausibility.
This is why I’d consider an American White person calling an American Black person the word “nigger” to be hate speech, while the latter calling the former the word "cracker’ is not. Both are racist*, but only one carries the history of enslavement and lynching and burning crosses with it.
There are hate speech laws in my country. Just gratuitously flying the flag of the old regime is now hate speech. And I’m fine with that.
- the caveat here being of course that they are not engaging in friendly banter where both are accepting of the speech.
So some of the time she was, according to you.
So those times where even you have to admit she was clearly being satirical she wasn’t being racist, but those times where you can isolate and spin it’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT even though, in context and aggregate with the tweets that are clear and unmistakable satire one would obviously understand that these isolated phrases were satirical too, she was being serious. Which proves she’s a racist. As further evidenced by the fact that she’s… not writing shit like that anymore ? And wasn’t writing shit like that before, contrary to what you’re claiming.
Convincing. The defense rests.
(For further evidence of what it is Unreconstructed Man is, knowingly or not, engaging is, see this video)
Yes. Occasionally, it would be clear from the context of her tweets that Sarah Jeong was using racist tropes to make fun of racists.
Other times - many other times - it would be clear from the context of her tweets that she was just being a fucking racist. Like when she tweeted “Fuck white women lol”. That wasn’t a response to racism. That wasn’t Jeong taking a racist trope and turning it on it’s head to make a greater point. That was just “fuck white women lol”.
You seem to think that someone who is aware of racist tropes - and who is even, in limited circumstances, capable of mocking them - could never actually be racist themselves. But that’s utter bullshit. Of course they can! Particularly if, like Sarah Jeong, they don’t think racism against white people is ”real” racism.
It’s clear that, no matter how many examples I provide, you’re just going to scream “TOTALLY DIFFERENT! CONTEXT!!! CONNNNNNTEEEEXTT!!!” at me regardless. So how about this: Find me the context that makes “Fuck white women lol” acceptable.
It’s okay. I’ll wait.
I’m not going to watch a 35 minute TED talk just because you couldn’t be bothered to type an extra sentence.
Of course you’re not going to watch. I was linking it for the benefit of intellectually curious who actually care to know what harassment culture (and particularly alt-right, bad faith harassment culture) does and presents and causes. Not people who already know because they’re engaged in doing it.
But once you’ve accepted the concept of banning hate speech, you aren’t the one who gets to decide what is hate speech and what is not. Your opinion on that matter isn’t anymore valid than the opinion of the person who wants a vastly more restrictive implementation. And currently, in fact, we aren’t going towards a restrictive interpretation of what hate speech is, rather towards a more and more extensive view.
Basically, supporting censorship is saying : “there are things that are so bad that we shouldn’t allow people to say them”. Once you’ve agreed with that principle, and support it, deciding where the line should be drawn between “real bad” and “not so bad” is entirely subjective and can change at any time in any direction (and will tend to be more and more extensive because everybody will think : "if X can’t be said because it offends that guy, then Y shouldn’t be said either because it offends me). And there’s no way you can show that your subjective line in the sand is any better or make any more sense than that other arbitrary line in the sand. By validating the legitimacy of banning repeated and extremely offensive hate statement, you’re validating the legitimacy of banning somewhat offensive and occasional hate statements. By accepting the legitimacy of banning hateful racist statement, you’re accepting the legitimacy of banning hateful antinational statements as well, for instance. Whatever will get banned will only depend on the trend of the moment once you’ve agreed with censorship.
Free speech is an either/or issue. Either you open the flood gates, or you don’t. Voltaire, in his famous quote, didn’t make any exception for speech he really, really, really, hated. And there’s a reason why he didn’t.
And how do you know that Jews didn’t make up the holocaust? That’s a second, huge, issue there is with limiting free speech.
Denying the holocaust is currently a crime in France. You (generic you) can’t publish a book explaining that it didn’t happen, you can’t create a website explaining that it didn’t happen, you can’t explain on TV why you think it didn’t happen. Which means that you (specific you) don’t have access to information disproving the holocaust. You can’t know what are the arguments of people believing that the holocaust didn’t happen (maybe they discovered last year in Tel Aviv the reels proving definitely that all the extermination camp footage you have seen were faked in a studio, for instance). As a result, you can’t state anymore that the holocaust did happen. You’re in the same position wrt the holocaust as comrade Popov was in 1950 wrt the statements he was reading in the Pravda. He can’t judge if they’re true or not, since he knows that any contradicting information will be suppressed.
And of course, don’'t assume that it will be as caricatural as the holocaust example (although…beware…it can always becomes exactly as caricatural. There are no lack of examples). It might be that the racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever has a good, valid, argument on some aspect of a social issue. But this argument will be suppressed becomes it comes in support of a statement deemed hateful. To give an example, statements critical of Islam, even extremely valid ones, are coming under fire currently in the name of the fight against Islamophobia. And of course, although you’re apparently ignoring this possibility, another otherwise valid argument will be suppressed because it comes in support of a hateful statement decrying our nation, its glorious history and its citizens or insulting the beliefs of the Catholic church.
Choosing censorship is choosing ignorance. There’s no other way to put it. The only rational position when speech in support of X is banned is to admit that you can’t know anymore if X is correct or not.
And thinking that censorship is likely to stay limited to whatever you approve of is naive at best. When the law about suppressing hate speech on social media that I mentioned twice was voted, deputies tried to introduce all sorts of things under “hate speech”, from supporting pornography to disparaging traditional agricultural practices. As I already wrote, support for censorship of offensive speech is very trendy at the moment, and everybody has a long list of things he finds offensive.
And what about people who don’t know you? Why should I assume that your statement was a joke? And even if I believe it was a joke, what if I’m of the opinion that not only it’s a terrible joke (I’m honestly surprised that none of your Jewish friends ever told you to fuck off with this joke, in fact, because even I would find its repetition pretty tiring and offensive, eventually), but also that it stays equally offensive and is still hate speech, and that you still should be sentenced for holocaust denial?
Presumably, you don’t read the same things I do, or are less sensitive to the continuous attacks against free speech. A lot of people have a problem with un-PC things.
This isn’t true. When Jeong was first called out for her racism, she tried to cloud the issue by saying that her racism was ‘ironic’ and in response to racism she had received. She tried to substantiate this by citing two racist tweets that she got; one from September 2014 and one from October 2014. Those were her examples, that she chose.
The problem? Jeong was doing anti white tweets before then.
Oh, does this mean you’re picking up your ball and going home?
I’d have to review, but could we conclude that since you’ve chosen to discuss only the Jeong case, it implies you do not believe there are other cases?
But I guess in the interest of actually getting people to watch it, I might as well summarize it : it’s a talk by Lindsey Ellis, a minor YouTube personality who happens to be a girl and a feminist and who does film criticism. She’s pretty funny and good at it, and I enjoin you to look her up and watch her explaining and demonstrating complex film theories strictly through the lens of Michael Bay’s *Transformers *franchise. It’s hilarious.
But anyway, during the James Gunn manufactured outrage episode she happened to publicly defend him on Twitter at which point she was seized upon by the throng of alt right idiots spouting their usual nonsense. In response to some guy accusing her of enabling white genocide, which as we all know is something that is real and happens and is totally a threat to American society, she responded by sarcastically saying she was “enthusiastic about white genocide” because it was “going to be the best genocide ever” and she was “making a Pinterest board about it”. Lindsay is white herself, if that matters or dispel any doubt that she was being in any way serious. It was just a silly response to a silly person which at the time was barely noticed by anyone.
Then Ellis’ work became a little more mainstream and she was booked for a show on PBS, at which point her harassers started plastering that one tweet over and over again as proof that she was a racist hatemonger ; demanded she be fired ; harassed her friends and coworkers and every last PBS affiliate with that nonsense to the point where even though they knew it was a cut-and-dry bullshit attack they still didn’t want to touch Ellis or support her for fear of catching the hate crowd’s attention themselves - basically the reactionary culture war machine organized a concerted attack against her based entirely on a bad faith take of one isolated tweet, and she had no idea how to deal with that.
The rest of the talk is about how all of that affected her personally (spoiler : she had to have herself committed at one point), how everything she tried to address the “controversy” failed and the reasons it failed, as well as tentative advice to other progressive YouTube content creators on how to deal with that shit in the future.
I found OP unclear and stopped reading the thread. Here are the four examples in OP:
My own views:
A. Regardless of whether Americans approve of American free speech traditions, I’m stunned that an intelligent person wouldn’t understand that some cultures and some good-spirited people might want to ban such things as Koran burning.
B. America’s enemy subverted an American election and got their pawn elected. Surely we should explore ways to prevent such sabotage (though we should try to do so with only modest effect on the legitimate free-speech rights of Americans).
C. [confused] America’s news media now has dismal quality; and it is getting worse. This is a separate (though closely related) topic.
D. If this study is being used in support of the claim that American free speech just ain’t working as well as we’d like, then count me in!
I see the situation the same as I do gun control. Other countries have laws against hate speech, and they seem to work well. The US is well known for its racism problem–less so other countries.
“Censorship!” is not an argument. Freedom of speech has always had limits. You can’t false advertise, you can’t libel, you can’t slander, etc. Freedom of speech is a concept created by the government to prevent the party in power from creating laws to silence their opposition. Such cannot occur in a democracy–one must be free to discuss changing the current policy. It doesn’t exist so that people are free to harm people with their words. In fact, the stuff I mentioned exist to try and minimize the ability to use speech to harm others.
There is this weird cultural thing in America and not elsewhere that elevates “freedom of speech” above all other considerations, rather than justice or fairness or equality. Stephen Fry said it best when he said freedom of speech is treated as a tool in other countries, rather than an end to itself like in the US.
I do not worry about the law being unfairly implemented, because it would inherently be less unfair than things are now. It is unfair right now that minorities face bigotry that the majority does not. As long as the laws are actually written in such a way to describe bigoted speech, it’d be fine. Hate speech is not so complicated to define when you don’t have people who are trying to undermine the very concept involved.
As for us not having all the classes already covered yet? Well, that’s true, but that’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. No one argues that we shouldn’t have anti-discrimination law because not everything is covered by the “suspect class” designation. No, we simply argue that more classes should be added.
Reasonable hate speech laws, like reasonable gun control laws, would be useful. No, no law is perfect. We’d have to err on the side of caution, letting things go that are clearly bigoted. But it can be done.
And, honestly, like gun control laws, I feel that those who say it is wrong but refuse to try tactics that have worked in other countries are doing the equivalent of just offering their “thoughts and prayers.” The ability to use a gun isn’t more important than lives, and this mythically pure “freedom of speech” that exists nowhere and would be inherently harmful (as the exceptions show) isn’t more important than fighting the very real harm that bigotry does.
It bugs me that this is some sort of extreme position in the US.
This presupposes that all hate speech carries meaningful information. It does not.
Not directly, no. But I can “decide” by supporting or not supporting the exact writing of the law, discussing my opinion with people etc…
Of course it is, since I’m self-evidently right and they’re wrong 
Possibly, but if that’s the case I tautologically don’t condone or support a more extensive view than my own. I think hate speech, unlike porn, can be very strictly defined and identified by a specific set of characteristics or matrix of comorbid characteristics.
I’d amend that to “some rethoric and ideas are irredeemably toxic and inevitably, inescapably lead to violence”. It’s an utilitarian, consequentialist argument rather than a moral outrage one.
True-ish (in the sense that I don’t think that line is actually all that arbitrary or subjective, and can in fact be qualitatively defined) but so what ? That merely means I should fight to keep the line where I feel it should be rather than where people who are seeking to abuse it want to put it.
Of course I can.
I’m really not. For one immediately coming to mind thing, the nation is by definition not a protected class, not a demonstrably victimized subset of itself, cannot be the victim of violence or aggression, cannot feel distress etc… I strictly reject that slippery slope argument.
I can’t ? I mean I’m pretty sure I can, seeing that as a (future) high school teacher it’s covered in the program and I’m going to have to state it and demonstrate it once a year. And, time constraints permitting, possibly address Holocaust denial itself in passing as a subset of the larger subject of antisemitism.
It really, but really isn’t. Rather it seeks to address the problem of people who *know *it is not correct, but seek to exploit vulnerable persons and funnel them into a hateful worldview with a web of lies and manipulations and bad faith. There is absolutely no credible basis to dispute the reality of the Holocaust, period. And there is no societal benefit to be gained from platforming the bad faith actors who do.
shrug and those deputies are complete idiots at best, and should be voted out for their demonstrabled, demonstrated pinheadery and lack of foresight. Any law can be hijacked and subverted by bad faith actors. Which is why it’s in the public interest not to put dishonest idiots in power.
stares at America, hard
The people who don’t know me can think whatever the fuck they like about me I guess ? If they’re actually interested in my positions or whether or not I was making a joke they can, I dunno, ask me. Or look up my posting history. Or engage with me in good faith and see how that goes. Conversely, if they’re just being offended for the sake of it (or pretend to be for fun and profit), fuck 'em.
(I’m not using that specific kind of joke myself BTW - it was just a caricatural example. If I did and my friends found it unfunny they could, again, maybe mention it to me. One of my lady friends has in fact expressed irritation at my regularly pretending to be an arch-chauvinist prick like my dad, and why it was getting tiresome to her specifically… which has indeed prompted me to try and stop doing that)
Sounds like you’re proposing is the speech version of the Republican health care plan: everyone should speak with civility/have health coverage! I mean, we aren’t actually going to DO anything about it…
Do you oppose other restrictions on speech, like fire/crowded theater or defamation?