Japan is surprisingly racist, altho quiet and sorta polite about it.
And the atrocities in Serbia etc were racist, of course. Far worse than the USA. “Ethic Cleansing” .
:rolleyes:
Canada does not have Trump as President. *'nuff said.
*
I do not see where Germany, France,or South Africa have been improvd by thelegislation of speech laws.
On the other hand, I can see where China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and other places have had negative results from speech laws.
I am supportive of laws against libel/slander, incitement, and similar actions through speech. I do not support, (or see the point) in using the law to suppress the expression of ideas or beliefs.
So what’s the score in this thread? Ravenman, MrDibble and wolfpup support laws banning hate speech, Bryan Ekers is an unknown, and everyone else opposes them?
You don’t think it’s an improvement to walk around in, say, Germany and not have to worry about someone screaming Nazi propaganda at you? Setting aside the question of whether there are other trade offs that make it a bad deal, that seems like a pretty obvious improvement, at least when viewed in isolation.
Before being granted access to national secrets, a person must voluntarily give up their right to speak of those secrets.
Where did I say I support banning hate speech?
That’ll earn you a warning for insults, Kobal. Stop it. Now.
My God, you demand your citizens yield their GOD GIVEN RIGHTS AS AMERICANS FROM AMERICA THE BEGREATEST BESTEST COUNTRY ON EARTH?!?!?!?!
Of course, that still leaves slander, libel and threats, but JEEZUS!!!
Demand? No.
I don’t agree with slander, libel, and threat laws, so there’s that.
I like knowing who my enemies are. I like being able to identify the jackasses. So that’s on them.
We already have those, you know, as well as law against child porn. Surely you’ve heard of “clear and present danger”?
That dog won’t hunt. Also, our laws regarding slander/libel and such have pretty high standards. You better have proof, and it better be good.
There is absolutely no way that would fly. That would probably violate a number of laws, beyond any hate speech one. It sounds like the old “separate but equal”, clause, which was ruled “unconstitutional”.
You may not like it, but that’s how it goes. You can’t have one law for one race, and a different law for another. You’re going to end up creating different classes of people, and that’s the last thing you want.
Not to mention, what if one minority uses a slur against another? Such as Louis Farrakhan and his antisemitism? Or a Native American calls another man a Jap?
I’ll sum it up as Alexander Kerensky once said: “he who does not defend liberty everywhere, defends it not at all.”
I messed up the most important link in my previous post. Sorry about that. This is what I meant to link to:
Hate Speech and Freedom of Expression: Legal Boundaries in Canada
The point I wanted to make with that link, and the rest of my comments in that post, is that hate speech laws are intentionally very limited and very carefully interpreted by the independent judicial system to ensure that their sole effect is to protect vulnerable minorities from horrendous incitements to persecution such as calls for genocide, contrary to all the unfounded hysteria from the right and free-speech absolutists that it will inevitably be used to prevent people from saying mean things about the government.
My whole point is that I completely disagree with the binary absolutism implied in the first sentence. Real-world issues are almost never black-and-white, on or off. With all respect for your service, your predecessors in service – both in your country and in mine – fought the Nazis to ensure that such horrors would never occur again. They didn’t do it so that neo-Nazis could rise again today using exactly the same hateful genocidal rhetoric to corrupt democracy.
Moreover, constitutional absolutism is no protection against the abuses of government. An abusive government could just ignore the Constitution altogether, just as the present administration is ignoring the norms of governance and established law. And even before that, the USA has been far behind most western democracies on the international freedom index, yet has all the social turmoil associated with virtually unfettered hate speech.
There’s nothing weird about it when you put it into the context of our history of censorship. Comstock laws in the 19th century suppressed the distribution of literature regarding contraceptives, southern states curtailed pro-abolition literature and were later aided by congress when it passed a law allowing postmasters for follow local laws regarding such material, threats of government censorship led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority which stifled comic books as a medium, and, hell, even motion pictures have been censored because from 1915 until 1952 they weren’t considered to have any 1st Amendment protections.
I think the best way to ensure fairness and justice is to have a broad definition of freedom of speech.
Sure that seems like an improvement assuming what is considered Nazi propaganda is indisputably Nazi propaganda. But in the real world, empowering the state and the environment that leads to people willingly giving up liberty always has trade offs. Abuse of power by the state has led to more misery and more deaths than any other institution.
But is it reduced? I would argue “Definitely”
I wasn’t talking about your ridiculously outdated constitution.
I take it you’re against Affirmative Action laws and the existence of Native American casinos too?
The difference in classes already exists (unless you do think the word cracker is as hostile a thing to say as the word nigger), I’m talking about reducing the threat.
They’d both be racist. But unless there’s a past history of race-based violence by NoI against Jews, or NAs against Japanese, it doesn’t rise to the level of hate speech.
Preventing hate speech *is *defending liberty. The liberty to live your life free from threat of violence.
Saying anything different is just some “It’s bigoted to oppose bigotry” bullshit.
But you can’t know if it does or not if you can’t hear the speech. As I wrote, if you don’t have access to the arguments of holocaust deniers, you’ve no way to determine if they’re right or wrong and you can only state your ignorance on this issue.
Only by allowing holocaust deniers to speak you can determine if their speech carries meaningful information.
Support for censorship is pretty much always based to the idea that it’s “obvious” that the speech is wrong, which means “my culture/subculture/political side, at this particular moment in time, sees it as wrong, and people who don’t are evil or stupid”. There’s no way restrictions on speech will be based on any kind of unbiased, objective assessments and limited to speech that can be determined objectively as being devoid of meaningful information.
Even assuming that it’s started this way, and it won’t be, people will push to go further. For instance, if you ban statements to the effect that black people are apes because it’s objectively false, they will in no time demand that statements to the effect that they’re ugly should be banned as well, even though this is entirely subjective. Because people don’t want to ban speech that is objectively false, they want to ban speech that offends them. Restriction to speech will be based 99% of the time on banning what the currently most influential part of the population will particularly dislike hearing. Regardless of whether it’s false, impossible to objectively assess, or even objectively true.
And what is banned will of course fluctuates according to random cultural and political changes. The only reason why the progressive left is so willing currently to limit free speech is that they feel that the wind is blowing in their direction, and that the censorship will be of what they dislike. And, as shown in another thread, are under the delusion that it will keep forever to blow in this direction (and not too far in that direction, either). But of course it won’t (not that it would be legitimate to support censorship because you know it will benefit only your side, anyway).
And besides, pushing towards more and more restrictions of speech (and not only by the government, censorship on social medias matters a lot, for instance) will trivialize them, and will inevitably result in more and more people and groups demanding more and more restrictions, and their demands being more and more perceived as legitimate. Once people have been properly convinced that banning hate speech is legitimate, they begin to state that burning the Koran (as we see in this article) or caricaturing Mahomet is hate speech as well (that’s a discourse we begin to hear not only from people who believe that religion is inherently deserving of respect but also from leftist progressives) that should be banned too. And if those things are banned, you can hardly argue that burning the bible, or mocking the tenets of the Christian faith shouldn’t be similarly banned. And anyway, even if you attempt to argue that, since the majority of the population is not composed of people who think that their religion should be less protected than the religion of minority groups, you’ll lose this argument.
Restrictions (of all kind) to free speech is receiving more and more support; and in particular support from the groups that historically used to be the defenders of free speech. Free speech has never been supported by the majority. People in general never really accepted that someone should be allowed to say, print or support ideas that offended them, attacked things they held sacro-sanct, or diverged from what was “obviously” right. Freedom of speech has been maintained only by a constant fight of the progressives against, essentially, the moral majority. For centuries. But now, it’s the former guardians of the gates who say that they should be opened. Ir doesn’t bode well for the future of free speech.
Just a quick last point : there’s a rising generation that thinks that freedom of speech isn’t worth maintaining. They’re, in my opinion, about as deluded as the anti-vaxers, and for more or less the same reasons.
Of course.
Did you imagine hate speech legislation is some form of Precrime? It’s prosecuting people for hate speech utterances they actually make.
Threatening violence is already illegal. And no, I don’t think it’s “bigoted to oppose bigotry”. I do, however, think it’s short-sighted and ineffective.
Oh, there has to be a history of violence by one group against another? :rolleyes: So then is all speech against women by men hate speech? Or does it only count if it’s by race?
Nation of Islam and antisemitism
Affirmative action – that depends on how you define “affirmative action”, and how various laws work.
Casinos – well, I don’t think casinos in general should be banned. Native American reservations are on sovereign land – I’m not an expert there. (Not to mention casinos exist in other areas of the country – there are a few here in Pittsburgh, for example)
The First Amendment is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. People will still suffer consequences. All it means is that the government can’t punish you. But people have lost jobs, business deals, friends, suffered serious ridicule and basically become figures of intense hatred themselves. (Despite their whining that “BUT I HAVE A RIGHT TO MY OPINION!!! FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!”)
You really want to stop hate? You’ll never do it entirely, but the only way is education. NOT banning it. That’s just going to drive it underground and make people feel like martyrs. These dumbasses already claim their rights are violated if someone refuses to sell their books, for example, and their stupid fans lap it all up.