Why Are Millennials Wary of Freedom?

No to the latter; the problem is that it would literally be bad law. It does not target that which you wish to target, and would prosecute those who have done no wrong, because the wrong is defined by what's in the prosecution's head instead of something the defendant actually did.

You're saying that laws should be passed and then we can see as a society how those laws work out, which is absolutely backwards. Bills should be constructed and debated until they're acceptable for broad application in all situations & directions, and only then be signed into law. (unfortunately, it's all lobby and panic driven nowadays)

Again, if you want to fine others for speaking indecently in your eyes, then others can fine you for speaking indecently in their eyes. That's nonsensical for a legal structure.

I am under the impression that you've never been involved in any legal proceedings. None of it is ever about what is right or reasonable; it's ALL about finding out if the letter of the law (or contract, or whatever) has been breached. If a law goes on the books, people will be prosecuted for it by its letter, regardless of the law's intent. That's literally the job of the legal industry. And this isn't because the government magically decides to clamp down on things, it's because individuals with disagreements start bringing lawsuits, empowered by new laws.

> Now, I think a lot of people, young ones more so even, including me, have noticed a trend of a kind of speech which seems to only harm society or individuals.

The traditional media and social media websites make money off that polarization and viral outrage. It attracts monetizable eyeballs and clicks. This isn't a representative state of the day to day behavior of people, it's an artificially concentrated charged environment that certain charged people engage with, while everybody else steps back and calls them weirdo zealots. Those who get sucked into the ridiculousness do so by yelling at constructed stereotype targets, never by actually having conversations with actual people in real life, and are often quite different IRL than online.

This simply isn't "real" enough to legislate. It's a bunch of hotheads yelling at each other. Why should this be a legal matter?

> Providing no positive social value, other then power to those who speak it. And the issue is not with the ideas being controversial, or unpopular, but really with how it is spoken in demagoguery terms.

Having no social value, and trying to muster social momentum to somebody's claims has no basis to be illegal. That's my fundamental question of you.

The US government is constrained in its powers; what significant impetus is there to expand this to something with such massive collateral damage and slippery slopes?

You're the one calling for change, so it's your views that need the burden of proof.

> If I acknowledge this problem, I conclude that fully unconstrained speech has its own set of downsides and issues to a healthy society.

I think you're barking up a red herring, to mix metaphors. The fact that people are screaming over each others' caricatured ideas is not caused by the lack of laws punishing it.

> I think denying either of these problems is just ignoring reality. So what do we do? Do we continue down the path of accelerating demagoguery speech until it overtakes most outlets, and accentuate the problem? Do we ignore the people who do suffer harm from such speech?

I said this in the very beginning: "Any argument for free speech necessarily empowers unacceptable speech, and any argument against free speech necessarily criminalizes acceptable speech." I think it's better to have people disagreeing with each other, than the government criminalizing the populace for acting like humans with beliefs & opinions.

> Do we continue down the path of accelerating demagoguery speech until it overtakes most outlets, and accentuate the problem? Do we ignore the people who do suffer harm from such speech?

But those things aren't real.

Demagoguery doesn't work unless people buy into it. If people buy into it, that indicates it's where people were heading anyway; it's just rallying. Suffering "harm" from speech is in very few cases an actual thing, and where it is it's already illegal. There are fundamental disagreements about where the country should go, what's "right" for the country, how children should be raised/corrected/taught, how drugs should be handled, what should be paid for by taxes, etc etc. These disagreements must be able to be out there in the court of public opinion for a free society to develop answers to them. Some will be reasoned, some will be emotional, and some will scream on social media. Again, why is that a problem? Why must it be a legal issue? WHY????!?!?!?!? :)

> So my first instinct is to explore hybrid solutions. Can we be smarter about speech. Can you restrict the worse of it, while not damaging the best of it?

You don't get to decide for everybody else what's the "worst" and "best" parts of their free speech!

It would be a social and cultural movement which accomplishes change of speech. The law won't change how people think & believe, and the law has no mandate to be involved here. Plus, it would cause martyr complexes and streisand effects which would have the exact opposite outcome to your intent.

I think you're literally talking about using the law to allow you to promote your ideas, by criminalizing promotion of ideas that you're against. Now imagine for a moment that somebody of the ideas you're against is taking the same approach. You'd be quite militant against that situation, wouldn't you? If they can't do it, then why should you have the right to? I don't care which side is which, that's a legal usurpation of freedom. Keep this stuff in non-governmental speech among the population.

> Now, I just think if we don't acknowledge the problem though

You're being incredibly nebulous about "the problem". What specific problem is there with all the online argumentative babbling out there that you think requires legal action, and is not already illegal? People yelling at each other? People calling each other names? People posting propaganda to try to increase the purchase of the ideas they want to peddle?

It's up to listeners to freely determine what they agree with or not, who's worth listening to, and where they will give their social weight. If listeners are empowering those peddling speech you dislike, well then I guess you're democratically outnumbered and the people have spoken to what they actually want. Or, it could simply be that you're listening to overblown media caricature-laden hype and the "problems" that you see are smaller or more nuanced in reality than what you might believe.

But really, look at what you're saying. Legislation, re-education, categorizing other people's speech for legal consequences...

Ah, ok. Since you were always pointing to insults and demagoguing and such as things that must be legally silenced, I thought you were placing the content of the discourse as the problem.

> newer generations seem to devalue the merits of free speech and democracy. Now why is that?

The simplest reasonable answer is just that they're distanced further from the solved problems of the past, and from the solutions deemed necessary to counteract or prevent those problems. And thus, history begins to repeat itself.

I hope you're not excluding yourself from the label of devaluing the merits of free speech, because obviously you're promoting a reduction of free speech as well, for reasons you still haven't made clear.

> I'm saying I think a bill to restrict certain nefarious speeches

Again, who defines the "certain nefarious" categories?

We already have a term that acts a barrier that when crossed triggers the law: Damages. Your rights end where my nose starts. But as long as you're not that far, you're within your rights. I think that's the cleanest boundary to draw.

> And now, that to me, would help freedom and the safeguard of the free society.

"Hate" and "insulting" speech doesn't harm anything, except maybe blood pressure temporarily. It's damaging actions that do, and that's completely irrespective of whether they're driven by this ill-defined usage of "hate" or not. So leave the thoughtcrime alone, and police the actual crime. The only "hate" you actually need to worry about is that which manifests into action, which would be policed anyway.

> Now, I think there's a certain amount of speech right now, which is hateful and insulting, and some of it could be demonstrated to be hurtful to a free and democratic society.

I'll bite. Name one common case, where legal speech and not action is the problem. "Hurtful" as in feelings is a nonstarter as a literally anti-American concept: Diversity itself hurts feelings and offends beliefs, and we are an intentionally diverse nation.

> Well, it seems that some other countries have managed to find a better balance and contradict that statememt, yet remained very free and democratic.

I'd posit it has nothing to do with the laws, and more to do with having a more unified cultural identity than the USA. There are also tons of other factors which show you can't simply translate the effectiveness & outcome of a law across borders, especially when they're at the core of particular social unrest.

> I think you just don't believe that this level of precision is possible.

It's not the precision of censorship that's a problem, it's that you feel some sort of (what I would personally call tyrannical) passion to punish these targeted people in this way. Remember, you're talking about social media and such, where people socialize and banter with their friends, where people get into arguments over disagreements just like in real life, and where everybody overpublishes flippant reactionary stuff that would previously have been private. That's a lot of very new & very raw human interaction and personal expression going on there. Let it settle.

> And examples of recent corporations taking actions against employees debating hot topics and getting fired over it is irrelevant, as that's more of a debate about corporate power, and the bounds of a contract.

I agree. That's angry mob stuff, not legal stuff, and has its own problems.

> But, I have to say, you're making me think twice. I don't believe in the outrageous dangers of such restrictions, but you've made me think that maybe there's also little gain, and so the whole exercise might be a bit of a waste of time and effort.

Thank you. Yes, that's a lot of what I was pointing at.

But in places like Germany, the speech legislation has galvanized underground Nazi movements which keep popping up and growing. In the long view, it's probably better for the speech itself to be free and deposed, than for it to be illegal and foment in private as secret underdogs and martyrs. So it's not just for little gain, it's easily damaging (because it will be applied "legally" aka by the letter of the law) and counterproductive by galvanizing counter elements.

> I don't believe in the outrageous dangers of such restrictions

How different is this from the dangers of drug laws? Exposure laws as I brought up before? Laws around suspicion of terror? These have already destroyed tons of lives beyond their intended targets. There's a lot of danger in vague ideas gaining a specific legal wording, and having a police & court system bound to enforcing those words. It's best to only legislate the subset that has can be more objectively tested in court.

If you search around, you'll also see plenty of cases of hate speech laws being overapplied in the countries you venerate here as well. Laws are dangerous things (and moreso in the USA than most smaller 1st world countries), and we should not be passing permanent law to deal with temporary flare-up problems.

BTW, go read some legal stories from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15492907

> Maybe I worry about hateful and insulting speech too much, and its harmless

It's certainly not harmful enough to summon Justice to bring wrath down on people's personal interactions (ie, social media interactions) through the letter of the law.

> or maybe you're right, preventing that kind of speech is just covering up the inevitable, if people chose to hate and insult, society might be going that way no matter what restrictions are put in place.

You can't control what others believe & say, society-wide. This is especially true if you're using a stick instead of a carrot. It's simply out of your hands. Just focus on your actions, and your own sphere of influence. You will be subjected to people who find you just as disagreeable as they are to you. That's life, and it's a two-way street. You don't get to destroy them, just as you wouldn't want them destroying you; you get to coexist with them in this big ol' melting pot of diversity.

But I'm still left questioning why "hate" and "insult", when it's just bloviating words in an impersonal setting such as broad internet discussions, need to be punished.

Surely your own words are formally "hating" and "insulting" what you disagree with, in calling someone's earnest words "worse speech" than others, labeling people as "demagogues", openly advocating to suppress & punish other people's words & expressions via new laws. Even the notion of labeling "hate" is basically prejudiced hate & insult if the only thing it's based on is a shallow disagreement. It doesn't matter how rational it's dressed up.

The KKK has engineered very specific rationalizations and tempered sounding non-prosecutable speech over the years, for instance. That doesn't make it any less "hate", does it? So shouting/insulting/etc is orthogonal to all of this, and shouldn't be a basis for your punishment proposals either.