101–110 of 154 posts
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We should have all of those, but right now we have those asymmetrically depending on your cause.
What does "asymmetrically" mean other than freedom of speech not implying freedom from consequences?
>In other words, the First Amendment recognizes that the government cannot regulate “hate speech” without inevitably silencing the dissent and dialogue that democracy requires While I'm all for debates about the pros and cons of more or less permissive speech policies, sentences like this always betray the quasi religious nature of American speech attitudes. Many of the oldest democracies in the world work perfectly…
Free speech as the right to dissent in a democracy, almost every reasonable person in the western world can get behind this.
Free speech as the right to march in the streets demanding the destruction of democracy and the physical harassment and denial of rights to minority groups, advocating the use of political violence, the removal of democratically elected figures, the alteration of elections, and even the overthrow of the state; this is a place that most of the rest of the western world won't follow.
And -- in the actual history of the United States -- when this kind of political speech was made by the left wing in the form of the communist movement, it was heavily opposed and censored in brutal fashion. The United States spied on, jailed, censored, etc far left wing activists for decades both abroad and domestically. The intelligence agencies as they exist in the US were almost exclusively set up for this purpose. This was policy advocated for and enacted by politicians on both the liberal and conservative side of the fence. There's maybe less of it now, but that's because there's almost no far left present in the US anymore.
But there seems to be a blind spot by many libertarians of various stripes in the United States when we are talking about this kind of speech from the far right.
The organized Far Right is the biggest actual material threat to democracy in the western world right now -- not a few instances of maybe-censorship.
The meaningful discussion is to when and how and if we (as a society) intervene around the organization of these groups. I think it should be clear from what happened on January 6th that there are explicit and concrete and measurable costs to democracy and an open society itself to not intervening at all.
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This isn't even true now. There are all sorts of limits including but not limited to gag orders, no contact orders, defamation, harassment, malicious use of a telephone device, obscene phone calls and so forth. You imply that it is utterly impossible to draft a law forbidding some speech without handing the tools of oppression to the next fellow to hold office but we already deal with plenty of nuanced situations now…
Stochastic terrorism isn't really a thing though. It's just a vague accusation anyone can make, without proof of cause and effect. Purely rhetorical in nature.
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>> How does even harmful speech (e.g. your examples) prevent your freedom of expression? Fear, threat of property and physical harm.
That is not the same thing though is it. People today fear being socially ostracized or losing a career over crossing an undefined or subjective line. Neither of these fears are the same as actually preventing someone from expressing their views. When threats become actual violence there are already laws to address that. Trying to preemptively protect people from mean words invariably harms more people than it purpor…
Only physical violence or does psychological violence count too?
What about cyberbullying and mobbing?
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We want to ban speech today that was considered acceptable 60 years ago; and the things we celebrate today are things people wanted to ban or censor 60 years ago. You can’t have it both ways: if you want to speak freely about what you care about, you have to let the people you hate speak freely too. Over the last 100 years, it has done far more good than harm to let people express themselves
Typically, hate speech wasn't afforded the same reach 60 years ago that it may have now. You have to remember that all these idealistic views happened in the context of a very harsh monopoly on mass media and a much tighter control of which opinions would be platformed on there (can you imagine a communist being allowed to speak during the cold war, other suppression of speech in that area aside?)
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Calling them evil is not prohibited, but if you say they are evil, so we should kill them all. That's a different level.
That’s not what the law says, though. It criminalizes speech that incites hatred or calls for violence.
>In other words, the First Amendment recognizes that the government cannot regulate “hate speech” without inevitably silencing the dissent and dialogue that democracy requires While I'm all for debates about the pros and cons of more or less permissive speech policies, sentences like this always betray the quasi religious nature of American speech attitudes. Many of the oldest democracies in the world work perfectly…
> It would probably be worthwhile to have a much more empirical approach, trying to actually measure what the impact of prohibiting certain speech is. Who gets to do the measuring? Same people that get to define (and redefine when politically convenient) what hate speech is.
This rhetoric is exactly what I meant when I said free speech has quasi religious status. A perfectly normal, obvious fact, that measurements and decisions are made by biased people is presented as an argument to put free speech beyond questioning or a science based approach.
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Am I understanding correctly that if I were to fly to Germany, step out of the airport, and shout “Americans are evil”, I’d have violated this law?
Calling them evil is not prohibited, but if you say they are evil, so we should kill them all. That's a different level.
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That’s not what the law says, though. It criminalizes speech that incites hatred or calls for violence.
Americans are evil, doesn't incite hatred but kill them all, calls for violence.
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We want to ban speech today that was considered acceptable 60 years ago; and the things we celebrate today are things people wanted to ban or censor 60 years ago. You can’t have it both ways: if you want to speak freely about what you care about, you have to let the people you hate speak freely too. Over the last 100 years, it has done far more good than harm to let people express themselves
Are you sure? Didn't it help that is wasn't unacceptable to call a black person n**r and to call a homosexual f**t? Freedom of expression always goes in both directions. Your free expression can suppress my freedom of expression.