121–130 of 154 posts
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He likely means you can be openly anti white without consequences but not anti black. Openly anti Christian but not anti Jewish.
I believe we would be better off as a society if we either decided it was ok, or not ok and not situational. In a perfect world we'd just all decide to be better people and not racist without external pressure, but that seems like a pipe dream.
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Perhaps this is nitpicking around your main point, but ... " running on an American operating system " What operating system? I'd imagine this site is running on Linux, like almost everything else on the Internet, and I struggle to understand how you could define Linux as an American operating system .
Linus Torvalds is a U.S. citizen and Americans (or at least American companies) appear to contribute disproportionately to their population and even national GDP to at least the kernel (I realize the kernel isn't the OS, but I can't think of a better proxy value). https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/
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>Western European countries don't share the same idea of free speech as in America, yet they continue to be democratic. But are they really? Can you really claim to be democratic when you have wholesale determined that only approved speech can be uttered? How does democracy work when some can speak and others cannot?
> Can you really claim to be democratic when you have wholesale determined that only approved speech can be uttered? How does democracy work when some can speak and others cannot? Democracy works best when unhelpful fringes cannot speak. Antisemites for instance contribute nothing of substance to any democracy. Same goes for people insisting on abusing fellow humans based on their sexual orientation or skin colour. H…
- Lenin, probably
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So, youre asserting that democracy works vest when disfavored minorities are suppressed? How do you imagine the civil rights movement would have worked out if unfavorable positions of the time were suppressed? How would that work for LGBQ rights? There is no value in suppressing bad views. Exposing them let's them be recognized for what they are. Suppressing them causes them to grow and fester in the shadows. What pe…
> So, youre asserting that democracy works vest when disfavored minorities are suppressed Antisemites aren't a disfavored minority, the Jews they're hating on are. > How do you imagine the civil rights movement would have worked out if unfavorable positions of the time were suppressed? Hating on a group of people for who they are isn't an unfavourable position that merits being protected. Or compared to a civil right…
Are you saying that:
1. the majority of the population of are antisemites
or
2. antisemites aren't disfavored
because I would say that both of these are false. Few people are antisemites, and antisemites are strongly disfavored to the point of having their speech made illegal - and "punch a nazi" is a meme.
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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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> 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.
Sure, but that's nothing special. Any measuring, any science is done by people with the usual biases, that's hardly a reason against doing science and acting on empirical results. In medicine, law, economics there's always heavy political biases but that doesn't mean making judgements based on data is worse than making no decsisions or just making our preferred conclusions up. This rhetoric is exactly what I meant wh…
> that's hardly a reason against doing science
If you have a better argument, feel free to make it. If not, this line of thought can be dismissed out of hand.
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Do you think this has happened while libel and defamation laws? If not, why are those laws different? I simply don't understand why I could be sued for saying "[individual X] is a pedophile" but it is fine to say "all [race/religion/gender/sexuality Y] individuals are pedophiles" even if that individual X is included in that group Y. Aren't you defaming individual X either way? Why does including other people in your…
It is best to look at this from a procedural standpoint. If you make a specific claim against an individual, that individual has the ability to prove that they are harmed/affected by what you have done. Which means they have standing and the case is much less likely to be immediately dismissed. Additionally, that individual is able to defend themselves against the claims that you have made and would actually be able…
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>Western European countries don't share the same idea of free speech as in America, yet they continue to be democratic. But are they really? Can you really claim to be democratic when you have wholesale determined that only approved speech can be uttered? How does democracy work when some can speak and others cannot?
> Can you really claim to be democratic when you have wholesale determined that only approved speech can be uttered? How does democracy work when some can speak and others cannot? Democracy works best when unhelpful fringes cannot speak. Antisemites for instance contribute nothing of substance to any democracy. Same goes for people insisting on abusing fellow humans based on their sexual orientation or skin colour. H…
That's fine, as long as the government doesn't declare you part of an "unhelpful fringe".
> Their opinions are invalid
I am 100% sure that you, personally, hold opinions that are considered "invalid" by a sizeable chunk of society.
That doesn't make it okay for them to shut you up.
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As other comments said, this argument, while sounding superficially logical, does not agree with reality: most Western European countries don't share the same idea of free speech as in America, yet they continue to be democratic.
What does democracy have to do with it? There are illiberal democracies, and within liberal democracy (the category into which western nations mostly fall into if you ignore covid behavior), there is a wide spectrum of how liberal they are. The democratic aspect has very little to do with free speech
Banning “hate speech” without restricting political speech is prohibitively difficult because of the target’s inherent subjectivity. That's the crux right. As soon as you decide that a certain kind of speech is "illegal", the goalposts shift to convincing others that speech you don't agree with falls in the illegal category. Even what seem like sensible categories like inciting to violence immediately get spun around…
Do you think this has happened while libel and defamation laws? If not, why are those laws different? I simply don't understand why I could be sued for saying "[individual X] is a pedophile" but it is fine to say "all [race/religion/gender/sexuality Y] individuals are pedophiles" even if that individual X is included in that group Y. Aren't you defaming individual X either way? Why does including other people in your…
It's not defamation to say "All surgeons are butchers" but is defamation to say "Doctor (insert doctor's name) is a butcher." (that is, assuming that the doctor isn't actually a butcher... truth is a defense against defamation).