I should have the right not to sell rope to a lynch mob. Fascism is a cancer and we should take whatever legal means we can to eradicate it before it kills the host.
Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
131–140 of 204 posts
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. The ACLU, on the other hand, has begun to rationalize their way out of defending white nationalists. Not exactly a very good defender of civil liberties if they start drawing ideological lines as to who they defend. I had just started donating to them in the last week, too; I felt a bit silly canceling so soon.
source on the ACLU thing?
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
as unfortunate as it may be, you not only have to fight against the nazis ideals, but also for their right to hold them and speak them in a public forum, like any other citizen. That's from the history books about the country's founding.
Nope. Nazi speech is banned in Germany cause they learned their lesson.
Interestingly enough, Germany has a Nazi party and they have a seat in the European parliament.
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
So in your estimation, Nazi hate is so powerful that even the example of World War 2 and seventy years of progress in racial equality was not enough to inoculate the vast majority of the people of the United States against it -- but passing a law against saying it in public will?
Yes, it would help. It's been 70 years since WW2 ended and people are fast forgetting its lessons. Take an example, pretty much everyone agrees that ISIS uses the web as an online recruitment tool to radicalize young people and that they are very effective with it. This point is fairly non-controversial. Yet when the same point is made about extreme right-wing movements radicalizing young Americans, these concerns ar…
I don't see open Nazis having a seat in government in any country where it is legal to advocate Nazi ideologies. On the other hand, Austria and Germany, two countries where that is illegal, have together 5 European MP's from their respective Nazi parties.
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#135"incite hate"
That is a scary, clever manipulation of language. Inciting violence is an exception to free speech because it is directly linked to a specific violent result.
"Hate" is non-specific, and not an action at all. It often means nothing more than offending someone or violating some political correctness. Hate speech is and should be protected speech.
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#136"[W]e strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous. That’s because, even when the facts are the most vile, we must remain vigilant when platforms exercise these rights. Because Internet intermediaries, especially those with few competitors, control so much online speech, the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world." Well said. I'm glad…
Can't agree more. Today it's Nazis, tomorrow it's not showing enough support for the chosen candidate. This is the one slippery slope. It's evident in PC-speech. Today's PC speech is not the PC speech from the 90s. And it's not that I don't like Pc speech. I prefer it. But I also don't want it to be the only kind of speech one can use for discussion. Try and have any good philosophical argument without breaking PC bo…
[deleted]
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#137I think we should examine the effectiveness of bans on speech r.e. limitation of the spread of an ideology.
For example, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (not a group with an incentive to deflate numbers), at its peak the National Alliance had 1,200 members. All together, there are a few thousand active Neo-Nazis in the United States.
In contrast, let's take 2 countries where advocating Nazi ideology is illegal: Austria and Germany.
In Austria, the Freedom Party, founded by a former SS officer, has 50,000 members, 13 seats in the Upper House (similar to the Senate in the US) and 38 seats in the lower house as well as 4 in the European Parliament.
In Germany, the NPD received over 600,000 votes in the most recent election and now has a seat in the European Parliament.
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#138There are many good quotes on freedom of speech to ponder.[1] I think my favourite is Mencken's. > The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. A close second is Wilde's: > “I may not agree with you, but I will defe…
Mencken was of course famously anti-semetic and racist, though the claims of his support of the Nazi's may be overstated.
One interesting quote in this regard is this:
"Any defense of Germany was impossible, he concluded, ''so long as the chief officer of the German state continues to make speeches worthy of an Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and his followers imitate, plainly with his connivance, the monkey-shines of the American Legion at its worst.''"
Weird to see Hitler, before he became the go-to bad guy, being compared with classic American racism and political violence, with the implication that better is expected of him.
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uneducated people should be protected from ideas that are proven to be bad. Like capitalism? Or free Negroes? Western Culture?
Please don't make it absurd. The border is very clear. Ideas that undoubtedly caused tens of millions of deaths. It is even worse than child porn.
> Ideas that undoubtedly caused tens of millions of deaths.
Like slavery or manifest destiny? both ideas that America as a whole supported at one time, and used ideas like "they are too uneducated" to prop up.
Re: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
#140I think we should examine the effectiveness of bans on speech r.e. limitation of the spread of an ideology. For example, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (not a group with an incentive to deflate numbers), at its peak the National Alliance had 1,200 members. All together, there are a few thousand active Neo-Nazis in the United States. In contrast, let's take 2 countries where advocating Nazi ideology is i…
I don't think comparing the adoption rate of Nazi ideology in nations where it was historically successful to nations where it was historically unsuccessful is appropriate.
A more equivalent comparison is Nazi ideology in Germany/Austria to Klanist ideology in the United States. The list of US politicians with Klan affiliation is long.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_members_in_United...