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Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

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Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#321

Post by s1artibartfast »

gallopingcomp wrote: post #288
s1artibartfast wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

abusive speech isnt illegal either

Which is not to the parent comment’s point anyway.

Then maybe I missed the point of the comparison. Why would we care if speech is considered abusive of not?

From the perspective of the article, hurtful speech (abuse), is and always will be subject to the interpretation of the listener. As such it will always change with time and context.

Anything can be interpreted as abusive speech at any time. It is not a consensus definition.

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#322

Post by vannevar »

giantg2 wrote: post #282
vannevar wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you, but I haven't heard of any kind of mass movement to get pain and suffering damages from Donald Trump's tweets, as painful as they were to endure. If you're talking about libel, that's a separate thing, and has been around since before the First Amendment. If you publish untrue things and they harm someone, of course you can (and should) be held liable for your words. Divorce is also a different…

Things like harassment, or intentional infliction of emotional distress can be a basis for pain and suffering lawsuits. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/suing-e... Things like insults, shaming, and verbal abuse are part of emotional abuse in divorce cases. These need not be evidence of actions or character. These can be used for an at fault divorce. What is consided to br an insult or shaming can…

Again, those are legal principles that have been enshrined in law for a long time. The article does not address them, which leads me to believe the author was thinking of more general cases of offensive speech, like the campus speaker example he offers, and not specific cases of verbal abuse. There may be cases where people are urging broader scope for those laws, which have a pretty high bar as the lawyer commented earlier in the thread. But most of the debate around offensive speech focuses on the issue of access to platforms.

When it comes to public universities, there is a legitimate question, since a publicly funded university may be considered a state actor. But when it comes to private services like social media where it seem most of the controversy lies, they're free to set any rules they want. And unsurprisingly, their terms of service generally give them broad discretion on who they let use their service.

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#323

Post by pugets »

XorNot wrote: post #242
Joeboy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's something to that, but I think the main thing that happened was that we developed incredible new technology that allowed all of humanity to communicate openly in real time on an equal footing without gatekeepers or censorship. Then we looked at it and decided we didn't like it.

You're posting this on a heavily moderated forum with multiple censoring methods.

Yes, but HN “works” because it is a small-ish community with principled moderators and generally well-educated people. The community guidelines request that commenters assume the best intentions in others. I’ve been in enough heavily-censored forums, groups, and websites to say that too much moderation can be worse than too little.

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#324

Post by comte7092 »

belorn wrote: post #318
comte7092 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is oft repeated, the law you refer to only applies to state action. The notion we could easily apply this to private individuals quickly breaks down. Employee X gets fired for publicly stating that their employers products are trash, said employee sues, nothing about what they said was illegal.

From the companies perspective, the harm done by an employee talking trash about products is very similar to the harm done by an employee talking about unions or employee conditions. And the law generally recognize this. It is not protected to intentionally harm the company if the intention is purely to cause harm. It is protected if the intent is to warn the public about a harmful product (Whistleblowing), or to pro…

I guess I don’t really see what your point is then. If you’re going to the point where we are getting into civil disputes, then how isn’t “employee became the center of controversy on social media and caused damage to company X’s reputation” not covered under this rubric? Because that is essentially what “cancel culture” is.

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#325

Post by farmaway »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #292
farmaway wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws are almost never enforced that way and almost always flouted in that direction, so the common misperception is understandable.

This hyperbolic nonsense to say laws are almost never enforced that way. There are real biases and Injustice, but it doesn't a disservice do any reasonable debate to make such exaggerating claims

It's not an exaggeration. My city government has funded a "Black Excellence Center" which will use public funds to build a racially-exclusive art gallery/business incubator/cultural space for black people, who represent ~6% of my city's population and are not excluded from any of the similar places which already exist:

https://www.theblackcenter.org/

This is blatantly unconstitutional, but no one has challenged it in court and no one will. Other examples abound, such as racial discrimination in Ivy League admissions (now challenged in court, but for its impact on Asians mainly) and observed differences across race in admitted med students' MCAT scores.

Teddy Roosevelt once said that, "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism" and, "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." Well, here we are. Separate schools, separate standards, separate funding, separate public investment, except for the one largest demographic group... all driving my country into further conflict and disunity.

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#326

Post by flangola7 »

kneebonian wrote: post #201
disembiggen wrote: post #143

I am not a liberal. Many people are not. The paradox of tolerance is the easy counterarguement to this. If you choose to never do anything in response to the things people say that's your perogative, I on the other hand can listen just fine to other people and my response to the things they say might be to tell them to stop saying it. "I don't believe you should be allowed to say this without consequence" is also a t…

Ah yes the paradox of tolerance. The "our enemies will stop us so we must stop them first" argument. Never found it convincing for some reason.

When you see someone walking towards you with a knife and he says "I am going to stab you", you don't wait for him for to make physical contact before you decide to draw your gun.

The Nazi party was in power for over a decade before the first gas chamber was built. If they had been stopped at the broadcasting hate propaganda stage millions of lives would have been saved, and a war requiring the collective military capacity of the rest of the hemisphere wouldn't have been necessary.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the 20th century is that the broadcasting of the right words for long enough and to enough people can cause destruction and death orders of magnitude greater than any single weapon of war.

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#327

Post by s1artibartfast »

ejb999 wrote: post #172
LastTrain wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't my recollection at all, can you provide an example of a mainstream publication or politician attaching "he shouldn't be so provactive" to their support. And if you can't, why would you go on believing it?

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1994/03/273-3/132... "Salman Rushdie’s rights as an author are absolute and ought to be inalienable. A free society does not ban books. . . . But it is preposterous to pretend that the first principle governing the publication of Satanic Verses is the last word on the subject. . . . Mr Rushdie is entitled to abuse the religion in which he was reared and must be protected aga…

I think that is a pretty balanced take and falls short of "he shouldn't be so provactive".

It simply says he shouldn't be applauded for being provacative. Being a victim of injustice is not itself a virtue.

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#328

Post by realjhol »

nbardy wrote: post #314
realjhol wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that we can have value-free laws instituted by impartial institutions is a fantasy. By its very nature politics is about rewarding friends and punishing enemies. If the state - any state - regards you as deplorable, then it is totally irrelevant that some piece of paper somewhere might claim you are entitled to some rights. In practice this won't matter. The state will crush you, and the mob will cheer.

There is no true scotsman. Doesn't mean we can't have truth

That's irrelevant.

The fact is that we don't have neutral institutions. Even theoretically it would be extremely unlikely, and in practice it won't happen, chiefly because it would involve people in the in-group making comittiments to deplorable people in the out-group.

This might be approximately possible in a united cohesive high-trust society... but that bond of kinship simply doesn't exist anywhere in the West today

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#329

Post by cmh89 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #252
breadbreadbread wrote: post #144

I think this article comes very close to saying "don't let words affect you", which is fundamentally impossible to ask anyone to do and taken to it's logical conclusion I should also not absorb anything in the article. I also think this article also ignores the fact that hateful people often use the language of free speech to justify their own behavior and to punish their critics. Everyday on the internet I see trans…

"Everyday on the internet I see trans people threatened, disrespected, or legislated out of existence" Legislation in the US has actually made trans people vanish or are we using large amounts of hyperbole? People have been saying mean things about other groups for millennia, as long as its just words, its fine. I'm a jew, I see the neo nazi groups with banners or Kanye ranting and just laugh. Who cares? Now if they…

> I'm a jew, I see the neo nazi groups with banners or Kanye ranting and just laugh. Who cares? Now if they want to come at me with physical violence then that's something else. I'll respond in kind

You're acting as though the likely outcome of neo-nazi groups is some skinhead trying to fight you. What actually happens is neo-nazi groups radicalize angry young men who then go out a gun down a whole bunch of people at a synagogue.

>Trans people are for some reason the only large visible group yelling that speech is violence and saying mean things about them should be illegal.

This is simply nonsense. Pretty much every group in the country has a contingent that wants speech against them regulated

Re: Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society

#330

Post by belorn »

jzb wrote: post #134

If we want a "liberal, intellectual society" we absolutely have to consider some speech "violence." To use one current example: The people pushing the idea of trans people as "groomers" is violence. It is not an intellectual debate, it's not necessary to entertain in order to preserve free thought, etc. The goal of that speech is to other trans people and it endangers them. Tolerance of that kind of speech ensures th…

> The people pushing the idea of trans people as "groomers" is violence.

I never heard that one before, but it sounds awful similar to the idea that men are all at risk of being pedophiles and should not be allowed to work in places near children.

The idea that all men are inherently dangerous and need to be removed in certain areas and contexts is a fairly common held viewed. Is it that any less of violence than people who view trans people as inherently dangerous? Personally I view both believes to be intolerant and discriminating, but I doubt I will live long enough to see a society where we can move beyond such views.

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