Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
[Hate Speech]: how America (and the world) deals with it
Posts
You are answering "this can happen" with "it won't happen" and "I don't think it's happened yet".
The problem is that it can happen. You want to rely on the mercy of your leaders and the sensible behavior of your fellow citizens to protect your rights. I prefer not to.
You've been asking people to prove the slippery slope is fallacious in this case though, which I believe you can probably see the issue with.
And no one has satisfactorily showed that it isn't fallacious here. So it is safe to conclude that hate speech laws, and a less-than-american constitutional free speech don't result in a doom and gloom scenario.
You already rely on them to protect your rights unless you're posting from an uncharted island somewhere.
Yes it is.
If you want to show that, since A leads to B, B must lead to C, and eventually Z, you have to show why those things will happen.
For example, people who campaign against gay marriage say that it will lead to absurdities such as humans marrying animals. And we show why they are wrong by showing those things are in a different class, and anyway almost nobody is campaigning for that right etc etc etc.
So, for example, you say that hate speech laws will necessarily lead to terrible things. You need to show why that will happen. You need to explain the apparent health of the countries which have hate speech laws, and no, 'loleurope' is not sufficient.
Things do, of course, lead to other things. But the slippery slope fallacy is called a fallacy for a reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Neither does not having them.
So, why more laws if they won't do anything?
As a Pats fan I'm required a sense of humor because fucking Super Bowl.
Well, the people advocating them believe they will protect minorities from some of the more deleterious effects of abuse. They have not been claiming things will go generally bad without them, merely that they will improve things for minority victims of hate speech.
In addition to the occasional successful prosecution of people for hate speech, I like to think that hate speech laws encourage people to be more circumspect and thoughtful about the claims they make, and the manner in which they make them. Put another way, some people have talked about a chilling effect on speech that these law will have; I prefer to think of it as a cooling effect on inflammatory rhetoric.
Maybe that's not something you find valuable, but when I see the alternative and what it entails, I'm grateful for it.
Considering the Don't Tread On Me sentiment firing behind the people that these laws are probably going to effect most, I see the complete opposite happening.
Ah, so the folks who claim that hate speech laws of any kind pose some "extreme danger" to civil liberties and political discourse can make those claims without citing even a single real-world example or even coherently defining what those dangers are using anything other but stale cliches, but when I cite a real-world example of how unrestricted hate speech contributed to real world genocide that's not enough because now only crime statistics count as actual proof. Oh, and that the media doesn't actually do anything to create or perpetuate people's opinions, since they spring full formed out of the ether and people could just ignore social and cultural influences at will if they really wanted to.
Shift those goalposts!
I am also still waiting for any of the folks advocating for "free speech" to bother to provide even the slightest rationale why other forms of "pure speech", such as libel, fraud, and slander, are worth restricting, if indeed they think they should be.
That's not what I said. You're discussing a hypothetical. In the hypothetical, laws are not used to criminalize hate speech; they're used to prevent it from existing in the first place, by taking away the means of speech entirely.
Do you not see A) the difference between the government putting someone in jail for something they said and the government shutting down someone's radio station for something they might say and
First off, at the level of free speech I'm advocating, those voices would be protected, not validated.
Second, how exactly are you supposed to have an open discussion of an issue if the people who believe in one side of it are not allowed to profess their beliefs, under penalty of imprisonment?
I dunno, we seem to keep jumping back and forth. Anyway, I did answer your question: if your country chooses "genocide" over "not genocide" through free and open discussions with itself, having restricted discussions with itself instead is not going to solve that problem. (And do you think that people angry and crazy enough to want to murder people are going to care about a possible two-year jail sentence?) If a country has a major element within it calling for genocide, things have gone far enough that your next step is military intervention, not outlawing the speech.
What? Yes. We have volumes of jurisprudence on how you decide whether fraud and libel/slander are actually harmful or not. Nobody says, "This guy said Lord Haversham is secretly gay, but that's just obviously false, says my gut, so it was definitely slander." These things are decided on the basis of factual evidence--did it cause provable, tangible harm? Were the claims provably, intentionally inaccurate?
Let me be clear: fraud, libel and slander are not ideas, good or bad, that we remove from society. They are actions involving falsehoods which cause specific, provable, tangible harms. It doesn't matter whether the fraud is within the orthodoxy or not; we would prosecute equally a person who ran a fake charity to help gay teens and a person who ran a fake charity to help gay teens become straight. The criminal part is the word "fake" there.
----
I don't think anyone in this thread, including my at my most hyperbolic, have suggested that hate speech laws destroy the fabric of your society, or will land us in 1984 (or worse, in that TV pilot that didn't get picked up yesterday about the dystopian future where love has been outlawed). Our argument is not "hate speech laws now, dogs and cats living together later." Instead, the general thrust of it seems to be that hate speech doesn't prevent harm, and sometimes does harm, and/or always could cause future harm, not to some nebulous concept of the nation but to actual people whose speech needs protecting.
No one arguing for hate speech laws seems willing or able to offer tangible evidence that those laws prevent harm, and so far the response to all of the given examples of people whose speech has been wrongfully criminalized is "works as designed," so I dunno what you want to discuss, exactly.
Sorry, we've decided that self-congratulatory back-slapping comments are only allowed when one side of the debate does them. When the other side does them, it's hate speech and therefore must be banned.
Except that laws that criminalize hate speech also shut down those methods of transmitting that hate speech. Which is why it's very much on topic, despite you pretending it's not.
You're validating those voices by saying they deserve to be part of an "open discussion".
The idea that to have a valid and open discussion of genocide you need to include the voices of those people who think that genocide is a great idea is not self-evident.
Yes, just continue to ignore the person who was in Rwanda at the time who claimed that shutting down the anti-Tutsi radio stations would have had a positive impact on the level of violence.
Why can laws against hate speech, including incitement to violence and genocide, not be judged according to the same metric? Not to mention that the "provable, tangible harm" of libel or slander often involves things like "emotional distress", but somehow that is reasonable when discussing criminalizing one form of speech but not another?
So incitement to violence doesn't cause specific, provable, tangible harm? Should the Nuremberg Files website have been left online?
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
How many theocracies really have any sort of free speech to begin with?
I can't think of any actual democracies where the public would want such a law. Even evangelicals in America don't seem to question that criticizing religions is a type of speech that is valid. They certainly engage in it constantly themselves.
-edit-
Of course, "kill all the jews/deport all the muslims" is so far from merely being critical of a religion that it requires Fox News levels of spin to be anything but vile and hateful spew. Religious criticism it is not.
Who are you arguing with? I'm reading the section posted that your replying to and then your reply and the two are getting all oil and watery.
First, incitement to violence is already covered under just about any common sense free speech system. In the case of Rwanda you've got something much more sinister at play than the Rwandan Rush Limbaugh bleating on the radio: Nationalistic rage and war was in play. You seem to keep discounting this fact. The radio thing in Rwanda was a military weapon at this point, more akin to the Tokyo Roses we had in WWII. This is a whole 'nother bucket of cheese from what this thread was seemingly about. If you were going to talk about Rwandan hate mongering then its the years between war that are relevant.
Second, you say that hate speech regulations are there to prevent the transmission of hateful rhetoric and such. Just like marijuana laws are there to stop people from using them and copyright laws are there to stomp out pirating, the simple fact is that haters gon' hate and you trying to smother them out with laws does nothing but validate what they're doing in their eyes and, on top of that, you start giving credence to martyrs and heroes of the movement. Its happened before, numerous times, where the limits of free speech allowed someone to break out with shit so unbelievably beyond the norm that it was not only shocking but impossible to ignore.
Then the United States does not have a "common sense free speech system", since only imminent incitement to violence is usually considered unprotected speech.
Of course there are political and cultural elements that can make hate speech more (or less) influential, but then again, the context of the discussion was someone claiming that developing nations transitioning towards a more open political system should not use the European or Canadian model of free speech but the U.S. model. I was pointing out a real-world example of how, in situations where there's political and cultural tensions between ethnic groups, that embracing a civil libertarian view that hate speech should be protected since it contributes to the political debate can and has been misguided.
It's also worth noting that I don't consider Rush Limbaugh to be "hate speech", since he doesn't openly advocate for violence against individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or cultural identification.
But if you'd like an example of hate speech in the U.S. that I don't think should be protected, I'll once again point to the Nuremberg Files, a website that posted tons of personal information about abortion doctors and celebrated when those abortion doctors were killed or injured. Do you think that such websites should be allowed to post such information and incite people to take violent action?
This dynamic already exists among domestic hate groups, since even under the current U.S. view of free speech they consider themselves to be the victims of a massive governmental conspiracy to silence their opinions and exclude them from the political system. Claiming that moving (back) to considering non-imminent calls to violence against entire ethnic, social, or cultural groups to not be protected speech would somehow alienate them further doesn't hold water. Not to mention that the U.S. has already seen plenty of examples of domestic terrorism already from those hate groups, ranging from the OKC Federal Building bombing to anti-abortion violence.
Also, you're once again ignoring that the media has an influence on people. Blithely saying that "haters gon' hate" ignores how these viewpoints do not exist in a vacuum, and groups that espouse violence to not organize and communicate simply through the use of telepathy. The point of preventing the transmission of hateful rhetoric is not to stop individuals who already hold those views from continuing to hold them.
I also have no idea what that last sentence you wrote even means, so providing one of the numerous examples of whatever it is you're talking about might be helpful.
My point was less about religion and more about the type of laws you're apt to get in the places we're talking about. Rwanda keeps coming up. It's my understanding that some of the anti-Tutsi speech was being broadcast from state run radio stations. It just seems unrealistic to expect the perpetrators to write laws to stop themselves from saying what they really want to say. I just don't think hate speech laws can even be considered until you have a vibrant and thriving democracy.
I don't have to show shit. You haven't shown why this example is at all applicable to the current situation. What do sex offender registries have to do with hate speech?
The answer is "nothing".
Except you haven't established why that is at all. I don't agree at all with what you are saying and you haven't shown any reason I shouldn't think that way. No harm is done in telling bigots they can't spread their bigotry. If this is your example, it's only one that proves one of the points of this thread: that this is only about a differing philosophical stance on speech and neither position is more harmful then the other.
And if "No speech should be suppressed, period" is your argument, then why do you keep trying to act like the problem is those laws being used inappropriately rather then just the very idea of those laws? You are waffling back and forth here between "the laws are bad because the very idea is bad" and "the laws are bad because it will be inapprorpiately used to suppress legitimate speech". And showing no example of either.
Yup, it is. because you haven't shown the existence of the slope. You have to show the chain that leads from A to B to C to D.
You didn't claim "this can happen". You made silly claims about inevitable outcomes of hate speech legislation, I pointed out that, no, that stuff didn't actually happen in countries that introduced hate speech legislation. Therefore, the stuff that you pretend is a necessary consequence of hate speech laws obviously isn't a necessary consequence of hate speech laws.
I would argue that it is incredibly unlikely to happen in an otherwise functional democracy, and absent an otherwise functional democracy, hate speech laws are probably the least of your worries. Also, you already rely on the "mercy" (stupid phrasing) of your leaders and the sensible behaviour of your fellow citizens every single day. Finally, I'm not actually in favor of hate speech legislation, I was just annoyed with your silly claims about the real world consequences of such legislation.
No, I'm only arguing that you need to have an open discussion in order to have an open discussion. If we had a discussion on genocide and we both agreed that it's wrong, and nobody wanted to contradict us, great! I would love for society to get to a place where bigotry and hate do not exist, and in that society I would not argue that we needed a dissenting viewpoint to be invented. But dissenting viewpoints cannot be repressed by the majority opinion if the resulting conversation is to be considered open.
Moreover, I've argued upthread that if the government treats all speech equally regardless of content (as opposed to harm, since there was some trouble with the distinction earlier), it is in effect validating all viewpoints and none of them.
Take this out of the political realm for a moment and look at the way science deals with dissenting opinions. Rather than being repressed, when a scientist's claims run counter to the norm, they are given heightened scrutiny. If found true, they are celebrated; if found false, they are dismissed (specifically and not summarily--"This author's hypothesis has not been proven by this evidence, but may be proven if he ever finds better evidence in the future"). This has resulted in scientific orthodoxy being shattered and rewritten repeatedly throughout history. There's no way to say, "You claim that you have a perpetual motion machine, when obviously that's not the case, therefore we're not going to listen to you or allow you to publish the details of your claims" without also saying, "You claim that the universe is heliocentric, when obviously that's not the case, therefore we're not going to listen to you or allow you to publish the details of your claims." And even arguing against claims that do seem incontrovertibly to be false causes scientists not only to re-examine but to strengthen their own theories--the reason that evolution is probably the single most well-documented and proven theory in science is that constant dissent has required evolutionary scientists to understand and find evidence for every single piece of it.
I don't disagree with that person, but that's because the radio stations crossed the line from hate speech into incitement. I'm not enough of a lawyer to tell you when they crossed that line, but I can tell you they were past it by the time they were publishing lists of the names and addresses of targets.
I have yet to be convinced that hate speech results in specific, provable, tangible harm. Rwanda seems pretty argued out, do you have any better examples?
Libel and slander are almost always civil matters, with only a handful of cases prosecuted under criminal statues (which are only on the state level in America, in 17 states). I believe civil suits are sufficient to resolve libel and slander disputes. "Emotional distress" does not often apply to criminal cases outside of maybe using judicial latitude during sentencing, and a few crimes that specifically involve it (harassment).
Do you honestly believe that hate speech laws in 1930s Germany would have prevented the Holocaust? There were a lot of laws against what Hitler did. He got into power and changed them.
Rwanda is still an example of how hate speech can create an environment where genocidal violence against a minority group can be considered normal and acceptable. Considering how you seem to think that the media has no real impact on society, I'm pretty sure that no other examples will strike you as valid, but how about examples of Klan intimidation through the use of calls to non-imminent yet targeted violence combined with public displays such as cross burnings? How about the example I've already given about the Nuremberg Files and anti-abortion terrorism?
So then "emotional distress" in only reasonable, provable, and tangible in civil, not criminal cases? That seems an arbitrary shift.
Citation needed.
Sorry, I didn't realize the Nuremberg Files was an anti-abortion thing, not a Hitler thing.
I think both of your examples--actually, all three of your examples, including Rwanda--suffer from conflating hate speech with actual threats or incitement. The Nuremberg Files site was found in court to contain actual threats (posting names, pictures, and addresses of abortion doctors in the form of wanted posters--information that was later used to commit murders), a finding upheld by the Supreme Court. Likewise, the Klan's speech (at least without a more specific example of what "calls for non-imminent but targeted violence" look like) may be acceptable in a way that burning crosses on other people's lawns most certainly is not. So my answer to all of these is "half of this behavior is already criminalized, as it should be." I have yet to hear any argument that specifically discusses the impact of the non-criminalized hate speech in these examples.
I admit that I'm not really educated enough to properly discuss the legal standards for "emotional distress" and why they might be applied in some cases but not others. I will say that just as a layman I have the impression that most cases involving emotional distress pair that with more tangible harm. Ie., "your slander lost me my job and therefore my income, and also I was upset."
Well, Germany had laws against murder and laws against the sort of power that Hitler came to wield. He definitely changed the latter. After the Night of Long Knives, he had the Reich government pass a brief measure stating, "The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 1934 in order to put down attacks of high treason shall be legal State self-defense." A description of Hitler's rise to power reads like a long and terrifying House of Cards fanfic--political posturing, systemic manipulation, blackmail, intimidation, etc. He learned after the Beer Putsch that revolution would only be successful if it happened within the mechanism of government.
I believe that someone as charismatic and determined as Hitler would have gotten started even without uttering hate speech, and that once he had power he would have changed or ignored the laws against it.
This is not only gooseshit, it's the sort of Broderite nonsense that's gotten us into the political mess we have in the US.
Man, I am completely fine with calling stupid shit stupid. There isn't two sides to every argument, and I am not calling for "Democrats, Republicans disagree on shape of Earth." That doesn't mean I want to throw people in jail for saying shit I think is stupid. By "repressed" I mean "thrown in jail."
I think you will find that I never made that claim, and why should I offer a rationale for another topic? I think THAT would be an example of goalpost shifting. You showed that hate speech can lead to real world genocide BUT THIS IS NOT THE SAME THING as Hate Speech laws being beneficial to society.
With regard to this specific subthread, I would suggest stop being a goose. I am not @Astaerath and I would appreciate you not lumping his arguments in with mine. And you STILL have given fewer examples of the impact of Hate Speech laws than I have - and technically that's YOUR argument not mine.
This is funny, because I cited existing hate speech laws earlier in the thread. You must've glossed over them.
I think you are missing what is to be cited - it's relatively easy to find out if other countries have hate speech laws, what's slightly less easy is to cite that "it has protected its people" and/or "its better than the American system".
What you have cited is that Europe has had relatively few incidents of people of people being successfully prosecuted for Hate Speech laws, which kinda supports the argument that governments may not go ker-RAZY with them (although, as @Tinwhiskers noted, there are still incidents of what could be considered overreach).
However, my understanding of the argument is "Hate speech encourages propagation of hateful actions. By restricting speech through hate speech laws, we reduce hateful actions".
I have no problems with that argument - there's no fundamental flaw with the logic. There's the potential chilling effect on speech other than hate speech, but other people have pursued that avenue in this thread. What I'm more interested in (and what @jungleroomx was referring to) is "Have hate speech laws protected people?" (with the corollary of "If hate speech laws haven't protected people, why should we accept these restrictions on free speech?") With specific reference to that, I (and I make no claim that other forum members have been doing the same) have been saying "if you want to demonstrate the impact of hate speech laws, here would be a good way to do so".
Our libel laws are a clusterfuck - just ask Simon Singh.
On the other hand, we did ban Fred Phelps from entering the country. Personally, I like to think we did it just to piss them off.
I must have glossed over how much safer they've made people too. Like how Patriot Act kept us safe since 2001.
Jungle's not arguing in good faith because he's asking me to prove causation via correlation. As someone who's been on these here forums for longer than most, I can tell you right now that's pretty much impossible.
So your position is they keep people safe but there's no fucking way to tell?
Guess I should just take your word on it, eh?
You're arguing in favor on an ideology that "hate speech" should be limited without a solid definition of what hate speech is, but claiming it is solid and pretty much saying nobody will ever misuse it ever, despite the fact that the USA is fucking up and misusing the laws currently on the books and should be ashamed and dot dot dot.
Not good faith? I can't even tell what logical path you're following.
See my above post. You're arguing in bad faith. You asked how they make people "safe" without defining what you mean by "safe". De-mystify your terms if you want to continue in earnest.
I laid down a solid framework defining hate speech as it applies. In case you missed it:
It's true that correlation =/= causation, but establishing a comparison between an "experimental group" and some form of "control group" would be an excellent start. For example, Australia has had various hate speech laws implemented across its member states at various intervals - it should be possible to do a before/after comparison both intrastate and interstate and come up with a conclusion on the impact of crimes against minorities caused by hate speech laws. That would go a long way towards proving the argument "Hate speech laws protect people".
I am aware that the required data may not be publicly available, but this is not the only possible source of data and there are other potential comparisons that could be used instead. I would also hope that I'm not goosey enough to expect that the Hate Speech Debate TM will be resolved once and for all right here within these forums. "I don't know" is actually a reasonable response, with the corollary that maybe it shouldn't be claimed that Hate Speech laws have the desired effect of reducing harm if it can't be proven.
That's about as rock solid as soggy bread. So, abusive, as in what? People can be extremely touchy, take things out of context, and infer a racial hate mongerer where none exist (see Fox News). Apparently all it takes is for someone to get pissed and the other ones goin to jail.
Its also good to see that only race is protected.
Go look up the military laws regarding prejudicial misconduct. They're much more detailed but still incredibly porous when it comes to actual enforcement.