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[Hate Speech]: how America (and the world) deals with it
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They're not very effective at chilling discussion. Have you been to the internet lately?
I'm being flippant, but I'm referencing something I said earlier in more detail: I'm not sure that, at this point in history and when considering the National Discourse, the heckler's veto is even possible anymore.
It boggles the mind that people can say "Look at how oppressed gay people have been by the majority for centuries, that's why we need the government to be empowered to repress minority thought."
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As I said before, if these ideas had prevailed 60 years ago, talking about gay rights would be hatespeech and people would be in jail for it right now.
Uh, nope.
Again, not unless you can explain the equivalency between this quote:
And this quote:
How are these statements of equal value?
60 years ago they didn't need hate speech laws to oppress homosexuals because they could simply throw them in prison for being gay.
I'm also not sure how you can ever spin a civil rights movement into "hate speech" unless you're going with the old social conservative stand-by of "These people want to do their own thing and I don't like that so I feel oppressed" which isn't the type of sentiment that is addressed by modern hate speech laws.
They both are speech.
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The major way to counter this is to not let one group be treated differently than another group.
Any speech law should applied equally. If it is hate speech to say "I hates fags" then it better fucking be hate speech to say "I hate tea baggers!" As soon as you make a law where it is only OK for one side to be hateful, you better get ready to find yourself on the wrong side.
Value is irrelevant to the discussion. We don't decide to regulate speech based on how valuable some people think it is. You can't get there from here, without first explaining why we should start evaluating the importance of speech when considering whether we should ban it. You haven't done this.
Also, that first statement is hate speech anyway because it's sexist and promotes a vision of the nation that specifically excludes women, while also being a rallying cry for the rollback of the suffrage movement.
That's every criminal law in the broadest sense.
In the specific sense, no, there is no similarity between "Burn in hell all fags die" being hate speech and "We wish to be married like straight people" as hate speech.
They are not similar in sentiment or intent. They do not express comparable ideas.
There is nothing about them that is the same other than that they are things that people say.
Well, yeah, actually, we do.
I mean, that's not the sole sufficient criterion, but it is a criterion.
See: obscenity laws
Who are these assholes who got rid of the trade unions, communists, and socialists, and then turned on their own kind!
This is bullshit.
Well their leadership is.
But yes, yes hate crimes laws typically protect religious groups as well.
Note: It protects them from hate speech, not with the nonsense spool is warning of where it's "Well my church teaches this thing and you said that's not true so it's hate speech!"
Because that's not hate speech.
You can't have an open or pluralistic society that represses the idea that having an open or pluralistic society is bad. Its a self-defeating proposition.
Modern hate speech laws define an orthodox position (and one I agree with) that racial, sexual orientation and gender differences don't define the worth of an individual. "Hate speech" is the expression of ideas in contravention of that orthodoxy. If one honestly thinks that gay sex is immoral, one may be mistaken, an asshole and/or an idiot. But being mistaken, an asshole and/or an idiot doesn't strip one of the fundamental right to express ideas and opinions. This is especially true when humanity is fallible and the popular assessment about whether holding an idea makes you mistaken, an asshole and/or an idiot is both inherently infallible and directly related to whether or not one is able to express that idea in the first place. The idea that two men who have sex with each other should be allowed to adopt a child would have been judged mistaken, asshole-ish and idiotic by a sizeable majority a generation ago. Unless you have come to the conclusion that humanity has reached its intellectual and moral epoch (an opinion that is mistaken and idiotic) and we can now safely decide what is and what is not permissible to think (and if we can somehow maintain that intellectual perfection while retarding discussion), we shouldn't cut off lines of debate.
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And if you were going to write hate crime legislation to protect political pacs then yeah tea-baggers would need protection.
Of course no one wants hate crime legislation to protect political pacs because no one commits hate crimes against them.
As opposed to racial and ethnic minorities, religious minorities (aka: Jews and Muslims), gays who are actually singled out for violent crimes simply because of who they are.
If people started actually committing hate crimes against social conservatives I would want them protected.
This is the key difference between myself and social conservatives, since they certainly do not return that sentiment.
Hate crime law is distinct from hate speech law though. I'm not dismissing your entire point out of hand because I understand that some groups are more in need of protection than others but you can't really conflate the two.
Well there you go. Hate speech laws need to address the type of speech that accompanies or incites violent crime, not reasoned moral or religious statements regarding... whatever.
It gets drowned out in the din of the likes of Fred Phelps but there are plenty of religious conservatives who manage to express their feelings on homosexuality without saying things that are hateful.
I'm fine with that.
I don't think that we should conflate inciting violence with being bigoted, though.
The two have a huge overlap, but they're not the same.
On this, both you and Glenn Beck agree, and that is a far greater flaw than your disagreement on everything else. If you're coming from the position that the other side is morally bankrupt, there is no room for debate, compromise or agreement.
That attitude will work when the group you refuse to deal with is small; I, personally, have no desire to come to a compromise with WBC, for instance. When you take that position against a large section of the populace, it is something of a problem. And, as more people take that position, one far more likely to result in violence than anything spewed by Fred Phelps.
A guy like Fred Phelps who crudely expresses an ignorant position that "God Hates Fags" is a reprehensible human being. But the content of the speech is not inherently more "reasoned" than the counter-protest "God Loves Fags" unless you hold the position that a loving God is inherently more reasonable than a hateful God (which an agnostic like myself would not necessarily agree with). And in order to argue that position the counterargument must be available to be made.
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And building a bomb and building a computer are both technical engineering actions, but one is illegal and one is legal, and the fact that building bombs is illegal - as far as I'm aware - has not caused a massive government lockdown on all of electronics manufacturing or hobbyist engineering.
OK so you don't recognize free speech. Glad we're on the same page.
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While I feel the point your making is sound, I feel that this statement isn't being entirely honest about the nature of the current discourse (in U.S. politics). There is certainly the issue of conflating speech with an impetus for action, but you can't omit the reality that the volume of speech is effectively suppressing the speech of others. To wit, if you were to ask me how I identify as far as my religion I would identify myself as an atheist. Given the current political climate, any attempt at a meaningful political career might as well be dead on arrival regardless of the content I could potentially bring to any number of issues. Now, would I support some law that is meant to protect myself from the questioning of my religious stance (or in my case a lack thereof)? Of course not, but I would certainly like to see a society where one side cannot shout so loudly that it works to actively suppress a dissenting opinion regardless of whether or not that shouting promotes any form of actual action against the dissenting argument.
EDIT: Side track, but there is a lot wrong with using the Katie Couric "piece" for anything meaningful. On the merit of what she cites alone, without continuing this side track too long, there are two things. 1) Confirmation bias is a thing. 2) They don't draw any real meaningful conclusions beyond the potential for short term aggression. Specifically, there is still no conclusive link between that aggression and actual violent action. Hell, let's throw in a 3) They do not determine a root origin of the aggression mentioned. And even if they could, they would still have to show an origin that only exists within video games as a medium and not violent images in other forms of media or the competitive nature of sports.
Current Playthroughs: Neverwinter Closed Beta|Let's Build! Sim City
-Obscenity
-Fighting words
-Direct incitement of unlawful actions
-Slander and libel
-False or misleading commercial advertising
-Threats
-Speech that interferes with the operations of a school
I daresay that if there is a slippery slope, the United States has already gone a fair ways down.
Laws can be written to be as narrow or broad as you like.
This seems to be one of the key mistakes in these arguments. Some persons are unable to distinguish between:
1) Acts of genocide that actively kill people.
2) Talking about killing people.
Joining a genocide advocacy group doesn't actually kill anyone. Talking about wanting to commit genocide doesn't actually kill anyone.
So, yeah. Actively engaging in X and talking about X are two very, very different things.
You act like I'm somehow responsible for the political polarization of the country.
I'm not, thanks.
But just because the current Republican strategy is "Never compromise we get everything we want period or else" doesn't mean that I'm obligated to bend over in order to receive some sort of "thank you for rising above it by conceding to everything" gold star from internet conservatives.
Lack of a meaningful political career does not equal suppression of speech! The fact that your opinion isn't very popular + it denies the truth of a fundamental worldview held by the majority is what will doom your political career.
Richard Dawkins is not having his speech suppressed - he's making a tidy living by agreeing with you.
I still contend that in the modern world, it's not possible to suppress speech via the heckler's veto OR by weight of the majority.
So my suggestion is to ratchet up punishments/liability for these categories in the instances where "hate speech" (i.e. speech targeting protected groups or discrete, insular communities) is used. Or, as an alternative, using hate speech as indicia that the speech in question fits into one of these categories.
Perhaps stopping these things before they hit the killing people point is a good idea
Agreed.
Where we disagree is over the causal efficacy of words, and the degree to which noises constitute necessary or sufficient conditions to actually inflicting actual harm on persons.
A person is motivated by their personal beliefs, habits, emotive dispositions, etc. The noises they hear from other people are interpreted through those personal dispositions.
Saying, "Go kill fags" will not, in itself, motivate someone to kill. A person needs to already have particular emotive dispositions, webs of belief, etc.
The problem is not the noises people make, or the words people use. The problem is the actual motivational forces within particular individuals that compel them to inflict harm on others.
But saying "lol you're just like Glen Beck" is fairly bitchy too so.
Meh
I would be fine with that.
Suppressing the actual act of speech is difficult, but suppressing any potentially meaningful gains from that speech (and the discourse that follows) is entirely possible.
Admittedly, my political career analogy isn't best, but it's what popped into my head.
Current Playthroughs: Neverwinter Closed Beta|Let's Build! Sim City
Wouldn't his maintenance of it impart some level of responsibility?
I think you do want to say he's responsible, insofar as he's complicit.