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
I wouldn't exactly call that "content neutral", the way (for example) a public ordnance prohibiting people from loudly playing recordings in a public street in the middle of the night would be. As I said before, I would much rather have preferred if the Supreme Court had held that racism, bigotry, etc. are indicia that make it more likely that a given example of speech would qualify as fighting words, incitement, threats, etc. I don't think that position tracks exactly with any of the laws in the jurisprudence, but I would be comfortable with the Court laying out that sort of framework for legislators to work with.
That doesn't really mean much, though, I think. Mining companies are probably under oversight for things like collateral damage and OSHA laws. That's why I said the such a large area.
Pretty much everyone using ANFO is since OKC (at least). On the other hand, I don't know if there is oversight on every farmer who uses black powder to remove a stump.
This isn't a philosophy of language thread.
If you want to have one of these ultra-pedantic arguments make a different thread for like the 3 people on the forums who actually want to have one of those little masturbatory arguments.
The Phelps clan is peppered with amazing lawyers. I firmly believe they are trolling the entire country to make money and argue 1st Amendment cases before the SCOTUS.
This is maybe the most chilling thing you've said in the thread.
Drama llama much?
So we've established that Hacky isn't harboring horribly offensive racist feelings which he may want to freely express later and isn't an anarchist.
zomg thread hitler
No, we've established that he doesn't care about asking the State to silence people because he thinks he's one of the good guys and it'll never affect him. Also that he's comfortable with government deciding what forms of pure expression are acceptable.
Less thread hitler, more McCarthy fanboy.
Perhaps.
But what's more interesting is that you, who are yourself extremely allergic to having his posts.... interpreted broadly and extrapolated in logical directions, are interpreting his post thus.
I would expect you to read his post as narrowly as you ask others to read yours, which of course means that he's only comfortable with the state silencing virulent racists and homophobes, and even then only when they fail to couch their rhetoric in a pretense of politeness and just shout epithets.
As for the second part, it's very clear to me that Hacky considers "the government" to be an extension of the people, and not some alien entity looming above us pulling ideas and values out of their asses instead of drawing them from the collective will of the public.
That's how you view the government, maybe. But you're projecting.
As I said I think its a firmly good faith effort to put what you believe out there while admitting its based more on gut feelings and not necessarily concrete.
You're responding to that effort by going "oh my god what a terrible thing to say how could you say that"
I don't think you're debating in good faith.
If anything, racism, sexism and bigotry deserve more protection than other kinds of "fighting words." If I were to walk up to someone and yell at them "You're just a syphilitic abomination that dropped unnoticed from the twat of a thoroughly raped donkey corpse" then that could possibly qualify as fighting words(I don't think a statute involving that exception has ever actually survived scrutiny but I may be mistaken). And I'd be expressing nothing of public concern. If I were to walk up to someone and yell "You're just a worthless Mexican that dropped unnoticed from the twat of a border jumping wetback" then I'm still being just as inflammatory, but now I'm expressing more of a viewpoint on a matter of public concern (even if I'm doing so in an indirect and dickish way and even if the position is dickish).
I mean the Heritage Foundation - one of the country's most prominent political think tanks - just released an immigration policy paper that was cowritten by a guy whose PhD thesis was that immigrants had an inherently lower IQ than native whites, were unlikely to catch up and should therefore not be allowed entry.
That's incredibly racist, based on shit science and only differs from "Mexicans are all dumb!" on a windshield pamphlet by its veneer of cultured response, embossed letterhead and expensive suit the bigot wears. Yet both are protected speech. If you start to say "You can express forbidden viewpoints as long as you're polite" or perhaps "..as long as you do it from behind a mahogany desk with a hundred million dollar think tank behind you" then you've actually constructed a framework worse than just simple prohibition of undesirable viewpoints.
It may be honest, but that doesn't mean its rational. A lot of people feel the sun goes around the earth, even if you rationally know the opposite to be true.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
That's weird, because I don't feel like your second example "deserves protection" really at all.
In fact, the only thing that sentence says to me is "mitigating circumstances" for the inevitable assault charge against the guy who flattened the speaker there.
No, I'm interpreting his posts pretty narrowly. Those two statements I made above are narrow and I think legitimate restatements of the positions he's taken in the thread, and in this quote tree!
He's already argued that "Kill All $epithet" should be interpreted as a command phrase because it has an implied "you" as the subject in the sentence diagram, and therefore is incitement that should be punished. he's not looking at a narrow and limited power here, and he's happy to throw it over to The Courts to try and determine where the expression tripwire is located.
But he's not paying any attention to the idea that our public would in the past have (Joseph Motherfucking McCarthy) happily used this power to silence legitimate speech if it had existed then, and that granting the government this power will cause people he thinks are terrible to silence speech he thinks is important and useful.
The Collective WIll of the Public is something that we sometimes need to guard against and protect the individual from, as anyone who supported gay marriage during the Clinton era will tell you. This is also something he's not willing to grapple with.
What we have here in this thread is a group of people who hear things that are really, really hurtful and want somebody more powerful to come in and silence. They seem to believe they have a monopoly on legitimately feeling harmed by strong language, and that no one will ever come along later and use their new censorship power for ill.
Even though people come along and use it for ill all the time, today, and have done so throughout history except here in America where we recognized that shit from the jump and prevented our government from doing it to us.
It is rational because its a genuine attempt to engage with the issue, its like saying "I believe in god but I understand that may be due to an innate desire on my part for there to be a greater moral purpose". I respect when people make a real attempt to look at their feelings and internal motivators. I think its a much more clear headed and worthwhile style of debate than MY LOGIC IS SUPERIOR.
There's no doubt that vulnerable minorities (be it by birth or belief) need to be insulated from the will of the people in a democracy to prevent the mob from torching all the Jews or gypsies or communists or whatever.
However, there is certainly a balance that needs to be struck between insulating minorities from the oppressive will of the public and having a government whose powers are derived from that same public.
You cannot design a clockwork government that can be set in motion to govern over people for all time without any further input from them.
Or rather, you can, but it won't govern them well and it wont do it for long. Unresponsive governments get overthrown.
Being comfortable with government deciding what forms of "pure expression" are acceptable does not make one a "McCarthy fanboy".
For example, are you comfortable with the government deciding that certain forms of slander or libel are not protected speech? What about those forms of "pure expression" that are well within the definition of immediate incitement to violence? What about intentionally misleading claims about products or services, or any other types of scams?
I think you're both okay with the government censoring or sanctioning certain types of "pure expression", you just differ on what does and does not qualify for the purity test.
People don't want to live from day to day at the mercy of their insane neighbor. You may find the fact that people actually want to be governed by a state that has power and authority over people to be "chilling" but it's the simple truth.
Be as chilly as you like, my friend.
The flip side to that equation is anarchy, and I will fetch you as many blankets as you like to make you comfortable rather than live under an anarchy just because you get scared of "big government".
Actually, I doubt you need to go as 'deep' as "Unsustainable through everyday life."
A fantasy libertarian government that deals entirely in military manners would almost certainly be dominated by the military bureaucracy, the officer corps, and whatever dominant interests formed in the general staff--and pretty soon. It's probably not an exaggeration to say there's never been a purely apolitical military force since the rise of a nation state.
You'd have a government that could drown in a bathtub, but has to carry an attack helicopter on its back every day.
You probably wouldn't even have to wait for people to demand greater attention to social welfare, or an interventionist government that keeps spouses from murdering one another at the threat of divorce. The military would wait for the first point of contention with the rest of the government, and promptly stomp over medium-office-sized government on the pretense of establishing order and protecting the citizenry (its source of money and manpower). Given the possibility for rampant crime, social disorder, decaying infrastructure, they may even have a good point.
Unless your fantasy libertarian country existed on the moon, or on the Amish Homeworld, then you might be able to have a military you could drown in a soup bowl to go with your government.
My good faith posts, establishing a position and elaborating on it, are on the first three pages.
You could honestly skip over to PantsB's long initial posts as well, because he's said it better than I have.
Good faith doesent mean "having a point and expressing it loudly". Good faith is putting aside the firey rhetoric, assuming, for a second, that your opponent isn't Hitler, or Joe McCarthy and making a sincere and vulnerable attempt to communicate.
I think Joe McCarthy is a perfectly apt reference to bring into the discussion. It's recent history we could imagine might have been far worse if Hack's opinions about hate speech had existed at the time.
Being a communist sympathizer was about as hateful as speech got, according to McCarthy. Instead of a blacklist, we'd be talking about all the filmmakers who went to prison for their political beliefs because some folks saw fit to roll back their 1st Amendment protections.
Supporting hate speech legislation is not supporting McCarthy's opinions, but it certainly is supporting a regime where future McCarthys will be able to do more damage to more people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/peter-king-muslim-radicalization-hearings_n_1613746.html
It's interesting that you bring up the Red Scare era. Many members of the American communist party were convicted of crimes under the incitement to commit a crime exception to the free speech clause. Later, the Supreme Court pushed back against that sort of practice and heavily limited the incitement exception.
Would you look at that? A limitation on the freedom of speech that is demonstrably capable of being abused, but which most people now trust the judiciary to apply fairly!
Yep, a cautionary tale about the danger of broadly interpreting the law for what we believe are altruistic reasons, that got away from us and screwed a bunch of people before finally being reeled back when it was clear we'd made a mess of things.
Why do we want to open that door again, just so we can fuck over a bunch of people and then fix it again a decade later?
That's a legitimate question, because so far this thread has demonstrated no actual harm to the public caused by hate speech that would suggest we further reduce the 1st Amendment rights of the individual.
Not all wounds are physical.
It's more like opening a different door, after gaining experience with getting it exactly where we want it.
What about all the LGBT teenagers who have killed themselves after suffering anti gay harassment?
I guess the most important thing is that we protect the sacred right to stand in someone's face and scream the most vile possible things at them for freedom or something.
And given how bad we are at proving the result, trying to tie it to a cause is near impossible.
If I stab you we can prove the harm-you're bleeding everywhere. We can also prove the cause.
If I call you a Fag, you can't only not prove the harm, but how do you prove the speculative harm was caused by me?
Add onto that that in order for a legal system to be reasonable, people need to be able to know if their actions will or won't be illegal ahead of time. I have called numerous friends of mine Fag. If none of them were secretly closeted, did this cause harm?
It's a tragedy that we should remedy through our own speech. But, basically, yes. Because in years past, it was people screaming "women should vote" and "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" and "Plymouth Rock landed on us" that got us where we are today.
That's like the 5th time you've equated civil rights demands with hate speech.
They are completely unalike.
Either explain how "Let us vote" "Let us get married" is similar to "all fags die" or "jews caused 911" or "all muslims out of the US" or cease this comparison.
Please note: We're discussing hate speech laws not generic unpopular speech laws, which is a thing exactly no one has asked for.
And if you think you've successfully linked hate speech laws with a descent into 'all unpopular speech is outlawed' think again. You have not shown this at all.
Either that or it's just Spool seizing on the most insulting analogy he can come up with and repeating it until he gets a good reaction.
Which was the entire point of me posting the AZ HB 2281 a few pages back.
No.
Let him explain it himself.
He's said it enough times he must feel strongly enough that he can be arsed to explain his crappy analogy. Let him defend it or not.
Look, Malcom X's rhetoric is chock full to the brim with straight-up hatespeech, and his successor even moreso. We needed to protect it though, because to stop hatespeech is to allow all sorts of other speech prevented purely on content, with no specific harm shown to any person.
34,000 people in the LGBT community die from suicide each year. The rate is four times as high in the LGBT community in the 14-22 year old age bracket as comparable to heterosexuals.
All of them had names and you can goddamn bet hatespeech had something to do with it.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel:
Maledictions: The Offering.
Now in Paperback!