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[Hate Speech]: how America (and the world) deals with it
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Correction: you think you're discussing hate speech laws. What you're actually doing is discussing laws that give the government the ability to silence and punish people for speech that they subjectively view as worthy of it. You are doing this because you can't seem to grasp that someone beholden to a different ideology is going to use this in a different way than you intend it to be used.
Once you allow for the content of speech to be held up to a subjective value system and legally judged worthy or not worthy, you're just straight out butchering the whole concept of free speech.
Which is what I think some of you actually want. There's been people in this thread who have stated that they're fine with speech being limited with the assumption that the speech being limited is speech they don't like. I find the idea abhorrent, but I suppose it does explain why ruining the whole concept of free speech doesn't seem to phase you.
I mean... Sweet Merciful Odin, we've got a good thing going on here! We have advanced as a country and as a society on the back of free speech. What horrible downward trend is convincing you that we need to upend the whole damn thing?
It's a problem but not nearly a big enough one to change one of the cornerstones of 1st amendment jurisprudence.
It's because hate speech is poorly defined concept. It is not speech that causes harm, since that is fraud or incitement.
KILL ALL FAGS
FAGS DESERVE TO DIE
FAGS WILL BURN IN HELL
GOD HATES FAGS
GAY IS A SIN
AIDS IS GODS PLAN
I HATE FAGS
FAGS HAVE AIDS
NO FAG MARRIAGE
ADAM&EVE NOT ADAM & STEVE
FAGS SUCK
This is Gay!
What a Fag!
Fuck you you fucking camping faggot with your fucking gay newb gun.
DAMN BREEDERS
FUCK MORMONS
LDS ARE BIGOTS
Which of those fall in the hate speech box and which don't will vary based on who you ask.
I'm not sure that convincing people to kill themselves falls under the purview of the first amendment.
"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:
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How much?
Bullshit. Total suicides in the US(09) was 36,900. LGBT didn't make up 95% of all suicides.
Only that person can make the ultimate decision to commit suicide, words without legal force backing them can't make you do shit.
And this is a thing we should be doing every amount of our own speech to combat.
Um, this is not true. At all. There's a reason why speech is regulated to the degree it is.
I stand corrected; I misread the NYT article.
I don't understand how you can make the disconnect that driving people to feel a certain way has no impact on their following actions.
"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!
How come so many countries have hate speech laws but no discernible loss of free political speech?
Are you arguing American exceptionalism, or are you arguing that Canada and the E.U. don't have robust free political discourse?
You are arguing the slippery slope, and it's uncompelling.
And your analogy is crappy anyway. The nastier stuff that macolm x wrote is not what advanced the civil rights movement. And there's really no way to spin either pro or anti abortion advocacy as hate speech.
Now targeting specific women in the pro-choice movement and calling them filthy whores in every possible way the English language will let you do it might be hate speech, but it's also speech that doesn't advance either side of the argument and serves society in no way so I don't see how your argument follows.
I particularly do not get this "60 years ago gay marriage advocacy would be hate speech" because no, no there is no definition of hate speech which magically makes "everything I disagree with" hate speech.
Again, and for the last time: hate speech laws not unpopular speech laws.
If you can prove that hate speech laws produce unpopular speech laws that's great, but just banging the slippery slope drum is not compelling.
Also, dismissing the gay suicide problem as "a tragedy but" is almost inhuman. Shame on you. There is no value in harassing gay teens until they kill themselves, no one benefits from it in any way and trying to tie the freedom to inflict that kind of harm on people with the civil rights movement is offensive. But then, I gather that your intent was to be offensive, I just don't see how it serves your argument.
Make your own speech louder. And bullshit on the numbers. Where the hell did you get those numbers from?
Read this page, I've already addressed my error after being called out on it once.
"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!
It's not even a real thing.
"verbally abusive?"
pshaw.
It's just free speech.
Glorious free speech.
Fair enough. I'll stand by making your own speech louder, though. That's how our society works, and I'd say that we've come quite a long ways on that philosophy.
And demand I be silenced.
I certainly think that denying the essential personhood of the unborn with the intent to allow their systematic government-funded murder is hatespeech. How can you be more hateful than literally legitimizing murder through dehumanization?
Anyhow, yes I believe political speech IS restricted and that the EU is missing a tangible component in their political and social discourse as a result. You can ask Geert Wilders about that, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali about that, but they have to be very careful in their answers while they're in Europe.
Why do you think the US with all its Anti-USSR hatred, redscare McCarthism, Cuban missile crisis, etc; never outlawed the communist party, but it was outlawed in many European countries? Or is banning political parties not a loss of political speech?
You seem to really be struggling with this. "Hate speech" has no inherit meaning. The law that bans it won't say "hate speech now illegal". You can't ban it via vocabulary(Fag, Spic, N****, etc). So it will say something like "Speech demeaning of a Ethnic/Religious/Gender/Orientation group is now illegal", and if you've lived through a Christmas season in the US, you know damn well the most persecuted group in the US is the White Christian(Hate Speech?).
Or how about "Speech condoning the ending of human life". No one likes murder or genocide, gets rid of encouraging people to kill themselves, looks good to me right?
"Speech demeaning of religious institutions, clergy, and ceremonies". That'd probably be enough to handle gay marriage marches. They are clearly demeaning of a religious ceremony. Or some idiots will have signs you can construe that way to shut the whole thing down.
Explain to me why you think this hasn't happened in European countries with hate speech laws.
If you have to ascribe motives to the speaker that they have not stated to make their speech hate speech then it's a very safe bet that it's not hate speech and you're being a demagogue.
And that's exactly what your spin on pro-choice advocacy as hate speech is doing: ascribing all kinds of evil motives to the pro-choice lobby that they have never stated.
The WBC and the KKK don't need hateful motives ascribed to their speech to make it hateful, it's hateful all on it's own.
So what I'm hearing here is "really badly written laws produce a shitstorm of terrible downhill results".
Which, sorry to be a dick here, but it's something that isn't news to anyone.
"but we have terrible lawmakers that cannot ever be trusted to write laws that will not sell all our souls to China and force us to eat our dogs!" may be a decent argument against having hate speech laws.
The problem is that it's an even better argument for overthrowing your entire government or moving to a country that isn't flirting with dystopia.
Who says it isn't happening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering
This is angels on the head of a pin territory. How would you craft a law that makes the distinction? You just don't think that statement was hatespeech because you believe abortion isn't the same as child-murder.
For those who do, advocating it is extremely hateful.
Actually now I'm pretty sure your were trying to be as offensive as possible short of getting infracted so that you could make this argument as soon as someone called you out in it.
There's no other logical reason for you repeating that particular analogy about civil rights movement = hate speech as many times as you did when it wasn't gaining you any argumentative traction whatsoever.
It is a really, really bad analogy.
Just curious, but have you or anyone else here actually done any research on this? It seems like something that's just being asserted...
Non-sequitur. You want to have a debate about appropriate limits on the freedom of religion, you're gonna need to make another thread.
Is there an example of a well-written law in another country that would satisfy you? Or has someone already named it?
It'd be nice to talk about something concrete here.
They aren't badly written. They are written that way because banning pro-choice or pro-gay marriage events would be their goal, because if the concept is okay. Alabama writing a more broadly phrased state version that opps look at that also manages to also effect these not actually hate-speech events, is an eventuality not an accident of poor wording.
You didn't even read my damn post.
Anti abortion people may find pro choice arguments ridiculously offensive, but in order to construe them as hate speech you have to assign motives to the pro choice lobby which they have never claimed for themselves.
I think Paul Ryan hates poor people, but I cannot really claim to know that for sure based on his budget.
I have to assign a motive that he never claimed to call his budget hate speech.
Which is why his budget wasn't hate speech.
Same with the pro choice lobby. Absent these evil motives you're dreaming up for them, it's just a big difference of opinion.
See also: Hirsi Ali being forced to leave the Netherlands because they couldn't guarantee her safety, while those that conducted a campaign of hatespeech are free to live there. That's kind of a double play because the movie she starred in was accused of being hate speech and censored, and then the government declined to protect her from legit death threats (and failed to protect the director from actual death), leaving her no choice but to seek asylum in...
... the USA, where there are no speech codes.
Yes they are.
One-sentence laws are a dead give away that an amateur came up with them.
If you have plans to run for office in the future I suggest law school. Because you are a poor lawmaker.
If you believe that a fetus is a living person, there is no need to ascribe motives. Advocating abortion is advocating de-personing to legitimize murder, because a=a.
How is this different from believing that god says he hates gay people? All you're doing is claiming that to you, the motive in one case is self-evident and in another it isn't. That's entirely subjective and part of the problem with your argument.
Again, for the zillionth time, who decides? And what happens when you don't like the answer to that, and it silences you?
When you say "the government declined to protect her from legit death threats", do you mean "the government spent millions of Euros to provide her with round-the-clock protection by armed security guards"?
http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/2007/2/7/violence-is-inherent-in-islam-it-is-a-cult-of-death.html
It is not difficult to write laws that don't criminalize speech which requires 2 full Fox News cycles worth of spin to be transformed into hate-speech.
They want unborn children to be murdered. How is that not hateful to advocate?
It doesn't take demagoguery to point out that millions of Americans believe exactly that.
Sorry allow me to craft 70 page example laws for us to use. If this is really the best counter argument you have?
You can construct laws that both outlaw the nebulous 'hate speech' and can also be used to suppress minority groups.
The 1st is a bulwark. We can write laws that protect the individual from harmful harassment when they can demonstrate harm, but to write laws pre-emptively banning all instances of a certain kind of speech because we think it might, maybe, harm someone if they hear it?
That is a completely different thing.
It is a completely reasonable counter argument to your argument, which consisted of writing a very vague-very unrealistically short-law and then showing how easy your example law was to undermine.
Yes.
And then rescinded it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/05/the_caged_virgin.html
WOOOSH again.
Hate speech has no inherent meaning. It's definition would be set by the legislative body that drafted the laws.