11 ms·

Exactly. And "Freedom of Speech" is a broad term, with a wide variety of implications. Freedom of speech also means being able to channel ideas that aren't as p

by caiob 10y ago

Exactly. And "Freedom of Speech" is a broad term, with a wide variety of implications. Freedom of speech also means being able to channel ideas that aren't as popular and most of the mainstream media may not agree with. People should be able to express those ideas as well.

mschuster91 10y ago
> People should be able to express those ideas as well No. There is no place in the world for antisemitism, homophobia or other right-extremist views. These "opinions" are direct threats to people. And when the state, as it often does, fails to protect the marginalized, then in my opinion nearly anything is acceptable to stop these "opinions" from being expressed. We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies - and also in America we see what happens. Evil to the core, all of it.
- function_seven 10y ago
  You tell me what your model speech code would look like, and I'll show you how I could use it to shut your speech down within a decade.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    I generally agree with this point of view, but a look into history (you don't even have to go back to Hitler or Stalin - the last 10 years should be enough!) proves that "free speech without limits" as done in the US is a path to disaster. For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.
    - self-diversity 10y ago
      I've been alive and in the US for well over 10 years, and I pay a lot of attention to speech issues. What proof do you believe shows us to be on a path to disaster? I could agree that there are a lot of people who think their feelings should matter more than expression, but "disaster" seems ridiculously hyperbolic to me.
    - function_seven 10y ago
      > For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way. I absolutely find it acceptable. It's proof that the 1st Amendment is alive and well. Consider these groups as the canaries in a coal mine. As soon as they're shut down, based solely on the content of their ideas, the whole point of free speech is doomed. You may think that only certain categories of ideas should be protected speech, and strive to enact that into law. But when the political winds change and your ideas become unacceptable, you'll have nothing to stand on when your speech is criminalized.
    - duncan_bayne 10y ago
      You seem fairly free with your criticism of American free speech, considering _they_ didn't birth Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        I sincerely hope that you will not live to regret making this comment, also, if that's the level you wish to compare the United States with you're not setting the bar very high.
        duncan_bayne 10y ago
        Sorry for the excessive snark. What I meant was, I think the US obsession with freedom of speech is an important one, and helps society to challenge the ideas that underpin totalitarianism. I think the absence of an American Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini is in part a consequence of their historical attitude towards free speech. This is the most chilling aspect of Trump's behaviour, in my opinion: his disregard for the importance of free speech.
      - cookiecaper 10y ago
        Yeah, it's definitely sad and ironic to see people citing dictators, whose first actions are to consolidate the press into a state-controlled outlet and then to swiftly and ruthlessly crush all political opposition, as reasons to place more limitations on what people are allowed to say/think. Are these guys even listening to themselves? Our values and principles in favor of free speech have been a protection for us. It's crucial to understand this, because as we see in this thread, there are groups that are working hard to criminalize speech that they dislike. Sadly, this is seeing some success. Americans are forgetting who they are and where they've come from. For me, the question is not whether whether the U.S. will continue to succeed into the centuries ahead, but rather if the U.S., as presently constituted, will hold together long enough to be taken over by a despot or if it will just disintegrate into regional warfare first.
        geebee 10y ago
        I agree. I recall a scene from Stefan Zweig's "world of yesterday", where he describes how a group of young men, armed with clubs, stormed a student debate and beat the speakers severely. The police, honoring an old tradition of never entering the debate hall, stood outside as it happened. I guess I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure when and how this happened, who was behind it, and what it foreshadowed. Zweig is an exceptional writer, and this was an exceptional book. To everyone interested in this thread: please don't take a tl;dr from me on this. There's a lot of interest in Zweig these days, for good reason. This passage from this book kind of haunts me, and has led me to think about what it means when civil law enforcement and rule of law stands down as politically motivated thugs use violence to shut down free speech, especially but not only in universities.
    - Brendinooo 10y ago
      >there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US How 'not small', particularly in relation to a nation of over 300 million people? >Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way. I do not find such content acceptable in any way. But freedom of assembly and speech is baked into the United States' DNA, and rightfully so. Take a look at the Skokie case[0] - offensive stuff, but the ACLU stuck up for them anyways, and it ended up setting a legal precedent in the Supreme Court. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union#The_Skokie_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union...
  - lazaroclapp 10y ago
    Are you sure about that? I am usually a pretty strong free speech advocate, up to toeing the line of being a free speech absolutist at some points in my life (of the: "nuclear weapon blueprints posted online are just as valid speech as any other sequence of bits, information wants to be free!" variety). But I still think you can design speech codes that are not prone to slippery slope under any sane interpretation. I mean, the U.S. already has one of those, the whole "fighting words" exception, other countries have a few of their own. It is not entirely clear to me that banning say "open calls to organized violence or coordinated reprisals against members of an ethnic or religious group, on the basis of membership into such group" would be to the detriment of political discourse. Don't get me wrong, as I said, I am more often on the corner of extreme free speech than its opposite, but saying that the only other alternative is broad censorship is a bit of a strawman. Even with things like eugenics, which I do find instinctively abhorrent, you can easily craft a clear line where things like "I believe group A is better at X than group B, here is my social science study about it and supporting evidence" are perfectly valid speech (and people can engage with that if they so wish and counter speech with speech until the truth emerges), but where continuing with "therefore we must get rid of all B" is considered axiomatically unacceptable. One is a question of facts, the other is a matter of societal ethics. As for Mexico, by the way, since I am from there, let me point out that the issue with the safety of journalists in the country now a days (vs say in the sixties) has very little to do with whether we have freedom of speech as a value (we do, both legally and as a society, maybe not to the extreme of the U.S. but to a higher degree than many countries where this is not as big of a problem). The issue is the weakness and capture of the state, where no matter what the people want or the laws say, the state is not able to protect people or enforce laws (in part because it is materially incapable, in part because it is corrupt and colluded).
    - jakebasile 10y ago
      > fighting words This isn't an exception to free speech protections. 'In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. [...] the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence. ' Quoted from https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-censorship-tropes-in-the-medias-coverage-of-free-speech-controversies/ https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
- geofft 10y ago
  I agree with you, but I am worried that antisemitism, homophobia, and bigotry in general is the sort of thing that crops up on its own; it can't be eliminated by silencing it. Post-war Germany for instance attempted to suppress Nazism, but it's still around 70 years later. I am totally willing to accept the theory that Germany did not suppress Nazism enough, but I'm worried that's not actually the answer.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Suppress Nazism? Lol that what our governments did after the initial denazification was the exact opposite. The early Secret Service was mainly former NSDAP personnel up until the 70s. Many right-wing groups, including terrorists (NSU! And thst's just one of them), were covertly supported and aided by the Verfassungsschutz (Office for protection of the constitution).
    - joemi 10y ago
      I believe this[1] and this[2] are what was being referred to... There were actual measures in place to suppress Nazism by suppressing free speech. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#West_Germany_.281945.E2.80.941990.29_and_re-unified_Germany_.281990-present.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#West_Ger... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
- coredog64 10y ago
  e.g. I can tolerate anything but the out group? http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
- thinkmilitant 10y ago
  You are right, free speech can be very dangerous. People use it to mobilize others to truly evil acts. But freedoms have always been dangerous. I think they are worth the risk.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    The risk is mass murder. Nazis have murdered over 200 people in the last two decades alone in Germany. In Chechenya, only two days ago homophobes murdered at the very least three homosexual people, arrested over a hundred - and credible activists fear for much worse numbers. Fascist and reactionary ideologies always lead to death.
    - thinkmassive 10y ago
      murder is already illegal
    - jakebasile 10y ago
      How many people are killed by the Islamic state? I don't think they have strong free speech protection there. Free speech and evil are not causal links.
    - joemi 10y ago
      Restriction of free speech is a tool of fascist regimes. You don't fight fascism by becoming a fascist yourself.
      - baobabKoodaa 10y ago
        A hammer is a tool of fascist regimes as well. Doesn't mean you become a fascist by using a hammer. (For what its's worth, I support free speech as well. I just don't support poor arguments.)
        joemi 10y ago
        A hammer is also a tool of non-fascist regimes, though. Is restriction of free speech also a tool of non-fascist regimes?
- jakebasile 10y ago
  You don't beat bad ideas by stifling them, that doesn't work. Beat ideas with better ideas. And once you cede authority over what is ok speech to someone else, you may not continue to agree on that definition.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    That's the premise, but it stands up poorly under examination. Simple, explicit, appealing and emotional arguments and messages beat out complex, tacit, unattractive, and logical ones. Messages with massive organisation and resources behind them can dominate disorganised or uncentralised attempts to counter them. Attempting to reput or fact-check specific claims operates relatively poorly. The consequence has been that many regimes, and philosophers, including those who generally promote free speech, such as John Stuart Mill himself in "On Liberty", put conditions and limitations on the concept: It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it. https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2 https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
- alexbecker 10y ago
  And who gets the power to decide what's "right-extremist"? You?
- komali2 10y ago
  Anti-cartel articles are a danger to the cartels. I think the issue comes to honesty and truth. Generally, far right anti semitic articles are untrue.... Unless they are about Israel. The problem isn't the facts (Israeli missile strike takes out 3 Palestinian citizens or whatever), it's the analysis after (alt-right paper: "it's the Jew's fault," ISIS paper: "it's America's fault," Israeli paper: "three terrorist sympathizers killed in heroic military action"). That's a narrative, and that's nearly impossible to contro sanely, if you are perfectly honest with yourself. Would you strip away a Unions right to push a pro worker narrative? Would you strip Apple's rights to push a pro-corporate narrative? Would you strip a black man's rights to claim he is experiencing racism? What about a white man's rights to claim that racism isn't as big of an issue as the black man says? There are viewpoints that to you seem so wrong you firmly believe it's be safe to just make them illegal, but that mindset is just an outright dangerous precedent to set because of how fluid human morality and language is. I'm curious to hear how you feel about this, it is an interesting (and very, very old) debate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  > We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies This is your major fallacy. You're trying to imply that the Holocaust was possible because Germany had free speech for all, which is completely wrong--it was possible because the Nazis were successful in denying free speech to their opponents.
- digitalmaster 10y ago
  Agreed. But I think that the way you combat negative harmful speech is with more speech.

by caiob 10y ago

mschuster91 10y ago

> People should be able to express those ideas as well No. There is no place in the world for antisemitism, homophobia or other right-extremist views. These "opinions" are direct threats to people. And when the state, as it often does, fails to protect the marginalized, then in my opinion nearly anything is acceptable to stop these "opinions" from being expressed. We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies - and also in America we see what happens. Evil to the core, all of it.

function_seven 10y ago
You tell me what your model speech code would look like, and I'll show you how I could use it to shut your speech down within a decade.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  I generally agree with this point of view, but a look into history (you don't even have to go back to Hitler or Stalin - the last 10 years should be enough!) proves that "free speech without limits" as done in the US is a path to disaster. For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.
  - self-diversity 10y ago
    I've been alive and in the US for well over 10 years, and I pay a lot of attention to speech issues. What proof do you believe shows us to be on a path to disaster? I could agree that there are a lot of people who think their feelings should matter more than expression, but "disaster" seems ridiculously hyperbolic to me.
  - function_seven 10y ago
    > For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way. I absolutely find it acceptable. It's proof that the 1st Amendment is alive and well. Consider these groups as the canaries in a coal mine. As soon as they're shut down, based solely on the content of their ideas, the whole point of free speech is doomed. You may think that only certain categories of ideas should be protected speech, and strive to enact that into law. But when the political winds change and your ideas become unacceptable, you'll have nothing to stand on when your speech is criminalized.
  - duncan_bayne 10y ago
    You seem fairly free with your criticism of American free speech, considering _they_ didn't birth Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      I sincerely hope that you will not live to regret making this comment, also, if that's the level you wish to compare the United States with you're not setting the bar very high.
      - duncan_bayne 10y ago
        Sorry for the excessive snark. What I meant was, I think the US obsession with freedom of speech is an important one, and helps society to challenge the ideas that underpin totalitarianism. I think the absence of an American Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini is in part a consequence of their historical attitude towards free speech. This is the most chilling aspect of Trump's behaviour, in my opinion: his disregard for the importance of free speech.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      Yeah, it's definitely sad and ironic to see people citing dictators, whose first actions are to consolidate the press into a state-controlled outlet and then to swiftly and ruthlessly crush all political opposition, as reasons to place more limitations on what people are allowed to say/think. Are these guys even listening to themselves? Our values and principles in favor of free speech have been a protection for us. It's crucial to understand this, because as we see in this thread, there are groups that are working hard to criminalize speech that they dislike. Sadly, this is seeing some success. Americans are forgetting who they are and where they've come from. For me, the question is not whether whether the U.S. will continue to succeed into the centuries ahead, but rather if the U.S., as presently constituted, will hold together long enough to be taken over by a despot or if it will just disintegrate into regional warfare first.
      - geebee 10y ago
        I agree. I recall a scene from Stefan Zweig's "world of yesterday", where he describes how a group of young men, armed with clubs, stormed a student debate and beat the speakers severely. The police, honoring an old tradition of never entering the debate hall, stood outside as it happened. I guess I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure when and how this happened, who was behind it, and what it foreshadowed. Zweig is an exceptional writer, and this was an exceptional book. To everyone interested in this thread: please don't take a tl;dr from me on this. There's a lot of interest in Zweig these days, for good reason. This passage from this book kind of haunts me, and has led me to think about what it means when civil law enforcement and rule of law stands down as politically motivated thugs use violence to shut down free speech, especially but not only in universities.
  - Brendinooo 10y ago
    >there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US How 'not small', particularly in relation to a nation of over 300 million people? >Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way. I do not find such content acceptable in any way. But freedom of assembly and speech is baked into the United States' DNA, and rightfully so. Take a look at the Skokie case[0] - offensive stuff, but the ACLU stuck up for them anyways, and it ended up setting a legal precedent in the Supreme Court. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union#The_Skokie_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union...
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  Are you sure about that? I am usually a pretty strong free speech advocate, up to toeing the line of being a free speech absolutist at some points in my life (of the: "nuclear weapon blueprints posted online are just as valid speech as any other sequence of bits, information wants to be free!" variety). But I still think you can design speech codes that are not prone to slippery slope under any sane interpretation. I mean, the U.S. already has one of those, the whole "fighting words" exception, other countries have a few of their own. It is not entirely clear to me that banning say "open calls to organized violence or coordinated reprisals against members of an ethnic or religious group, on the basis of membership into such group" would be to the detriment of political discourse. Don't get me wrong, as I said, I am more often on the corner of extreme free speech than its opposite, but saying that the only other alternative is broad censorship is a bit of a strawman. Even with things like eugenics, which I do find instinctively abhorrent, you can easily craft a clear line where things like "I believe group A is better at X than group B, here is my social science study about it and supporting evidence" are perfectly valid speech (and people can engage with that if they so wish and counter speech with speech until the truth emerges), but where continuing with "therefore we must get rid of all B" is considered axiomatically unacceptable. One is a question of facts, the other is a matter of societal ethics. As for Mexico, by the way, since I am from there, let me point out that the issue with the safety of journalists in the country now a days (vs say in the sixties) has very little to do with whether we have freedom of speech as a value (we do, both legally and as a society, maybe not to the extreme of the U.S. but to a higher degree than many countries where this is not as big of a problem). The issue is the weakness and capture of the state, where no matter what the people want or the laws say, the state is not able to protect people or enforce laws (in part because it is materially incapable, in part because it is corrupt and colluded).
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    > fighting words This isn't an exception to free speech protections. 'In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. [...] the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence. ' Quoted from https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-censorship-tropes-in-the-medias-coverage-of-free-speech-controversies/ https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
geofft 10y ago
I agree with you, but I am worried that antisemitism, homophobia, and bigotry in general is the sort of thing that crops up on its own; it can't be eliminated by silencing it. Post-war Germany for instance attempted to suppress Nazism, but it's still around 70 years later. I am totally willing to accept the theory that Germany did not suppress Nazism enough, but I'm worried that's not actually the answer.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Suppress Nazism? Lol that what our governments did after the initial denazification was the exact opposite. The early Secret Service was mainly former NSDAP personnel up until the 70s. Many right-wing groups, including terrorists (NSU! And thst's just one of them), were covertly supported and aided by the Verfassungsschutz (Office for protection of the constitution).
  - joemi 10y ago
    I believe this[1] and this[2] are what was being referred to... There were actual measures in place to suppress Nazism by suppressing free speech. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#West_Germany_.281945.E2.80.941990.29_and_re-unified_Germany_.281990-present.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#West_Ger... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
coredog64 10y ago
e.g. I can tolerate anything but the out group? http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
thinkmilitant 10y ago
You are right, free speech can be very dangerous. People use it to mobilize others to truly evil acts. But freedoms have always been dangerous. I think they are worth the risk.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  The risk is mass murder. Nazis have murdered over 200 people in the last two decades alone in Germany. In Chechenya, only two days ago homophobes murdered at the very least three homosexual people, arrested over a hundred - and credible activists fear for much worse numbers. Fascist and reactionary ideologies always lead to death.
  - thinkmassive 10y ago
    murder is already illegal
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    How many people are killed by the Islamic state? I don't think they have strong free speech protection there. Free speech and evil are not causal links.
  - joemi 10y ago
    Restriction of free speech is a tool of fascist regimes. You don't fight fascism by becoming a fascist yourself.
    - baobabKoodaa 10y ago
      A hammer is a tool of fascist regimes as well. Doesn't mean you become a fascist by using a hammer. (For what its's worth, I support free speech as well. I just don't support poor arguments.)
      - joemi 10y ago
        A hammer is also a tool of non-fascist regimes, though. Is restriction of free speech also a tool of non-fascist regimes?
jakebasile 10y ago
You don't beat bad ideas by stifling them, that doesn't work. Beat ideas with better ideas. And once you cede authority over what is ok speech to someone else, you may not continue to agree on that definition.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  That's the premise, but it stands up poorly under examination. Simple, explicit, appealing and emotional arguments and messages beat out complex, tacit, unattractive, and logical ones. Messages with massive organisation and resources behind them can dominate disorganised or uncentralised attempts to counter them. Attempting to reput or fact-check specific claims operates relatively poorly. The consequence has been that many regimes, and philosophers, including those who generally promote free speech, such as John Stuart Mill himself in "On Liberty", put conditions and limitations on the concept: It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it. https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2 https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
alexbecker 10y ago
And who gets the power to decide what's "right-extremist"? You?
komali2 10y ago
Anti-cartel articles are a danger to the cartels. I think the issue comes to honesty and truth. Generally, far right anti semitic articles are untrue.... Unless they are about Israel. The problem isn't the facts (Israeli missile strike takes out 3 Palestinian citizens or whatever), it's the analysis after (alt-right paper: "it's the Jew's fault," ISIS paper: "it's America's fault," Israeli paper: "three terrorist sympathizers killed in heroic military action"). That's a narrative, and that's nearly impossible to contro sanely, if you are perfectly honest with yourself. Would you strip away a Unions right to push a pro worker narrative? Would you strip Apple's rights to push a pro-corporate narrative? Would you strip a black man's rights to claim he is experiencing racism? What about a white man's rights to claim that racism isn't as big of an issue as the black man says? There are viewpoints that to you seem so wrong you firmly believe it's be safe to just make them illegal, but that mindset is just an outright dangerous precedent to set because of how fluid human morality and language is. I'm curious to hear how you feel about this, it is an interesting (and very, very old) debate.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
> We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies This is your major fallacy. You're trying to imply that the Holocaust was possible because Germany had free speech for all, which is completely wrong--it was possible because the Nazis were successful in denying free speech to their opponents.
digitalmaster 10y ago
Agreed. But I think that the way you combat negative harmful speech is with more speech.