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> Failing of the culture for sure. But take the public indecency laws for example. Or the road laws, like laws against jaywalking and other obedience laws of th

> Failing of the culture for sure. But take the public indecency laws for example. Or the road laws, like laws against jaywalking and other obedience laws of that sort. The smoking and drinking laws are also good examples. Gambling laws. Harassment laws. Those all impose conduct on people, work reasonably well, and rarely are misused. These are also much more objectively tested in a court of law. That's the main point, not the subject of culture or behavior. Somebody feeling threatened, feeling that words that were spoken had a hidden implication that attacks them, is subjective, easily faked, and does not require any intent or malicious behavior of the accused. > I think speech targetting a sizable audience, like in media outlets, public quorum, internet forums, should not be allowed to insult or threaten a group, and shouldn't be allowed to entice others to those acts. Yeah, that's fine. It's how people should act decently, for whatever shared notion of "decent" we can muster. Different forums have different levels of moderation depending on what sort of culture of interaction they want. Some are very professionally-minded, some are loose and openly revel in offensive banter and arguments between participants. Also, actual threats are already illegal. If you want to add to the set of things that are illegal, then you're talking about making non-threats illegal. You can stop including "threaten" to try to legitimize the severity of the other more minor infractions such as insults. Don't get tyrannical with your own personal view of how people should be "decent". Freedom means freedom for others to act in ways you don't consider decent, in the understanding that others don't agree that your ways are decent, but that same freedom is extended to you. Any legal restriction you put on others can be turned around to punish you for things you think are right but others don't, with those others now equally armed with the new laws. >I think this could be legislated, and I believe cases of abuse would be rare, and in those cases, I think legal recourse can be used to have a proper verdict. But WHY? There's no reason in a free country why you should seek to over-legislate minor behavioral misconduct, overreactions, strong opinions, personality clashes, and the like, if no actual damage occurs. If you legitimately want to drop the notion of "a free country" or "constitutional government" as the US defines it and explicitly head down the road of totalitarianism to pursue some homogeneous ideal of enforced acceptable behavior, then cross that line; don't conflate it with freedom. Consider public indecency laws again: Not everybody thinks that the incidental situations of changing clothes or using bathroom facilities should be prosecuted if somebody else happens to catch an accidental glimpse. Heck, some people don't even believe that nudity should be hidden or shamed. Yet since these are effectively zero-tolerance laws, people get life-ruiningly legally branded as sexual offenders for minor and non-antagonizing accidental situations. Because of course the broad intent of the law is agreeable and a hot topic, nobody wants to actually challenge such law, no matter the collateral damage. Online speech laws as you describe would overcriminalize in the same way. > You're just not allowed to verbally attack someone. This is the core of your problem. Who defines what an "attack" is? Everybody's jumping on the bandwagon today to be victims of verbal attacks, demanding a mob outrage response for every little slight they perceive, defining "violence" as things the "attacker" isn't even aware of, etc. Disagreements are too easy to be branded as "verbal attacks" to put legal weight behind that branding. Physical attack is clear-cut. Financial attack is less so, but has countable damages. Verbal attacks as a whole have no basis but some arbitrary internal interpretation. We already have laws for harassment, which is continued behavior, not a single perceived attack. > Which I believe most American would culturaly favor. America still has a very strong culture & respect for free speech, but yeah this entire article is about an age range which has a component of disagreement to that. But there's also a millennial and post-millennial backlash to this disagreement and the various outlandish victimization claims (which damage the legitimacy of actually victimized people), and going even more reactionarily right-wing. > I think it's in our values that we condemn verbal abuse. Here you're conflating words for a fabricated escalation, which is part of the intellectual dishonesty I'm pointing out. You've switched multiple times from "attack" to "abuse", which are different concepts. Again, harassment and abuse are already illegal. If somebody says something angry online, that's not "abuse". If somebody verbally attacked you or your beliefs, that's neither objective nor legally damaging, with a link between those 2 adjectives. > I'm curious to learn more abiut this. Can you provide examples? It's very possible I'm being naive here, and I'm just not aware of these instances and their impact. Sorry, at this point, I think you're just trolling for something. We're on hacker news, where things like the github behavior policies, google diversity manifesto, harassment in startup workplaces, people getting banned from major projects & technical conferences for outside issues, and other such things have been major headlines, hashing through all the various arguments on all sides.

didibus 9y ago
By the way, thank you for actually engaging in a civil discussion that has meats on its bones. Really, if anything, I'm trying to be convinced. Trust me, none of it is trolling, I'm surprised you'd think that actually. I'm just a hard sell on ideas. If I understand, your hesitation to have any constraint on acceptable speech in certain situation is that you suspect it would cause more unfair harm due to it being used to falsely condemn people, where they did not intend to cause social harm? And you believe that injustice be a greater bad to society then the instances where speech was used with the intent to harm. And I 100% follow that logic. In fact, if true, then yes, I'd be fully onboard. Now, I think a lot of people, young ones more so even, including me, have noticed a trend of a kind of speech which seems to only harm society or individuals. Providing no positive social value, other then power to those who speak it. And the issue is not with the ideas being controversial, or unpopular, but really with how it is spoken in demagoguery terms. If I acknowledge this problem, I conclude that fully unconstrained speech has its own set of downsides and issues to a healthy society. I also acknowledge that fully restricted speech has issues, in fact, I agree, much worse issues, and we have other countries and history as examples. I also feel we have other countries and history as examples of the harm demagoguery speech can have when it overtakes rational speech. I think denying either of these problems is just ignoring reality. So what do we do? Do we continue down the path of accelerating demagoguery speech until it overtakes most outlets, and accentuate the problem? Do we ignore the people who do suffer harm from such speech? Maybe, but if so, ya, you're going to have to hard sell me. Like I'd need to really be convinced there's no better solution. That this is the ideal trade off and I have to just accept the problems it comes with, knowing that's the best we can do, that alternatives are just worse. So my first instinct is to explore hybrid solutions. Can we be smarter about speech. Can you restrict the worse of it, while not damaging the best of it? So you gave great pointers in that, such as: Is legislation really the right approach? Or should, say, education be used instead? How would speech be categorized? And how would we distinguish accidental misuse of it, with no real intent, versus premeditated? You also strongly hinted that in doubt, the default should be to allow it. You brought up if it should be about the harm to the listener, or the intent of the speaker? Those are great considerations, and clearly this is a complex problem. Now, I just think if we don't acknowledge the problem though, and either convince people the status quo is the ideal solution to it, or come up with something better, then we might end up with a new generation who will come to simply resent free speech, having only seen its downsides, and might choose to outright repel it much more strongly then I'm suggesting.

didibus 9y ago

By the way, thank you for actually engaging in a civil discussion that has meats on its bones. Really, if anything, I'm trying to be convinced. Trust me, none of it is trolling, I'm surprised you'd think that actually. I'm just a hard sell on ideas. If I understand, your hesitation to have any constraint on acceptable speech in certain situation is that you suspect it would cause more unfair harm due to it being used to falsely condemn people, where they did not intend to cause social harm? And you believe that injustice be a greater bad to society then the instances where speech was used with the intent to harm. And I 100% follow that logic. In fact, if true, then yes, I'd be fully onboard. Now, I think a lot of people, young ones more so even, including me, have noticed a trend of a kind of speech which seems to only harm society or individuals. Providing no positive social value, other then power to those who speak it. And the issue is not with the ideas being controversial, or unpopular, but really with how it is spoken in demagoguery terms. If I acknowledge this problem, I conclude that fully unconstrained speech has its own set of downsides and issues to a healthy society. I also acknowledge that fully restricted speech has issues, in fact, I agree, much worse issues, and we have other countries and history as examples. I also feel we have other countries and history as examples of the harm demagoguery speech can have when it overtakes rational speech. I think denying either of these problems is just ignoring reality. So what do we do? Do we continue down the path of accelerating demagoguery speech until it overtakes most outlets, and accentuate the problem? Do we ignore the people who do suffer harm from such speech? Maybe, but if so, ya, you're going to have to hard sell me. Like I'd need to really be convinced there's no better solution. That this is the ideal trade off and I have to just accept the problems it comes with, knowing that's the best we can do, that alternatives are just worse. So my first instinct is to explore hybrid solutions. Can we be smarter about speech. Can you restrict the worse of it, while not damaging the best of it? So you gave great pointers in that, such as: Is legislation really the right approach? Or should, say, education be used instead? How would speech be categorized? And how would we distinguish accidental misuse of it, with no real intent, versus premeditated? You also strongly hinted that in doubt, the default should be to allow it. You brought up if it should be about the harm to the listener, or the intent of the speaker? Those are great considerations, and clearly this is a complex problem. Now, I just think if we don't acknowledge the problem though, and either convince people the status quo is the ideal solution to it, or come up with something better, then we might end up with a new generation who will come to simply resent free speech, having only seen its downsides, and might choose to outright repel it much more strongly then I'm suggesting.