4 ms·

> a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions To be absolutely clear, "their opinions" here (in the exam

> a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions To be absolutely clear, "their opinions" here (in the example you gave, and presumably what you're referring to) is hate speech, which the US allows[0]. What advantages have accrued to the US through hate speech being protected, in your opinion? You say "a lot fewer people being jailed", but a quick scan of, say, UK cases prosecuted as hate speech[1] don't show examples of people being jailed for it. Do you have some statistics for "a lot [of] people being jailed or otherwise punished" for hate speech? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...

brigandish 7y ago
From The Times[1]: > More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums 13 forces declined to give the information which means it is very likely to be far higher. That was a couple of years ago and it appears to be increasing. As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. Even the anomolies would support it, like China, by using a historical chart. Are hate speech laws making Europe safer? Maybe it would be better if you tried to show that with some statistics. [1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day-in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...
- peteretep 7y ago
  > As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. I suspect you have not done your research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... But, the question I originally asked remains, although I'll restate it to make it even easier to answer. You are tasked with convincing a newly formed republic to add a constitutional right to free speech like the USA, rather than free-ish speech like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. What are your arguments, based on these countries? What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?
  - serf 7y ago
    >What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly? I think it's non-trivial to try to quantify the effects of free speech. Freeform opinions off the top of my head: the definitions of 'hate speech' are too fluid, allowing argument opposition to massage the definition until your protest against them is considered to be hateful -- which then allows legal options to silence the opinion. The United States has been the culture leader of the Western world for some time, and the position seems to be ever-increasing. The United States is , and has been, the largest media producer ever . This allows the United States to own the most effective propaganda engine the world has ever seen. New branches of media genre and topic since the 1900s are almost entirely US-centric (Pop art, Beatniks, Flower power, hip-hop and rap culture, jazz, blues, etc) -- many of them included topics like public dissent and negative opinion of government that would've been entirely illegal in the majority of the rest of the world. They are all now ubiquitous throughout the world, spreading US-centric culture to all reaches. I think that freedom of speech helped to facilitate the role the United States now holds within 'Western Civilization', related to the above mentioned points. In my opinion, in our world, owning the world's biggest propaganda engine seems to be the most dominating weapon yet. Some questions : If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? The United States is that example, at the moment. At what point is a parity reached between damages of false-imprisonment, and actual damage accrued from the results of hate speech? What are the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with? Why do we attack social problems with less communication, and enforced communication, rather than with care for the ill individuals who display behavior outside the social healthy norm? Will macro actions help problems that stem from individual issues? And most importantly : Who gets to define our speech? Who holds the keys to the kingdom? Who deserves that trust?
    - peteretep 7y ago
      That's a lot of points, so I'm going to simply hone in on one point which I feel is sort of indicative here: > If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? I genuinely, honestly believe that of the countries I've highlighted, the people in the US get the rawest deal. It ranks lowest in life expectancy, locks up three times as many people as the next highest on that list, people get the least paid time off, obesity is by far the worst, people still go medically bankrupt(!!!), people are killed by law enforcement at three times the rate of the next highest (Canada), inequality (via Gini coefficient), homicide rate is 4x the nearest neighbor (UK). In short, I think it's hard to build an argument off "copy what the United States did because they're the best".
- pjc50 7y ago
  "Safety" from hate speech is difficult to define in statistical terms, because it tends to be nonlinear - everything looks fine until someone goes on a murder spree or starts up the death camps again. The last European genocide was in my lifetime, at Srebrenica (which, incidentally, Spiked Magazine are denialists of) Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems. The US seems to hang on the cusp of this, in having racially motivated mass murders only occasionally, that don't quite spill over into mass genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_attacks_on_synagogues_and_Jewish_communal_organizations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_attacks_...
  - brigandish 7y ago
    > Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems. In 2013 there were 33,636 deaths due to guns. Even without breaking down those figures (2/3 were suicides) it would take 178 years to reach the 6 million regularly claimed to be the total for the Holocaust. That seems to be a fair price to avoid genocide and tyranny. Why would any of the mass murders "spill over" into mass genocide? I don't see why one should logically follow from the other (I stress logically because they obviously don't in practice, as the example of the US shows).
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Mass murders aren’t the the thing that spills over into genocide — they get stopped when the shooter runs out of bullets etc. — it’s hate speech which spills over because it gets the speaker an army which can replenish itself. To put it another way, it’s not like Hitler personally shot all the people he killed, he convinced other people to do it for him.
      - brigandish 7y ago
        Good, we're agreed, hate speech is vile. What we're not agreed on is the response. I am convinced by John Stuart Mill that I am not infallible therefore I should not be judge of who can and cannot speak. I can, however, judge the speech and think it is wrong and oppose it with my own speech. If they move to violence I may defend myself or others. Or I could claim infallibility and judge that this is hate speech but that is not so this person cannot speak or say these things but that person can. In Germany, the person doing the judging was Hitler and people who agreed with him. It doesn't sound like the best system to me. A big help to his plans was that the people denied the right to hold weaponry for personal defence were… Jews. As Frederick Douglass pointed out when talking about the oppression of blacks in America, without the right to bear arms the work of the abolitionists would not be over. History proved him (and Mill) right in Germany too.
Simple_Guy 7y ago
hate speech is a recent invention by the leftists to suppress opposing political viewpoints.

brigandish 7y ago

From The Times[1]: > More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums 13 forces declined to give the information which means it is very likely to be far higher. That was a couple of years ago and it appears to be increasing. As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. Even the anomolies would support it, like China, by using a historical chart. Are hate speech laws making Europe safer? Maybe it would be better if you tried to show that with some statistics. [1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day-in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...

peteretep 7y ago
> As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. I suspect you have not done your research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... But, the question I originally asked remains, although I'll restate it to make it even easier to answer. You are tasked with convincing a newly formed republic to add a constitutional right to free speech like the USA, rather than free-ish speech like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. What are your arguments, based on these countries? What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?
- serf 7y ago
  >What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly? I think it's non-trivial to try to quantify the effects of free speech. Freeform opinions off the top of my head: the definitions of 'hate speech' are too fluid, allowing argument opposition to massage the definition until your protest against them is considered to be hateful -- which then allows legal options to silence the opinion. The United States has been the culture leader of the Western world for some time, and the position seems to be ever-increasing. The United States is , and has been, the largest media producer ever . This allows the United States to own the most effective propaganda engine the world has ever seen. New branches of media genre and topic since the 1900s are almost entirely US-centric (Pop art, Beatniks, Flower power, hip-hop and rap culture, jazz, blues, etc) -- many of them included topics like public dissent and negative opinion of government that would've been entirely illegal in the majority of the rest of the world. They are all now ubiquitous throughout the world, spreading US-centric culture to all reaches. I think that freedom of speech helped to facilitate the role the United States now holds within 'Western Civilization', related to the above mentioned points. In my opinion, in our world, owning the world's biggest propaganda engine seems to be the most dominating weapon yet. Some questions : If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? The United States is that example, at the moment. At what point is a parity reached between damages of false-imprisonment, and actual damage accrued from the results of hate speech? What are the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with? Why do we attack social problems with less communication, and enforced communication, rather than with care for the ill individuals who display behavior outside the social healthy norm? Will macro actions help problems that stem from individual issues? And most importantly : Who gets to define our speech? Who holds the keys to the kingdom? Who deserves that trust?
  - peteretep 7y ago
    That's a lot of points, so I'm going to simply hone in on one point which I feel is sort of indicative here: > If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? I genuinely, honestly believe that of the countries I've highlighted, the people in the US get the rawest deal. It ranks lowest in life expectancy, locks up three times as many people as the next highest on that list, people get the least paid time off, obesity is by far the worst, people still go medically bankrupt(!!!), people are killed by law enforcement at three times the rate of the next highest (Canada), inequality (via Gini coefficient), homicide rate is 4x the nearest neighbor (UK). In short, I think it's hard to build an argument off "copy what the United States did because they're the best".
pjc50 7y ago
"Safety" from hate speech is difficult to define in statistical terms, because it tends to be nonlinear - everything looks fine until someone goes on a murder spree or starts up the death camps again. The last European genocide was in my lifetime, at Srebrenica (which, incidentally, Spiked Magazine are denialists of) Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems. The US seems to hang on the cusp of this, in having racially motivated mass murders only occasionally, that don't quite spill over into mass genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_attacks_on_synagogues_and_Jewish_communal_organizations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_attacks_...
- brigandish 7y ago
  > Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems. In 2013 there were 33,636 deaths due to guns. Even without breaking down those figures (2/3 were suicides) it would take 178 years to reach the 6 million regularly claimed to be the total for the Holocaust. That seems to be a fair price to avoid genocide and tyranny. Why would any of the mass murders "spill over" into mass genocide? I don't see why one should logically follow from the other (I stress logically because they obviously don't in practice, as the example of the US shows).
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Mass murders aren’t the the thing that spills over into genocide — they get stopped when the shooter runs out of bullets etc. — it’s hate speech which spills over because it gets the speaker an army which can replenish itself. To put it another way, it’s not like Hitler personally shot all the people he killed, he convinced other people to do it for him.
    - brigandish 7y ago
      Good, we're agreed, hate speech is vile. What we're not agreed on is the response. I am convinced by John Stuart Mill that I am not infallible therefore I should not be judge of who can and cannot speak. I can, however, judge the speech and think it is wrong and oppose it with my own speech. If they move to violence I may defend myself or others. Or I could claim infallibility and judge that this is hate speech but that is not so this person cannot speak or say these things but that person can. In Germany, the person doing the judging was Hitler and people who agreed with him. It doesn't sound like the best system to me. A big help to his plans was that the people denied the right to hold weaponry for personal defence were… Jews. As Frederick Douglass pointed out when talking about the oppression of blacks in America, without the right to bear arms the work of the abolitionists would not be over. History proved him (and Mill) right in Germany too.

Simple_Guy 7y ago

hate speech is a recent invention by the leftists to suppress opposing political viewpoints.