4 ms·

If you start putting people who murder people with knives in prisons, soon we're not gonna be able to use knives in our kitchens.

newsbinator 6y ago
Determining murder is (fairly) objective. You have a dead person and a guy with a knife who confesses that he stabbed him. Determining hate speech isn’t usually (or ever?) objective. You have a living person and a guy with a chat bubble who confesses that he has a political opinion. Sometimes you want that guy's speech. Take the world of Star Wars, after the Empire has won. What is hate speech in their world? If you say that people who believe in the Sith religion are bad, that's "Hate Speech" and should be deplatformed.
- krageon 6y ago
  A political opinion and hate speech are distinct. There's at least one law body you can look at to help you understand why and how that is, namely the German one.
- diragon 6y ago
  That's a great analogy because it highlights an important point: we're living in the real world, not in a movie. In the real world, it's sometimes fairly obvious when someone should be forcibly shut up. In the olden days, it meant leaving an establishment when some village idiot was rambling in there. Eventually, the owner of the establishment would stop letting the idiot in. That's what's happening in Twitter, nothing more. The scale is a lot larger, sure, but still.
  - newsbinator 6y ago
    That reminds me of: > The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
pensatoio 6y ago
First off, your sarcastic premonition is already happening in the UK. r/loicence is a treat. However, to be more serious, your comparison makes no sense. The redefinition of hate speech by a certain political quadrant led us down this path. As soon as the standard changes from “inciting physical violence” to “saying things I don’t like,” then whoever wields the most power can censor at will. Strict standards of free speech are the only moral course of action, despite what the advocates of redefining language would have you think.
- kaba0 6y ago
  I mostly agree with you, but then the solution should not be a proper definiton of hate speech instead of letting it go? Also, I don’t see it misrepresented in actual laws, but only in non-law-related contexts. If we trust juries with the proper application of not always clear laws (and we do just that currently), than I don’t see the point of the usual “slippery slope” argument.
cirgue 6y ago
Wrong analogy. A better one is that we’re trying to combat knife murders by restricting the sale of knives instead of prosecuting murderers. In order to have any real impact, you’re going to have to get pretty extreme.

newsbinator 6y ago

Determining murder is (fairly) objective. You have a dead person and a guy with a knife who confesses that he stabbed him. Determining hate speech isn’t usually (or ever?) objective. You have a living person and a guy with a chat bubble who confesses that he has a political opinion. Sometimes you want that guy's speech. Take the world of Star Wars, after the Empire has won. What is hate speech in their world? If you say that people who believe in the Sith religion are bad, that's "Hate Speech" and should be deplatformed.

krageon 6y ago
A political opinion and hate speech are distinct. There's at least one law body you can look at to help you understand why and how that is, namely the German one.
diragon 6y ago
That's a great analogy because it highlights an important point: we're living in the real world, not in a movie. In the real world, it's sometimes fairly obvious when someone should be forcibly shut up. In the olden days, it meant leaving an establishment when some village idiot was rambling in there. Eventually, the owner of the establishment would stop letting the idiot in. That's what's happening in Twitter, nothing more. The scale is a lot larger, sure, but still.
- newsbinator 6y ago
  That reminds me of: > The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

pensatoio 6y ago

First off, your sarcastic premonition is already happening in the UK. r/loicence is a treat. However, to be more serious, your comparison makes no sense. The redefinition of hate speech by a certain political quadrant led us down this path. As soon as the standard changes from “inciting physical violence” to “saying things I don’t like,” then whoever wields the most power can censor at will. Strict standards of free speech are the only moral course of action, despite what the advocates of redefining language would have you think.

kaba0 6y ago
I mostly agree with you, but then the solution should not be a proper definiton of hate speech instead of letting it go? Also, I don’t see it misrepresented in actual laws, but only in non-law-related contexts. If we trust juries with the proper application of not always clear laws (and we do just that currently), than I don’t see the point of the usual “slippery slope” argument.

cirgue 6y ago

Wrong analogy. A better one is that we’re trying to combat knife murders by restricting the sale of knives instead of prosecuting murderers. In order to have any real impact, you’re going to have to get pretty extreme.