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And that's where problems arise. Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like with

And that's where problems arise. Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. We either value the freedom to express ourselves within the limits of the law or we don't. As soon as there are more people who think like you do, none of us are safe and it just becomes a system that silences whatever and whoever is unpopular enough.

TylerE 3y ago
This isn't "people I disagree with". Stromfront, and the groups it enables, are literal nazis. "Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing.[11] The Stormfront website has been registered at Network Solutions since 1995 and was founded in 1996 by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party." National Socialist White People = The American Nazi Party. That is literal. They changed from the NSWPP to the American Nazi Party in 1983. Their logo has a swastika on it. LITERAL NAZIS.
- twoodfin 3y ago
  Nobody argues with this. But LITERAL NAZIS have free speech rights in the USA same as anyone else. Once upon a time the ACLU defended a similar group’s right to march loudly through Skokie, Illinois: https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-taking-stand-fre... If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    The Constitution binds the government and the government ONLY.
    - twoodfin 3y ago
      What did you think I meant by If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature. ?
      - TylerE 3y ago
        Because the 1st is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
    - nxm 3y ago
      What if the government reaches out to social media company and asks them to police speech that they don’t like, as was the case during Covid/Hunter Biden Laptop?
      - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
        And yet it still happened, to the point where thousands died a preventable death. "hunter biden laptop" was always a distraction tactic, just like "but hillary's emails". It was an attempt to muddy the waters and obscure the republican's long list of shit they got up to. Thankfully, we've gone from "fuck around" to the "find out" age now. If Biden did a thing then the legal system will take care of it. That is all.
    - pyuser583 3y ago
      This isn’t even true. The 13th Amendment applies to everybody,
    - EarlKing 3y ago
      No one cares. This is class warfare. The proletariat needs the right to engage in debate free of interference from the bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie-adjacent. You're not going to win anyone over by saying that the law doesn't provide for that. Hang your laws. The natural rights of the proletariat should not be up for negotiation.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    I don't think anybody in this thread has disputed that neo-Nazis have free speech rights under the First Amendment. What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services. To make it intuitive: the First Amendment is just as much a guarantee of a right to not speak as it is a right to speak. In other words: it is just as much a guarantee that the state is not empowered to make you do or say things. Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services...Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights. Freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. It (in theory) protects us from oppression by our government. Freedom of speech is also an ideal that we should strive for in a free society. One would protect us from oppression by forces other than our government. Private businesses don't have an obligation to uphold people's rights the way the government does, but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't expect them to respect the ideals of freedom of speech. Because our country doesn't do enough to protect the people from what are basically monopolies we should apply extra pressure to companies who are uniquely positioned to oppress us. I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options. Once a single company, or small group of companies, can decide who has a voice that company has become a liability to our security and freedoms. Those companies should either be broken up or others must be allowed and enabled to step into that space to create alternatives. That might mean that certain barriers to entry will need to be dismantled. It might mean changing laws to accommodate newcomers into the market. As long as truly competitive options exist and/or can be created, freedom can exist. Sadly, right now we don't really have truly competitive alternatives for things like cloudflare or payment processors and there are many places where single entities hold dangerous amounts of power when it comes to the internet. Imagine if ICANN decided to refuse to provide IPs or domains to anyone whose political views they disagreed with. When non-governmental agencies hold too much power, as Hurricane Electric does, we have to hold them to a higher standard, take actions against them, or put alternate systems in place to protect ourselves from them.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Cloudflare isn’t the government and has no specific requirement to enable the use of their platform to further a political agenda. Being a racist nazi advocating for violence isn’t a protected class, and private companies are not required to host content or otherwise provide a platform for any particular speech that’s not otherwise protected by law. They can host their content on other platforms, or self host.
    - pyuser583 3y ago
      Cloudflare has issued statements in the past that they desire to provide their service to everyone, but have been put under immense external pressure not to. Sometimes they cave, sometimes they don’t. But they’ve begged the public, and presumably the customers/investors pressuring them, to treat them as dumb pipes, not editors.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Perhaps, but my point is that the constitutional right doesn’t extend beyond the government. Just like HN can moderate without fear, so can cloudflare. They choose to take a more hands off approach - good for them. But it’s a choice, and there are apparently limits to their forbearance.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Literal Nazi's are also "people I disagree with". How MUCH you disagree with them doesn't change the two stipulated facts their. They are people. And you disagree with them. Free Speech doesn't exist for people to be agreeable. It's only purpose is specifically to protect controversial statements.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Depending on who is in power, Ukrainians might be called literal Nazis at the end of a rifle. If you empower the good guys today with the wrong machinery, you will be crushed in the future by the bad guys.
wredue 3y ago
I strongly disagree with people who seek to suppress freedom of speech. This is not the hypocrisy that you’re painting it as. I question the motives of anyone sympathizing with Nazis as “just a different opinion” Suppressing nazism is not “suppressing freedom of speech”. It is suppressing people who seek to suppress.
- bllguo 3y ago
  if you claim to support unrestricted free speech then of course this is hypocrisy. how could you possibly argue otherwise? "seeking to suppress" is still a form of speech. you cannot have your cake and eat it too. if you don't support unrestricted free speech that's fine, but don't pretend you do. i personally don't either.
  - wredue 3y ago
    people who optionally break the social contract by pushing hate and genocide as an agenda cannot be protected by the social contract. They are the ones who are breaking it. Not me. Therefore, they are the ones who are removing themselves from the protections of freedom of speech.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hattmall 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - wredue 3y ago
    Freedom is speech protects people from retaliation by the government. It is not and was never meant to protect the infringing upon other people’s right to a good life. Do you have any more alt-right copy pasta bullshit to spread?
    - yesco 3y ago
      I think people who consider Freedom of Speech, the principle, to be exclusively a government thing, are stupider than people who think the right to Free Speech applies to everything. Wonder why this misaligned perspective seems so popular with pseudo-intellectuals these days.
afavour 3y ago
> Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. I’m deeply ambivalent about a site like Cloudflare censoring anything but the logic here… absolutely not. You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare. If I were a person calling for a ban to such speech my own speech wouldn’t automatically be subject to the same criteria.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare. We already have laws against speech that incites violence and you might be surprised how contested the lines themselves are. There are a lot of people these days who outright state that speech itself == violence and should carry the same consequences. I'm not a free speech absolutist. When pressed, I don't think very many people are. I just think we need to be extremely careful when it comes to expanding those boundaries and that we're better off to err on the side of freedom because of the importance of what we stand to lose.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    > speech itself == violence What's the argument against? Folks have been driven to suicide by targeted harassment and doxxing labeled "speech." The whole reason we have laws about public accommodation is because in a society you can drive someone to ruin by everyone collectively refusing to do business with them which was (and still is for the gays) backed by 1A. The threat of violence is violence, speech that is an implicit threat of violence is violence. Speech that makes people feel unsafe due that implicit threat is violence (say a neighborhood where every house had a flag with a black man hung by a noose). Verbal abuse is still abuse. Everyone who's ever been to school knows that bullying doesn't actually require anyone lay a hand on you to make you live in constant fear and that dynamic doesn't just go away when you become an adult. Sure, we could coin a term like "diet violence" to mean actions that cause in people the behave as if they were under the threat of violence but which doesn't cause bodily harm but what would be the point? Legally it makes sense to do that to discourage escalation but to the victim the only difference is usually but not always the severity. I'm sympathetic to folks when their messaging or iconography becomes recognized as an implicit threat of violence due to it being co-opted by others when they didn't mean it that way but if a bunch of people started flying communist flags and lynching people I would take mine down even if I was just really pro-workers rights. To me speech is about the content, the ideas, not any particular expression. In opposite world where "we're here we're queer" was a line that caused people to hide in their homes in fear I would be like yeah that's violence if I used that phrase in a speech. I can't separate cause and effect. I can still express my totally fine idea that queer folks do and will always exist, just using different words.
causality0 3y ago
If you don't believe in freedom of speech for people you hate you don't believe in it at all. The refusal to use force to stop opinions the majority doesn't like is the only thing that makes any progress possible. Being able to say things other people want to stop you from saying is the defining characteristic of free speech.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  You're right; I don't believe in it as a categorical virtue. I believe in it as an extremely useful feature of a system of government as a check against the failure mode of the leadership becoming so disconnected from the public that they fall to corruption. In short, "It's not okay for the government to turn the public square into an echo chamber." Private people, groups, companies though? Not only may they curtail speech more or less arbitrarily in places they own, I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed. And with very few, narrow, specific cut-outs, American law agrees with that premise.
  - causality0 3y ago
    Oh certainly, I agree with you fully, at least unless and until we manage to get service providers classified as common carriers.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed. "freedom of association" is what a lot of people who owned diners felt enabled them to deny services to black people. Maybe you still feel that they should have been able to refuse service to anyone for any reason including skin color. We collectively decided that society works a lot better when we infringed on the rights of diner owners in order to protect the rights of everyone who wanted a seat at the lunch counter. There's an argument to be made that in exchange for the privilege of corporate personhood, any company offering services to the general public should be required to serve any member of that public no matter what their beliefs. I'm not yet convinced that's an ideal situation personally, but situations like this make me more sympathetic to the idea. I'd rather see our government take steps to make sure that no company is allowed to be in a position to oppress the American people leaving them without recourse. I'd sooner see companies with monopoly power broken up or pathways cleared to bring in meaningful competition. That should help protect the American people from oppression by non-governmental agencies while preserving the rights of companies to discriminate according to ideology (if that's a value we think is worth protecting).
andrepd 3y ago
No, you're drawing a false equivalence. Advocating for genocide of entire ethnic groups is not "an opinion I disagree with", in fact: the crucial point is that it is an opinion that if taken up would mean the end of freedom for other people. It's the old paradox of tolerance/freedom/etc. If you would like to preserve e.g. free speech and rule of law then you must resist, by force if necessary, people who would abolish that very same free speech under whose cover they propagate the idea of dismantling it. Other than that it's fair game.
- autoexec 3y ago
  The paradox of tolerance is about "unlimited tolerance" which already isn't a thing. We have exemptions to the first amendment for words that rise to the level of incitement of violence. The author of that paradox also states: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols". I have yet to hear an argument for genocide that can't be countered by rational argument. When hate groups commit acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that. We don't need to fear words. In fact, I much prefer it when racists make themselves known by their words rather than their actions.
gmerc 3y ago
We learned the hard way what happens if you don’t oppress Nazis. Paradox of tolerance.
- autoexec 3y ago
  The Paradox of tolerance doesn't mean what you think it does. It talks about "unlimited tolerance" which already doesn't exist under law or the first amendment. We have many restrictions on freedom of speech, such as incitements to violence. The author also states explicitly that his words shouldn't be used to "suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument" and that such extreme action should be reserved for situations where all else has failed and we're up against "fists or pistols" Violence, not words, is the problem. Thankfully we're not tolerating their violence.
_cenw 3y ago
No, most of you seem to be comfortable ignoring when things turn into safety hazards for people who are not you. That includes Nazis for a sliding scale of people who are not part of majority culture (trying really hard to not say white men adjacent for your sensibilities). The luxury of liberal principles - facing the threat of the rise of fascism - really can only be exercised by those least affected by such a rise. I'd be really interested to hear how you think Hitler should've been handled in the 1920s and early 1930s. Could a debate parler have saved Germany's democracy?
seanhunter 3y ago
This is an argument that seems reasonable but lacks important nuance and addressing it forms the center of "The Open Society and its Enemies" by Karl Popper, which I would recommend reading. Popper's argument is essentially that tolerance is essential to open society and therefore to maintain openness, society must ironically be intolerant of those who are intolerant themselves or would spread intolerance. Nazis were specifically on his mind, WW2 having just occurred, and Popper uses them as an example of people who use tolerance by others to spread intolerance and therefore reduce freedom overall. For society to defend freedom, it has to not permit that.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Karl Popper discusses "unlimited tolerance" which literally no one is demanding. With very very few exceptions, we all accept limitations on speech. We have specific exemptions to free speech like incitements to violence for this reason. Popper also states: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols". When hate groups are committing acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that behavior.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
It's not the opinion I disagree with, it's the actions and policy changes that result from it, which turn into genocide. If a website has people talking politics, that's fine; if a website has doxxing and organizing lynchings, that's not fine. The problem is that one thing (opinions) can lead to the other (genocide) if not kept in check.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Thankfully we already have laws against lynchings and genocide so there is no reason to violate the ideals of freedom of speech. If anyone is doing either of those things we can (and absolutely should) throw the book at them.

TylerE 3y ago

This isn't "people I disagree with". Stromfront, and the groups it enables, are literal nazis. "Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing.[11] The Stormfront website has been registered at Network Solutions since 1995 and was founded in 1996 by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party." National Socialist White People = The American Nazi Party. That is literal. They changed from the NSWPP to the American Nazi Party in 1983. Their logo has a swastika on it. LITERAL NAZIS.

twoodfin 3y ago
Nobody argues with this. But LITERAL NAZIS have free speech rights in the USA same as anyone else. Once upon a time the ACLU defended a similar group’s right to march loudly through Skokie, Illinois: https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-taking-stand-fre... If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature.
- TylerE 3y ago
  The Constitution binds the government and the government ONLY.
  - twoodfin 3y ago
    What did you think I meant by If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature. ?
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Because the 1st is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
  - nxm 3y ago
    What if the government reaches out to social media company and asks them to police speech that they don’t like, as was the case during Covid/Hunter Biden Laptop?
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      And yet it still happened, to the point where thousands died a preventable death. "hunter biden laptop" was always a distraction tactic, just like "but hillary's emails". It was an attempt to muddy the waters and obscure the republican's long list of shit they got up to. Thankfully, we've gone from "fuck around" to the "find out" age now. If Biden did a thing then the legal system will take care of it. That is all.
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    This isn’t even true. The 13th Amendment applies to everybody,
  - EarlKing 3y ago
    No one cares. This is class warfare. The proletariat needs the right to engage in debate free of interference from the bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie-adjacent. You're not going to win anyone over by saying that the law doesn't provide for that. Hang your laws. The natural rights of the proletariat should not be up for negotiation.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  I don't think anybody in this thread has disputed that neo-Nazis have free speech rights under the First Amendment. What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services. To make it intuitive: the First Amendment is just as much a guarantee of a right to not speak as it is a right to speak. In other words: it is just as much a guarantee that the state is not empowered to make you do or say things. Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services...Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights. Freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. It (in theory) protects us from oppression by our government. Freedom of speech is also an ideal that we should strive for in a free society. One would protect us from oppression by forces other than our government. Private businesses don't have an obligation to uphold people's rights the way the government does, but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't expect them to respect the ideals of freedom of speech. Because our country doesn't do enough to protect the people from what are basically monopolies we should apply extra pressure to companies who are uniquely positioned to oppress us. I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options. Once a single company, or small group of companies, can decide who has a voice that company has become a liability to our security and freedoms. Those companies should either be broken up or others must be allowed and enabled to step into that space to create alternatives. That might mean that certain barriers to entry will need to be dismantled. It might mean changing laws to accommodate newcomers into the market. As long as truly competitive options exist and/or can be created, freedom can exist. Sadly, right now we don't really have truly competitive alternatives for things like cloudflare or payment processors and there are many places where single entities hold dangerous amounts of power when it comes to the internet. Imagine if ICANN decided to refuse to provide IPs or domains to anyone whose political views they disagreed with. When non-governmental agencies hold too much power, as Hurricane Electric does, we have to hold them to a higher standard, take actions against them, or put alternate systems in place to protect ourselves from them.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Cloudflare isn’t the government and has no specific requirement to enable the use of their platform to further a political agenda. Being a racist nazi advocating for violence isn’t a protected class, and private companies are not required to host content or otherwise provide a platform for any particular speech that’s not otherwise protected by law. They can host their content on other platforms, or self host.
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    Cloudflare has issued statements in the past that they desire to provide their service to everyone, but have been put under immense external pressure not to. Sometimes they cave, sometimes they don’t. But they’ve begged the public, and presumably the customers/investors pressuring them, to treat them as dumb pipes, not editors.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Perhaps, but my point is that the constitutional right doesn’t extend beyond the government. Just like HN can moderate without fear, so can cloudflare. They choose to take a more hands off approach - good for them. But it’s a choice, and there are apparently limits to their forbearance.
hattmall 3y ago
Literal Nazi's are also "people I disagree with". How MUCH you disagree with them doesn't change the two stipulated facts their. They are people. And you disagree with them. Free Speech doesn't exist for people to be agreeable. It's only purpose is specifically to protect controversial statements.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Depending on who is in power, Ukrainians might be called literal Nazis at the end of a rifle. If you empower the good guys today with the wrong machinery, you will be crushed in the future by the bad guys.

wredue 3y ago

I strongly disagree with people who seek to suppress freedom of speech. This is not the hypocrisy that you’re painting it as. I question the motives of anyone sympathizing with Nazis as “just a different opinion” Suppressing nazism is not “suppressing freedom of speech”. It is suppressing people who seek to suppress.

bllguo 3y ago
if you claim to support unrestricted free speech then of course this is hypocrisy. how could you possibly argue otherwise? "seeking to suppress" is still a form of speech. you cannot have your cake and eat it too. if you don't support unrestricted free speech that's fine, but don't pretend you do. i personally don't either.
- wredue 3y ago
  people who optionally break the social contract by pushing hate and genocide as an agenda cannot be protected by the social contract. They are the ones who are breaking it. Not me. Therefore, they are the ones who are removing themselves from the protections of freedom of speech.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hattmall 3y ago
[flagged]
- wredue 3y ago
  Freedom is speech protects people from retaliation by the government. It is not and was never meant to protect the infringing upon other people’s right to a good life. Do you have any more alt-right copy pasta bullshit to spread?
  - yesco 3y ago
    I think people who consider Freedom of Speech, the principle, to be exclusively a government thing, are stupider than people who think the right to Free Speech applies to everything. Wonder why this misaligned perspective seems so popular with pseudo-intellectuals these days.

afavour 3y ago

> Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. I’m deeply ambivalent about a site like Cloudflare censoring anything but the logic here… absolutely not. You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare. If I were a person calling for a ban to such speech my own speech wouldn’t automatically be subject to the same criteria.

autoexec 3y ago
> You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare. We already have laws against speech that incites violence and you might be surprised how contested the lines themselves are. There are a lot of people these days who outright state that speech itself == violence and should carry the same consequences. I'm not a free speech absolutist. When pressed, I don't think very many people are. I just think we need to be extremely careful when it comes to expanding those boundaries and that we're better off to err on the side of freedom because of the importance of what we stand to lose.
- Spivak 3y ago
  > speech itself == violence What's the argument against? Folks have been driven to suicide by targeted harassment and doxxing labeled "speech." The whole reason we have laws about public accommodation is because in a society you can drive someone to ruin by everyone collectively refusing to do business with them which was (and still is for the gays) backed by 1A. The threat of violence is violence, speech that is an implicit threat of violence is violence. Speech that makes people feel unsafe due that implicit threat is violence (say a neighborhood where every house had a flag with a black man hung by a noose). Verbal abuse is still abuse. Everyone who's ever been to school knows that bullying doesn't actually require anyone lay a hand on you to make you live in constant fear and that dynamic doesn't just go away when you become an adult. Sure, we could coin a term like "diet violence" to mean actions that cause in people the behave as if they were under the threat of violence but which doesn't cause bodily harm but what would be the point? Legally it makes sense to do that to discourage escalation but to the victim the only difference is usually but not always the severity. I'm sympathetic to folks when their messaging or iconography becomes recognized as an implicit threat of violence due to it being co-opted by others when they didn't mean it that way but if a bunch of people started flying communist flags and lynching people I would take mine down even if I was just really pro-workers rights. To me speech is about the content, the ideas, not any particular expression. In opposite world where "we're here we're queer" was a line that caused people to hide in their homes in fear I would be like yeah that's violence if I used that phrase in a speech. I can't separate cause and effect. I can still express my totally fine idea that queer folks do and will always exist, just using different words.

causality0 3y ago

If you don't believe in freedom of speech for people you hate you don't believe in it at all. The refusal to use force to stop opinions the majority doesn't like is the only thing that makes any progress possible. Being able to say things other people want to stop you from saying is the defining characteristic of free speech.

shadowgovt 3y ago
You're right; I don't believe in it as a categorical virtue. I believe in it as an extremely useful feature of a system of government as a check against the failure mode of the leadership becoming so disconnected from the public that they fall to corruption. In short, "It's not okay for the government to turn the public square into an echo chamber." Private people, groups, companies though? Not only may they curtail speech more or less arbitrarily in places they own, I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed. And with very few, narrow, specific cut-outs, American law agrees with that premise.
- causality0 3y ago
  Oh certainly, I agree with you fully, at least unless and until we manage to get service providers classified as common carriers.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed. "freedom of association" is what a lot of people who owned diners felt enabled them to deny services to black people. Maybe you still feel that they should have been able to refuse service to anyone for any reason including skin color. We collectively decided that society works a lot better when we infringed on the rights of diner owners in order to protect the rights of everyone who wanted a seat at the lunch counter. There's an argument to be made that in exchange for the privilege of corporate personhood, any company offering services to the general public should be required to serve any member of that public no matter what their beliefs. I'm not yet convinced that's an ideal situation personally, but situations like this make me more sympathetic to the idea. I'd rather see our government take steps to make sure that no company is allowed to be in a position to oppress the American people leaving them without recourse. I'd sooner see companies with monopoly power broken up or pathways cleared to bring in meaningful competition. That should help protect the American people from oppression by non-governmental agencies while preserving the rights of companies to discriminate according to ideology (if that's a value we think is worth protecting).

andrepd 3y ago

No, you're drawing a false equivalence. Advocating for genocide of entire ethnic groups is not "an opinion I disagree with", in fact: the crucial point is that it is an opinion that if taken up would mean the end of freedom for other people. It's the old paradox of tolerance/freedom/etc. If you would like to preserve e.g. free speech and rule of law then you must resist, by force if necessary, people who would abolish that very same free speech under whose cover they propagate the idea of dismantling it. Other than that it's fair game.

autoexec 3y ago
The paradox of tolerance is about "unlimited tolerance" which already isn't a thing. We have exemptions to the first amendment for words that rise to the level of incitement of violence. The author of that paradox also states: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols". I have yet to hear an argument for genocide that can't be countered by rational argument. When hate groups commit acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that. We don't need to fear words. In fact, I much prefer it when racists make themselves known by their words rather than their actions.

gmerc 3y ago

We learned the hard way what happens if you don’t oppress Nazis. Paradox of tolerance.

autoexec 3y ago
The Paradox of tolerance doesn't mean what you think it does. It talks about "unlimited tolerance" which already doesn't exist under law or the first amendment. We have many restrictions on freedom of speech, such as incitements to violence. The author also states explicitly that his words shouldn't be used to "suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument" and that such extreme action should be reserved for situations where all else has failed and we're up against "fists or pistols" Violence, not words, is the problem. Thankfully we're not tolerating their violence.

_cenw 3y ago

No, most of you seem to be comfortable ignoring when things turn into safety hazards for people who are not you. That includes Nazis for a sliding scale of people who are not part of majority culture (trying really hard to not say white men adjacent for your sensibilities). The luxury of liberal principles - facing the threat of the rise of fascism - really can only be exercised by those least affected by such a rise. I'd be really interested to hear how you think Hitler should've been handled in the 1920s and early 1930s. Could a debate parler have saved Germany's democracy?

seanhunter 3y ago

This is an argument that seems reasonable but lacks important nuance and addressing it forms the center of "The Open Society and its Enemies" by Karl Popper, which I would recommend reading. Popper's argument is essentially that tolerance is essential to open society and therefore to maintain openness, society must ironically be intolerant of those who are intolerant themselves or would spread intolerance. Nazis were specifically on his mind, WW2 having just occurred, and Popper uses them as an example of people who use tolerance by others to spread intolerance and therefore reduce freedom overall. For society to defend freedom, it has to not permit that.

autoexec 3y ago
Karl Popper discusses "unlimited tolerance" which literally no one is demanding. With very very few exceptions, we all accept limitations on speech. We have specific exemptions to free speech like incitements to violence for this reason. Popper also states: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols". When hate groups are committing acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that behavior.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

It's not the opinion I disagree with, it's the actions and policy changes that result from it, which turn into genocide. If a website has people talking politics, that's fine; if a website has doxxing and organizing lynchings, that's not fine. The problem is that one thing (opinions) can lead to the other (genocide) if not kept in check.

autoexec 3y ago
Thankfully we already have laws against lynchings and genocide so there is no reason to violate the ideals of freedom of speech. If anyone is doing either of those things we can (and absolutely should) throw the book at them.