[666maslo666]

Hate speech, inciting violence, threats, cyber bullying do not actually harm democracy or silence anyone at all. You could argue that if some hateful ideology like nazism gets to power, then it can use actual violence to silence the opposition. But it is only after this happens that there is some harm to democracy, and there are other laws to prevent that. Speech alone is incapable of harming a democracy in any way whatsoever.

And I for one am not comfortable in silencing the opposition only because there is a miniscule chance that it could prevent the next Hitler from arising. That is too much of a remote possibility to justify criminal punishments on. Especially since when such beliefs begin to get mainstream then no amount of hate speech laws will help you because the will to enforce these ridiculous laws will be the first thing to go. Then you will have bigger issues in society than a bit of hate speech here and there.

[karajorma]

Second, from your description it sounds like illegal speech laws are hate speech themselves.
"tools to opress" now I'll grant you the only people this oppresses are ****ty people, but that is the exact attitude that all oppressors have had in regard to those they oppress.

You could make the argument that not having hate speech laws is just as oppressive though. It's all well and good trying to claim that the ideal is that all speech should be permitted but this is the real world we live in and you're basically consigning anyone in a minority to live in fear because you want to protect an ideal. An ideal that claims it wants all people to be able to speak freely without fear. But if people are already in fear, they aren't going to be able to speak freely in the first place. So you've already lost.

When it comes to protecting the rights of people who are innocent or the rights of people who are guilty, you have to choose to protect the rights of the innocent. That's why we deprive people of their freedom for committing crimes in the first place.

[666maslo666]

You could make the argument that not having hate speech laws is just as oppressive though.

No you could not. You could make an argument that lack of hate speech laws could maybe lead to rise of an actually oppressive regime in the future, if the hate speech catches on and gains actual power. But mere lack of hate speech laws is not oppressive at all under functioning democracy.

[karajorma]

I just pointed out exactly who it oppresses (minorities) and you ignored that to ride your hobby horse about dictators and evil regimes.

EDIT: Before you go any further guys, imagine being a black man in a country where the majority is white and whenever you speak you hear calls to "Kill the nigger!" Exactly what free speech do you think you have? It doesn't matter whether the law claims you have the right to free speech without fear if in practice you don't.

That is the reason why hate speech laws are needed. That's why they safeguard free speech more than they harm it.

[Bobboau]

you're basically consigning anyone in a minority to live in fear

of being talked at 

if people are already in fear

of
being
talked
at
:
w
t
f
:

When it comes to protecting the rights of people who are innocent or the rights of people who are guilty, you have to choose to protect the rights of the innocent. That's why we deprive people of their freedom for committing crimes in the first place.

They are only guilty if you assume the conclusion. That talking can be a crime.

If people are unable to stand up against bad ideas, THAT is the problem that needs addressing, and as I mentioned illegal speech laws just make that problem worse.

Not to mention that they cause the people who already have those views to retreat into hidden private echo chambers that only further radicalize them.

[karajorma]

Read the edit to my post above. This is not about being talked at.

[Bobboau]

imagine being an Atheist in a "Christian Nation" where there are dozens of nationally syndicated radio broadcasts talking about how atheists are without morals and a threat to civil society. Imagine being the most distrusted minority in america. It doesn't matter what the law says because "atheists shouldn't be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God"

now I want you to imagine a world where your minority status does not affect the validity of your argument.

[Luis Dias]

Saying "Kill the nigger!" has no effect if the actual threat of that sentence wasn't sufficiently true. The thing here was, it was damned true. They used to kill them for just being so.

Personally, I'm always moderately minded by fiat, I am wary of absolutist ideologies, and that includes an absolutism of "free speech" I'm afraid. That is to say, I don't mind certain exceptions to free speech. But as far as I can tell, these should be as minimal as possible. To arrest people, to deprive them of their own freedom, to destroy their personal lives and their finances because they said some stupid **** once in their lifes is too much of a disproportionate answer, if all the consequence is that some bad things were said and meant. If, however, some person was killed (or injured) directly due to these words, they should definitely be responsibilized in some manner.

[karajorma]

For the most part, I agree with you there Luis. I don't think we should have to wait for someone to actually be harmed before doing something. If there is a reasonable expectation of harm should be enough of a yardstick. That means that people with power get clubbed with this rule far more often than some sadsack tweeting about killing all white people.

As for this case being disproportionate, I do wonder if this particular person has attempted to use these same laws to her own advantage a few times and is on the receiving end of that, rather than simply being picked at random.

imagine being an Atheist in a "Christian Nation" where there are dozens of nationally syndicated radio broadcasts talking about how atheists are without morals and a threat to civil society. Imagine being the most distrusted minority in america. It doesn't matter what the law says because "atheists shouldn't be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God"

now I want you to imagine a world where your minority status does not affect the validity of your argument.

That's easy enough to say when you don't have 200 years of systematic persecution of atheists at your back. Things have been pretty good for us in the last 100 years. Now if the police were more likely to kill you if you were an atheist. And you were more likely to killed at random for it. Then you might have a point.

And even still, atheists don't feel free to speak up. There are a **** load of atheists who hardly ever mention their lack of faith and only then to close friends. And it's precisely because of the kind of bull**** you mention. But at least they don't live in a climate where admitting to being an atheist could easily kill them. Unlike being black.

I'm not saying that your minority status should have any effect on the validity of your argument. I'm arguing that people with a minority status are oppressed out of free speech and that hate speech laws are an attempt to redress that balance. In an ideal world we wouldn't need them, but in the real world, we do.

[Bobboau]

You don't have an argument so you are trying to distract by bringing up my race. I'm not going to compete in the oppression olympics because it's irreverent. The validity of what I'm saying is unrelated to whether it's coming from the mouth (fingers?) of a cisgendered hetero-normative rich white male christian, or a black genderfuid homosexual poor muslim otherkin. Trying to play that game is not helping you convince me that I'm wrong, it is having the opposite effect on me.

Someone being an internet tough guy is not going to result in anyone being shot. On the other hand that internet tough guy being ridiculed and shown to be an impotent idiot will damage his position and anyone else who takes it. The fact that in 50 years we've gone from Black people being lynched on the street to the white house shows this. Back in the day people were not standing up again text on a glowing panel, they were standing up to fire hoses and attack dogs. they won with words, with argument, with open debate against racists. they won the argument, when it was face to face with rich white guys with guns. The racists have been pushed back into the periphery, if you wall them off you will only make them stronger because it is the disinfecting light of free and open debate when they say "K1LLtehn!ggres" they only hurt themselves, when they try more sophisticated things like bringing up statistics about blacks committing more crime they get destroyed by actually showing what is wrong with that. How would an argument like that effect someone who's never seen a racist online get ripped apart with every chance to defend themselves?

[666maslo666]

I dont agree that anyone can be oppressed by speech at all. Even in your example of "kill the nigger", it would only be real oppression if it actually progresses from words to something more, such as physical violence or immediate threat of it. Otherwise it is merely a verbal exchange of ideas, however despicable. Being insulted is not oppression.

Also, your example is completely unrealistic. There is no situation in real life where whenever you speak up, you hear calls to be killed. Not in any developed nation anyway. You may hear lots of such calls if a black person speaks on a KKK rally, lol, but thats about it. Not in mainstream discourse. So minorities are not really silenced by hate speech at all. They may be bothered by it sometimes, but not silenced, not unless they want to be silent and go out of their way to be quiet. To silence someone, you need something more than speech, you need physical violence, or its imminent threat. And that is not something that happens in modern democracies.


I really dont like how you are trying to frame this advocacy of hate speech laws as actually helping the free exchange of ideas. It is the polar opposite of what hate speech laws and censorship are for, so it is dishonest and absurd. At least have the courage to admit that you are afraid of the potential impact of some ideas and so you simply want to give up freedom for security and silence the opponents. Stop pretending you are doing it for freedom of expression in some strange roundabout way, because you are not. Quite a few years ago I used to support some limited form of hate speech laws, but I never dared to pretend that it was anything else than an attempt to social engineer potentially dangerous ideas out of public consciousness and as such inherently anti-free speech and limiting. That is true no matter if you agree with such laws or not.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Lack of hate speech bans is oppressive to political discourse. Yeah, right..

[Luis Dias]

Actually some people say things like "GAAhhh I'm going to KILL you mother****a" all the time and we (correctly) don't put much weight into it. Perhaps we store it in our memory banks for the one off rare case where it was actually serious (just like we do look if we actually won the lottery ticket), but that's about it. Yeah it's rude. No, it doesn't deserve jail time. Variations can go like "You're scum, you're a waste of space", or "Someone should put a bullet through your skull". That latter one is probably illegal in the UK, and yet we do understand that 99,99% of the time it's not literal. It's just someone venting with frustration about something they saw or heard.

Hey, just like saying #KillAllWhiteMen. No one in their right mind should take that hashtag seriously. It's crude and rude, but I guess that was the point from the get go, and it was very much non literal. At worst it was a hashtag filled with the crazed psychotic fantasies that sometimes humans have against others in order to vent their frustrations. I even (gasp) understand its small "therapeutic" benefits.

That this hashtag will get a "hearing" is ridiculous. And not just from a waste of resources point of view, but if the system is so stupid that it cannot grasp this is something that should never reach the judicial system, then why would we feel any safer that the remaining parts of this system will be much better? At best, we are at the hands of the common sense of a judge. Who can be at their bad day (Imagine that he just went through a divorce with a crazed feminist woman and is out to get revenge into those damned women). Yeah I know, lightning strike odds, but then, what the **** are the odds of being jailed for tweeting a ****ing hashtag in the so-called "Free World"?

[Scotty]

Take it easy grandpa.

A day late, but how about we not do this in the future, hmmm?  Debate the point, not the poster.

[Ghostavo]

Karajorma, the issue with those kinds of laws is who decides what is hate speech and what's not?

[karajorma]

Who decides what is incitement to violence or to riot and what's not?

You don't have an argument so you are trying to distract by bringing up my race.

I didn't even know what race you are, let alone deliberately bring it up. I could have just as easily brought up being Muslim in America but then you get into problems with people correcting you if you use the word racist.

Someone being an internet tough guy is not going to result in anyone being shot. On the other hand that internet tough guy being ridiculed and shown to be an impotent idiot will damage his position and anyone else who takes it. The fact that in 50 years we've gone from Black people being lynched on the street to the white house shows this. Back in the day people were not standing up again text on a glowing panel, they were standing up to fire hoses and attack dogs. they won with words, with argument, with open debate against racists. they won the argument, when it was face to face with rich white guys with guns. The racists have been pushed back into the periphery, if you wall them off you will only make them stronger because it is the disinfecting light of free and open debate when they say "K1LLtehn!ggres" they only hurt themselves, when they try more sophisticated things like bringing up statistics about blacks committing more crime they get destroyed by actually showing what is wrong with that. How would an argument like that effect someone who's never seen a racist online get ripped apart with every chance to defend themselves?

Hate speech laws aren't there to prosecute every single case of racist speech you know. Just incitement to violence. But you don't even believe that incitement to violence is a crime in the first place anyway so you're pretty much a lost cause in this debate anyway.

[Black Wolf]

Karajorma, the issue with those kinds of laws is who decides what is hate speech and what's not?

Democratically elected representative governments? We just had this debate in Australia over the repeal of parts of the Racial Discrimination Act. The people made their voices heard, and the repeal was stopped. You can read some of the history here - these laws aren't used oppressively, nor are courts bound to uphold or convict all complaints and charges brought under them.

[karajorma]

@Luis, remember I brought up the point about the difference between a fundamentally flawed law and a misapplication of a law. If you want to argue that hate speech laws are fundamentally flawed I'm going to disagree with you. If you want to argue that this law is flawed or that it was applied counter to its purpose, that's a completely different argument. I'm arguing against Bob and 666 who disagree with the fundamental idea of hate speech laws.

[Luis Dias]

Like I said I do think exceptions should exist and  incitement to violence is one of them, etc. My point was just to say that, whatever it was within the system that allowed this person to be held in a court for making these tweets, it indicts the system as it is. As in, this case shows that something's gone too far. What exactly it was, I'm not sure.

[karajorma]

That is a fair point. But it is worth remembering that we're only hearing one side of the story and the original tweet has since been deleted. For all we know the tweet was aimed at someone she'd been harassing.

That said, the more I read about the story, the more I suspect that she didn't do anything worthy of this reaction, even if she has acted rather foolishly.

[jr2]

Who decides what is incitement to violence or to riot and what's not?

You don't have an argument so you are trying to distract by bringing up my race.

I didn't even know what race you are, let alone deliberately bring it up. I could have just as easily brought up being Muslim in America but then you get into problems with people correcting you if you use the word racist.

I didn't either.  Does anyone actually know the race of anyone else here?