Yes, Let’s Rethink Free Speech

[Doctor Amadeus]

I didn't. And I really can't dumb this down any further. If you can't figure it out, well, tough.



It doesn't matter if the target is an individual or group, actual threats that imply imminent harm are illegal. The belief that we need "special" laws to cover threats made based on race, etc, is infantile and irrational.



That's your opinion. Mine differs. /shrug



Threats of harm are threats of harm regardless of the rationale behind them. And those threats are already illegal.



Sigh, see above. Also, you keep saying that hate speech laws are "on the books". No, they're not. In fact, the Supreme Court already addressed this. Now that doesn't cover the "threat" portion of hate speech because again, we have laws against threats already.

No wrong for all the reasons stated this is a root fundamental issue of you misunderstanding the law and misconstruing now case law, which is not legislative. As for your opinion it comes from the same place. And no SCOTUS did not rule on this

[Deleted]

Free Speech is good and I want it to stay. But only the type of speech I agree with. The other type let's just punch the people saying it.
- Far Left.

Free speech is good and I want it to stay. But only the type of speech I agree with. The other type let's just punch the people saying it.
- Far Right.

[Mistame]

No wrong for all the reasons stated this is a root fundamental issue of you misunderstanding the law and misconstruing now case law, which is not legislative. As for your opinion it comes from the same place. And no SCOTUS did not rule on this

So willful ignorance is the path you choose. Fair enough.

[Sharein]

Hate speech do need laws whether you think so or not

Do you know what hate speech laws are going to achieve?

That we go back to the era of the witch hunts. Where we can just point at someone on the streets and say "HE HURTED MUH FEELS" and then the police comes knocking him down. If you don't see how arbitrary that is going to be then you most likely haven't studied law or social concepts.

Free speech is good and I want it to stay. But only the type of speech I agree with. The other type let's just punch the people saying it.
- Far Right.

Goes for Far Left as well. Don't be ignorant or far left. -Every- extreme wants to shut the other end of the spectrum up and wants to shut those we do not agree with their extreme ideas up. I am all for shutting nazis up, but don't be selective and shut marxists/neo communists and salafists up as well. It is not like their ideas are much better.

[Slant]

Did you miss the satire part of the address?

I get that it's there. But the article is really badly written and confusing. This isn't exactly a masterpiece of satire.

[rayvio]

having freedom to say whatever you want and having a responsibility towards what you say are not mutually exclusive

in the US people have the right to bear arms. that does not automatically give them the right to shoot anyone they don't like (contrary to stereotypes). if a person uses their words as a weapon they should have to answer for it. this is why things like bullying, hate speech and bad karaoke should be, and are, met with criticism, mockery and/or social exile depending on severity

[Deianeira]

This is just what I've observed so take this with a grain of salt.

It's a matter of framing. It's not what is being said but how it's said. As you said, trigger warnings have existed forever in the form of content warnings. The kind of people that made trigger warnings a well known term within the current culture are usually, (or at least, this is the perception) the same sorts of people that say that the wage gap is a problem, and Republicans are racist, misogyny and racism are rampant on college campuses, etc, etc.

More or less, it's a tribalistic urge to deny the ideology of "the enemy" so strongly that even if the enemy isn't wrong about everything you still need to denounce them in totality. Pretty much everyone is vulnerable to this kind of epistemological fallacy. The "anti-SJWs" do it with trigger warnings. The left has been doing it a fair bit with Trump lately. Just think about Trump's statements about Charlottesville. Specifically, think about them in a vacuum, devoid of context. He condemned, in the strongest possible terms, (his words, not mine) violence and bigotry on many sides. He also said that both sides had good and bad people but that everyone needs to learn to at least tolerate each other but preferably learn to love each other. Trump was lambasted for this speech, for not being radical enough.

It was a positively Gandhi-esque sentiment. It's not the sentiment that matters to most people though, educated or uneducated. It's all about the framing and the context.

I fall victim to this reasoning error as well. I try to catch myself when I do though and I try not to make the same mistake twice.

The problem with the reasoning "both sides have good people" is that however you slice it when you walk and protest and a Nazi walks right beside you and you say nothing and pretend its nothing out of the ordinary then no you are not a "good" person. Some might say that well i dont agree with their stand on the genocide thing but they do have things in their agenda that i agree with that is just bullshit.

Also about your comment that " Specifically, think about them in a vacuum, devoid of context." Why should we think about them in that vacuum when we know all the context of the event. If there was no information on who attended the protest then yes you could have voiced it like Trump did.

Just accept it Trump is at the very least an apologist for NeoNazi and White supremacists.

[Realitytrembles]

Again, the US specifically exempts obscenity from freedom of speech explicitly because it is offensive for people to hear. Are you on a crusade to remove the obscenity exemption?

In fact, I do disagree with that law.

[ejpaints]

But you're not arguing a principle there but rather a legal interpretation that is a question of degree. On the particular matter of hate speech the SC has taken a very liberal interpretation of the First Amendment, while on obscenity they've taken a very narrow interpretation.

Which puts you in the rather absurd situation where the government can't make it illegal to say "whites are the master race and the evil Jews should be exterminated", but they could make it illegal to tell those people to go fuck themselves.

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Uh uh uh, no you don't. We're not talking about its production which is illegal. I specifically said its distribution.

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Again, the US specifically exempts obscenity from freedom of speech explicitly because it is offensive for people to hear. Are you on a crusade to remove the obscenity exemption?

Distribution still involves exploitation of a minor. Stop grasping for straws. It's a bad analogy, just give it up already.

[McTroll]

Distribution still involves exploitation of a minor. Stop grasping for straws. It's a bad analogy, just give it up already.

First, he'd need to know what "freedom of speech" entails. He clearly has no idea of the concept.

[Stormdash]

Man, there's nothing like "first amendment law via google", like Mormoloyce having heard of the obscenity rule. While the rule is infamously amorphous, here's two important things about it --

A) it's incredibly limited in application precisely because the prevailing assumption of 1st Amendment is in favor of protecting as much speech as possible, and
B) by the very nature of all other 1st Amendment jurisprudence, the obscenity rule does not apply to political expression at all.

If your delusional fantasy is that you can use the obscenity rule to ban, say, conservatism, your legal ignorance has overcome your reason.

EDIT:

The prevailing test of whether the exception applies in most US courts comes from Miller v. California, 413 US 15 (1973), and is articulated a three prong test --

(1) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, ‘taken as a whole,’ appeals to ‘prurient interest’
(2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and
(3) whether the work, ‘taken as a whole,’ lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

So, again, political opinion and ideology are categorically not "obscene" as a question of 1st Amendment jurisprudence.

[DJ117]

Sith Justice Warriors: If you are not with me, then you are my enemy.

[Masoner]

Let's not redefine free speech. That's a slippery slope.

This, no we should not redefine free speech. Anything and I mean in the slightest of deviation can create an opinion for all levels of terrible outcomes.

[Sharein]

This, no we should not redefine free speech. Anything and I mean in the slightest of deviation can create an opinion for all levels of terrible outcomes.

And if left to left wing regressives, there will be a lot of "equal" pigs.

[Armourboy]

This, no we should not redefine free speech. Anything and I mean in the slightest of deviation can create an opinion for all levels of terrible outcomes.

Exactly.

In a government chosen by the people, the last thing you need is a loophole that allows those in power to ever silence the opposition. There are lots of people out there that do and say lots of things that I don't really agree with, but I will defend their right to do so every single day.

[OrcsRLame]

The problem with the reasoning "both sides have good people" is that however you slice it when you walk and protest and a Nazi walks right beside you and you say nothing and pretend its nothing out of the ordinary then no you are not a "good" person. Some might say that well i dont agree with their stand on the genocide thing but they do have things in their agenda that i agree with that is just bullshit.

Also about your comment that " Specifically, think about them in a vacuum, devoid of context." Why should we think about them in that vacuum when we know all the context of the event. If there was no information on who attended the protest then yes you could have voiced it like Trump did.

Just accept it Trump is at the very least an apologist for NeoNazi and White supremacists.

I'm pretty busy right now so I'm gonna make this as short and simple as I can.

"Some might say that well i dont agree with their stand on the genocide thing but they do have things in their agenda that i agree with that is just bullshit."

You have fundamentally misunderstood your enemy which is why they are going to beat you.

Current day Nazi groups do not talk about committing genocide. How the fuck do you think people become Nazis? Allow me to spell it out for you. There's a guy. We'll call him Joey. Joey wants to kill all the Jews. Joey doesn't know anyone else that wants to kill all the Jews though, so he has to be sneaky because he can't do it himself.

So Joey goes and talks to his best friend, we'll call him Bobby.

J "Hey Bob, would you mind if we talk about something kind of serious?"
B "Sure bro, what's eatin' ya?"
J "Well, I'm part of this group called the alt-right, and I want you to join."
B "Aren't they Nazis or something?"
J "We are Neo-Nazis but we don't stand for genocide or any of that crap. We're not bad people."
B "Shit man, I know you're not a bad guy, but I think you might be fallin' in with a bad crowd."
J "Just let me show you some videos and some data and tell you what we're all about. I won't be pushy and you can make up your own mind when I'm done and I'll answer any questions you have."
B "Okay man, sounds reasonable."

So Joey shows Bobby some things on the internet. He shows the video of Joe Biden stating that white people will be a minority in thirty years and that that's a good thing. He'll show Bobby how no mainstream media source has condemned this as racism. He'll show the video of the college debate where the black guy says all white people should kill themselves because that's the ethical thing to do. He'll show the video where that woman at the DNC says it's her job to tell white men that they need to shut up. Joey will have 100 different articles, videos and forum posts showing the liberal elite of this country condemning white people. Then Joey will say...

J "These people are out to get us man. They want to get rid of white people! That's genocide and I for one am not just gonna sit back and take it. We reject the idea of genocide. We're Neo-Nazis because the Nazis were white nationalists, and that's what we need right now. This isn't a supremacy movement, it's a civil rights movement."
B "Okay man, I'm in, but at the first talk of killin' Jews I'm out."

So Bobby joins the alt-right, and he sees it everywhere now. People blaming white people for things, anyone that calls those people out gets character assassinated to the Nth degree. And no one on the left addresses what the alt-right actually says, or if they do they give it a passing mention. Every single mention is genocide this, racism that, and this just further cements the idea that Joey was right. Every single thing these people are saying about the alt-right is not compelling to Bobby because it was addressed by Joey before Bobby ever joined.

And Bobby would probably hold to what he said about jumping ship as soon as the Jew killing talk starts. But it will be too late by then and he will never see it coming. Bobby is not a bad guy. If Bobby saw a black guy or a Jew on the side of the road with a broken down truck, Bobby would go out of his way to help that guy. Joey is the fucking problem, not Bobby. Bobby is just a useful idiot.

And every single time you spout your retarded monolithic evil nonsense that a fucking first grader could see through, you create more Bobbies for the Joeys of the world to scoop up. People like you that say everyone on the other side is a demon are the biggest Nazi enablers on the planet. You are God's gift to their side.

If you want to do something useful instead of helping the Nazis gain a bigger following, you need to come up with a way to defeat their arguments. Counter what they actually say instead of what you think they believe. Rhetoric is a type of combat and you don't know the first thing about it. You just get in the way.

[Mormolyce]

Distribution still involves exploitation of a minor. Stop grasping for straws. It's a bad analogy, just give it up already.

Um, you may wish to believe that but legally speaking you are completely wrong. Look it up.

First, he'd need to know what "freedom of speech" entails. He clearly has no idea of the concept.

Well this is an ironic comment.

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In fact, I do disagree with that law.

What are you doing about it?

[ejpaints]

Um, you may wish to believe that but legally speaking you are completely wrong. Look it up.



Well this is an ironic comment.

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What are you doing about it?

The mere possession of child pornography is a prosecutable offense. I don't need to look it up. I've unfortunately known people who now sit in a prison cell for the offense. I was active duty at the time. They had to be guarded in a hotel room by people from another unit when the parents in my unit found out because people wanted to kill him. Dude conveniently had his wife volunteer for free childcare for all of our squadron events. Trust me, I'm intricately aware of how the investigation on that offense goes. It's taken so seriously it's the only time I've ever seen the FBI take jurisdiction over a court martial proceeding.

[Pony Soldier]

we should redefine the first amendment. Anything that is hateful, especially to Trump, should be censored.

And anybody with the name of Robert Lee should be exiled from the country.

[Mormolyce]

The mere possession of child pornography is a prosecutable offense.

Yes exactly, because it's exempted from free speech protection. Due to a specific ruling of the court.