"To be sure, that doesn’t mean that deliberately offending people for its own sake is morally acceptable, or that people should be entitled to use speech to incite violence, harass, or threaten."
The difficulty is knowing what the intent was. Usually there are ways of "non-violent" communication. But it seems a lot of it is subjective.
By far it seems the most restrictive places are primary and secondary schools.
It's not a coincidence that the postmodern thoughts that underpin a lot of this bullshit simply does away with intent, declaring it to be completely useless, and saying that the only thing that can be used to judge a message is how it affected the recipient.
Combine that with "words are violence", and you can manufacture physical abuse out of thin air.
It's really not the way forward for progressivism.
I never associated Hilary Putnam with postmodernism, but I suppose he could have been affected by something in the air while writing The Meaning of 'Meaning'.[1]
> It's not a coincidence that the postmodern thoughts that underpin a lot of this bullshit simply does away with intent
Please make the connection between the disregard of intent and any rigorous definition of "post-moderism". Genuinely I don't see it.
I think the degradation of intent is more at the hands of those who have used it as a shield than anyone else. We've seen entire regions of the world thrown into chaos without consequence. Why, because the responsible parties didn't intend the chaos. At a certain point it gets a little thin.
What's imporant here is scale. Yeah, if you say something that rubs someone the wrong way, they should be able to have a conversation with you about your intentions and weigh those in their judgement. But what if it keeps happening. How long does someone else need to value your intent? 10 times? 100 times? Forever?
And of course when we get to things that affect people's lives on a much more material basis, maybe its good that we stop counting intent for so much. Maybe what we need is for decision makers to get a little more cautios because they will actually feel some consequences if they really screw up a lot of people's lives.
The guy who says things were "just a joke" when he see's the frown of disapproval...but he never apologizes. And he also doesn't stop doing it. It's "just a joke" every time.
Postmodernism absolutely does not deny intent. In fact, motivation behind texts/speech (as well as interpretation by readers/hearers) is such an important part of it that you can't really do postmodern analysis without accounting for motives.
The closest thing I can imagine for any kind of defense of your statement is that postmodernism will not let the declared or conscious intent of the speaker absolutely constrain a text. The logical distinctions between "not absolutely constraining" and "declaring it to be completely useless" should be clear. And the idea that people don't always declare their intent accurately should also be uncontroversial.
Really, postmodernism is essentially very big elaboration on the principles underlying Sinclair's observation "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
People who equate speech with violence have generally never known physical violence.
I've always held that position firmly. The trouble is, people are turning out to be a lot more programmable than I thought they (we) were. You could almost say that we're becoming more like machines at the same time that machines are becoming more like us. To the extent that's true, the part of the old saying that goes "... but words will never hurt me" can be seen as less valid.
Agreed. It's an announcement that you've determined that some speech has to be crushed, but also preemptively framing it as self-defense. It's like when you first hear about Libertarians having a Non-Aggression Principle at their core, but then you start to hear how they redefine "aggression."
In a very similar way, when Group A starts calling Group B "terrorist," it's really an announcement that Group A is going to be compromising their own professed ethics and processes to destroy Group B. It's an announcement of martial law, not a label that reliably describes any particular behavior by "terrorist" groups.
Speech- and thought-violence rhetoric is just empty rationalization and crybully rhetoric from the powerless, but it's often a prelude to a brutal crackdown when it comes from the powerful.
I don't know if this is true all the time. I think knowingly sending rape threats to rape victims is pretty violent behavior. I think knowingly trying to trigger someone into an eating disorder relapse or coercing someone into suicide are heinous things that fall into violence. I think there is a line where speech can be violent or said with the intent to harm someone the same as a punch is.
I also agree extreme cases make bad law. That's why I'm disagreeing with the extreme that there are no exceptions to the notion of speech not being violent.
I think we have to be careful not to put words in each others' mouths here. To be clear, I am not saying that specific, credible threats of violence should be treated as "speech" in the First Amendment sense.
In my view, the status quo, where most speech is fair game until it rises to the level of coercive threats, is about right.
Things can be bad without being violent. I don't understand this widespread push to try and erase the difference between non-violent bad things and violent bad things.
Compared to the actual act of rape? No. That kind of thinking just devalues the victim.
Numerous rape victims have objected to subsequent threats of additional rape, and would probably not take kindly to your inference that they're somehow devaluing themselves. You commented above that you think many participants in this debate lack experience of physical violence, and to be frank I am inclined to wonder the same of you in this instance.
Those would be intentional (a differentiation the article makes) threats. These fall under terroristic threats. They are not violent themself, but they are threats of violence which are not legal.
> I think knowingly sending rape threats to rape victims is pretty violent behavior.
This is correct, also because such speech is quite often a precursor to actual violence. View it as more than a thing in isolation, without consequence.
In a political context, violent rhetoric about a particular group of people is predictably followed by actual violence towards members of that group. Hate speech is very much a part of hate crimes. They're not separable.
how much physical violence is enough? Getting jumped by a crowd of dudes for no reason? Getting held up at gunpoint? There was definitely some other stuff as well, but those are the most memorable. I do admit that i haven't been in an actual warzone though.
So you're saying that you equate speech (not credible, specific threats or other extreme examples of non-protected speech) with having your life threatened physically.
I wish I could understand where you're coming from. I genuinely do.
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That's why I said "generally." I'm not setting out to invalidate or disrespect any individual's experience.
It's likely that we'd have no trouble finding Holocaust survivors who would equate Nazi rhetoric with violence, for instance. They would agree with your position, given that such rhetoric arguably facilitated violence against them that would not otherwise have occurred. German law reflects this point of view.
But my position has traditionally been that prior restraint empowers the bad guys to an even greater extent. You don't want Nazis spreading messages of hate and violence... but you really don't want them telling you what you can say, if/when they come to power again.
I dunno if I agree with you overall, but getting punched in the face in the street is wildly different from someone calling you a bad name on the Internet, so on that point I entirely agree.
Getting punched in the face is primal, it gets into that part of your brain that we’re all wisely told to suppress, the animalistic nature of us upright apes.
It’s… well, nobody has ever said anything to me online that has caused me to feel even a fraction of what I’ve felt getting punched in the face.
I don’t know how or even if that contributes to the conversation, but I think it’s worth saying.
I have a lot of experience with physical violence. The Brandenburg criteria of specificity and imminence are useful legal yardsticks, but they also assume every set of circumstances is isolated from everything else and can can considered independently, almost in a social vacuum. This is partly the outcome of the Anglo-American legal tradition and the reductive philosophical approach it uses.
It's less clear cut in the real world. To some extent one must be willing to tolerate negative incoming messages, or otherwise one would never leave one's home ot risk any interaction at all. On the other hand, to argue that no speech act can ever have a violent component by definition is facile; much speech as a prelude the violence, and a lack of specificity in space, manner, or time just as easily be designed to stoke fear by strategically using uncertainty to render its object paranoid and exhaust their defensive capability in advance.
Much of this discourse at present is purely strategic, and often wildly disingenuous. Many people who speak in lofty terms about free speech (not specifying anyone in particular here) are notably silent when it comes to people harrassing librarians or allegations that drag shows = groomers + pedophilia and therefore are legitimate targets for physical or terroristic violence (bomb threats and the like that are sufficiently credible to provoke a police response).
So what? I'm not arguing about the legal contours, I'm arguing about general concepts of meaning and risk management, outside of a legal context. I said so explicitly at the beginning of my comment.
Much of this discourse at present is purely strategic, and often wildly disingenuous. Many people who speak in lofty terms about free speech (not specifying anyone in particular here) are notably silent when it comes to people harrassing librarians or allegations that drag shows = groomers + pedophilia and therefore are legitimate targets for physical or terroristic violence (bomb threats and the like that are sufficiently credible to provoke a police response).
Now, imagine that the bad actors you're referring to have come to power, and because you've nerfed 1A, they now have the power of prior restraint over your speech, and that of their victims.
Still think it's a net win?
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The big problem I have with what you wrote is "much speech (is) a prelude (to) violence," used in a context that seemingly justifies equating the speech with the violence that ensues. This is an argument for prior restraint. No?
I haven't nerfed 1a, nor have I made any argument for prior restraint. Would you kindly refrain from projecting your anxieties onto me, and respond to what I actually wrote?
Although violent speech may seem hard to swallow, the alternative of censorship has been shown throughout history to be far more detrimental. It seems that the younger generation has not fully understood this fact, but hopefully they will come to understand it through the lessons of others, rather than through their own experiences.
Has it? I see censorship as being extremely successful nowadays. It seems to keep the world together nowadays. Imagine we’d publish everything we know, many people would oppose.
speech inciting violence is unacceptable. Speech isn't by it's nature violent--although it might be called forceful--and I would refrain from ever calling speech violent.
(and even speech inciting violence turns out to be acceptable to a majority of people in conditions where you say you want to kill (for example) a pedophile or a racist, or when you're writing a Declaration of Independence or a French National Anthem (La Marseillaise) because everybody agrees, the Tree of Liberty must periodically be watered by the blood of tyrants!)
my comment is a little bit all over the place, but what I'm trying to say is, you should never agree to call speech violence but always put in the word "incite/ment"; and at the same time it's difficult to make any broad or universal statements about speech without discovering it's a complex subject. Humans are good at imagination or conceptualizing hypotheticals, and we have the capacity for violence, so it's very difficult to say what someone can and can't say, usually the listener understands implicitly but sometimes the person listening does not have your interstests at heart, has their own motives, or is plain nutso.
But having a <ul> without display:block and adding custom oversized dots that aren't aligned to the line - we can all agree that is violence, can't we?
I don't think that most of the people who equate hate speech with violence are literally requesting assualt charges be brought. They are calling for boycotts and de-platforming, both of which fall well within the bounds of the "marketplace of ideas." While there is indeed no right to not be offended, there is also no right to be listened to, and no right to artificially amplify your speech on someone else's dime. We live in a world where the mechanisms of mass communication are held in private hands---there is no digital public square, regardless of what techno-libertarians might have you believe. So there are speech winners and there are speech losers, chosen generally by capital. If you want to change that and have a public platform, you'll have to consider the digital equivalent of communism. Until then, you'll have to live with mass suppression of speech just as you live with mass amplification of it. They are two sides of the same coin.
They may not be requesting assault charges, but they may be requesting pain and suffering compensation, or using "unkind" comments as leverage in a divorce.
I didn't downvote you, but I haven't heard of any kind of mass movement to get pain and suffering damages from Donald Trump's tweets, as painful as they were to endure. If you're talking about libel, that's a separate thing, and has been around since before the First Amendment. If you publish untrue things and they harm someone, of course you can (and should) be held liable for your words. Divorce is also a different situation, where someone's words may be fair game as evidence of actions and character, depending on the circumstances.
Things like insults, shaming, and verbal abuse are part of emotional abuse in divorce cases. These need not be evidence of actions or character. These can be used for an at fault divorce. What is consided to br an insult or shaming can vary greatly on perspective. Not to mention, the court may not stick ro just these examples and could include other things that makes the other person feel bad - "I hate this meal. Why do you always make this?"
Again, those are legal principles that have been enshrined in law for a long time. The article does not address them, which leads me to believe the author was thinking of more general cases of offensive speech, like the campus speaker example he offers, and not specific cases of verbal abuse. There may be cases where people are urging broader scope for those laws, which have a pretty high bar as the lawyer commented earlier in the thread. But most of the debate around offensive speech focuses on the issue of access to platforms.
When it comes to public universities, there is a legitimate question, since a publicly funded university may be considered a state actor. But when it comes to private services like social media where it seem most of the controversy lies, they're free to set any rules they want. And unsurprisingly, their terms of service generally give them broad discretion on who they let use their service.
"When speech causes emotional or mental pain, the offended parties are morally entitled to nothing in the form of compensation from or punishment for the offender."
Considering this is repeated a couple times by the author, it seems they are talking about a general statement and not a narrow circumstance, even if they're using a specific example. It's important to point out that the statement above is not universally true, or if it is, then our laws are immoral.
"Again, those are legal principles that have been enshrined in law for a long time."
“When we do become offended, as we all will, we must settle for responding with criticism or contempt, and stop short of demanding that the offender be punished or required to make restitution,”
It seems to me that restitution and punishment would include those leveled by the legal system. Simply because something has be law for a long time does not make it off limits to discussion, especially if it's application/interpretation has changed over that time.
These are fair points if we read the article as a criticism of existing law. I didn't read it that way, mostly because of the current political context where "cancel culture" is a big issue. But I can certainly see how it can be taken that way. In that case, I can only say that I would strongly disagree that speech alone should never be actionable, there are just too many obvious exceptions such as the ones we've talked about here (libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, harassment). Laws evolve for a reason. They are not academic exercises in philosophy, they arise from experience.
> I don't think that most of the people who equate hate speech with violence are literally requesting assualt charges be brought
First off, they are. but if you are saying: loose your job and ability to make a living, losing your ability to speak in public, fuck me give me those charges then!
you are backing tyrannical ideas while trying to pretend you are just being reasonable.
The tyranny isn't coming from me, it's coming from the people that own the company that's firing you. And the "tyrannical idea" you're referring to is called capitalism, and it has its upsides and its downsides. Don't shoot the messenger.
It appears that you are engaging in a logical fallacy by utilizing capitalism, which I assume is not something you hold in high regard, to silence someone's perspective during a discussion and attributing the blame to capitalism.
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are primarily owned and controlled by individuals and private companies rather than by the government or public institutions.
None of the things mentioned above are related to capitalism's coverage of free speech. It seems that your intention is to suppress those who hold differing opinions, and you are using the assumption that the silenced individuals support capitalism to justify your actions.
A logical fallacy is a flawed argument that can be revealed by reasoning. For instance, someone suggesting that attributing blame to capitalism is a way to silence another's speech. That is a logical fallacy, because it omits any explanation of how such an attribution could silence another person. :-)
Seriously though, do you not see how private ownership of communication services impacts the question of who is allowed to use those services? And that if there were a truly public service, how that would dramatically change the situation with respect to First Amendment rights?
For the record, I'm a huge fan of capitalism. But it surprises me how many people don't understand that it has drawbacks, and that we should be honest with ourselves about those drawbacks. It's ok to say that you're pro-capitalism but that you also think that the Internet (or at least some of it) should be a public utility, for instance.
Also, contacting someone's employer is far from a slam dunk freedom of speech case. It could easily run afoul of several criminal statutes, not to mention the obvious civil liability.
One more nail in the coffin for Internet anonymity.
You are right about this classification, but in my opinion freedom of association does need to be limited. Freedom of association is a right that people should have in their private life, but it is definitely not a right that government or government-funded public institutions (e.g. education) should have. Similarly the types of 'association' which are essential for basic life - namely, housing, employment and finance - already have various anti-discrimination laws that effectively assert that everyone should have equal access to these things and freedom of association is not an excuse to exclude people from these core needs.
In essence, what I'm saying is that a card-carrying member of some radical movement (whichever movement you or I hate the most) perhaps should be shunned by people in all kinds of social activities because of their beliefs, but IMHO as long as they aren't breaking the law, they still should have the right to be a part of the society and receive core services which require interaction with it, namely, public services, education, jobs, housing, etc.
We have drawn a line in sand upon crossing which people are excluded from society, and that line is criminal law if determined in due process. And before crossing that line people should have the right to not be discriminated in employment. If most of your coworkers hate you because you come from the "opposing outgroup" where there's mutual hate and perhaps a history of violence between your "tribes" - too bad for them, both you and them should still have the right to work there.
> I don't think that most of the people who equate hate speech with violence are literally requesting assualt charges be brought.
Right. I can't think of anyone I have come across in liberal media. But you can always dig someone up that takes any given position.
> While there is indeed no right to not be offended, there is also no right to be listened to, and no right to artificially amplify your speech on someone else's dime. We live in a world where the mechanisms of mass communication are held in private hands---there is no digital public square, regardless of what techno-libertarians might have you believe.
All correct. The people who want it to be one way or the other (depending on their political leanings) usually are conflating constitutional protections from the government as being applicable to/from everyone and everything else.
If you're screaming on Twitter that (some racial group) is bad, and people tell you to shut up, they are allowed to do so under the first amendment. You're allowed to do so under the first amendment. Twitter can totally ban you based on what they deem acceptable behavior, because the first amendment doesn't regulate private companies (just the government).
If you're calling for the extermination of that particular group, the government can charge you under US Code for inciting violence:
...But you have to prove intent, which is notoriously hard to do, and notoriously easy to get off scott-free from. ("I was being bombastic, I didn't think anyone would LITERALLY try and exterminate said group")
> They are calling for boycotts and de-platforming, both of which fall well within the bounds of the "marketplace of ideas."
This is a really obvious idea that people seem to have a lot of trouble understanding, especially when the framing of the conversation drifts toward "cancel culture".
>While there is indeed no right to not be offended, there is also no right to be listened to, and no right to artificially amplify your speech on someone else's dime
When you prevent somebody from being on a platform, you also prevent others from hearing what that person has to say.
As for amplification, it is not amplification to show me your tweets with #stabledifussion when that is what I search for - it is the entire point of Twitter.
It absolutely is amplification---without Twitter, there would be no tweet to search for. And never forget, the actual point of Twitter is to deliver value to its shareholders.
Twitter is now a private company, but that is besides the point, as it would only provide value to whomever owns it people use it, and they only do that if they can get access to what they value.
And no, to be amplification, Twitter would have to boost certain tweets artificially. It is very unartificial when I get results for searching. Otherwise it is also boosting if I use the municipal library to checkout a book, or buy it on Amazon, at which point amplification is meaningless.
You're taking for granted the existence of communication services like Twitter. Twitter is amplification. You can't walk out your front door and give a speech that millions of people instantly have access to. You can only do that because of the existence of private services like Twitter. And the reality is that you have no inherent right to use those services, they can exclude you from them for any reason they like.
Libraries are also amplification, but they are generally public. When a book is banned from a library, it potentially violates the First Amendment. Twitter is not public, so when a user is banned from Twitter, the First Amendment does not apply.
If and when we have a government-operated Twitter, it will have to offer equal access to everyone, and it will have to tolerate any speech that falls under First Amendment protection. But until then, you'll have to live with the possibility that the private services you use will kick you off because they don't like what you say.
You can't really call it a marketplace of ideas, then, if your response is [metaphorically] a SLAPP. E.g. people weren't just critical of Justine Sacco, they tried to destroy her. Tell me again who the bad guys are?
The courteous response would be to answer my question rather than deflecting from it.
But since you ask, I am not okay with it in many contexts and my confidence estimates are applied to individual situations rather than being general. I have had experience of being attacked by mobs, both online and physically. I have scars from being kicked in the head and stabbed in the leg during such an attack. I've separately been arrested and jailed on specious charges over political activity (more than once) and obtained dismissal of charges in court. And I have been the target of both verbal and physical violence on many, many occasions, often both on the same occasion. So I come at this question with very extensive first hand knowledge of how such arguments can play out.
So now, would you care to respond to the question I asked: how do you think coordinated speech in a marketplace of ideas differs from coordination of buying or selling in response to price signals?
The kinds of censorship that really bothers me is when people like Ron deSantis use the power of the state to force people like university professors to say specific things and muzzle them from saying other things. That's actual government censorship.
Those professors and teachers are employees of the government. Like it or not, that puts them under the same umbrella as police officers, fire fighters, and others. Government employees are very much restricted in what they can say and do when they are on the clock.
Academic freedom is not a legal concept, and unfortunately the law trumps the ideals in this case. However, academic freedom isn't exactly unlimited: a tenured physics professor who doesn't teach a class on physics, publish a paper on physics, or advise a student for 10 years will likely be fired at most institutions (unless they have a nobel prize or something). Professors working at state schools have additional limits on their academic freedom. This is why you don't tend to see theology departments at state schools.
Also, in practice, you could reasonably argue that there generally isn't much academic freedom in most fields, since most research is grant-funded, and that is controlled by (usually) governments.
It's amazing how quickly people will pivot to "censorship of professors" when they are talking about laws that control the curriculum of elementary schools.
I don't dislike professors or teachers at state schools, but I understand that they work in an institution that effectively does not offer academic freedom. If you are a professor, you can work at any other institution in the country, other than the 50-100 or so that are run by states, and you will have all the academic freedom you want. If this country goes to a major war, a large number of those professors are likely going to be told to work on something war-related, because they are agents of the state.
If you are a teacher, who was actually targeted by the education control bills in FL, you arguably don't have enough training to have really have earned academic freedom. Until about 5 minutes ago, nobody argued that they did have academic freedom. Curricula are there for a reason.
"Today, Florida honeymoon registry company Honeyfund.com, along with workplace diversity consultancy Collective Concepts and its co-founder Chevara Orrin filed a federal lawsuit to block enforcement of Florida’s HB 7, the Stop WOKE Act. The law purports to “fight back against woke indoctrination” by, among other things, barring employers from engaging in speech that “advances” certain “concepts” regarding race, sex, religion or national origin. The suit names Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Florida officials as defendants and challenges the statute as unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments for barring the expression of viewpoints disfavored by government officials and chilling a wide range of speech in workplaces. "
I should have been clearer: you said Ron DeSantis was using the power of the state to force university professors to say things. I was after a citation for that claim.
"In this case, the Court ruled that a state cannot force children to stand, salute the flag, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The justices held that school children who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, for religious reasons, had a First Amendment right not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the U.S. flag."
"If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time?
Simple question do we agree we don't need a middle school teacher explaining in graphic detail how to have sex? Or maybe "alternative" theory like flat earth?
If not I don't know how we reach a common ground if we agree though maybe just maybe we can agree that teacher shouldn't be teaching certain things at certain ages and not call that "censorship". You might disagree what ages or things but still.
A teacher isn't there to instill their values or beliefs into a child but to teach the curriculum.
Abstinence only education is known to not work, so unless your want to end up with a bunch of pregnant teenagers who think porn accurately depicts sex, having school teachers explain how sex works seems like the only reasonable conclusion. The only question then is at what age. Middle school starts off at 10-years old seems a bit young to me for graphic descriptions of sex. It is certainly old enough to have already learnt about what inappropriate touching is and what relationships are, though. Age 14, which is at the end of middle school seems like a reasonable age though.
What age do you think is reasonable for schools to be teaching sex? Explicitly, how to use a condom, and the inaccuracies of porn.
> What age do you think is reasonable for schools to be teaching sex? Explicitly, how to use a condom, and the inaccuracies of porn.
I'm not going to play along with your attempt to deflect from your failure to answer. The specific age we choose doesn't really matter that much in the context of our discussion and you know that.
Lawyer here, and this definitely strikes me as one of a surprising number topics in which, the law has for some time, already a very effective and useful way to get at this concept.
Sure, speech can be harmful and hurtful, to the point that someone should get punished for it. But the law has generally done very good job of reminding us that this tends to be a VERY NARROW possibility, i.e. the harm has to be very specific and directed and measurable.
> the law has generally done very good job of reminding us that this tends to be a VERY NARROW possibility, i.e. the harm has to be very specific and directed and measurable.
Here in the US, yes. In the rest of the world (like, EU) they aren't very specific.
There are other good things, but it is certainly a deficiency in Europe. Some criminalize insults pretty heavily. While the thought behind that might be decent, I don't believe it to work in the future.
For example in Germany the first amendment protects dignity. An ideal law nobody can really fully adhere to. It works because there is a societal consensus about its meaning. Nothing the law can really determine. I believe this consensus will not really survive the 21st century. Perspectives will be too different. Dignity in religious communities means something entirely different than in a secular society, and even in that values will diverge more and more.
A lot of these laws are ancient and many were intended to protect monarchy from vulgar peasants, so I am a bit surprised "progressive" forces seem to have found their love for it.
In the interest of civil liberties, these laws would need to be changed at some point. They basically allow authority to selectively punish anyone under almost any pretense.
It's not an exaggeration. My city government has funded a "Black Excellence Center" which will use public funds to build a racially-exclusive art gallery/business incubator/cultural space for black people, who represent ~6% of my city's population and are not excluded from any of the similar places which already exist:
This is blatantly unconstitutional, but no one has challenged it in court and no one will. Other examples abound, such as racial discrimination in Ivy League admissions (now challenged in court, but for its impact on Asians mainly) and observed differences across race in admitted med students' MCAT scores.
Teddy Roosevelt once said that, "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism" and, "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." Well, here we are. Separate schools, separate standards, separate funding, separate public investment, except for the one largest demographic group... all driving my country into further conflict and disunity.
Not saying what you're saying is wrong, but there are lawsuits every day for discriminating against what people think are the majority in employment and housing. I'm not sure why my post was downvoted for pointing out a fact about the law and that most people don't realize it.
But you're doubling down not just on that people aren't aware of it but that it's a dead letter. That's wrong. You're confusing the government's spending power with discrimination in employment.
This particular type of grievance is only possible when you fail or refuse to comprehend the long, brutal, and massive privilege that “one largest demographic” took for itself for centuries. “Separate schools, separate standards, separate funding, separate public investment” indeed.
Yes that is why the civil rights law in California was almost repealed last year, they wanted to make it legal to discriminate against white people. Such moronic thinking does not consider the future consequences. Law by teenagers.
"Almost" is not true. Did someone drop a bill in the legislature? Maybe. Did it even make it out of committee? Where are you getting this? "Almost" is doing a lot of work.
If your source was AM radio or Fox News don't bother to reply. Leginfo only, please.
Nope, that's a repeal of our affirmative action ban WHICH FAILED in 2020, during the alleged peak of the woke mob. I bet Fox doesn't mention that affirmative action is illegal in California.
That is not repealing our civil rights law, the FEHA, or amending it to remove protections for white people, who are, by the way, only a plurality here. Even if we had, the federal law, Title VII, still protects everyone. The question isn't who you are, it's whether you were discriminated against on that basis.
Personally, I am really glad the rest of the country hates us and thinks we're shit so they don't come here, but it gets annoying when people just make stuff up. No, the place is far from perfect, but it's nothing like what people imagine. Even in San Francisco, they recalled the prosecutor who wouldn't do anything and San Francisco is probably the most extreme. People think that must mean every city around it is the same. Other than Berkeley, sometimes, they just aren't. In fact most of us go, thank god I don't live in San Francisco, which, by the way isn't the second biggest city in the state. San Jose has more people than San Francisco and so does San Diego. San Diego is much, much more purple. It's almost like 40m people are different.
They sure seem happy to take our tax dollars though.
Arguably, a ban on racial discrimination (or "affirmative action") is a civil rights law, so almost repealing such a ban would be almost repealing civil rights law.
Arguably being the key word, then yes. But the voters rejected it. Arguably or not, we weren't talking about affirmative action, we were talking about what people call the civil rights law, which is the FEHA, which is the state analog of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So, it's arguable if you don't know what you're talking about, and then it just becomes "annoying-reply-guy"-ly.
That strongly depends on how you convince them. If you one-on-one talk someone into shooting up a school, that's conspiracy. If you tell a large audience that teachers and children are a scourge upon society that must be eliminated and count on some small fraction to be unhinged enough to connect the dots, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
It really depends on what you did to convince them. See the top level post.
The law does not only care about causality. It is also cares free speech, reasonable interpretation, and comparative responsibility.
I could craft and publish an argument School shootings are in fact a positive good a we should have more of them. I am legally in the clear, even If someone finds my argument convincing and goes and shoots up a school because of it.
"Reasonable" can be whatever the judge/jury say it is. That can vary wildly. There are laws on the books in which the statute specifies "reasonable" and a judge has determined that it's an absolute liability offense because determining reasonableness is too hard and would frustrate the legislatures intent. (Even though this conflicts with other precedential opinion which states you can't ignore the letter of the law to pursue it's spirit).
In short, "reasonable" means nothing until the people in power tell you what it means.
I was speaking about what the law philosophically cares about - how it was crafted.
When it comes to this example, it is a lot more clear. I can write a book on why you should shoot up schools and it would be protected. Reasonable does not come in to that part of the question.
Sure, I'm just saying in practice the ideals that the laws were crafted on tend to go out the window - to the point that the law (through opinion) contradicts the written statute.
>"Reasonable" can be whatever the judge/jury say it is."
Not really. The boundaries of "reasonable" are... wait for... it reasonableness.
I.e. if a jury or a judge isn't reasonable, then an appeals court can overturn it. A judge or jury is not given free reign to determine anything to be reasonable.
She was convicted because she breached her duty of care after he informed her that he attempted suicide, and she told him to get back in the car and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it. The judge was spot in noting that by having the conversations with him that she did, at the time, she had a duty of care that she did not uphold. Your characterization of her liability is completely inapposite what the court found, it is misleading, and it is being done so to serve your own political beliefs regarding speech.
interesting. What are my beliefs regarding freedom of speech? I attempted to provide an example of what the OP spoke of, might have been wrong. My beliefs regarding freedom of speech is that is should be just shy of absolute. Only limit should be believable threats of violence. I appreciate you telling me what I believe and my political beliefs though.
When did I say what your political beliefs were? It's obvious to anyone reading your post, that you shared what you did to further your beliefs. Sheesh! And go figure, you're just shy of an absolutist. Who would have guessed that? (me! I would have!)
So because your post was obviously made in an effort to expound upon the validity of your beliefs, it must be the case that I only ever do that? I don't follow. I wasn't projecting, I was just using basic reading comprehension skills to understand why someone would write what they did. It's a totally normal skill: https://www.lsac.org/lsat/taking-lsat/test-format/reading-co...
Where did you get that? The court decision does not mention "duty of care" (which is a well established term for situations that have nothing in common with this one). She created a different kind of duty for herself, not by any of the preceding messages but rather by the final "get back in" message.
Harm and causality are not the sole factors that the law turns on. I can convince people to do all types of terrible things, but that does not make it illegal
> The test determined that the government may prohibit speech advocating the use of force or crime if the speech satisfies both elements of the two-part test:
> The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,”
> AND
> The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
[snip]
> The Supreme Court in Hess v. Indiana (1973) applied the Brandenburg test to a case in which Gregory Hess, an Indiana University protester, said, “We’ll take the fucking street later (or again)." The Supreme Court ruled that Hess’s profanity was protected under the Brandenburg test, as the speech “amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time.” The Court held that “since there was no evidence, or rational inference from the import of the language, that his words were intended to produce, and likely to produce, imminent disorder, those words could not be punished by the State on the ground that they had a ‘tendency to lead to violence.’”
> In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.(1982), Charles Evers threatened violence against those who refused to boycott white businesses. The Supreme Court applied the Brandenburg test and found that the speech was protected: “Strong and effective extemporaneous rhetoric cannot be nicely channeled in purely dulcet phrases. An advocate must be free to stimulate his audience with spontaneous and emotional appeals for unity and action in a common cause. When such appeals do not incite lawless action, they must be regarded as protected speech.”
And because I also see this doctrine over-applied online:
> In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court redefined the scope of the fighting words doctrine to mean words that are "a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs." There, the Court held that the burning of a United States flag, which was considered symbolic speech, did not constitute fighting words.
> In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), the Supreme Court found that the "First Amendment prevents government from punishing speech and expressive conduct because it disapproves of the ideas expressed." Even if the words are considered to be fighting words, the First Amendment will still protect the speech if the speech restriction is based on viewpoint discrimination.
The page I linked to links to multiple law review articles on the subject:
Hello, I was just born yesterday and now I'm shocked to discover every single person I've met so far has hold some view I dislike.
Theoretically, how much outrage do I need to manufacture to get the legal system to ignore the Brandenburg test and prosecute today's flavor of thought villain?
I expect the above will get flagged but it's correctly pointing out that we've effectively brute forced some loopholes that allow normal protections on speech and thought to be bypassed. The fact that you "can't" say certain things ends up shifting the game to claiming your opponent has said one of those certain things.
Edit 2: and just to clarify my point, once these loopholes get found, people jump on them and aggressively exploit them. Look around this thread for the kinds of rhetoric people that oppose free speech are using. What would they have subbed in 15 or 50 years ago?
exactly. the poster you are responding to is pretending that the boundaries of polite conversation have always been the same as the boundaries of legal speech when that's obviously not the case and has never been.
Not clear why you're getting downvoted, but this is the exact right answer. The Twitter files was proof that the Federal government put pressure on Twitter to censor specific viewpoints.
Somehow, I don't think that the material covered by the so-called "Twitter files", or the material not covered by them (e.g. Trump asking directly for deletion), is what the GP was referring to.
>Hess uttered, "We'll take the fucking street later" or "We'll take the fucking street again." Hess was convicted in Indiana state court of disorderly conduct.
>The Supreme Court reversed Hess's conviction because Hess' statement, at worst, "amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time." In contrast to such an indefinite future time, the Court emphasized the word imminent in the "imminent lawless action" test of Brandenburg. Because the evidence did not show that Hess' speech was intended and likely to produce "imminent disorder", the state could not punish Hess' speech.[3][4]
While that shows the supreme court ruled in his favor because of a lack of time specificity, that doesn't mean that the court would necessarily rule against him had he specified a time. Speculatively there might be more involved in the assessment.
As is oft repeated, the law you refer to only applies to state action. The notion we could easily apply this to private individuals quickly breaks down.
Employee X gets fired for publicly stating that their employers products are trash, said employee sues, nothing about what they said was illegal.
From the companies perspective, the harm done by an employee talking trash about products is very similar to the harm done by an employee talking about unions or employee conditions.
And the law generally recognize this. It is not protected to intentionally harm the company if the intention is purely to cause harm. It is protected if the intent is to warn the public about a harmful product (Whistleblowing), or to protect fellow employees for harm. When those cases do end up in court, what judges and juries will focus on is on intent as the deciding factor once harm has been agreed/established.
I guess I don’t really see what your point is then. If you’re going to the point where we are getting into civil disputes, then how isn’t “employee became the center of controversy on social media and caused damage to company X’s reputation” not covered under this rubric? Because that is essentially what “cancel culture” is.
A real lawyer would know about Lloyd corp v tanner and be able to contextualize the fact that most of this controversy exists because it is legal to limit speech in the ways we are debating all over the internet.
People saying “we should limit it to what the law says” don’t make a ton of sense… because the law says that Twitter limiting speech is perfectly acceptable.
The first amendment doesn’t even apply in civil cases. Everything you listed aren’t exceptions to free speech, they are positive constructions as to the kinds of speech that you can make a civil claim of injury over. As such, they are not exhaustive.
I guess what I should have said was that they’d have a sense of the operative case law in the area they were speaking on. I don’t think that is too high of an expectation. That case wasn’t something I had to google and I’m not in school currently.
If that's their area of the law. Being a lawyer isn't about memorizing everything. It's about knowing how things work more broadly. Writing memos about the current law is for law students and junior associates unless it's your narrow focus area.
> few liberal-minded commentators seemed eager to say Rushdie was entirely without fault
This does not match my recollection. As I recall things, Rushdie was vigorously defended by the left, which at the time quite liked the idea of freedom of speech. At least in the UK, can't speak for anywhere else.
I would say he was quite vigorously defended by liberals. Since the 1970s there pretty much hasn't been such a thing as the left, especially in Rushdie's hayday of the 80s-00s. If there was, I doubt it would've spent much time worrying about the fate of a bourgeoisie fantasist.
Nothing against Rushdie btw. I loved the Satanic Verses. But institutional journalism (which provides the fundamental model most people use to understand Anglo politics) has conflated the terms left and liberal. And while I respect the drift of language as natural and intrinsic to culture, this misplacement has created a silly situation in which hypocracy, action and in-action are misattributed. Because these are two groups (overlapping in some cases) but distinct in a fundamental way.
In fact, I would say articles such as this are entirely flawed in that they don't grasp this distinction because they take institutional journalism's political narrative way past its power to describe reality.
Edit: BTW, this affects conservatives and "the Right" as well. Most of the people that rise to the top of the Rupblican and Tory parties are effectively "liberal". Most would not abolish civil liberties, equality before the law, etc. Just about everyone elected to government in both the UK and the US in all parties sit on a spectrum of liberalism. Mostly they just disagree about what year the government needed to stop doing things to create a "liberal" society.
My recollection, which could be faulty, was that people sided with Rushdie but there was a "but he probably shouldn't be so provocative" attached to it. So that tracks with the "entirely without fault" bit, as I remember it.
However, that's based on my memory from the "buzz" around the book and the fatwa when I was a high school senior. I could easily be misremembering or maybe took too strong an impression from a specific op-ed or talk show. Finding copies of coverage as it was happening is a little tricky.
If there is a group that is likely to be violent at that sort of provocation, you very much want to provoke them so they can be found out and somehow extinguished.
Yes you can, that requires some balls (such as not allowing fucking Hizb ut-Tahrir run schools). You'd think it violates the free speech principle, but smart people have that covered by the paradox of tolerance.
Also we put fake kids online and young-looking cops to lure predators all the time for that exact reason.
As long as there are people wishing to "behead those who offend Muhammad", there should be an offensive Muhammad cartoon on every street light.
We absolutely should do that, if we can do that without actually harming children. Literally this is why we do not do that: because it would be wrong to harm children.
There should also be an international institute of holy text destruction. Build a big armored building where once a day, mass-market copies of all holy text's in common circulation in the world are unceremoniously set on fire and live-streamed.
Because if you can't deal with that without trying to kill someone, you have no place in modern society (not to mention that contextually, burning a holy text - and a flag for that matter - is considered the correct way to dispose of it).
That isn't my recollection at all, can you provide an example of a mainstream publication or politician attaching "he shouldn't be so provactive" to their support. And if you can't, why would you go on believing it?
"Salman Rushdie’s rights as an author are absolute and ought to be inalienable. A free society does not ban books. . . . But it is preposterous to pretend that the first principle governing the publication of Satanic Verses is the last word on the subject. . . . Mr Rushdie is entitled to abuse the religion in which he was reared and must be protected against those who want to intimidate him into silence. [Guess the conjunction] But the idea that we all have a duty to applaud his calculated assault is a novel interpretation of the liberal obligation."
Yanking a couple of outlier authors and commentators out as representatives of common opinion is disingenuous as hell.
Society-wide we've also got a huge problem with victim-blaming when it comes to crime, and we are only just starting to make in-roads on it. We've just done another round on this with "somehow NATO is causing Russia to invade Ukraine in a campaign of murder, rape and destruction".
So an unequivocal assertion of his absolute right to make those statements and obligation of a free society to defend him, coupled with the idea that liberals shouldn't feel obliged to form a consensus opinion on the actual book...
I'm sure other commentators came up with much more heavily caveated and reluctant defences of the Satanic Verses than that one, but that one seems fully in agreement with most ideals of free speech tbh, actually more so than the "Speech is violence? Not..." article author's insinuation that criticising the book or acknowledging it was offensive was incompatible with liberalism...
As I believe I said in the original comment - finding the coverage at this point is tricky. That was from the late 80s, and digging up the original sources[1] is far more research than I'm willing to do. I don't see you demanding evidence in the other direction.
If you'd like to prove me wrong, feel free. I was quite open that this is based on my memory of events and I didn't assert it as cold hard fact. If I'm shown evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to believe differently. I look forward to your extensive research.
[1] Some of which might be available online, much of which in the form of talk-show commentary and TV news, etc., is unlikely to be and may not even be preserved.
I was too young to remember the surrounding events, but I do know that Rushdie's close friend Christopher Hitchens has spoken about being turned away from his leftist roots because of the lack of support for Rushdie from many on the left.
There was kind of a moment around 9/11 & invasion of Iraq&Afghanistan when the "left" (a term I hate, but I'll put aside that hate for now) pivoted on how it treated Islam, Islamic countries & immigrants and speech which was inflammatory around Islam. And in that context I think there was on the whole some sympathy on "the left" for Rushdie before, and less so after. (But like, I also think you can't make any broad generalizations about "the left" which in the US especially is some sort of stupid umbrella term which collapses neo-liberal centrists in with radical socialists, as if they have much in common at all.)
Prior to 9/11 the feminist movement and the left generally was fairly openly hostile about Islamic fundamentalism (and probably Islam generally), the Iranian regime, in the same way as it was around Christian fundamentalism, etc.
e.g. I vaguely remember a feminist convention of some kind, I think in Toronto, late 90s? when a pro-Iranian women's group showed up and had a table, and it caused a big stir and a far left socialist feminist group of some sort went over and vandalized their table and tried to evict them, etc.
But after the American/Republican reaction to 9/11 and the wave of brutal Islamaphobia ("clash of civilization" crap), acts of violence against immigrant Arab populations, invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. many people on the left took principled positions on this that I think were on the whole more nuanced and were sympathetic to most Muslims in the context of the times; to try to denounce the imperialism colonialism, Christian nationalism, etc. that was flooding the culture.
I think burning a Koran or whatever in a post-9/11 era is a lot different from pre/9-11. At least in the first 10 years of the millenium doing something like that is a clear and explicit racist and bigoted act. Rushdie, tho, that's more complicated.
I think this has been a hard line to straddle. And many since took far more un-nuanced positions; idiots like George Galloway have taken their so-called anti-imperialism from this time and turned it into an outright pro-Putin, pro-Assad, reactionary politics which is in no way left wing or socialist, but ... at some point originated from there?
It's worth pointing out that post the post-9/11 point Hitchens himself pivoted from "left" (with a good critique of liberalism) to neo-conservative hawk. And he did so in a pretty ugly way.
Hitchens is still a liberal whether he is neoconservative or not because neoconservatism is a form of liberalism.
Its just "liberalism in one country", or "great power liberalism" i.e. in the US context the constitution doesn't apply to our enemies, which regardless of whether or not it is moral or wise in modern times, it is certainly an accurate reading of the text and intent of the constitution.
Neoconservatism for instance is almost always framed as defending liberal societies against illiberal societies, as an ideology its adherents hold liberalism in very high regard. The common arguments against neoconservatism are that they hold liberalism in too high of regard/violently high regard, and of course that you cannot be truly liberal if you are illiberal in fighting illiberalism. I still remember that Poppins quote being used by neocons to justify ugly wars, before it became popular with young Democrats during the Trump years.
Before his neo-con conversion, Hitchens was explicitly some kind of social democrat or socialist, but not "liberal" in the US sense in that he routinely viciously criticized American liberals for their hypocrisy and for their pro-capital, pro-imperialist positions.
But yes I understand you're meaning liberal in the European/classical sense more than the American sense. US politics are wacked.
In any case, it's all hypocrisy. Conservative or liberal alike in the US and other western countries will all mostly fold in behind oppressive governments and very illiberal policies the moment their nation state and established financial order is threatened. We got a taste of that after 9/11, but we will likely see far worse in the future.
If A could beat B, he wouldn't resort to such rhetoric. Person A has a repressed desire to bully that manifests as this passive-aggressive fake politeness.
This is false. Sometimes rhetoric is deployed to mask incapacity, sometimes it's just a delaying tactic - eg to get person B nervous or to allow time for person A's accomplices to close in.
In 2023 that ‘speech’ could well be spam generated by ChatGPT. ‘Free speech’ isn’t the right model to describe coordinated inauthentic communications, spam, agenda spamming, disinformation, etc. In case where capacity to receive messages is limited, communications can be vandalism if not violence.
It's interesting because in French, to speak literally translated would give something like "take the talk". (prendre la parole)
So when somebody speaks, he takes something with, I guess, the hidden assumption that he/she's preventing others from taking it.
When a message board or user is kicked off a platform, it's never for "saying the wrong thing" or "political correctness". It's generally because they organized targeted campaigns of harassment, doxxing, swatting, and other kinds of behavior that violated the terms of service.
"At least three people have died by suicide after becoming targets of Kiwi Farms harassment campaigns, according to Vice. In 2016, the family of a trans person who died by suicide, Lizzy Waite, was harassed by Kiwi Farms trolls for weeks after her death. She had posted a suicide note on Facebook."
"Sorrenti, known to fans of her streaming channel as “Keffals,” says that when her front door opened on Aug. 5 the first thing she saw was a police officer’s gun pointed at her face. It was just the beginning of a weekslong campaign of stalking, threats and violence against Sorrenti that ended up making her flee the country."
When we talk about violent forms of speech, this is what we mean. Actual crimes.
Note that this website was, in the end, taken down. But the users have moved on to other spaces where they organize harassment campaigns, such as Libs of Tiktok.
>>When a message board or user is kicked off a platform, it's never for "saying the wrong thing" or "political correctness".
That is not what I have seen - what about all the MDs and scientists that warned about possible side-effects of the vaccine, but since their opinions were not approved by the government, were kicked off twitter/facebook etc?
How about the NYPost being de-platformed for reporting on the hunter biden laptop story? a story which has now been admitted to being true?
Not so long ago, bodily punishments were considered fully acceptable, or even beneficial. So the distinction against physical violence which this article paints as clear, is in fact a recent development. Which may or may not continue further.
> In contrast, physical violence is an uncomplicated, universal offender. A punch to the face hurts everyone.
What a completely deranged take. It's easy to conceive of a thought experiment that absolutely destroys this perspective.
Imagine that I've applied lidocaine to my face and you punch me. Then someone points out that because I didn't feel pain, that "It's ok to punch other people in the face."
The author's argument makes about as much sense, ie: none.
You're going to have a frustrating time if you use that kind of pedantry to build a bad-faith interpretation of the proposed argument. "Joey got hurt in the boxing match" does not generally mean he was offended by the color of his opponent's shorts, and when someone talks about a punch in the face hurting someone they're using the broadest sense of the word 'hurt,' which is commonly accepted to encompass all of emotional pain, physical damage, and the deleterious effect of violence on any given community. Choosing the specific definition that makes the argument weakest isn't really productive unless you're just looking to get mad about something.
That would be an insightful comment if you hadn't just deliberately misinterpreted someone by tethering yourself to an overly-specific denotative meaning.
>Imagine that I've applied lidocaine to my face and you punch me. Then someone points out that because I didn't feel pain, that "It's ok to punch other people in the face."
Your entire strawman is invalidated because the author wrote "hurt", not "pained". Even if you didn't feel pain, a punch still hurts (injures) your body. QED.
Hurt: To cause physical damage or pain to (an individual or a body part); injure.[0]
>What a completely deranged take.
Reread your comment over again if you want a completely deranged take.
I think this article makes a key mistake that I see almost all commentators make of visions of free speech less radical than, say, the first amendment: They consider only the direct effects of speech on those who hear it. If you accept this, it's very easy to(correctly) respond that it's not the state's job to police mere offense, no matter how grave it may be. Some people who try to make criticisms of a radical free speech regime(such as the NYT author this article mentions) also fall into this trap, but I think the much more compelling for limiting speech is less about harm done by speech to listeners and more about incitement of physical harm.
It's very, very easy to communicate in ways that encourage and incite violence(be it direct physical violence or denial of the means to live a dignified life), especially against groups against whom such violence is already normalized. Not all speech that does incite violence is intended to, but this fact also lends plausible deniability to people who do explicitly want violence but know that it's socially unacceptable to call for it directly. There is the danger of being overzealous with what speech to limit, but at the same time, it's undeniable that a lot of money and attention is flowing to ever-bolder provocateurs whose only possible goal is to escalate existing tensions and iniquities to violence in service of their political aims. Taking such people at their word on their intentions is dangerous, and those who do so have no right to act surprised and claim innocence when actions and rhetoric escalate past the point they're comfortable with.
> but at the same time, it's undeniable that a lot of money and attention is flowing to ever-bolder provocateurs whose only possible goal is to escalate existing tensions and iniquities to violence in service of their political aims.
Then you should defeat them in the marketplace of ideas and be able to counter their facillous words. To suggest otherwise is to stand in a position where you claim that some people are incapable of intelligently reasoning about something and that another superior individual should be able to police what they hear.
If someone says racist hateful things you're argument is that people should not be allowed to listen to it because it is a "bad thing" and other people who aren't as wise as you shoudlnt be allowed to hear it because they might act violently.
The marketplace of ideas is a completely made up thing to justify a stance of political non-action against real harms. People who are for example planning a mass shooting against a demonized minority are not participating in such a market, to the extent it exists at all.
This isn't really about whose ideas are more correct. The strategy is, as Steve Bannon infamously put it, to "flood the zone with shit". They're basically doing a DDoS against the marketplace of ideas.
It is effectively impossible to reason people out of positions they have not reasoned themselves into.
The market place of idea struggles in my close friend group where we have sort of a tradition to do these kind of debates, despite us being very close since almost a decade, and educated above our national average.
It's a nice enough idea, but i dont see how to make it work in a space where money amplifies speech, and some types of speeches have been a negative to specific groups of people throughout history.
The obvious long term solution is more education but that requires money, so the obvious short term solution is censorship
> It is effectively impossible to reason people out of positions they have not reasoned themselves into.
Some people cannot be trusted with certain ideas so a more superior individual must control what they can hear.
Do you realize how patronizing and condescending you sound about your friends by the way when you clearly imply your ideas are well reasoned and factual and theirs are the result of psychology manipulation?
But it is true, in fact that is part of the core ideas of representative democracy, and also the basic principle behind the monopoly of violence that any democratic state has to have
Some people cannot be trusted with certains ideas so a more superior indivdual or organisation must control what they can do
Or must we abandon policing since we can all exchange on the marketplace of ideas ?
My idea is since i control 40 gunmans and you control 0, you owe me money despite nothing having ever happened between us. No violence was ever implied.
Not saying that speech = action, but i cannot see how you can argue for police to exist but speech to be free as speech in itself must lead to actions, or why else would we speak in public ?
> Then you should defeat them in the marketplace of ideas and be able to counter their facillous words. To suggest otherwise is to stand in a position where you claim that some people are incapable of intelligently reasoning about something and that another superior individual should be able to police what they hear.
How do I defeat someone "in the marketplace of ideas" when the person inciting violence is backed by a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate, an undemocratic government, or a police union/sheriff gang?
> If someone says racist hateful things you're argument is that people should not be allowed to listen to it because it is a "bad thing" and other people who aren't as wise as you shoudlnt be allowed to hear it because they might act violently.
It's not about being "wise", it's about incentives. Plenty of people directly and benefit from violence against marginalized groups, and it's in their interest to accept and encourage the normalization of violence against those groups. Media provocateurs have an impeccable sense of what they need to say and what ideas they're communicating when they speak. Plausibly deniable provocation works so well precisely because the target audience understand the real message perfectly.
>How do I defeat someone "in the marketplace of ideas" when the person inciting violence is backed by a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate, an undemocratic government, or a police union/sheriff gang?
Violence. I would not bet against escalating physical violence in the coming decade or two in the US along political lines.
Even if I agreed with you (I don't), moving harm further and further away from actual speech and trying to divine what the speaker is "actually saying" and punish them for that leads to Stasi thought police every time it's tried.
I think everyone is able to see how the other side incites violence, but thinks the rule doesn't apply to them. For instance, there was a lot of rhetoric about how dangerous it was when Donald Trump was elected - that it would be the end of Democracy, that fascism was coming to the U.S., that we could well end up with concentration camps and nuclear war. The man who shot up the Congressional baseball game[1] was a member of pages dedicated to how threatening Trump and the Republicans were. Are the people who said that responsible for his attempt at political assassination?
I guess you can argue that. But most people I see bringing up "stochastic terrorism" suddenly say that those types of violence don't count. It's not just that this outlook is controversial - I've yet to meet anyone who has applied it consistently.
"In nations where millions of people hold diverse beliefs, who gets to decide exactly when speech becomes “harmful” and which people should be protected from offensive or critical speech?"
I don't know, maybe we could all get together and collectively decide with some kind of voting mechanism??? Or, if voting every time is too onerous, we could elect a "representative" to stand in for our views? Just a thought!
The news media, journalists, anti- whatever activists.
Look at coronavirus and the lock step nature of journalism when people said the truth about distancing not being effective, keep the schools open, etc. people were banned from Twitter, YouTube pulled down videos and / or bd special pop ups to tell you to be wary about this person’s point of view.
Yes, it's a great idea to let people decide what is and isn't true. We know that the more people decide something the better decision they make, that's why mobs of people are known for their cold and rational approach to issues.
We could even go one step further and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and they could decide what is and isn't true. We would have an office, let's call it General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press. Главлит in short.
Ok, we can vote to allow individuals to instead unilaterally decide what is or isn't true, a system which also has zero problems! People are, after all, known for their cold and rational approach to issues.
The real debate about free speech is about finding the right balance between harms caused by speech and harms caused by censorship.
It's about the distinction between highly protected forms of speech like journalism, ideas, and protests/strikes, and undesirable speech such as incitements to hatred, slander/harassment, spam, and predatory speech.
As a society you have to figure out which kinds of speech is deserving of broad platforms (talks at universities, interviews on national TV), which kind of speech should be downranked but not banned, and which kind should result in outright de-platforming or even prosecution.
The "speech is violence" rhetoric just means that speech has actual consequences and that we should look at these consequences instead of unthinkingly taking an absolutist free speech position. Free speech is never an absolute, and as anybody who has spent a lot of time online knows, there cannot be free speech without moderation (i.e. censorship).
Yes but the problem turns out that no matter how you define it whatever criteria you use to restrict speech will eventually become redefined to mean. "What those in power currently dislike."
It's why the first amendment is their to recognize speech should not be limited because if it ever is, it will never stop being so.
The first amendment doesn't protect literally all speech. Never has, never will. And your assertion that restrictions on speech (e.g. banning spammers) will inevitably lead to some kind of authoritarian dystopia is purely speculative.
"Speech is violence" doesn't exist as a principle in modern western societies. It's a slogan and call for a coordinated mass political attack against an identified target.
It is applied by political partisans to attack their enemies and not applied to themselves or their allies.
It's cynical, crass, mass political power put into action. Reluctant participants are dragged along under the implied threat that they will be targeted because "inaction is complicity" or some similar slogan.
> For example, "cancel culture" doesn't seem like a problem to me. It's a pretty reasonable and sensible response by people who disagree with opinions shared by individuals with large platforms taking liberties to hurt people.
Would you feel differently if it wasn't about canceling those who "hurt people" (where we again would need a definition of what is violent speech that hurts)? Like, if some group went out to cancel people because of their skin color, religion, sexual orientation, political persuasion, gender etc, would that also fall under "reasonable and sensible"? After all, these mobs would be just as offended by some person's reach/platform/existence as the ones who are doing the canceling now.
For the sake of this discussion, I'll define "cancel" as in "cancel culture". It would be to "boycott their activity, discourage others patronizing them, and prominently proclaim you do not agree with them or want to support them financially or the growth of their platform, with the aim of aligning collective action to reduce their influence".
> Like, if some group went out to cancel people because of their skin color
Are you, by any chance, referring to racism? This flavor of "cancel culture" transcends my definition in a lot of ways (often involving physical violence, unjust law enforcement incarceration, employment discrimination and more).
Also it is as old as modern global civilization, far predating the modern discourse about free speech, and yes, I dislike it. And so we as a society exert some amount of opposing force in response again, by "canceling" the racists in turn. This feedback loop continues for generations, and we slowly (hopefully) trend towards a less racist society.
So how do I feel about it? I dislike racism, but it exists today as part of an ecosystem of forces that seems reasonable to me.
> This flavor of "cancel culture" transcends my definition in a lot of ways (often involving physical violence, unjust law enforcement incarceration, employment discrimination and more).
Employment discrimination aside (you'll find that with the tolerated kind of canceling, too, even though the employers may not do it voluntarily, but catering to mob pressure, but then again, aren't they often in racist settings as well?), what if they don't include physical violence or state action? Would you find it okay if some group pressures vendors, customers, social clubs etc to cancel someone because of the color of their skin?
I'm not looking for a "gotcha" or something, and I included religion and political persuasion in that list intentionally. You can't change your skin color or sexual orientation, and we're kind of saying that you can't change your religion (though we agree that you totally can, apostasy is both normal and accepted and not a crime), but we kind of say that you can with your politics (otherwise it would be protected and you couldn't discriminate against someone based on it).
The problem I see with tolerating the common cancel culture is that it's often as arbitrary as those motivated by racism etc because it depends on exactly what the article was arguing: whether some speech is violent, and then additionally how violent it is (e.g. bad enough to warrant aggressive action).
Racists actually believe that their targets are unworthy and bad and deserving of their hatred and persecution. Some fringe groups believe that JK Rowling is leading a genocide campaign against trans youth in the UK and would love to cancel her because of it (I don't think there's a chance of success, but that's besides the point for whether we'd tolerate the attempt). I find both beliefs absurd, yet I understood you'd find cancelling because of the latter one reasonable, so I wonder whether you feel the same about the former or why you'd see that differently. And if that's too extreme, consider cancellation because of politics.
> The problem I see with tolerating the common cancel culture is that it's often as arbitrary as those motivated by racism etc because it depends on exactly what the article was arguing
IMO any "arbitrary" cancel culture response will quickly self-correct, unless the affected party doubles down on their offense and doesn't handle the response well. That's kind of a PR skill and I don't see it as a problem of cancel culture itself, but just a lack of maturity among (mostly) celebrities/influencers in responding to this relatively new form of public expression (see: Andrew Tate)
Glad you mentioned, the whole "JK Rowling is a TERF" scenario is a perfect example of where I think cancel culture is Good Actually. She has a very large and engaging platform that has influenced an entire generation and more. She then chose to align her public opinion ("trans women don't deserve the rights of women") with the basis of an opinion that is the root of much trans violence. I think the response to her proclamation is proportional to the distance she placed herself at to that extremist position — she put herself pretty close, and every time she doubled down on it, she got hit by another "wave of cancellation". She quieted down and improved her PR response (presumably without changing her opinions), and she seems largely unaffected as a civilian or in her income. The cancellation seems to have just been a "regulating" force on the opinion that "trans women aren't women".
But at the end of the day, that's just an approximation of market responses to her brand. She chose to stick to her brand, and the market has responded. She still makes a tidy royalty sum, she isn't under threat of state punishment or sanctioned violence, and the "offended" aren't legally empowered to act in any way specifically against her that they aren't legally allowed to otherwise.
Re: racists, yes, racists believe they are right and justified, and I disagree with them. Still, my hope and trust that society will impose a counteracting force that will cost racists more for that opinion than it gains them, in the long run, not that racists are forbidden (somehow, not sure how) from "cancelling" people they arbitrarily choose to discriminate against.
Thank you for your explanation and for not regarding my questioning as an attack against you. I now understand your position better and for what it's worth, I find it consistent in itself, and that's, at least to me, the major hurdle any position on these things has to take and very few do.
I'm not worried too much about celebrities facing cancellation. But with normalization of the approach, it becomes a generic tool against individuals, celebrity or not. It's certainly not swatting, but well-placed campaigns against someone can quickly find them in hot waters with their employer, landlord, neighborhood or even friends and family, who might want to cut ties to not be targeted themselves, even if they don't believe that the allegations are true or that they're offensive. It looks too much like a mob to me, and mobs rarely care about truth, justice or appropriateness, they care about annihilation (and the thrill of the act, and the bonding experience).
> would that also fall under "reasonable and sensible"?
No, because discrimination against someone ("canceling" them) for their race, religion, or sexual orientation is explicitly illegal in many circumstances.
Of all the asinine takes on free speech this one is the worst.
Freedom of speech is a concept and idea, the government doesn’t have the right nor ability to police or grant anyone an intrinsic freedom they already have. All the government can do is lend some of its protections to help prevent others from trying to stop you from speaking freely. But as a society if we say that your right to free speech only exists in government buildings. Well… that’s not anything at all.
"What many people failed to understand, and therefore failed to defend, is an unpleasant fact of intellectual liberalism: When speech causes emotional or mental pain, the offended parties are morally entitled to nothing in the form of compensation from or punishment for the offender."
It's entirely subjective. For instance, if you're a Christian, the Bible would have you beaten, stoned, amputated or killed for different types of speech deemed offensive to specific parties.
The US legal system also provides many avenues for punishing people based on their speech.
Most legal systems and most religions follow similar rules.
It’s not that people expect compensation or punishment, it’s that as private citizens, we’re totally and completely free to judge the shit out of people for what they say and do.
I don’t expect the government to step in when someone says something hateful, but I do pay attention to which groups allow that kind of behavior in their associations and which don’t.
We all do have a right to leave the rooms hateful people are in, and the people in charge of those rooms (as long as its not the government) are free to control how their space gets used.
This privileges the government as one of many organizations with outsized power.
Should we also restrict private, yet powerful, organizations from similar actions?
Clearly the article was considering various non-governmental institutions as places where liberal intellectualism are traditionally important and whether or not they should continue to have those values.
Another thinkpiece positing that facing consequences for saying fucked up shit is somehow a bad thing.
How many of these must we suffer through? Why do none of these people grasp the concept that when you speak to other people, they do not have to passively absorb your words?
This author, like many others, could use the sage advice my father gave me in 5th grade when I taunted and made fun of another student and got beat up for it: "Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash."
There are two distinct things people often confuse on either side of this issue.
Say a stupid/offending/violent thing and you’ll face consequences from
1) other people listening in the form of shunning/shouting/lost opportunities/laughing.
2) the government in form of fines or even imprisonment.
People on both sides get all hot and bothered when they receive 1) and complain that they have freedom of speech or that their opponents are bigots. This should mostly be ignored, like you said: "Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash."
Some people however want their opponents to face 2) and that is very dangerous. That is literally fascism and this sentiment exists on both sides as well.
It’s 2) we need to defend against and pretending that we’re only talking about 1) is a fatal misunderstanding.
479 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadThe difficulty is knowing what the intent was. Usually there are ways of "non-violent" communication. But it seems a lot of it is subjective.
By far it seems the most restrictive places are primary and secondary schools.
It's not a coincidence that the postmodern thoughts that underpin a lot of this bullshit simply does away with intent, declaring it to be completely useless, and saying that the only thing that can be used to judge a message is how it affected the recipient.
Combine that with "words are violence", and you can manufacture physical abuse out of thin air.
It's really not the way forward for progressivism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam#Semantic_externa...
Please make the connection between the disregard of intent and any rigorous definition of "post-moderism". Genuinely I don't see it.
I think the degradation of intent is more at the hands of those who have used it as a shield than anyone else. We've seen entire regions of the world thrown into chaos without consequence. Why, because the responsible parties didn't intend the chaos. At a certain point it gets a little thin.
What's imporant here is scale. Yeah, if you say something that rubs someone the wrong way, they should be able to have a conversation with you about your intentions and weigh those in their judgement. But what if it keeps happening. How long does someone else need to value your intent? 10 times? 100 times? Forever?
And of course when we get to things that affect people's lives on a much more material basis, maybe its good that we stop counting intent for so much. Maybe what we need is for decision makers to get a little more cautios because they will actually feel some consequences if they really screw up a lot of people's lives.
The closest thing I can imagine for any kind of defense of your statement is that postmodernism will not let the declared or conscious intent of the speaker absolutely constrain a text. The logical distinctions between "not absolutely constraining" and "declaring it to be completely useless" should be clear. And the idea that people don't always declare their intent accurately should also be uncontroversial.
Really, postmodernism is essentially very big elaboration on the principles underlying Sinclair's observation "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I've always held that position firmly. The trouble is, people are turning out to be a lot more programmable than I thought they (we) were. You could almost say that we're becoming more like machines at the same time that machines are becoming more like us. To the extent that's true, the part of the old saying that goes "... but words will never hurt me" can be seen as less valid.
In a very similar way, when Group A starts calling Group B "terrorist," it's really an announcement that Group A is going to be compromising their own professed ethics and processes to destroy Group B. It's an announcement of martial law, not a label that reliably describes any particular behavior by "terrorist" groups.
Speech- and thought-violence rhetoric is just empty rationalization and crybully rhetoric from the powerless, but it's often a prelude to a brutal crackdown when it comes from the powerful.
Compared to the actual act of rape? No. That kind of thinking just devalues the victim.
That said, specific threats aren't normally examples of protected speech. Extreme cases make bad law.
In my view, the status quo, where most speech is fair game until it rises to the level of coercive threats, is about right.
Numerous rape victims have objected to subsequent threats of additional rape, and would probably not take kindly to your inference that they're somehow devaluing themselves. You commented above that you think many participants in this debate lack experience of physical violence, and to be frank I am inclined to wonder the same of you in this instance.
This is correct, also because such speech is quite often a precursor to actual violence. View it as more than a thing in isolation, without consequence.
In a political context, violent rhetoric about a particular group of people is predictably followed by actual violence towards members of that group. Hate speech is very much a part of hate crimes. They're not separable.
Is hitting someone who is trying to hurt a loved to try to get them to stop violent? Yes, 100%. Is it morally justified, even good? Again yes (IMO).
I don't understand this need to try to redefine words. While language certainly evolves, this sort of redefinition just feels different to me somehow.
Definitions of words matter.
I wish I could understand where you're coming from. I genuinely do.
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That's why I said "generally." I'm not setting out to invalidate or disrespect any individual's experience.
It's likely that we'd have no trouble finding Holocaust survivors who would equate Nazi rhetoric with violence, for instance. They would agree with your position, given that such rhetoric arguably facilitated violence against them that would not otherwise have occurred. German law reflects this point of view.
But my position has traditionally been that prior restraint empowers the bad guys to an even greater extent. You don't want Nazis spreading messages of hate and violence... but you really don't want them telling you what you can say, if/when they come to power again.
> People who equate speech with violence have generally never known physical violence.
Just wondering if that meets the standard or not. Not that I think all speech is violence though.
I just think you setup a strawman.
Getting punched in the face is primal, it gets into that part of your brain that we’re all wisely told to suppress, the animalistic nature of us upright apes.
It’s… well, nobody has ever said anything to me online that has caused me to feel even a fraction of what I’ve felt getting punched in the face.
I don’t know how or even if that contributes to the conversation, but I think it’s worth saying.
Getting punched in the face is a good start.
It's less clear cut in the real world. To some extent one must be willing to tolerate negative incoming messages, or otherwise one would never leave one's home ot risk any interaction at all. On the other hand, to argue that no speech act can ever have a violent component by definition is facile; much speech as a prelude the violence, and a lack of specificity in space, manner, or time just as easily be designed to stoke fear by strategically using uncertainty to render its object paranoid and exhaust their defensive capability in advance.
Much of this discourse at present is purely strategic, and often wildly disingenuous. Many people who speak in lofty terms about free speech (not specifying anyone in particular here) are notably silent when it comes to people harrassing librarians or allegations that drag shows = groomers + pedophilia and therefore are legitimate targets for physical or terroristic violence (bomb threats and the like that are sufficiently credible to provoke a police response).
They do promote a police response because making a bomb threat is illegal in itself. Harassment is illegal in itself
You don't need to redefine a bunch of words and do a bunch of mental gymnastics to make something that's already illegal illegal
Now, imagine that the bad actors you're referring to have come to power, and because you've nerfed 1A, they now have the power of prior restraint over your speech, and that of their victims.
Still think it's a net win?
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The big problem I have with what you wrote is "much speech (is) a prelude (to) violence," used in a context that seemingly justifies equating the speech with the violence that ensues. This is an argument for prior restraint. No?
speech inciting violence is unacceptable. Speech isn't by it's nature violent--although it might be called forceful--and I would refrain from ever calling speech violent.
(and even speech inciting violence turns out to be acceptable to a majority of people in conditions where you say you want to kill (for example) a pedophile or a racist, or when you're writing a Declaration of Independence or a French National Anthem (La Marseillaise) because everybody agrees, the Tree of Liberty must periodically be watered by the blood of tyrants!)
my comment is a little bit all over the place, but what I'm trying to say is, you should never agree to call speech violence but always put in the word "incite/ment"; and at the same time it's difficult to make any broad or universal statements about speech without discovering it's a complex subject. Humans are good at imagination or conceptualizing hypotheticals, and we have the capacity for violence, so it's very difficult to say what someone can and can't say, usually the listener understands implicitly but sometimes the person listening does not have your interstests at heart, has their own motives, or is plain nutso.
Agreed
Edit: Why disagree?
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/suing-e...
Things like insults, shaming, and verbal abuse are part of emotional abuse in divorce cases. These need not be evidence of actions or character. These can be used for an at fault divorce. What is consided to br an insult or shaming can vary greatly on perspective. Not to mention, the court may not stick ro just these examples and could include other things that makes the other person feel bad - "I hate this meal. Why do you always make this?"
https://www.jerkinsfamilylaw.com/emotional-abuse-and-divorce...
When it comes to public universities, there is a legitimate question, since a publicly funded university may be considered a state actor. But when it comes to private services like social media where it seem most of the controversy lies, they're free to set any rules they want. And unsurprisingly, their terms of service generally give them broad discretion on who they let use their service.
Considering this is repeated a couple times by the author, it seems they are talking about a general statement and not a narrow circumstance, even if they're using a specific example. It's important to point out that the statement above is not universally true, or if it is, then our laws are immoral.
"Again, those are legal principles that have been enshrined in law for a long time."
“When we do become offended, as we all will, we must settle for responding with criticism or contempt, and stop short of demanding that the offender be punished or required to make restitution,”
It seems to me that restitution and punishment would include those leveled by the legal system. Simply because something has be law for a long time does not make it off limits to discussion, especially if it's application/interpretation has changed over that time.
First off, they are. but if you are saying: loose your job and ability to make a living, losing your ability to speak in public, fuck me give me those charges then!
you are backing tyrannical ideas while trying to pretend you are just being reasonable.
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are primarily owned and controlled by individuals and private companies rather than by the government or public institutions.
None of the things mentioned above are related to capitalism's coverage of free speech. It seems that your intention is to suppress those who hold differing opinions, and you are using the assumption that the silenced individuals support capitalism to justify your actions.
Seriously though, do you not see how private ownership of communication services impacts the question of who is allowed to use those services? And that if there were a truly public service, how that would dramatically change the situation with respect to First Amendment rights?
For the record, I'm a huge fan of capitalism. But it surprises me how many people don't understand that it has drawbacks, and that we should be honest with ourselves about those drawbacks. It's ok to say that you're pro-capitalism but that you also think that the Internet (or at least some of it) should be a public utility, for instance.
Your employer declining to continue your employment: freedom of association
Advocating for a university to not host your talk: freedom of speech
A university not hosting your talk: freedom of association
and so on.
One more nail in the coffin for Internet anonymity.
In essence, what I'm saying is that a card-carrying member of some radical movement (whichever movement you or I hate the most) perhaps should be shunned by people in all kinds of social activities because of their beliefs, but IMHO as long as they aren't breaking the law, they still should have the right to be a part of the society and receive core services which require interaction with it, namely, public services, education, jobs, housing, etc.
We have drawn a line in sand upon crossing which people are excluded from society, and that line is criminal law if determined in due process. And before crossing that line people should have the right to not be discriminated in employment. If most of your coworkers hate you because you come from the "opposing outgroup" where there's mutual hate and perhaps a history of violence between your "tribes" - too bad for them, both you and them should still have the right to work there.
Right. I can't think of anyone I have come across in liberal media. But you can always dig someone up that takes any given position.
> While there is indeed no right to not be offended, there is also no right to be listened to, and no right to artificially amplify your speech on someone else's dime. We live in a world where the mechanisms of mass communication are held in private hands---there is no digital public square, regardless of what techno-libertarians might have you believe.
All correct. The people who want it to be one way or the other (depending on their political leanings) usually are conflating constitutional protections from the government as being applicable to/from everyone and everything else.
If you're screaming on Twitter that (some racial group) is bad, and people tell you to shut up, they are allowed to do so under the first amendment. You're allowed to do so under the first amendment. Twitter can totally ban you based on what they deem acceptable behavior, because the first amendment doesn't regulate private companies (just the government).
If you're calling for the extermination of that particular group, the government can charge you under US Code for inciting violence:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373
...But you have to prove intent, which is notoriously hard to do, and notoriously easy to get off scott-free from. ("I was being bombastic, I didn't think anyone would LITERALLY try and exterminate said group")
This is a really obvious idea that people seem to have a lot of trouble understanding, especially when the framing of the conversation drifts toward "cancel culture".
When you prevent somebody from being on a platform, you also prevent others from hearing what that person has to say.
As for amplification, it is not amplification to show me your tweets with #stabledifussion when that is what I search for - it is the entire point of Twitter.
And no, to be amplification, Twitter would have to boost certain tweets artificially. It is very unartificial when I get results for searching. Otherwise it is also boosting if I use the municipal library to checkout a book, or buy it on Amazon, at which point amplification is meaningless.
Libraries are also amplification, but they are generally public. When a book is banned from a library, it potentially violates the First Amendment. Twitter is not public, so when a user is banned from Twitter, the First Amendment does not apply.
If and when we have a government-operated Twitter, it will have to offer equal access to everyone, and it will have to tolerate any speech that falls under First Amendment protection. But until then, you'll have to live with the possibility that the private services you use will kick you off because they don't like what you say.
Well, they're literally doing this in the UK - people have and are being arrested for offensive speech.
Not “literally” the same as assault charges though - “public order” laws have a long sordid history of their own.
But since you ask, I am not okay with it in many contexts and my confidence estimates are applied to individual situations rather than being general. I have had experience of being attacked by mobs, both online and physically. I have scars from being kicked in the head and stabbed in the leg during such an attack. I've separately been arrested and jailed on specious charges over political activity (more than once) and obtained dismissal of charges in court. And I have been the target of both verbal and physical violence on many, many occasions, often both on the same occasion. So I come at this question with very extensive first hand knowledge of how such arguments can play out.
So now, would you care to respond to the question I asked: how do you think coordinated speech in a marketplace of ideas differs from coordination of buying or selling in response to price signals?
If you go after the person, you are not participating in any marketplace of ideas, you're now the one committing the violence.
Seems to be about the idea to me.
Or just like, new regulations on the giant corporations operating these services? No need to go as far as communism.
Also, in practice, you could reasonably argue that there generally isn't much academic freedom in most fields, since most research is grant-funded, and that is controlled by (usually) governments.
I don't dislike professors or teachers at state schools, but I understand that they work in an institution that effectively does not offer academic freedom. If you are a professor, you can work at any other institution in the country, other than the 50-100 or so that are run by states, and you will have all the academic freedom you want. If this country goes to a major war, a large number of those professors are likely going to be told to work on something war-related, because they are agents of the state.
If you are a teacher, who was actually targeted by the education control bills in FL, you arguably don't have enough training to have really have earned academic freedom. Until about 5 minutes ago, nobody argued that they did have academic freedom. Curricula are there for a reason.
FWIW, I think you're off by an order of magnitude, more or less.
This and other examples here:
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-s...
This was one in Canada recently.
"If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time?
It is possible."
https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identi...
Simple question do we agree we don't need a middle school teacher explaining in graphic detail how to have sex? Or maybe "alternative" theory like flat earth?
If not I don't know how we reach a common ground if we agree though maybe just maybe we can agree that teacher shouldn't be teaching certain things at certain ages and not call that "censorship". You might disagree what ages or things but still.
A teacher isn't there to instill their values or beliefs into a child but to teach the curriculum.
What age do you think is reasonable for schools to be teaching sex? Explicitly, how to use a condom, and the inaccuracies of porn.
I'm not going to play along with your attempt to deflect from your failure to answer. The specific age we choose doesn't really matter that much in the context of our discussion and you know that.
Sure, speech can be harmful and hurtful, to the point that someone should get punished for it. But the law has generally done very good job of reminding us that this tends to be a VERY NARROW possibility, i.e. the harm has to be very specific and directed and measurable.
Here in the US, yes. In the rest of the world (like, EU) they aren't very specific.
For example in Germany the first amendment protects dignity. An ideal law nobody can really fully adhere to. It works because there is a societal consensus about its meaning. Nothing the law can really determine. I believe this consensus will not really survive the 21st century. Perspectives will be too different. Dignity in religious communities means something entirely different than in a secular society, and even in that values will diverge more and more.
A lot of these laws are ancient and many were intended to protect monarchy from vulgar peasants, so I am a bit surprised "progressive" forces seem to have found their love for it.
In the interest of civil liberties, these laws would need to be changed at some point. They basically allow authority to selectively punish anyone under almost any pretense.
There are real biases and Injustice, but it doesn't a disservice do any reasonable debate to make such exaggerating claims
https://www.theblackcenter.org/
This is blatantly unconstitutional, but no one has challenged it in court and no one will. Other examples abound, such as racial discrimination in Ivy League admissions (now challenged in court, but for its impact on Asians mainly) and observed differences across race in admitted med students' MCAT scores.
Teddy Roosevelt once said that, "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism" and, "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." Well, here we are. Separate schools, separate standards, separate funding, separate public investment, except for the one largest demographic group... all driving my country into further conflict and disunity.
But you're doubling down not just on that people aren't aware of it but that it's a dead letter. That's wrong. You're confusing the government's spending power with discrimination in employment.
That is not repealing our civil rights law, the FEHA, or amending it to remove protections for white people, who are, by the way, only a plurality here. Even if we had, the federal law, Title VII, still protects everyone. The question isn't who you are, it's whether you were discriminated against on that basis.
Personally, I am really glad the rest of the country hates us and thinks we're shit so they don't come here, but it gets annoying when people just make stuff up. No, the place is far from perfect, but it's nothing like what people imagine. Even in San Francisco, they recalled the prosecutor who wouldn't do anything and San Francisco is probably the most extreme. People think that must mean every city around it is the same. Other than Berkeley, sometimes, they just aren't. In fact most of us go, thank god I don't live in San Francisco, which, by the way isn't the second biggest city in the state. San Jose has more people than San Francisco and so does San Diego. San Diego is much, much more purple. It's almost like 40m people are different.
They sure seem happy to take our tax dollars though.
Not having children is a life decision that's harmful to the society the same way suicide is harmful to the society.
Childfree groups should be treated as suicide cults.
The law does not only care about causality. It is also cares free speech, reasonable interpretation, and comparative responsibility.
I could craft and publish an argument School shootings are in fact a positive good a we should have more of them. I am legally in the clear, even If someone finds my argument convincing and goes and shoots up a school because of it.
In short, "reasonable" means nothing until the people in power tell you what it means.
When it comes to this example, it is a lot more clear. I can write a book on why you should shoot up schools and it would be protected. Reasonable does not come in to that part of the question.
Not really. The boundaries of "reasonable" are... wait for... it reasonableness.
I.e. if a jury or a judge isn't reasonable, then an appeals court can overturn it. A judge or jury is not given free reign to determine anything to be reasonable.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michelle-carter-found-g...
Sheesh indeed my friend, sheesh indeed.
If I killed someone, I can't be like "Whats the problem? Nature kills people all the time. Why are you so sentimental?"
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test
> The test determined that the government may prohibit speech advocating the use of force or crime if the speech satisfies both elements of the two-part test:
> The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,”
> AND
> The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
[snip]
> The Supreme Court in Hess v. Indiana (1973) applied the Brandenburg test to a case in which Gregory Hess, an Indiana University protester, said, “We’ll take the fucking street later (or again)." The Supreme Court ruled that Hess’s profanity was protected under the Brandenburg test, as the speech “amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time.” The Court held that “since there was no evidence, or rational inference from the import of the language, that his words were intended to produce, and likely to produce, imminent disorder, those words could not be punished by the State on the ground that they had a ‘tendency to lead to violence.’”
> In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.(1982), Charles Evers threatened violence against those who refused to boycott white businesses. The Supreme Court applied the Brandenburg test and found that the speech was protected: “Strong and effective extemporaneous rhetoric cannot be nicely channeled in purely dulcet phrases. An advocate must be free to stimulate his audience with spontaneous and emotional appeals for unity and action in a common cause. When such appeals do not incite lawless action, they must be regarded as protected speech.”
And because I also see this doctrine over-applied online:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fighting_words
> In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court redefined the scope of the fighting words doctrine to mean words that are "a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs." There, the Court held that the burning of a United States flag, which was considered symbolic speech, did not constitute fighting words.
> In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), the Supreme Court found that the "First Amendment prevents government from punishing speech and expressive conduct because it disapproves of the ideas expressed." Even if the words are considered to be fighting words, the First Amendment will still protect the speech if the speech restriction is based on viewpoint discrimination.
The page I linked to links to multiple law review articles on the subject:
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
http://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=28...
Suffice it to say: If someone online claims a speech act isn't protected due to the fighting words exemption, no it isn't.
Theoretically, how much outrage do I need to manufacture to get the legal system to ignore the Brandenburg test and prosecute today's flavor of thought villain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OV4VaNW4FU
Edit: to wit, the parent post claim in ridiculous action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34811787
Edit 2: and just to clarify my point, once these loopholes get found, people jump on them and aggressively exploit them. Look around this thread for the kinds of rhetoric people that oppose free speech are using. What would they have subbed in 15 or 50 years ago?
what fact is that? who enforces the "can't" ?
Regardless, does that remove the offense?
I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
"Kill x people" is fine and protected. "Kill x people at y date at z mall" is not.
Note:
>Hess uttered, "We'll take the fucking street later" or "We'll take the fucking street again." Hess was convicted in Indiana state court of disorderly conduct.
>The Supreme Court reversed Hess's conviction because Hess' statement, at worst, "amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time." In contrast to such an indefinite future time, the Court emphasized the word imminent in the "imminent lawless action" test of Brandenburg. Because the evidence did not show that Hess' speech was intended and likely to produce "imminent disorder", the state could not punish Hess' speech.[3][4]
Whether such laws are commonly enforced … well we know from modified motorcycles that they’re not.
Employee X gets fired for publicly stating that their employers products are trash, said employee sues, nothing about what they said was illegal.
And the law generally recognize this. It is not protected to intentionally harm the company if the intention is purely to cause harm. It is protected if the intent is to warn the public about a harmful product (Whistleblowing), or to protect fellow employees for harm. When those cases do end up in court, what judges and juries will focus on is on intent as the deciding factor once harm has been agreed/established.
People saying “we should limit it to what the law says” don’t make a ton of sense… because the law says that Twitter limiting speech is perfectly acceptable.
The first amendment doesn’t even apply in civil cases. Everything you listed aren’t exceptions to free speech, they are positive constructions as to the kinds of speech that you can make a civil claim of injury over. As such, they are not exhaustive.
This does not match my recollection. As I recall things, Rushdie was vigorously defended by the left, which at the time quite liked the idea of freedom of speech. At least in the UK, can't speak for anywhere else.
Nothing against Rushdie btw. I loved the Satanic Verses. But institutional journalism (which provides the fundamental model most people use to understand Anglo politics) has conflated the terms left and liberal. And while I respect the drift of language as natural and intrinsic to culture, this misplacement has created a silly situation in which hypocracy, action and in-action are misattributed. Because these are two groups (overlapping in some cases) but distinct in a fundamental way.
In fact, I would say articles such as this are entirely flawed in that they don't grasp this distinction because they take institutional journalism's political narrative way past its power to describe reality.
Edit: BTW, this affects conservatives and "the Right" as well. Most of the people that rise to the top of the Rupblican and Tory parties are effectively "liberal". Most would not abolish civil liberties, equality before the law, etc. Just about everyone elected to government in both the UK and the US in all parties sit on a spectrum of liberalism. Mostly they just disagree about what year the government needed to stop doing things to create a "liberal" society.
However, that's based on my memory from the "buzz" around the book and the fatwa when I was a high school senior. I could easily be misremembering or maybe took too strong an impression from a specific op-ed or talk show. Finding copies of coverage as it was happening is a little tricky.
By your insane logic, we should put kids out on the street by themselves to catch child predators.
Sometimes the safety of the threatened party is more important than finding out who wants to harm them.
Also we put fake kids online and young-looking cops to lure predators all the time for that exact reason.
As long as there are people wishing to "behead those who offend Muhammad", there should be an offensive Muhammad cartoon on every street light.
There should also be an international institute of holy text destruction. Build a big armored building where once a day, mass-market copies of all holy text's in common circulation in the world are unceremoniously set on fire and live-streamed.
Because if you can't deal with that without trying to kill someone, you have no place in modern society (not to mention that contextually, burning a holy text - and a flag for that matter - is considered the correct way to dispose of it).
"Salman Rushdie’s rights as an author are absolute and ought to be inalienable. A free society does not ban books. . . . But it is preposterous to pretend that the first principle governing the publication of Satanic Verses is the last word on the subject. . . . Mr Rushdie is entitled to abuse the religion in which he was reared and must be protected against those who want to intimidate him into silence. [Guess the conjunction] But the idea that we all have a duty to applaud his calculated assault is a novel interpretation of the liberal obligation."
Society-wide we've also got a huge problem with victim-blaming when it comes to crime, and we are only just starting to make in-roads on it. We've just done another round on this with "somehow NATO is causing Russia to invade Ukraine in a campaign of murder, rape and destruction".
I'm sure other commentators came up with much more heavily caveated and reluctant defences of the Satanic Verses than that one, but that one seems fully in agreement with most ideals of free speech tbh, actually more so than the "Speech is violence? Not..." article author's insinuation that criticising the book or acknowledging it was offensive was incompatible with liberalism...
It simply says he shouldn't be applauded for being provacative. Being a victim of injustice is not itself a virtue.
If you'd like to prove me wrong, feel free. I was quite open that this is based on my memory of events and I didn't assert it as cold hard fact. If I'm shown evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to believe differently. I look forward to your extensive research.
[1] Some of which might be available online, much of which in the form of talk-show commentary and TV news, etc., is unlikely to be and may not even be preserved.
But yes he hardly qualifies as liberal-minded.
I did. Its not a good book. Rushdie is a fucking boring writer.
0. https://pitchfork.com/news/barack-obama-shares-2022-summer-p...
Prior to 9/11 the feminist movement and the left generally was fairly openly hostile about Islamic fundamentalism (and probably Islam generally), the Iranian regime, in the same way as it was around Christian fundamentalism, etc.
e.g. I vaguely remember a feminist convention of some kind, I think in Toronto, late 90s? when a pro-Iranian women's group showed up and had a table, and it caused a big stir and a far left socialist feminist group of some sort went over and vandalized their table and tried to evict them, etc.
But after the American/Republican reaction to 9/11 and the wave of brutal Islamaphobia ("clash of civilization" crap), acts of violence against immigrant Arab populations, invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. many people on the left took principled positions on this that I think were on the whole more nuanced and were sympathetic to most Muslims in the context of the times; to try to denounce the imperialism colonialism, Christian nationalism, etc. that was flooding the culture.
I think burning a Koran or whatever in a post-9/11 era is a lot different from pre/9-11. At least in the first 10 years of the millenium doing something like that is a clear and explicit racist and bigoted act. Rushdie, tho, that's more complicated.
I think this has been a hard line to straddle. And many since took far more un-nuanced positions; idiots like George Galloway have taken their so-called anti-imperialism from this time and turned it into an outright pro-Putin, pro-Assad, reactionary politics which is in no way left wing or socialist, but ... at some point originated from there?
It's worth pointing out that post the post-9/11 point Hitchens himself pivoted from "left" (with a good critique of liberalism) to neo-conservative hawk. And he did so in a pretty ugly way.
Its just "liberalism in one country", or "great power liberalism" i.e. in the US context the constitution doesn't apply to our enemies, which regardless of whether or not it is moral or wise in modern times, it is certainly an accurate reading of the text and intent of the constitution.
Neoconservatism for instance is almost always framed as defending liberal societies against illiberal societies, as an ideology its adherents hold liberalism in very high regard. The common arguments against neoconservatism are that they hold liberalism in too high of regard/violently high regard, and of course that you cannot be truly liberal if you are illiberal in fighting illiberalism. I still remember that Poppins quote being used by neocons to justify ugly wars, before it became popular with young Democrats during the Trump years.
Jacobin had a reasonably decent article about this recently. https://jacobin.com/2022/09/christopher-hitchens-essays-left...
But yes I understand you're meaning liberal in the European/classical sense more than the American sense. US politics are wacked.
In any case, it's all hypocrisy. Conservative or liberal alike in the US and other western countries will all mostly fold in behind oppressive governments and very illiberal policies the moment their nation state and established financial order is threatened. We got a taste of that after 9/11, but we will likely see far worse in the future.
Person B: "How so?"
Person A: proceeds to beat Person B until he stops talking
Also group A has the power to subdue group B by other means than violence.
Take this example:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-...
"At least three people have died by suicide after becoming targets of Kiwi Farms harassment campaigns, according to Vice. In 2016, the family of a trans person who died by suicide, Lizzy Waite, was harassed by Kiwi Farms trolls for weeks after her death. She had posted a suicide note on Facebook."
"Sorrenti, known to fans of her streaming channel as “Keffals,” says that when her front door opened on Aug. 5 the first thing she saw was a police officer’s gun pointed at her face. It was just the beginning of a weekslong campaign of stalking, threats and violence against Sorrenti that ended up making her flee the country."
When we talk about violent forms of speech, this is what we mean. Actual crimes.
Note that this website was, in the end, taken down. But the users have moved on to other spaces where they organize harassment campaigns, such as Libs of Tiktok.
That is not what I have seen - what about all the MDs and scientists that warned about possible side-effects of the vaccine, but since their opinions were not approved by the government, were kicked off twitter/facebook etc?
How about the NYPost being de-platformed for reporting on the hunter biden laptop story? a story which has now been admitted to being true?
It turns out hate speech means speech somebody hates.
My reddit account was permanently suspended for upvoting vaccine skepticism.
If we're talking about actual crimes getting prosecuted, then what's the issue here? All I see is the law doing it's job
Somebody got swatted. Ok. We're talking about speech here, not swatting
What a completely deranged take. It's easy to conceive of a thought experiment that absolutely destroys this perspective.
Imagine that I've applied lidocaine to my face and you punch me. Then someone points out that because I didn't feel pain, that "It's ok to punch other people in the face."
The author's argument makes about as much sense, ie: none.
Your entire strawman is invalidated because the author wrote "hurt", not "pained". Even if you didn't feel pain, a punch still hurts (injures) your body. QED.
Hurt: To cause physical damage or pain to (an individual or a body part); injure.[0]
>What a completely deranged take.
Reread your comment over again if you want a completely deranged take.
[0] https://www.wordnik.com/words/hurt
It's very, very easy to communicate in ways that encourage and incite violence(be it direct physical violence or denial of the means to live a dignified life), especially against groups against whom such violence is already normalized. Not all speech that does incite violence is intended to, but this fact also lends plausible deniability to people who do explicitly want violence but know that it's socially unacceptable to call for it directly. There is the danger of being overzealous with what speech to limit, but at the same time, it's undeniable that a lot of money and attention is flowing to ever-bolder provocateurs whose only possible goal is to escalate existing tensions and iniquities to violence in service of their political aims. Taking such people at their word on their intentions is dangerous, and those who do so have no right to act surprised and claim innocence when actions and rhetoric escalate past the point they're comfortable with.
Then you should defeat them in the marketplace of ideas and be able to counter their facillous words. To suggest otherwise is to stand in a position where you claim that some people are incapable of intelligently reasoning about something and that another superior individual should be able to police what they hear.
If someone says racist hateful things you're argument is that people should not be allowed to listen to it because it is a "bad thing" and other people who aren't as wise as you shoudlnt be allowed to hear it because they might act violently.
The market place of idea struggles in my close friend group where we have sort of a tradition to do these kind of debates, despite us being very close since almost a decade, and educated above our national average.
It's a nice enough idea, but i dont see how to make it work in a space where money amplifies speech, and some types of speeches have been a negative to specific groups of people throughout history.
The obvious long term solution is more education but that requires money, so the obvious short term solution is censorship
Some people cannot be trusted with certain ideas so a more superior individual must control what they can hear.
Do you realize how patronizing and condescending you sound about your friends by the way when you clearly imply your ideas are well reasoned and factual and theirs are the result of psychology manipulation?
Some people cannot be trusted with certains ideas so a more superior indivdual or organisation must control what they can do
Or must we abandon policing since we can all exchange on the marketplace of ideas ?
My idea is since i control 40 gunmans and you control 0, you owe me money despite nothing having ever happened between us. No violence was ever implied.
Not saying that speech = action, but i cannot see how you can argue for police to exist but speech to be free as speech in itself must lead to actions, or why else would we speak in public ?
How do I defeat someone "in the marketplace of ideas" when the person inciting violence is backed by a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate, an undemocratic government, or a police union/sheriff gang?
> If someone says racist hateful things you're argument is that people should not be allowed to listen to it because it is a "bad thing" and other people who aren't as wise as you shoudlnt be allowed to hear it because they might act violently.
It's not about being "wise", it's about incentives. Plenty of people directly and benefit from violence against marginalized groups, and it's in their interest to accept and encourage the normalization of violence against those groups. Media provocateurs have an impeccable sense of what they need to say and what ideas they're communicating when they speak. Plausibly deniable provocation works so well precisely because the target audience understand the real message perfectly.
Violence. I would not bet against escalating physical violence in the coming decade or two in the US along political lines.
I guess you can argue that. But most people I see bringing up "stochastic terrorism" suddenly say that those types of violence don't count. It's not just that this outlook is controversial - I've yet to meet anyone who has applied it consistently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shootin...
That is not violence, not sure why you put some weasel statements in.
I don't know, maybe we could all get together and collectively decide with some kind of voting mechanism??? Or, if voting every time is too onerous, we could elect a "representative" to stand in for our views? Just a thought!
Look at coronavirus and the lock step nature of journalism when people said the truth about distancing not being effective, keep the schools open, etc. people were banned from Twitter, YouTube pulled down videos and / or bd special pop ups to tell you to be wary about this person’s point of view.
We could even go one step further and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and they could decide what is and isn't true. We would have an office, let's call it General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press. Главлит in short.
The real debate about free speech is about finding the right balance between harms caused by speech and harms caused by censorship.
It's about the distinction between highly protected forms of speech like journalism, ideas, and protests/strikes, and undesirable speech such as incitements to hatred, slander/harassment, spam, and predatory speech.
As a society you have to figure out which kinds of speech is deserving of broad platforms (talks at universities, interviews on national TV), which kind of speech should be downranked but not banned, and which kind should result in outright de-platforming or even prosecution.
The "speech is violence" rhetoric just means that speech has actual consequences and that we should look at these consequences instead of unthinkingly taking an absolutist free speech position. Free speech is never an absolute, and as anybody who has spent a lot of time online knows, there cannot be free speech without moderation (i.e. censorship).
It's why the first amendment is their to recognize speech should not be limited because if it ever is, it will never stop being so.
It is applied by political partisans to attack their enemies and not applied to themselves or their allies.
It's cynical, crass, mass political power put into action. Reluctant participants are dragged along under the implied threat that they will be targeted because "inaction is complicity" or some similar slogan.
Would you feel differently if it wasn't about canceling those who "hurt people" (where we again would need a definition of what is violent speech that hurts)? Like, if some group went out to cancel people because of their skin color, religion, sexual orientation, political persuasion, gender etc, would that also fall under "reasonable and sensible"? After all, these mobs would be just as offended by some person's reach/platform/existence as the ones who are doing the canceling now.
What exactly is the point of asking this? The answer is obvious and it isn't what's happening.
> Like, if some group went out to cancel people because of their skin color
Are you, by any chance, referring to racism? This flavor of "cancel culture" transcends my definition in a lot of ways (often involving physical violence, unjust law enforcement incarceration, employment discrimination and more).
Also it is as old as modern global civilization, far predating the modern discourse about free speech, and yes, I dislike it. And so we as a society exert some amount of opposing force in response again, by "canceling" the racists in turn. This feedback loop continues for generations, and we slowly (hopefully) trend towards a less racist society.
So how do I feel about it? I dislike racism, but it exists today as part of an ecosystem of forces that seems reasonable to me.
Employment discrimination aside (you'll find that with the tolerated kind of canceling, too, even though the employers may not do it voluntarily, but catering to mob pressure, but then again, aren't they often in racist settings as well?), what if they don't include physical violence or state action? Would you find it okay if some group pressures vendors, customers, social clubs etc to cancel someone because of the color of their skin?
I'm not looking for a "gotcha" or something, and I included religion and political persuasion in that list intentionally. You can't change your skin color or sexual orientation, and we're kind of saying that you can't change your religion (though we agree that you totally can, apostasy is both normal and accepted and not a crime), but we kind of say that you can with your politics (otherwise it would be protected and you couldn't discriminate against someone based on it).
The problem I see with tolerating the common cancel culture is that it's often as arbitrary as those motivated by racism etc because it depends on exactly what the article was arguing: whether some speech is violent, and then additionally how violent it is (e.g. bad enough to warrant aggressive action).
Racists actually believe that their targets are unworthy and bad and deserving of their hatred and persecution. Some fringe groups believe that JK Rowling is leading a genocide campaign against trans youth in the UK and would love to cancel her because of it (I don't think there's a chance of success, but that's besides the point for whether we'd tolerate the attempt). I find both beliefs absurd, yet I understood you'd find cancelling because of the latter one reasonable, so I wonder whether you feel the same about the former or why you'd see that differently. And if that's too extreme, consider cancellation because of politics.
IMO any "arbitrary" cancel culture response will quickly self-correct, unless the affected party doubles down on their offense and doesn't handle the response well. That's kind of a PR skill and I don't see it as a problem of cancel culture itself, but just a lack of maturity among (mostly) celebrities/influencers in responding to this relatively new form of public expression (see: Andrew Tate)
Glad you mentioned, the whole "JK Rowling is a TERF" scenario is a perfect example of where I think cancel culture is Good Actually. She has a very large and engaging platform that has influenced an entire generation and more. She then chose to align her public opinion ("trans women don't deserve the rights of women") with the basis of an opinion that is the root of much trans violence. I think the response to her proclamation is proportional to the distance she placed herself at to that extremist position — she put herself pretty close, and every time she doubled down on it, she got hit by another "wave of cancellation". She quieted down and improved her PR response (presumably without changing her opinions), and she seems largely unaffected as a civilian or in her income. The cancellation seems to have just been a "regulating" force on the opinion that "trans women aren't women".
But at the end of the day, that's just an approximation of market responses to her brand. She chose to stick to her brand, and the market has responded. She still makes a tidy royalty sum, she isn't under threat of state punishment or sanctioned violence, and the "offended" aren't legally empowered to act in any way specifically against her that they aren't legally allowed to otherwise.
Re: racists, yes, racists believe they are right and justified, and I disagree with them. Still, my hope and trust that society will impose a counteracting force that will cost racists more for that opinion than it gains them, in the long run, not that racists are forbidden (somehow, not sure how) from "cancelling" people they arbitrarily choose to discriminate against.
I'm not worried too much about celebrities facing cancellation. But with normalization of the approach, it becomes a generic tool against individuals, celebrity or not. It's certainly not swatting, but well-placed campaigns against someone can quickly find them in hot waters with their employer, landlord, neighborhood or even friends and family, who might want to cut ties to not be targeted themselves, even if they don't believe that the allegations are true or that they're offensive. It looks too much like a mob to me, and mobs rarely care about truth, justice or appropriateness, they care about annihilation (and the thrill of the act, and the bonding experience).
No, because discrimination against someone ("canceling" them) for their race, religion, or sexual orientation is explicitly illegal in many circumstances.
You should put more effort into your strawmen.
End thread. Please never open it again.
https://xkcd.com/1357/
Freedom of speech is a concept and idea, the government doesn’t have the right nor ability to police or grant anyone an intrinsic freedom they already have. All the government can do is lend some of its protections to help prevent others from trying to stop you from speaking freely. But as a society if we say that your right to free speech only exists in government buildings. Well… that’s not anything at all.
A line that many people still can't handle.
The US legal system also provides many avenues for punishing people based on their speech.
Most legal systems and most religions follow similar rules.
I don’t expect the government to step in when someone says something hateful, but I do pay attention to which groups allow that kind of behavior in their associations and which don’t.
We all do have a right to leave the rooms hateful people are in, and the people in charge of those rooms (as long as its not the government) are free to control how their space gets used.
Should we also restrict private, yet powerful, organizations from similar actions?
Clearly the article was considering various non-governmental institutions as places where liberal intellectualism are traditionally important and whether or not they should continue to have those values.
How many of these must we suffer through? Why do none of these people grasp the concept that when you speak to other people, they do not have to passively absorb your words?
This author, like many others, could use the sage advice my father gave me in 5th grade when I taunted and made fun of another student and got beat up for it: "Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash."
Say a stupid/offending/violent thing and you’ll face consequences from
1) other people listening in the form of shunning/shouting/lost opportunities/laughing.
2) the government in form of fines or even imprisonment.
People on both sides get all hot and bothered when they receive 1) and complain that they have freedom of speech or that their opponents are bigots. This should mostly be ignored, like you said: "Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash."
Some people however want their opponents to face 2) and that is very dangerous. That is literally fascism and this sentiment exists on both sides as well.
It’s 2) we need to defend against and pretending that we’re only talking about 1) is a fatal misunderstanding.
I have genuinely never seen anyone calling for 2) outside of nations run by theocracies and dictators, with the exception of the UK.