Please be specific. Which parts of the claim "The Irish government is proceeding with legislation to outlaw so-called “hate speech” – even after the vast majority of respondents to their public consultation expressed opposition to the idea" [1] are false?
Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified?
I understand some claims in that thread are speculative, but the majority is factual. Feel free to dispute the speculation, but please don't use it to trick people into thinking you've also disproven the facts the speculation is based on.
I don't know their methodology, but you can double check their results yourself. If 3600 responses is too much to go through, you can do a random sampling of a smaller set. I've looked at the first 10 submissions from individuals. 8 of them are opposed to the law, 1 is unintelligible, and one thinks the law, as proposed, doesn't go far enough.
Alternately, you can try to find reports on this consultation from some media that you trust. Though you may find they are all silent on it.
Edit: In fact, when interviewed, even Ireland's prime minister Leo Varadkar didn't dispute Gript's characterization of the consultation results (he merely claimed that the results aren't representative of Irish opinion, for which he offered no evidence, and certainly didn't conduct a referendum to definitively answer the question), as the video in that thread shows: https://twitter.com/griptmedia/status/1654113707004239872
Please be specific. Which parts of the claim "The Irish government is proceeding with legislation to outlaw so-called “hate speech” – even after the vast majority of respondents to their public consultation expressed opposition to the idea" [1] are false?
The only source for the "vast majority of respondents expressed opposition" claim I can find is your quoted source, a site that seems to focuses exclusively on culture war topics, and is based on their own analysis without publishing their data. Not a reliable source. I took a look at the gov.ie link you shared. It seems there were 104 written individual submissions, and 3528 online individual submissions. Whatever the prevailing mood of the responses, can this be taken to be an accurate snapshot of the public mood of a nation of 5 million people? Also, the gript.ie analysis ignored submissions by groups and elected officials.
Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified?
This law was debated in the Dáil by the TDs elected by the people to represent their views. People raised issued, amendments were made. The issue around possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred was raised. There was a largely civil public debate around it, where various groups raised various issues, including the specific one you mention. It just didn't go your way. This is how democracy works.
What's happened here is that this seems to have been picked up by the US right (Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk have rowed in) and it's brought a lot of attention to it. We largely don't have the deeply polarised discourse here that the US has, our democracy is largely civil and functioning more or less as well as such an imperfect system can. What we're starting to get here in recent years is a vocal and emboldened fringe minority who feel entitled to bring the validity of the whole system of societal decision-making into question when it doesn't support their views. This is the thing that is dangerous here, we've already seen this trend lead to violence in the US.
It's not "because they're an outcast." It's because of an assessment of their stated motivation and previous actions. That's not prejudice it's just judgement.
When people speak in bad faith, you don’t have to listen to them. The boy who cried wolf was in the wrong, not the townspeople who ignored him. Perhaps this is the one time when a normally un-reliable source is presenting a thesis that is intellectually sound - but unless a more reliable source picks it up, it’s not worth taking seriously.
That’s definitely an easy position to fall into, but not an absolute truth. I’m quite sure most people against hate speech laws are coming from a reasonable fear of restrictions on speech. How slippery is the slope is a very fair thing to discuss and debate
This. I actually don't have a strong position on the topic of the thread (the Irish law in question), other than personal experience of living in the country and not remotely finding it to be the oppressive thought-policing regime the thread describes, and generally agreeing that hate speech is a bad thing for society.
My point is that the thread is poor content written by a clearly unreliable source. I'm happy to engage with ideas I disagree with when they're presented intelligently with insight, but as soon as someone starts talking about world governments taking their orders from some hidden superior powers I'm out thank you very much.
“Cognitive deplatforming” is a brilliant way of framing the motivation of certain “free speech” advocacy. It’s not good enough for someone to be able to express the idea, nor to be able to amplify it by whatever platform provided to them. You also have to think about what they want you to think. Anything less than that is denying their right to speak.
Recognize the pattern of their motivations and the resulting ideas? Know they’re harmful from prior experience? Better go think on it some more, or you’ve unduly cancelled them from your own brain, and that’s bad because everyone who wants to be in your brain deserves to be, rent free of course.
> You also have to think about what they want you to think.
That's a wildly exaggerated interpretation of rainytuesday's post. I interpreted it as calling out the one-sided purity test applied to which media one may engage with.
I.e. you can ignore it and not think about it, but you can't expect others to concede that, just because the source doesn't parrot your side's orthodoxy, it can and should be ignored. Especially for something as mild as the statement about supporting news without a liberal filter.
Especially since, if motivated, biased, harmful (but truthful) reporting is enough to discredit a news source, then that would disqualify ABC, CBS, NBC, the Associated Press [1], the New York Times, and I'm sure many others.
If we ignore what anyone we dislike has to say, even when we think what they're saying is true, then dialogue is impossible.
> That's a wildly exaggerated interpretation of rainytuesday's post. I interpreted it as calling out the one-sided purity test applied to which media one may engage with.
You didn’t need to interpret. They said[0] what they meant pretty clearly.
> Non-engagement with the thesis was the point
And I don’t agree given actual political alignment that “news without a liberal filter” is mild. It’s a dog whistle for increasingly active hate. The news without such a “liberal filter” is openly hostile to my existence, and far moreso towards other people I care about. And to that point,
> If we ignore what anyone we dislike has to say, even when we think what they're saying is true, then dialogue is impossible.
I don’t want dialogue with anyone who wants me to cease to exist, nor anyone who wants to keep people I care about from existing. That’s not intellectual curiosity and it’s not the bedrock of a functioning society. It’s the exact principle of demanding people entertain harmful ideas even when recognized.
You can engage whatever you want, but I’m not obligated to spend a second thought on people who want me dead.
"No liberal filter" becomes "they want me and those I care about dead". It's so convenient when the only media that pass your purity test don't raise any uncomfortable points, or report on issues you'd rather be ignored, isn't it?
Upthread there’s a comment from “uvnq” that seemed unnecessarily hyperbolic, with phrasing like:
> They believe hate speech is violence. Not that it merely is bad, but that it actually equates to violence. In fact, certain forms of hate speech are not just violence, but genocide.
And then I get down the thread a bit and find the exact behavior described in uvnq’s post.
If the simple tagline “news without a liberal filter” can be interpreted as an indirect deadly threat against an individual’s life and very existence, then the moral framework has already been established to violently respond in “self-defense”.
I don’t need to be hyperbolic about speech as violence. The actual violence is violent. I also don’t need to make time to listen to the speech of people who want to do violence to me
Any publication to the right of Hillary Clinton is allegedly a threat to his existence; what a bad faith argument. Abandonment of truth in favor of "harm reduction" is the big picture, that's why everyone is worried about AI spitting out something contrary to the current phase of the sexual revolution or core liberal beliefs.
Plenty of other countries, especially western european ones, have since ~2015 introduced legislation (which later was either not/rarely enforced or walked back upon, though not removed) in which a person is presumed guilty until proven innocent for all kinds of 'hate speech', especially online.
I'm not sure if you're trolling by calling such shifts in society merely conspiracy theories. If it happened like 1-10 times, sure. But that's not the case, and since then euroskepticism was on the rise, only until ~2020 when covid came and suddenly everybody fell in line and forget we even had other (bigger) problems in our society than merely a flu-tier virus.
Note: I have not read the entirety of the thread as per i don't really care, only saw the part of a presumed legal document where you can be detained upon mere suspicions of wrongthought/wrongsay, which reminded me of similar legislation that passed in my country (& not only).
I'm not trolling, I'm pointing out that ascribing societal trends (which may or may not exist) to some hidden guiding hand through phrases like "falling into line" is suggestive of a conspiracy, i.e. a conspiracy theory. The phrase "conspiracy theory" has negative connotations I think because these theories are everywhere now, and so many are groundless variations of the same tropes.
As for "cognitive deplatforming", making a judgement on how seriously to take a piece of writing based on the author's other writing seems reasonable to me. When I look at that Twitter account I see the same tired old tropes about the WEF, covid conspiracy, government thought control etc etc, poorly written with nothing insightful or original. So I come to the same conclusion as another commenter: supremely ignorable.
Pressure groups are influencing the World Economic Forum and other globalist organizations to get countries to adopt these laws. So it's not a "conspiracy" of elites, rather that these pressure groups have managed to gain so much influence over the decades, that they in effect get to set our laws.
Don't be so dismissive. Just last month we had a US governor in a foreign country to sign away rights of his constituents back home in service of the interests of those rather influential foreigners.
If these were Mongolians or New Zealanders, it would seem bizarre.
"the legislation — passed Wednesday by the Legislature — makes it a felony for hate groups to harass people for their religion or ethnicity. Florida had the fourth-highest number of antisemitic incidents last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League."
He signed away his constituents' right to harass Jews?
And wasn't this bill already approved by the legislature?
One can already imagine the headlines if he DIDN'T sign it. "Desantis vetoes bill protecting Jews from white supremacists".
Huh, that's not too different than the headlines one sees right now.
When the summary of a new law is comprised entirely of saying it bans things that are already illegal (such as harassment [1]), that's a good sign they're lying through omission.
In this case, the law makes it a 1st class misdemeanor (up to 1 year jail time and $1000 fine [2]) to "display or project, using any medium, an image onto a building, structure, or other property without the written consent of the owner of the building, structure, or property" [3].
I.e. even if the display is not harassing or threatening in any way, and even if the owner does not complain, you can go to jail for up to a year. That includes any structure (such as a bridge or billboard), and any medium (unfurl a banner or use a projector).
In other words, it makes illegal to spread a message through anything but official channels they can pressure and control.
The thread is spot on. The hate speech laws have a very broad and vague definition so governments can act on populist impulses.
In UK, some guys got arrested under this pretext for burning a cardboard pretending it was a Grenfell tower. How is this the governments business? At all?
But people demanded "justice" and so the police stepped in
The UK is a country where it's illegal to offend people. It really isn't surprising that those people would get arrested but actual perpetrators of the Grenfell tragedy get off scot-free.
I remember not too long ago Ireland had blasphemy laws. Does anyone remember what happened to the guy who was criminally charged for mocking God on TV?
Context matters. I assume you left it out for good reason from your throwaway account? The video alone doesn't explain.
Grenfell tower housed mostly a non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths and 70 injured (mostly non-Brits), it's the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire.
His intent is debatable to some and in a court of law. In my opinion he got away lightly for something hateful and racist. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).
Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence often encoded in political systems and then you get violence + state. E.g Nazis started with "remove Jews from Germany" then shockingly when a lot of Jewish people don't want to leave their homes then it escalates as the bigotry whipped up at first runs into the reality of how to make it real. By the time they seized the full state machinery then it was too late.
No one can or will ever agree on what is and isn’t bigotry and the views of those who do agree are constantly changing. It’s a ridiculous thing to attempt to make illegal. Those who try are destined to find themselves jailed for bigotry.
> Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence often encoded in political systems and then you get violence + state.
I don’t think this is a causal relationship. Just think about the trillions of acts of bigotry that take place each year and how few of them result in genocide. Bigotry is bad, genocide is super duper bad. But saying one leads to the other needs to be qualified that it’s like a one in a billion chance. Equating bigotry with genocide debases the severity of genocide and is like saying unkindness leads to genocide. Or that not saying “bless you” leads to a feedback loop that ends in murder.
If we say "ah but think about the causal relationship anti semitism has a low risk of turning into a pogrom" that doesn't really carry a lot of water for the majority of Jewish people considering the amount of times it has happened in history in real life and not in debate club
For the sakes of what are nearly always incredibly low value and tedious "debates" I'm fairly ambivalent on defaulting towards removing hate speech. We can get enough of it from our government and media in the UK anyway so it's clearly not under any real threat.
Hate speech law can be real without any of the interpretation or spin put on it by the threat being real. I’m canadian. Canada has hate speech laws, and has for a long time. The stuff that gets charged under that law is almost always genocidal garbage. A few cases of less extreme (but still pretty extreme) content have been tried and tossed out. Idk if the irish law goes further, but this thread isn’t a reliable gauge of how this law fits into the irish legal system
Had you read the thread you would know that it does. It contains excerpts from the law, showing that mere possession of material that is "likely to incite hatred" is illegal. That's an incredibly broad definition. Does an article alleging there are many Jews in Biden's cabinet [1] qualify? Or a book alleging white people are racist and fragile [2]?
I mean I’d say no on both accounts. Are you so familiar with the irish legal system that you’re confidant both of these would be made illegal by the law as written? I’m not. Both of those things are not getting charged under the canadian system and i’m pretty sure the wording of our law isn’t too far different from the proposed irish law.
This thread and the comments here don't make it clear how extreme the Irish law is. If you're found in possession of anything deemed hate speech, you are legally presumed to be guilty unless you can prove you are using it for law enforcement or academic purposes. Possession is punishable by up to 2 years imprisonment.
It's an enormous amount of power that could allow the government to target literally anyone - if you look hard enough, many texts could be read as hate speech in this law (for example, the Bible advocates genocide against certain ethnic groups).
The phrasing of this feels a little hyperbolic. If you’re found in possession of illegal guns, you’re “automatically assumed to be guilty” unless you can prove you have a valid reason to possess illegal guns. That’s how making things illegal works. You could just say “possessing hate material is illegal under this law”. Which is not a weird thing snuck into the law - it’s literally what the law is about.
Does it? I mean we can argue if making hate speech illegal is a good idea or a bad idea - but making it illegal doesn’t throw out the concept of innocent until proven guilty as the phase “automatically assumed to be guilty” suggests.
Someone yelling fire in a crowded theatre isn’t “automatically assumed to be guilty”, they’ll be charged and placed on trial and the state will have to prove that a) they yelled fire, and b) this was the kind of speech we agree isn’t protected because it’s intended to cause harm. Similarly, if i’m caught possessing hate material the state would charge me and have to prove that i did possess that material, and that material fits the definition of hate speech.
If it’s possible to possess illegal words, then yes, we’ve abandoned the presumption of innocence. What moral failing is the possessor of illegal words guilty of?
That’s a strawman. There’s no illegal words in hate speech laws like the one in question. There are illegal intents, illegal publications, etc. - those already exist. To go back to my previous example: “fire” isn’t an illegal word. But shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre (where there is no fire) is an illegal action intended to cause harm.
Thinking genocidal thoughts, even saying genocidal ideas aloud, all are ok under most western hate speech laws. The line is usually in publishing or broadcasting genocidal ideas.
Hate speech laws are on a slope, and at the bottom is of that slope is authoritarian thought police territory, for sure, but it doesn't seem that slippery a slope from where i’m standing.
The law here states that if you possess the hate speech the assumption is that you intend to publish or broadcast it. You have to prove that you don't (by being an academic or law enforcement for instance). This is an attempt to keep people from engaging with crimethink, not broadcasting it.
Is there something about text that advocates for genocide that is worth engaging with? I’m not convinced there is. This is paradox of tolerance territory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance).
Last time I checked, "innocent until proven guilty" was still a foundational principle of Western law. Certain factions may be working hard to chip away that foundation with the intent of enforcing an ideological homogeny, but it's not gone yet.
And as far as i understand this law doesn’t change that. The state would still have to charge you and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did indeed possess hate material. Just like how it would have to prove you possessed a stolen gun or whatever. Which is exactly my point - the phase “automatically assumed to be guilty” is phrased to make it seem like the law throws out innocent until proven guilty, which i don’t think it does.
Sorry, i forgot 2nd amendment absolutists exist. Replace “illegal guns” with “stolen guns” to make the point make sense again. Also while you’re at it try out replacing “illegal guns” with “icbm launchers” just to check if you actually believe banning private ownership of weapons is always tyranny.
I think the issue is that by the law’s definition, Huckleberry Finn contains hate speech. And many other items.
So everyone has hate speech and the government can selectively choose who to prosecute. And just the act of defense is punishment enough, so the law is bad on that account.
If everyone in the country has an illegal gun then the law would be similar. In this case the law is not properly able to be enforced. In the US this would render it invalid.
Disclaimer: all of my beliefs are based on assumptions, and any of the assumptions I am making here could be wrong. This is my perspective on this issue and has been for a while.
I look to the beliefs of the people pushing such measures. They believe hate speech is violence. Not that it merely is bad, but that it actually equates to violence. In fact, certain forms of hate speech are not just violence, but genocide. The government could arrest someone for having materials on your device to commit violence in the form of bombs or shootings, why can't they arrest you for hate speech then? How did we treat the Nazis after their genocide? Since they believe that going against the government's beliefs is equal to genocide, will we be treated that way for "wrongthink"? This leads me to believe that it is possible in the future they may even try to kill you under the guise of preventing hate speech. It's happened before in many countries thay believed they were modern, rational, and scientific. Why can't it happen now? Because "we're not in a history book"? I wonder if someday this comment of mine will be used as exhibit A of evidence I "committed genocidal acts of hate speech" and should be shipped off to the gulag or concentration camp.
The beliefs of these people are creating a mathematical gradient pushing our society and culture towards punishment, revenge, hatred, and tyranny.. and who knows what the limits are to how far it will go.
For those of you inclined to disagree because of how extreme this conclusion sounds, I understand why you would do that, but that heuristic would also have led you astray in the numerous atrocities committed in what people in the 1900s believed were "modern times". The atrocities seemed to have been a product of human nature and our nature certainly hasn't changed in 80-50 years; if anything we have become prideful and don't think we need to watch out for our nature, which I would assume exacerbates our susceptibility to the flaws in our nature.
I am very interested to hear the thoughts of those of you who agree and disagree with me.
You seem to be equating my hate speech with actual violence. I don't know why you are so anti free speech but I worry that your censorious beliefs are creating a mathematical gradient pushing our society and culture towards punishment, revenge, hatred, and tyranny.. and who knows what the limits are to how far it will go
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed on HN—it's against the guidelines and destroys what the site is supposed to be for, so we have to ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against. For more explanation see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Yikes. That's way beyond the pale and not at all ok to post here, so please don't.
More generally, can you please not post flamebait to HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This whole "what value do they bring" discussion is a very normal feature of "mere rational debate" when it comes to refugees etc. But apparently my hate speech needs censoring when I switch the target group to people with bigoted views.
A general argument about that would be a red herring. The point is that you broke HN's rules badly, and we have to ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.
I don't make a habit of it. But if someone illustrating why hate speech is bad falls foul of the same rule banning actual hate speech then it seems like there's a pretty flawed rule somewhere
You'd be surprised how often people make that argument to justify breaking the rules - e.g. that they were just calling attention to someone else's badness. From a moderation point of view, that issue is orthogonal. You can "illustrate" without breaking HN's rules, and that's fine. But if you break the rules, we have to moderate, whether you were "illustrating" or not.
Many bigots have jobs and produce economic value. Each bigot has a mother who loves them. Many bigots have children they sacrifice for and protect.
But most importantly, bigots can be redeemed. If you violently remove someone, they lose the potential for redemption.
That’s my general response to “what value do bigots have.”
But what about bigots who brought about exceptional change in the world. If they had been removed, violently, the world would be worse off. Karl Marx was a bigot, anti-Semite and Mark Twain too. Malcolm X was a bigot and furthered civil rights. LBJ was a bigot who passed the civil rights act. Lincoln was a bigot that ended slavery.
Bigotry is bad, but it’s not someone’s defining characteristic. We want to end bigotry and help people commit less bigotry.
If I'd posted the same thing about $group I'd have had plenty of free speech defenders saying it's my right to ask questions have debate, express views etc. But apparently if I want to have similar types of debate about $group then it's not my free speech it's just me being violent in my words etc.
My suspicioun is a lot of "unlimited free speech" views are based on all debate being abstract chin stroking rather than having their own existence potentially be questioned and subject to the same kind of interrogation that are commonly expressed on the internet in hate speech.
For most people who are on the end of these "intellectual debates" there's not just fear created from what if a political group holding X views gets into a position of wielding power but there's also stochastic violence often from repeated assertions that they belong to some hive mind (e.g shootings in mosques and synagogues alike). These are always hand waved away by people who just want to pretend like it's all an abstract parlour game wether from malice or lack of caring.
Hate speech today is amplified by social networks that had been non-existent 20 years ago.
I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.
> I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.
Another comment supporting pain and suffering for the people they disagree with. "You are wrong that free speech does not have consequences" is a common anti-free-speech strawman, a dishonest tactic, and is not even remotely what I said
No thing as free speech, there's consequences to saying anything you want. Rightly so hate speech is removed from platforms and those people face prison time. What falls under that is constantly changing.
There's no real debates on whether Nazis should be given platforms on reddit or YouTube.
"So this is how liberty dies... with thundering applause."
The amount of people defending these laws in this thread is a frightening proof of this.
Everywhere these days you can find someone smart and utterly naive with their "but actually..." argument pushing the Overton window closer and closer to a censorship state, and there are not enough neutral people arguing for free speech itself. Only the weirdos and racist ones which are easy to hate and root against.
So all this playing Devil's advocate is actually helping along the normalization of these free speech bans.
The Overton window will go further than that due to the beliefs of the ideologues pushing to remove "hate speech". They believe that hate speech is literal violence and genocide, as bad as murder or mass murder. I posted a comment warning that this anti-hate-speech legislation may go further as time goes by, towards killing of people, and even further from there, and got 1 comment supportint the "violent removal of bigots from society". These people believe you are committing genocide with your words, why wouldn't we expect them to act as if they actually are preventing genocide?
Here is the comment, before they change or delete it:
Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–]
Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring?
(At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")
I thought this would be about all of the arrests of environmental protestors and anti royalist campaigners in the UK rather than the usual drivel about the right to be bigoted.
91 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadPlease be specific. Which parts of the claim "The Irish government is proceeding with legislation to outlaw so-called “hate speech” – even after the vast majority of respondents to their public consultation expressed opposition to the idea" [1] are false?
Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified?
I understand some claims in that thread are speculative, but the majority is factual. Feel free to dispute the speculation, but please don't use it to trick people into thinking you've also disproven the facts the speculation is based on.
[1] https://gript.ie/hate-speech-consultation-received-mostly-ne...
I don't know their methodology, but you can double check their results yourself. If 3600 responses is too much to go through, you can do a random sampling of a smaller set. I've looked at the first 10 submissions from individuals. 8 of them are opposed to the law, 1 is unintelligible, and one thinks the law, as proposed, doesn't go far enough.
Alternately, you can try to find reports on this consultation from some media that you trust. Though you may find they are all silent on it.
Edit: In fact, when interviewed, even Ireland's prime minister Leo Varadkar didn't dispute Gript's characterization of the consultation results (he merely claimed that the results aren't representative of Irish opinion, for which he offered no evidence, and certainly didn't conduct a referendum to definitively answer the question), as the video in that thread shows: https://twitter.com/griptmedia/status/1654113707004239872
The only source for the "vast majority of respondents expressed opposition" claim I can find is your quoted source, a site that seems to focuses exclusively on culture war topics, and is based on their own analysis without publishing their data. Not a reliable source. I took a look at the gov.ie link you shared. It seems there were 104 written individual submissions, and 3528 online individual submissions. Whatever the prevailing mood of the responses, can this be taken to be an accurate snapshot of the public mood of a nation of 5 million people? Also, the gript.ie analysis ignored submissions by groups and elected officials.
Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified?
This law was debated in the Dáil by the TDs elected by the people to represent their views. People raised issued, amendments were made. The issue around possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred was raised. There was a largely civil public debate around it, where various groups raised various issues, including the specific one you mention. It just didn't go your way. This is how democracy works.
What's happened here is that this seems to have been picked up by the US right (Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk have rowed in) and it's brought a lot of attention to it. We largely don't have the deeply polarised discourse here that the US has, our democracy is largely civil and functioning more or less as well as such an imperfect system can. What we're starting to get here in recent years is a vocal and emboldened fringe minority who feel entitled to bring the validity of the whole system of societal decision-making into question when it doesn't support their views. This is the thing that is dangerous here, we've already seen this trend lead to violence in the US.
My point is that the thread is poor content written by a clearly unreliable source. I'm happy to engage with ideas I disagree with when they're presented intelligently with insight, but as soon as someone starts talking about world governments taking their orders from some hidden superior powers I'm out thank you very much.
Recognize the pattern of their motivations and the resulting ideas? Know they’re harmful from prior experience? Better go think on it some more, or you’ve unduly cancelled them from your own brain, and that’s bad because everyone who wants to be in your brain deserves to be, rent free of course.
That's a wildly exaggerated interpretation of rainytuesday's post. I interpreted it as calling out the one-sided purity test applied to which media one may engage with.
I.e. you can ignore it and not think about it, but you can't expect others to concede that, just because the source doesn't parrot your side's orthodoxy, it can and should be ignored. Especially for something as mild as the statement about supporting news without a liberal filter.
Especially since, if motivated, biased, harmful (but truthful) reporting is enough to discredit a news source, then that would disqualify ABC, CBS, NBC, the Associated Press [1], the New York Times, and I'm sure many others.
If we ignore what anyone we dislike has to say, even when we think what they're saying is true, then dialogue is impossible.
[1] https://israelpalestinenews.org/associated-press-double-stan...
[2] https://ifamericansknew.org/media/nyt-report.html
You didn’t need to interpret. They said[0] what they meant pretty clearly.
> Non-engagement with the thesis was the point
And I don’t agree given actual political alignment that “news without a liberal filter” is mild. It’s a dog whistle for increasingly active hate. The news without such a “liberal filter” is openly hostile to my existence, and far moreso towards other people I care about. And to that point,
> If we ignore what anyone we dislike has to say, even when we think what they're saying is true, then dialogue is impossible.
I don’t want dialogue with anyone who wants me to cease to exist, nor anyone who wants to keep people I care about from existing. That’s not intellectual curiosity and it’s not the bedrock of a functioning society. It’s the exact principle of demanding people entertain harmful ideas even when recognized.
You can engage whatever you want, but I’m not obligated to spend a second thought on people who want me dead.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867929
I’m not asking for anything to be ignored. I’m asserting my right not to subject myself to it personally.
> They believe hate speech is violence. Not that it merely is bad, but that it actually equates to violence. In fact, certain forms of hate speech are not just violence, but genocide.
And then I get down the thread a bit and find the exact behavior described in uvnq’s post.
If the simple tagline “news without a liberal filter” can be interpreted as an indirect deadly threat against an individual’s life and very existence, then the moral framework has already been established to violently respond in “self-defense”.
I'm not sure if you're trolling by calling such shifts in society merely conspiracy theories. If it happened like 1-10 times, sure. But that's not the case, and since then euroskepticism was on the rise, only until ~2020 when covid came and suddenly everybody fell in line and forget we even had other (bigger) problems in our society than merely a flu-tier virus.
Note: I have not read the entirety of the thread as per i don't really care, only saw the part of a presumed legal document where you can be detained upon mere suspicions of wrongthought/wrongsay, which reminded me of similar legislation that passed in my country (& not only).
As for "cognitive deplatforming", making a judgement on how seriously to take a piece of writing based on the author's other writing seems reasonable to me. When I look at that Twitter account I see the same tired old tropes about the WEF, covid conspiracy, government thought control etc etc, poorly written with nothing insightful or original. So I come to the same conclusion as another commenter: supremely ignorable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
If these were Mongolians or New Zealanders, it would seem bizarre.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-...
"the legislation — passed Wednesday by the Legislature — makes it a felony for hate groups to harass people for their religion or ethnicity. Florida had the fourth-highest number of antisemitic incidents last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League."
He signed away his constituents' right to harass Jews?
And wasn't this bill already approved by the legislature?
One can already imagine the headlines if he DIDN'T sign it. "Desantis vetoes bill protecting Jews from white supremacists".
Huh, that's not too different than the headlines one sees right now.
In this case, the law makes it a 1st class misdemeanor (up to 1 year jail time and $1000 fine [2]) to "display or project, using any medium, an image onto a building, structure, or other property without the written consent of the owner of the building, structure, or property" [3].
I.e. even if the display is not harassing or threatening in any way, and even if the owner does not complain, you can go to jail for up to a year. That includes any structure (such as a bridge or billboard), and any medium (unfurl a banner or use a projector).
In other words, it makes illegal to spread a message through anything but official channels they can pressure and control.
[1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa...
[2] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/florida-misd...
[3] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/269/BillText/er/P...
In UK, some guys got arrested under this pretext for burning a cardboard pretending it was a Grenfell tower. How is this the governments business? At all?
But people demanded "justice" and so the police stepped in
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8akk-nZtuk "hate speech"
Grenfell tower housed mostly a non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths and 70 injured (mostly non-Brits), it's the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire.
His intent is debatable to some and in a court of law. In my opinion he got away lightly for something hateful and racist. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).
Completely agreed. So long as I get to define what is bigotry, and what is valid grievance.
I don’t think this is a causal relationship. Just think about the trillions of acts of bigotry that take place each year and how few of them result in genocide. Bigotry is bad, genocide is super duper bad. But saying one leads to the other needs to be qualified that it’s like a one in a billion chance. Equating bigotry with genocide debases the severity of genocide and is like saying unkindness leads to genocide. Or that not saying “bless you” leads to a feedback loop that ends in murder.
For the sakes of what are nearly always incredibly low value and tedious "debates" I'm fairly ambivalent on defaulting towards removing hate speech. We can get enough of it from our government and media in the UK anyway so it's clearly not under any real threat.
Had you read the thread you would know that it does. It contains excerpts from the law, showing that mere possession of material that is "likely to incite hatred" is illegal. That's an incredibly broad definition. Does an article alleging there are many Jews in Biden's cabinet [1] qualify? Or a book alleging white people are racist and fragile [2]?
[1] https://forward.com/news/462330/enough-for-a-minyan-a-jewish...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility
https://twitter.com/LFJIreland/status/1652774182210396165
It's an enormous amount of power that could allow the government to target literally anyone - if you look hard enough, many texts could be read as hate speech in this law (for example, the Bible advocates genocide against certain ethnic groups).
That’s what makes this quite a bit different than your gun analogy.
Someone yelling fire in a crowded theatre isn’t “automatically assumed to be guilty”, they’ll be charged and placed on trial and the state will have to prove that a) they yelled fire, and b) this was the kind of speech we agree isn’t protected because it’s intended to cause harm. Similarly, if i’m caught possessing hate material the state would charge me and have to prove that i did possess that material, and that material fits the definition of hate speech.
Thinking genocidal thoughts, even saying genocidal ideas aloud, all are ok under most western hate speech laws. The line is usually in publishing or broadcasting genocidal ideas.
Hate speech laws are on a slope, and at the bottom is of that slope is authoritarian thought police territory, for sure, but it doesn't seem that slippery a slope from where i’m standing.
So everyone has hate speech and the government can selectively choose who to prosecute. And just the act of defense is punishment enough, so the law is bad on that account.
If everyone in the country has an illegal gun then the law would be similar. In this case the law is not properly able to be enforced. In the US this would render it invalid.
You talking about Ireland, UK, Europe or ... globally?
I look to the beliefs of the people pushing such measures. They believe hate speech is violence. Not that it merely is bad, but that it actually equates to violence. In fact, certain forms of hate speech are not just violence, but genocide. The government could arrest someone for having materials on your device to commit violence in the form of bombs or shootings, why can't they arrest you for hate speech then? How did we treat the Nazis after their genocide? Since they believe that going against the government's beliefs is equal to genocide, will we be treated that way for "wrongthink"? This leads me to believe that it is possible in the future they may even try to kill you under the guise of preventing hate speech. It's happened before in many countries thay believed they were modern, rational, and scientific. Why can't it happen now? Because "we're not in a history book"? I wonder if someday this comment of mine will be used as exhibit A of evidence I "committed genocidal acts of hate speech" and should be shipped off to the gulag or concentration camp.
The beliefs of these people are creating a mathematical gradient pushing our society and culture towards punishment, revenge, hatred, and tyranny.. and who knows what the limits are to how far it will go.
For those of you inclined to disagree because of how extreme this conclusion sounds, I understand why you would do that, but that heuristic would also have led you astray in the numerous atrocities committed in what people in the 1900s believed were "modern times". The atrocities seemed to have been a product of human nature and our nature certainly hasn't changed in 80-50 years; if anything we have become prideful and don't think we need to watch out for our nature, which I would assume exacerbates our susceptibility to the flaws in our nature.
I am very interested to hear the thoughts of those of you who agree and disagree with me.
God bless
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
More generally, can you please not post flamebait to HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Obviously you can't call for "violently if necessary" "removing" people on HN. That's nowhere near a borderline call.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But most importantly, bigots can be redeemed. If you violently remove someone, they lose the potential for redemption.
That’s my general response to “what value do bigots have.”
But what about bigots who brought about exceptional change in the world. If they had been removed, violently, the world would be worse off. Karl Marx was a bigot, anti-Semite and Mark Twain too. Malcolm X was a bigot and furthered civil rights. LBJ was a bigot who passed the civil rights act. Lincoln was a bigot that ended slavery.
Bigotry is bad, but it’s not someone’s defining characteristic. We want to end bigotry and help people commit less bigotry.
My suspicioun is a lot of "unlimited free speech" views are based on all debate being abstract chin stroking rather than having their own existence potentially be questioned and subject to the same kind of interrogation that are commonly expressed on the internet in hate speech.
For most people who are on the end of these "intellectual debates" there's not just fear created from what if a political group holding X views gets into a position of wielding power but there's also stochastic violence often from repeated assertions that they belong to some hive mind (e.g shootings in mosques and synagogues alike). These are always hand waved away by people who just want to pretend like it's all an abstract parlour game wether from malice or lack of caring.
I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.
Another comment supporting pain and suffering for the people they disagree with. "You are wrong that free speech does not have consequences" is a common anti-free-speech strawman, a dishonest tactic, and is not even remotely what I said
Which non-abstract pain and suffering do you mean?
There's no real debates on whether Nazis should be given platforms on reddit or YouTube.
The amount of people defending these laws in this thread is a frightening proof of this.
Everywhere these days you can find someone smart and utterly naive with their "but actually..." argument pushing the Overton window closer and closer to a censorship state, and there are not enough neutral people arguing for free speech itself. Only the weirdos and racist ones which are easy to hate and root against.
So all this playing Devil's advocate is actually helping along the normalization of these free speech bans.
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU
Here is the comment, before they change or delete it:
Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–]
Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring?
(At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")