It’s the left and the right aggressively pushing for censorship these days. Both sides. It used to be a right wing stereotype but I think it’s more a left wing thing now. Maybe it’s just whoever is on the back foot are the ones who suddenly worry about their free speech while whoever is kn charge starts trying to silence everybody who disagrees with them
Canada, just look at Bill C-18. If that's not enough, they are about to try to pass an "anti-hate" bill as well targeting the internet, e.g. demanding taking down any content flagged as hate within 24 hours or massive penalties, so of course the default will be censorship to avoid penalties.
Sure, no problem. Bill C-18 is a tax on links to news articles. Currently the regulator in charge of implementing the law is only targeting 2 large companies: Google and Meta (you may have heard Meta stopped news sharing within Canada as a result and Google is considering the same), but it's expected for the regulator to apply this law to progressively more companies over time. But I would argue this severely restricts the free flow of information on the internet, which is effectively censorship (because it's removing news links from the internet, atleast in Canada)
It's more of a kind of trade war than censorship since the links being removed are removed in a content-neutral manner, not based on whether they support/oppose a specific viewpoint. Also, it's Meta that decided to remove the links of paying the tax. Removing links was not mandated by the government.
You're right the links are removed in a content-neutral manner, but the law also hurts smaller publishers more than larger publishers because the larger publishers are getting direct money contributions from the government to compensate them but the smaller ones aren't. So the most likely net effect of the law is to put out of business a lot of smaller news media in Canada and only the well-connected large news businesses will remain.
C-18 is about copyright. You can argue all copyright is censorship in the same way, which while I think is a valid viewpoint it's not really a good argument, copyright and censorship should be treated as two different things.
Put another way, if it should be legal for Google to do whatever they want with copyrighted content, I should also be able to do whatever I want with Google's intellectual property. You've got a status quo bias by looking at C-18 as "aggressively pushing for censorship" but ignoring Google's successful "censorship" of people who would copy other copyrighted works.
Is C-18 about copyright because it's about the content of news articles? I haven't really heard Bill C-18 being about copyright before. Are news articles copyrighted content? Honest questions, I'm not sure.
You are right I do have a bias. I'm not particularly trusting of Google or Meta, but in this particular argument I would side with them (even though as you point out Google in particular has been successful in other types of censorship)
> The primary component of Bill C-18 is a provision that *allows an eligible news business (acting alone or in a group) to initiate mandatory bargaining* with a digital news intermediary—an online communications platform (such as a search engine or social media service, excluding platforms whose primary purpose is to allow users to communicate with each other privately) that reproduces news content in whole or in part, or otherwise facilitates access to it by any means—if it is determined that there is a "significant bargaining power imbalance" between the intermediary's operator and the news business (based on size, strategic advantages, and whether they hold a "prominent market position")
Those who qualify as "news businesses" and are eligible to impose mandatory purchase of their news products, will have government-mandated carriage on social media platforms operating in Canada. Their news and stories will reach much further and with more spread, than those who do not qualify or participate.
In practice it benefits the major corporations like Rogers and Bell Media, and will not likely be of benefit to your local town newsletter, or someone trying to blow a whistle on the government. Unless it's a qualified "news business" as defined in the act, that content is now required to be de-emphasized, so you and I are less likely to see it.
Political censorship is not the intent of C-18, nor is it likely a consequence. (The real point of it is to subsidize the ailing major media corporations in Canada.) But when you start picking which messages will be amplified, you are implicitly turning down the volume on other messages, and it is, I think, by the broadest definition, a type of censorship.
It is just whoever the CRTC/Heritage Minister deems to be a Digital News Intermediary. If designated then these companies will have to pay to use links pointing to large media companies in Canada. The price will be determined either through negotiation or forced arbitration, but regardless Bill C-18 is a tax on news links in Canada. The effect of which is of course censorship even if it's not targeted but instead content-neutral. This will hurt the smaller publishers more than the larger publishers (who are actively getting monetary compensation) and so Bill C-18 effectively censors small news media in Canada.
If anyone is wondering the criteria for being deemed a Digital News Intermediary, there are two requirements: 1. a platform must be in a position of a “significant bargaining imbalance” between themselves and the news businesses. This is determined by the CTRC / Heritage Minister and is based on several factors (outlined in section 6 of the bill): e.g. "whether such an imbalance exists, including the size of the platform, whether the market gives the platform a strategic advantage, and if the platform occupies a prominent market position. According to Rodriguez (the Heritage Minister), only two platforms meet this standard: Google and Meta. This is why platforms such as Microsoft (with Bing and LinkedIn), Twitter, and Apple are not subject to the law even though they feature news links. 2. The second requirement is that the digital news intermediary must make news available content available to persons in Canada. If the platform does not make news content available, it is not a digital news intermediary.
I want to minimize how much I get yelled at online, so I’d rather not cite a source this time and make it look like I’m taking a side. The point is there are lots of examples, easy to look up, and from both sides, not just one side
"For example, California presents its Age-Appropriate Design Code as a privacy regulation. Yet, the law imposes obligations on websites to deploy algorithms, designs, and features in a certain way or face fines. Of course, algorithms, features, and designs are the means by which websites develop, display, and disseminate speech."
Censorship is aimed at dissent from the ruling class, and broadly never left or right. Leftist examples include within the nation state of the United States (most closely aligned with the 95% of leftist voter roles in DC and Eastern Virginia) through the persecution of Assange, social media censorship most transparent in the Twitter files, Hunter Biden laptop reporting (see Greenwald), media censorship regarding COVID treatments, and banning Trump and many others from social media.
I know a lot of people will say, “but there’s a good reason and that censorship is justified.” It is still censorship.
Whether you agree with it or not, the left broadly labels things it disagrees with as "racist" "bigoted", or anything "phobic". Anyone or anything attached with one of those labels, regardless of its veracity, is off limits in the public sphere.
Recent attempts to regulate "misinformation", "disinformation", and the new "malinformation" are all mechanisms for censorship as well. In the United States, the Disinformation Governance Board was created by the lefty government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Boar...
Ironically, during a hearing on censorship, RFK Junior was set to testify. The Democrat senator from Florida moved to stop the session and censor his testimony citing something else he had previously said that the senator did not like.
>Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) made a motion to move the committee into executive session — closing the hearing to the public — over concerns about Kennedy’s recent statement on COVID-19.
i.e. in a hearing specifically on censorship, the Democrat senator moved to censor Kennedy's testimony. I am not saying that I agree with what Kennedy said, but this is an obvious attempt at censorship.
The lefty government in Europe just started enforcing the DSA, and to quote Wikipedia:
>Swedish MEP Jessica Stegrud argued that the DSA's focus on preventing the spread of disinformation and "harmful content" would undermine freedom of speech.[58]
As evidenced by the Twitter Files, before Musk took over the left was censoring right leaning accounts heavily, corresponding directly with US federal agencies and taking orders to "investigate" specific accounts that were critical of lefty politicians.
Well, I can't think of any media articles talking about, specifically state level, censorship efforts from the left. But the Whitehouse was recently told by courts it couldn't communicate with social media companies about content moderation. Trying to claim that isn't censorship will require some mental gymnastics.
But let's not forget the censorship around the hunter Biden laptop story and the censorship of lab leak theories for covid. Both completely legitimate topics, both completely blocked out during an election year. The right wasn't calling for or defending those actions, the left was.
> Can you give an example of a lefty state government aggressively pushing for censorship?
From the article:
"For example, California presents its Age-Appropriate Design Code as a privacy regulation. Yet, the law imposes obligations on websites to deploy algorithms, designs, and features in a certain way or face fines. Of course, algorithms, features, and designs are the means by which websites develop, display, and disseminate speech."
You realise the right moved on to using 'both sides' arguments to justify the worst of what they want to do over a decade ago. Right?
It's quite easy to spin up a few hundred social media accounts, pretend to be left wing, make stupid arguments, then jump on right wing media and pretend those accounts represent left wing policy.
And rubes lap it up because its formatted in memes they have been trained to accept without questioning.
This is part of what I’m talking about. Part of it is a mob justice thing where people get attacked for not being pro left enough. Give me a break and stop pounding on people for not touting the line. I don’t want to get on anyone’s side
> This is part of what I’m talking about. Part of it is a mob justice thing where people get attacked for not being pro left enough. Give me a break and stop pounding on people for not touting the line. I don’t want to get on anyone’s side
You say you "don't want to on anyone's side" but then repeat right wing talking points like "not being pro left enough". It's not about being"left enough" but about how their actions make lives of most vulnerable people even worse.
And remember who benefits the most from inaction of good people.
Then my life is a left-wing talking point. Without socialised medicine, without public schools, without a lot of help from either government or NGO-s I wouldn't be alive today. And I see how much unnecessary cruelty today is pointed towards people who have no real voice to defend themselves. Because some ideologies want "The Other" as a scapegoat to skip all this pesky business of government governing.
For the most part, we get censorship because the majority wants censorship. (Or, at least, thinks they want censorship because they haven't thought all the way through what that actually is going to mean). The only reason we have anything resembling free speech in the United States is because the courts are stuck with the relatively unpopular first amendment - they're going to continue to ignore it as best they can and with a few trivial exceptions, not get much resistence.
The hard problem is defining censorship. 1a is applied pretty damn broadly in general - think Citizens United.
But even if you take a more narrow definition of it (ask your government to change its ways), does that mean you can stand outside your Congressman's house at 1am with a megaphone?
> does that mean you can stand outside your Congressman's house at 1am with a megaphone?
This is separately handled by the tort of nuisance, from common law; the content of the speech or the political office of the person hearing it is irrelevant. What's relevant is that it's a large noise disrupting someone's reasonable sleep hours.
In addition to tort (civil) claims, criminal harassment laws can also apply to using a megaphone outside someone's home at 1AM.
> the content of the speech or the political office of the person hearing it is irrelevant.
It SHOULD be irrelevant. In practice, it is often relevant: whether it's legislators (politicians) passing laws or mayors/ governors/ other executives (politicians) enforcing laws, there is a distinct partisan bent where they protect speech they agree with and target speech they don't.
This is also done by government agents in non-political roles, such as teachers and police: they protect speech they agree with and target speech they don't.
Sure, if a case ever makes it to a federal court, judges will take a more neutral view on the content of the speech, but how many folks can afford to do that?
> Does that mean you can stand outside your Congressman's house at 1am with a megaphone?
These days, that seems to depend entirely upon which cause you're protesting. If you're campaigning about the climate or against racism, you'll probably get away with it. But for many other causes, you'll probably be dragged away in handcuffs.
Police follow orders. For example, it's pretty obvious that in London they've been ordered by the powers that be to be very lenient to Just Stop Oil when they block roads over and over and over again.
Meanwhile, also in the UK, a lone anti-abortion campaigner has been arrested on more than one occasion for silent prayer outside an abortion clinic.
Under normal circumstances, it seems reasonable to limit protest in locations where patients visiting the clinic could be directly harassed, but at the same time, other protesters are permitted to repeatedly cause traffic chaos all over London, and are disrupting major events with no indication of any particularly harsh consequences.
> For the most part, we get censorship because the majority wants censorship. (Or, at least, thinks they want censorship because they haven't thought all the way through what that actually is going to mean).
I think that you have it the other way around. The minority that doesn't want censorship hasn't thought through what it actually means to not have censorship. Either that or the two groups are working with totally different definitions of censorship.
> I would be interested to see your thoughts from the perspective of a minority, especially one used as a scapegoat.
It is terrible what people say, do, have said, and have done to minority groups, but this sort of logic is a slippery slope to abuse. This means incentivized actors can intentionally identify with a group to pursue thought control over others. There should be a line in the sand when it comes to invading minds and forcing thought.
Treatment of minorities has gotten better over the trajectory of time through natural behavioral changes and intelligence growth. Why now more than ever do we need such progressive controls?
We live in a time where even the wolves do not necessarily have to be real to tell a story and now those stories can be used to force patterns of thought through censorship.
> A slippery slope fallacy (SSF), in logic, critical thinking, political rhetoric, and caselaw, is a fallacious argument in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect.[1] The core of the slippery slope argument is that a specific decision under debate is likely to result in unintended consequences. The strength of such an argument depends on whether the small step really is likely to lead to the effect. This is quantified in terms of what is known as the warrant (in this case, a demonstration of the process that leads to the significant effect). This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fearmongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience.
With all due respect, innocent people are dying because certain individuals incite violence against them.
It's easy to express you support free speech when you are not on the receiving end and don't need to deal with insane people who think you are the devil-manifest.
Would you be okay if your friends or family died in a shooting from an individual who consumed a particular class of content?
Reality is that nothing is done in a vacuum, every action matters, every discussion matters, everything we utter matters.
> The strength of such an argument depends on whether the small step really is likely to lead to the effect.
This does not fall into the fallacy aspect as it is already happening, groups are already being exploited for ulterior motives to control thought. Part of having a background in security research leads one to detect vulnerabilities. This is a gaping vulnerability.
> With all due respect, innocent people are dying because certain individuals incite violence against them.
Let us be clear that inciting violence is criminal and not considered protected speech.
> Would you be okay if your friends or family died in a shooting from an individual who consumed a particular class of content?
Less people are dying today than have historically died from hateful conduct. You cannot crush hate out of a society with censorship. Driving hateful behavior underground only emboldens the extremists. Only through education and the ability for an individual to observe how consensus genuinely rejects their hate can you change such attitudes.
You also cannot defeat an assumed logical fallacy with a different one, you are appealing to extremes when you take into account statistics and history.
> This does not fall into the fallacy aspect as it is already happening, groups are already being exploited for ulterior motives to control thought. Part of having a background in security research leads one to detect vulnerabilities. This is a gaping vulnerability.
Part of being a minority is being afraid to walk in the streets because you don't know what kind of media a random person has been consuming [1]. Examples like [1] are many and will only become more frequent as some people succumb to hate and others exploit them.
> Let us be clear that inciting violence is criminal and not considered protected speech.
Of course it is, but why won't anyone think of the children, wink wink, nudge nudge. If only there was some hero to save us all from those monsters!
That line of speech is frequent in certain circles and a certain class has been hearing this on repeat for a few years now.
> Less people are dying today than have historically died from hateful conduct. You cannot crush hate out of a society with censorship.
I am not keen on crushing anyone, I am keen on continuing living. Being visibly trans in a backwards country with crazy people is terrifying. I do not recommend.
> Driving hateful behavior underground only emboldens the extremists. Only through education and the ability for an individual to observe how consensus genuinely rejects their hate can you change such attitudes.
What more consensus from broader society does one need than literally telling them that their speech and actions are harmful and they need to stop?
> you are appealing to extremes when you take into account statistics and history.
The funny thing when you think about statistics is that those events that people conveniently aggregate to cutesy little numbers are happening to real people with real friends and families, with their own dreams and aspirations.
For you I am just a statistic, a tiny minority that you can look from afar. But for me, it's my life.
A deliberately fabricated hate crime to advance what agenda?
> What more consensus from broader society does one need than literally telling them that their speech and actions are harmful and they need to stop?
Is algorithmic and incentivized actor driven censorship considered consensus? From your perspective you support one thing through censorship but want to deny what consensus tells you in other aspects of reality. Censorship driven echo chambers support some opinions while they crush others. In some respects, we need more confrontation of opinion in society. Too few are forced to question themselves in current times, emboldened by these digital echo chambers, opinion solidified in thoughts and actions.
I genuinely hope that we can find a way to end this age of artificial division. Too many agendas being programmed into brains, too little reality driven truth.
> A deliberately fabricated hate crime to advance what agenda?
See, the difference is in one case a person was beat-up, and there's evidence, their life was possibly in danger, and in what you presented you have a hear-say. A false report. The difference is that one has the potential to cause harm, and the other is actual harm caused.
> From your perspective you support one thing through censorship but want to deny what consensus tells you in other aspects of reality.
From my perspective I fear for my life. This is what is on the line here. Not my ability to commit hate-crimes, not my ability to spew bigotry. Consensus - actual people - on average are understanding. On the other hand, there's a trigger-happy, outrage-addicted, gun-owning, self-proclaimed-terrorist and outright blood-thirsty minority who is angry because the broader society doesn't accept their bigotry.
I will repeat, to you, it's some imaginary threat that has the potential to happen 60 steps down the road if you concede that hate-speech is bad for everyone and pushes people to commit atrocities, and to me, it's my life.
> See, the difference is in one case a person was beat-up, and there's evidence, their life was possibly in danger, and in what you presented you have a hear-say. A false report. The difference is that one has the potential to cause harm, and the other is actual harm caused.
Bad actors harm everyone, rights protect against bad actors from breaking true consensus. In that case, they went a step further than a false report and actually staged the crime as well for "evidence". This is not the only occurrence, but one of the most high profile occurrences to have been caught.
> From my perspective I fear for my life. This is what is on the line here. Not my ability to commit hate-crimes, not my ability to spew bigotry. Consensus - actual people - on average are understanding. On the other hand, there's a trigger-happy, outrage-addicted, gun-owning, self-proclaimed-terrorist and outright blood-thirsty minority who is angry because the broader society doesn't accept their bigotry.
I am sorry you have personally experienced hatred like this. Even with experience, such fears should not fuel oppression of the world. Many are dying daily from war but personal experiences like this supersede actions against that, why? Please at least see the choice and selection biases in this, fear for your life at minimum invokes an emotional component. If you are unsafe there are likely actions you can take outside of intentionally trying to disrupt the rights of everyone else. Without personal compromise? Maybe not. Much as they want to force their opinions into reality, you want to force yours.
> I will repeat, to you, it's some imaginary threat that has the potential to happen 60 steps down the road if you concede that hate-speech is bad for everyone and pushes people to commit atrocities, and to me, it's my life.
It is not imaginary, it has happened and will continue to happen as long as there is incentive. Hate crimes against minority groups have lessened over time, but I will agree with you in that fear of such has been amplified. Some selectively amplify group positions to intentionally fuel hatred. This serves in two ways, for profit and distraction. Media could not profit from fear unless victims AND threats exist, thus they intentionally amplify opinions that provoke such threats.
We cannot solve the hate problem with censorship and removal of rights. The bad actors do not simply disappear because you no longer allow their thoughts in your reality. You have a right to be you up until violence and they have a right to be them up until violence. Many humans still operate from instinct, maybe the solution to hatred is to teach more to separate instinct and approach reality with logic? That would certainly upset our desire driven sales fueled world of individualization.
Not at all, I am fairly open about it because I am making a statement. The statement is that there are bad actors in this forum who silence discussions to push a certain narrative. Dang and whoever else moderates this is very much free to ban me, but they haven't.
> I am sorry you have personally experienced hatred like this. Even with experience, such fears should not fuel oppression of the world.
See, I have a desire to live a life just like you, I have siblings, I have a mother, and they love me and I love them. How will they feel when they will have to bury me because some rando decided to murder me?
You see, in this conversation you are putting the blame on me, for what you believe that I am doing - which I am actually not, if you read my comments in this thread I am very much against censorship as long as it doesn't devolve to hate-speech. My desire to live a life in decency will always trump your desire to enable harm - because those are the consequences - by allowing everyone and anyone to say anything they want and amplify that.
That is what you are doing. Instead of asking what the consequences are for hate-speech, how being bombarded with such speech changes your very own view of reality - just as any other interaction does because such is the way the brain behaves - you are more concerned with telling me to suck it up for being afraid for my life.
In your mind you have vilified me and put me in a position I never did myself. You did all that implicitly. Notice that in none of comments did I directly support censorship. What I support is accountability for the consequences of one's actions - that accountability includes stochastic terrorism.
You can't assume that everything and anything you do happens in a vacuum, people are not closed systems, everything we do matters. I wouldn't be in this position if I was allowed to be in this world, just like you are.
> If you are unsafe there are likely actions you can take outside of intentionally trying to disrupt the rights of everyone else
You are literally putting the blame on me for - let me check my notes - potentially getting murdered by a crazy person, and not on the person who pushed the crazy one over the line, gave them a gun, and pointed at me. You are literally blaming me for my inability to be invincible, and for wanting to live a life of the same quality as you are.
Sure, I can go get locked in an apartment - god knows I am already doing that because I am terrified - what more can I do? Do I not deserve the chance to live a regular life?
Why are you not blaming those who put me in this position in the first place? Why aren't you blaming those who actively cause harm and instead blame the victim for dying or getting assaulted, or harassed or worse?
> Maybe not. Much as they want to force their opinions into reality, you want to force yours.
What opinion am I forcing on anyone? That murdering people is bad? That minorities deserve to live regular lives as everyone else?
> Hate crimes against minority groups have lessened over time,
Really because I see the opposite. Minorities are being denied treatment that existed for decades because of fear mongering despite all actual evidence to the contrary. Is this not a hate-crime? Attacks against trans people have skyrocketed, and so have murders [1,2].
Please tell those families that you are okay with their children getting murdered, because a person can't handle not spilling vitriol.
1. I am not placing blame, I am saying there are actions you can take to live in less fear. Maybe personal sacrifices are required, but many have had to make sacrifices to avoid fear throughout history and not all fear is organic or fully based in reality. Media is known to amplify fear and reality has historically pushed many people in directions they do not want to go. Only in modern society has the expectation grown that reality needs to cater to everyone's individualism, an impossible feat. Please see an article I wrote here about the damage over-personalization has done https://hackernoon.com/personalization-or-personal-bubblizat...
2. Hate shifts over time. As soon as old targets becomes stale, the manufacturing of narrative amplifies new opinions to shift hate to. With amplification of opinion comes more dissent against opinion. Further reach comes with further responsibility. Censorship does not solve this. Hate crimes have gone down at large but have increased against your particular group, which allows you to somehow throw out the overall statistic showing progress? Talking to other groups that have historically experienced hate might add some perspective for you as to how things have indeed gotten better.
3. Taking action to infringe upon rights many respect, only generates more dislike for the group pursuing infringement. We should find solutions to lessen hate without infringement on any group's rights. Violence is not a right, there is not a "freedom of violence" constitutional amendment. The current state of censorship attacks much beyond hate, but uses hate as the primary scapegoat, amplifying the abuse of minorities along the way.
4. I am going to disengage at this point. The use of multiple personas in a single thread to promote your opinions causes questions as to your true intent here. You seem to be fairly solidified in your stances regardless. I wish you the best and a life free of fear.
In the US, minds are slowly changing on free speech. 40% of Millennials are OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities[1] and the trend by age cohort is very clear. We may disagree but we old people are aging out, and the newer generations are less likely to be free speech absolutists. Another poll[2] shows 61 percent of Americans agree that free speech should be restricted, and 51 percent believe that the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, should be rewritten to reflect the new cultural norms of today.
Its difficult to meaningfully compare small mostly homogenous nations with larger, more diverse ones. It not hard to imagine that when you have an overwhelmingly homogenous society, the need for free speech is greatly lessened because there are far fewer dissenting voices. Free speech is there to protect those minority dissenting voices, not the majority ones who will are going to hold popular and socially acceptable opinions.
How diverse was the nation that could enjoy the 1st amendment when it was passed compared to now? It is perhaps more a retrospective justification that would need data to support it.
America was if anything less diverse then than now. We've had many large periods of emigration since then. And that combined with the challenges with new technology tells me the first amendment is more important than ever.
Switzerland oddly does not collect ethnicity information in its census but it does collect nationality and language information and its pretty easy to conclude that Switzerland is overwhelming white Europeans over 85% of which are German or French speakers.
You are indeed making the “things that work in other places won’t work in America because of differences in race and ethnicity” argument.
This is a fairly lazy analysis that plays on America’s often unspoken cultural beliefs around race. While it is true that race is a major cultural marker in America, this fact is not innate and the oft repeated argument that “homogenous” societies can do things that we can’t amounts to little more than “we can’t do it because we are different”.
The determinants of diversity in the sense that it might be relevant to a discussion on free speech depend on a multitude of cultural factors. You can’t just say “well they aren’t diverse because they don’t match the criteria set out and defined by _America_”.
95% of Americans speak English. If half the country didn’t speak English well that would make for a very different society and culture than the one we have now.
Not quite true, epigenes have conclusively been shown, at least for a few generations, to be innate, inheritable, heavily modifiable by extreme enough environmental factors (such as starvation, violent crime, war, etc.), and even capable of skipping a generation and re-expressing later on like normal genes
Whether or not such changes lasts through several dozen generations is still undecided though.
> This is a fairly lazy analysis that plays on America’s often unspoken cultural beliefs around race. While it is true that race is a major cultural marker in America, this fact is not innate and the oft repeated argument that “homogenous” societies can do things that we can’t amounts to little more than “we can’t do it because we are different”.
You italicized innate so I assumed you meant to put special emphasis on that part?
For example, it's at least theoretically possible for someone who had ancestors a few generations ago that were enslaved to suffer some bonafide inherited and disadvantageous epigenetic mutations.
Or for those who has ancestors who got shell-shocked in past wars, got involved in serious car crashes, etc...
I'm not sure if such factors should be considered legally, lest competition turn it into some kind of pity olympics, but there's a non-zero chance large segments of the population came out of the womb genuinely, innately, disadvantaged slightly.
> For example, it's at least theoretically possible for someone who had ancestors a few generations ago that were enslaved to suffer some bonafide inherited and disadvantageous epigenetic mutations.
Emphasis on theoretically.
> there's a non-zero chance large segments of the population came out of the womb genuinely, innately, disadvantaged slightly.
may be slightly affected. Again, how is this relevant to a discussion on free speech?
My point was that there is no innate reason why race would lead to politically divergent opinions, at least not to the degree that it would lead to such major discord that it would require a fundamentally different model of free speech in society.
I agree? That's why I replied with a 'Not quite true' instead of a flat 'No' or 'that's incorrect' or some variation.
It's somewhat relevant since these epigenetic mutations can increase the probability of someone being a misanthrope, for example, that just hates other people and who doesn't care about their lack of free speech.
Or vice versa, someone with increased anxiety/nervousness/etc., and would be exceedingly disturbed by even small regressions in free speech rights.
No that's not the argument I'm making at all. But thanks for putting words in my mouth. It isn't about any intrinsic quality of race. But race does have a component inasmuch as any way to define an in and out group does.
White western Europeans have very similar cultures and societal norms due to their shared history. A Frenchman, Swiss and German are likely to have generally similar views on what would be acceptable speech for example.
But not all Americans have a shared culture and history that would influence their ideas. That's because, from even the very beginning, we have had a very civic minded form of nationality that 300 years ago was unheard of. And today is still fairly unique. But if I am a Presbyterian New Englander my cultural norms and what would be considered socially acceptable behavior will differ than a Baptist Southerner, A Catholic West coaster or an Atheist Midwesterner. There different regional cultures, religions, and cultural influences from our immigrant ancestors are going to shape things quite a lot. When I was growing up we called this the American melting pot. I don't know if that terminology is still used.
When you have a nation of immigrants they are going to have different ideas they want to express. Usually you will have one majority but many majorities. Traditionally that majority was rooted in the descendants of early English colonists. Sometimes derisively called WASPs. America has had a lot of strife between different groups interacting such as the large Irish influx during the potato famine. German and Italians during periods of upheaval in the late 19th century. Chinese immigrants on the west coast around the same time. Interactions and immigration both ways with our northern and southern neighbors. The consequences of the African slave trade. It goes on and on.
> The fact that you describe Switzerland as “mostly homogeneous” really undermines the credibility of your argument.
I'd love to hear an argument about how Switzerland is heterogeneous, but here's what I found:
Switzerland is a country of ~8.5M, or the same population as New York City, or 2/3 the population of the rest of New York State, or less than the population of Virginia and 11 other states.
And Switzerland is ~40k km², a bit less than New York State.
What I'm saying is it's very small compared to the US, with 330M people across 9M km² of land.
As for homogeneity, Switzerland doesn't have birthright citizenship (where the US does), so foreign nationals may remain foreign for multiple generations; it's also part of the Schengen, permitting EU members to travel and reside without a visa or other permission. All of this makes an apples to apples comparison with the US much harder.
Switzerland is ~75% Swiss nationals, with ~25% foreign nationals, but ~85% of those are from the Schengen area.
About 15% of the US population is foreign born, but almost half of those are naturalized citizens -- there's also 10M+ foreign nationals in the US illegally (more than the pop of Switzerland), though any children they have in the US will be natural-born citizens (unlike in Switzerland). If we include the first US-born generation, it jumps to 28% of the US population. And when we look at where those immigrants come from, two of the top three origins are in Asia (India and China).
Again, I don't know how to make an apples to apples comparison. It's likely that Switzerland is more heterogeneous than some places in the US, while less so than others. But if I had to make a broad statement, yeah, Switzerland is much more homogeneous than the US, and I'd love to hear an argument against it.
The US was designes as a republic specifically to prevent tyranny of the majority.
Already the direct-democracy bills of county elections destroy me. The _majority_ has voted to steal from me to pay for their daycare, housing, and other non public good subsidies every single voting cycle.
A direct democracy allows majority theft with no recourse or limit. It's proposterous!
There was a reason for voting qualifiers at the founding of the country. I say we bring them back if we want to switch to direct democracy so that only those with skin in the game get to vote: restrict voting to only those persons that pay income taxes on agi.
> The US was designes as a republic specifically to prevent tyranny of the majority.
The phrase “tyranny of the majority” was rarely used by writers and thinkers in the founding period. It was alluded to in one of the 85 essays that made up the federalist papers and the coining of the phrase is generally attributed to a French writer several decades later.
Your characterization is largely historical revisionism.
While I agree with you on certain points it is worth considering that US foreign policy proclaims to advocate for the spread of democracy and not the spread of constitutional republicanism.
I think Peter Thiel made some remark (maybe in his poorly moderated student youth period) along the lines of "Freedom is incompatible with democracy" which has an uncomfortable amount of truth to it assuming the state you are in remains actually committed to protecting those freedoms.
It is rather obvious to me at this point that the federal government is not in favor of its design. It advocates for democracy because the goal is to install true democracies and then unleash the cia to run persuasion operations to influence voting outcomes.
It is very similar to the rhetoric I hear when the left talks about attacks on democracy. They don't seem to actually mean democracy. They seem to mean their version of it, as in those voters that are aligned with them.
> It is rather obvious to me at this point that the federal government is not in favor of its design.
Absolutely. The big questions are if the transition to this state is inevitable, and once the transition has occurred are you better or worse off than under the Swiss system.
Going by the state of both societies the Swiss one seems to have a lot going for it.
Wouldn't the CIA be more easily able to manipulate a small pool of representatives than an entire population? Like, WAY easier? (You can't blackmail millions of people.)
Also, how is a minoritarian rule of the rich (plutocracy) a more just system than democracy? Yeah, they have skin in the game, and the game is protecting their wealth instead of contributing to the commonwealth. There's a happy balance to be found in there, of course, but you don't want to arrive at it via pitchfork.
> Wouldn't the CIA be more easily able to manipulate a small pool of representatives than an entire population? Like, WAY easier? (You can't blackmail millions of people.)
Certainly, but if the government doesn't have regular election cycles it's an all-or-nothing approach.
Consider MBS. If he doesn't want to play ball with the cia, he won't, and there isn't much the cia can do about it. He's not going anywhere anytime soon, or potentially ever during his lifetime. Contrast that against a gov that holds regular elections. The cia gets the opportunity to influence the election outcome (chance 1) and then gets a chance to influence the winner if they're not already captured (chance 2), all the while knowing if they fail chances 1 and 2 they will get to try again in a handful of years.
> Also, how is a minoritarian rule of the rich (plutocracy) a more just system than democracy?
I don't consider it minoritarian rule. The minority can only say no change. They can't craft change of their own. This helps prevent the tyranny of the majority problem. However, the majority is what is needed to actually make changes, or more aptly a super majority. This helps to make change slow and harder, which is not a bad thing in my opinion, especially considering how the ruling parties tend to oscillate every decade or so. The change that happens trends to be good for both parties, not just one.*
*Obviously a lot of things pass that are terrible (e.g, inflation protection act), but at least it required more than just 51% agreement.
The argument works both ways. In a concrete example:
Burning the Koran is offensive, should it be restricted? No! Freedom! Next they'll stop us watching old westerns and doing fancy dress etc! We have to be able to prevent this being extended to things which affect me.
Burning the Koran is offensive, should it be restricted? Yes! If we allow it then they can burn the flag/constitution/bible/effigies of the president/??? we have to be able to prevent this being extended to things which affect me.
"First they did x" construction works in both cases non?
Non, because they can already "burn the flag/constitution/bible/effigies of the president/???"
This is the status quo and it's accepted by nearly everyone on the free speech side. There is no sequence of future reductions in human rights to prevent.
> 40% of Millennials are OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities[1]
That poll is from 2015 (and the other from 2019), not necessarily representative of current views. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/upshot/millennials-pollin... millennials are becoming more conservative as they age (and many were radicalised by the covid response).
Also: even if Millenials were becoming more conservative (which would be very strange for a lot of economic reasons alone), the definition of “minority” held by the media may not really apply if nearly half of the generation identifies as non-white. (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2015-pr/cb15-113.ht...)
I have plenty of examples of hypocritical free-speech "absolutionists" to back my belief, but again, people will throw the good ol' no-true-scotsman response.
You are just projecting your inability to use data on everyone. Some people don't think like you.
Most so called "free speech absolutists", when pressed, will support some limits on free speech (e.g. incitement or "fighting words"). Many even support more strict libel and slander laws. Elon Musk is the obvious, prominent example of someone espousing "free speech absolutism" while limiting legal speech on his platform but there are plenty of others.
So we're not really arguing about whether speech should be restricted, but where that line should be drawn.
I would agree that Millennials support drawing that line a little more broadly, but there is also a difference about which speech should be more restricted. The pew research piece you linked was specifically about offensive statements about minority groups, but what if you asked about whether trans educational material should be banned or whether the word "cis" should be considered a slur? I suspect that the demographics would be flipped.
To "steel man" the argument put forward by the state: The government doesn't have the right to regulate speech, but does has the right to regulate how people behave and conduct themselves.
In meatspace, these concepts are distinct: You can speak all sorts of horrible stuff while being peaceful and conducting yourself well. You can also say nice things while being violent and belligerent. Government surely has the right to stop you from being violent and belligerent. On the Internet, there is no difference between speech and conduct. You conduct yourself by speaking/writing. So how can we enforce good conduct without regulating speech? The states are trying to draw the line between speech and conduct, and that's not easy (maybe impossible) online.
> The government doesn't have the right to regulate speech, but does has the right to regulate how people behave and conduct themselves.
:)
These types of comments make me smile. The government is an idea is the minds of people. It doesn't/can't have rights. It's a non-existent entity.
And yet. People believe that it has the ability to create 'rights', and people will be somehow beholden to its pronouncements. Is government 'God'? I think to most people the answer is yes. It is their authority; such individuals are not an authority of themselves.
The proper answer, imo, is that nothing except for my own heart and reason can guide me as to what is morally right or wrong. No work of man (law, religion, government) can say anything to me. All these works (law, government) are badly bent towards a self-serving elite, for the extraction of wealth from those that believe in these phantasms.
We laugh at those in history who we are told tithed 10% of their work to their local lord in the feudal system, and 10% towards the church, but don't blink at paying 40% to the government.
There are really only individuals, but the mind control in most is very effective.
> The proper answer, imo, is that nothing except for my own heart and reason can guide me as to what is morally right or wrong.
I think if we had the ability to trace the origin of each belief about what is right and wrong you would be surprised by how greatly law, government, and religion have influenced you.
Edit:
> There are really only individuals
This must be why solitary confinement is considered such a great privilege when incarcerated.
I disagree with the metaphor. In the past freedom of speech meant absolute free speech with a small blacklist of specific situations in which it would cause immediate, physical, danger to others. Everything else was okay, even if it hurts other peoples' feelings. It is an extremely GOOD thing to have for society, it is the main tool that the left used to gain the power that it has today. It is the main tool by which good people can overcome bad people in power.
The newer generation seems to be okay with moving from a blacklist -> whitelist approach where the range of acceptable opinions and topics are set by the group and things outside of that range are labeled offensive, bigoted, racist, something-phobic, or harmful in some other way and banned.
Responding specifically to your point about trans educational material, free speech absolutists are 100% okay with allowing trans educational material that says anything at all. I'm not kidding, think of whatever offensive thing you want to say about cis people, free speech absolutists are okay with you saying it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is something I, and other free speech absolutists, truly believe.
>In the past freedom of speech meant absolute free speech with a small blacklist of specific situations in which it would cause immediate, physical, danger to others.
You'll have to specify when this golden age existed. I suspect that if you name any specific date, we could find all sorts of respects in which freedom of speech was much more restricted in the US at that time than it is now.
I am not saying that it has always been perfectly implemented, right leaning politicians have been guilty in myriad ways of censorship over the years. But the ideal that we define as a culture is what I stated, and if we all agree that's what we want then we can work every day towards the ideal. It has been the ideal since the founding of the United States in 1776.
I know this to be true because my parents and grandparents told me that that is what their generation valued, and what they thought the definition of free speech should be.
If the majority of the people in a culture decide that they care about free speech then the minority of censorious bad people in power can be overcome.
How do you think the left got the power they have today? By being allowed to write whatever they want in opinion columns, make movies that insult corrupt politicians, write plays about evil industrial fat cats poisoning the water supply, marching through the streets with megaphones dissenting to war mongers.
Now we are saying it's okay to silence these people as long as we label them as "harmful" or "bigots" in some way. Even being anti-war is now somehow becoming associated with the alt-right taboo people that must not be talked about.
What we are seeing now is a generation of people who do not share the ideal of free speech, and are okay with censorship and an ingroup/outgroup by default.
Can you imagine a situation now where CUNY was unable to appoint someone to an academic position because the Catholic church canceled them?
As another example one might mention the vast reduction of censorship in movies. Movies can be shown now that would have been unthinkable in at least the first half of the 20th century.
Granted, there may also be instances of present day censorship that wouldn't have happened historically. But it's naive and completely ahistorical to see any past period as some kind of bastion of free speech absolutism. Believe me, lots of people in your grandparents' generation also wanted to restrict free speech (particularly with regard to e.g. sexually explicit content, or anything that might be vaguely connected with Communism).
Can we at least agree on the premise that free speech should be absolute? The parent pointed out that the implementation has never been perfect, but the objective was correct?
Conditional upon that, why wouldn't we strive to correct the implementation? The opposite seems to be happening.
My comment was in response to your initial response that nitpicked the OP's point that free speech was considered absolute in the past, contrary to the current climate which seems to be trying to do away with it and replace it with white listed speech.
The OP was discussing the ideology of free speech, not the implementation. My response was an attempt to bring the topic back to the ideology of whether free speech should be allowed in absoluteness, in contrast to your deviation towards implementation.
Unfortunately it applies to the whole Constitution. Those same people believe that the 2nd Amendment was only for a state-sanctioned militia and not for protection against tyranny, and simultaneously that it only applied to muskets and not modern weaponry. Confusingly, they don't believe that the 1A only applies to things written via quill and ink.
It's not so much that we're idiots, you see, but that we're reevaluating based on how things have been playing out the last 70 years.
For example very noticeably: the most powerfully tyrannical developments in the modern US are the retributive legal system, state violence against poor and minorities, crackdowns on sexual and reproductive healthcare, oppression of sexual minorities. And these policies are overwhelmingly supported by the same people who purport to value so highly their ability to fight tyranny with guns.
And at the same time we're seeing a growing grass-roots racial terrorism campaign, again enabled by the same people & policies. Lotta "lone wolves" out there who independently decide they need to shoot up a bunch of black or asian or jewish people.
So again it's not that we're fucking stupid. We just see that you're not willing to use that power for us, and we want your friends to stop using it to kill our folk instead.
I just think it's odd that you think that the solution to being picked on is to remove your right to defend yourself from being picked on. The 2A wasn't supposed to be just for "bigots". Use your rights. Relying on the government to protect you from bigots only works when the government itself isn't comprised of bigots. Then you'll really regret not having rights to effective individual defense.
“rights to effective individual defense” isn't going to cut it against a government armed with nuclear weapons, tanks, and what not. The notion that a few guns will protect you against government overreach is outdated by at least a hundred years.
1. The largest military industrial complex / empire the world has seen to date, struggles with underequipped, undereducated insurgents fighting for their beliefs already.
2. You assume the whole military would be unified in drone striking their fellow countrymen. I wager a large chunk, likely more than half, would splinter.
3. There's not much point in nuking the place you wish to rule. There won't be much left to rule.
Still, I'd bet that a bunch of lawyers and huge funds for campaign contributions would give you better chances than the contents of your armory. Or does everything look like a nail because all you have is a hammer?
It's unfathomable to me how you people are completely incapable of seeing how both are useful, and one doesn't need to exist on its own without the other.
I'm a materialist, and as such I see that the "right" to own and use weapons in this way is conditional on things outside the control of individuals. What do you think happens to a black man who shoots a cop in self defense?
We depend on us to protect us from bigots. And it's more effective and less morally compromising to do this when the bigots don't have guns. As it is an honest self defense class for my people starts with "have someone who knows how prison commissary works" and ends with "get right with the lord" because that covers the full spectrum of likely outcomes when a nonwhite person defends themselves with a weapon in the US.
Even then, it's not a very strong right, since for the past 30 years at least, the common reason for cops to shoot people is "I thought he had a gun" with suggestions that people carry bright orange wallets to avoid being mistaken for having a gun
And what is the point of "arms"? Why would the second most important right enumerated, be only placed there merely for keeping weapon-shaped trinkets in the household?
We have limits on all rights: the rights against unreasonable search and seizure (exigent circumstances), the right of freedom of expression (imminent lawless action), the right to freedom of association (imprisonment, parole), etc. For some reason we accept these but not on 2A, as we think it's this fundamental right to secure freedom.
But I think this overlooks how we've won our freedoms over the last century. Suffragettes didn't take mayors ransom. Labor unions didn't march on DC with firearms. Civil rights activists didn't surround police departments with shotguns. Protests against the draft were literally flower power.
The idea that rights flow from violence in today's world just doesn't track. It's way more likely you secure your rights with strikes, marches, and protests than with armed resistance. The truth is the idea of a noble rebellion violently struggling for freedom is a Confederate fantasy, which is the aesthetic preference of a certain demographic. It's maybe less romantic to them to run boycotts and strikes (and actually win the popular vote), but that's how things work these days.
Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? It's a backup. It's like saying "yeah my server runs super stable and I haven't had any power outages in the last few months, so I don't need a UPS, so I'll throw mine away." Which is great, until your data is irrevocably corrupted and you regret your decision.
You're right, marching with guns doesn't resolve civil issues most of the time. That's not the point. It's for when all other options are exhausted. And we won't truly appreciate it for what it is, until that time comes, by which point I hope we haven't complacently thrown it away because we couldn't learn from history (again).
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." ~ JFK
It's really based on "hasn't happened to me, so it probably won't happen to me" logic. Which is stupid when you're setting rules for generations to come. All good things come to an end, and the US will too. It will be a slow boil until we realize we're in a seriously corrupt and unrepresentative state that can only be fixed through force. It has happened time and time again, and to think we won't meet the same fate is incredibly naive. At least we have an enshrined fighting chance to reset the way we want.
Yeah but in this case your UPS causes tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths a year and lots of knock on effects like cops always having to worry about a suspect being armed to the teeth, metal detectors in schools, etc.
> It will be a slow boil until we realize we're in a seriously corrupt and unrepresentative state that can only be fixed through force.
There's no evidence this is happening, certainly not to the degree we should suffer the current level of gun violence to combat.
All of those things will happen whether we ban legal ownership of firearms or not.
Metal detectors in school can still come in handy for things like knives, unless you intend to ban those too. Way more people die from car accidents and drug overdoses, and those numbers don't have millions of legal self defense encounters to balance them out. Cops will always be concerned about their safety. You can kill someone if you simply gain physical control over them. An unarmed person charging you is just as dangerous as an armed one, in terms of use-of-force continuum.
These all have simple counterfactuals in other countries, like EU countries. The idea that violence won't decrease if we ban guns is completely disproven, empirically.
You've drastically altered the reality of US history. Violence and guns were a huge part of it. Labor unions had actual shoot outs with union busting officers, Malcolm X was absolutely using guns (King also had them), some draft protests were intentionally violent. If you really look, almost every "peaceful" movement had violent parts or another similar movement that was violent.
Perhaps the greatest example is the race riots, specifically LA where the police completely abandoned areas and local shop keepers used their own weapons to protect their livelihood.
Furthermore, the right to bear arms is heavily limited, automatic weapons have been banned for around 50 years at this point, getting any gun is subject to background checks in basically every case, age limits are also in place, "dangerous" things like suppressors require additional fees and paperwork in order to own.
None of this stuff looks like the Taliban's resistance or the Bolshevik Revolution. Besides a magnitude difference, the victory won was a moral one. No policymaker was afraid that they'd meet the guillotine unless they went along with the Wagner act. They were convinced, not coerced.
That's an oversimplified way to understand nonviolent resistance movements that's insufficient to explain their success.
In every case where they have been successful, a radical movement with the will to violence at their flank is what brings the other party to the negotiation table. The plausible threat of a mutually destructive protest movement with unconditional demands makes the measured compromise of the peaceful group seem acceptable by comparison.
Look at the environmental movement for what happens without this. Decades of nonviolent protest and resistance, but without a plausibly violent fringe there is no reason for anyone to capitulate to its demands, and so no one has.
We live in an age of government driven perception management at scale. From all over the world there are efforts online trying to erode free speech by either making things bad enough to convince others action against fundamental rights is needed, or by other more subtle means of manipulation. Do the people polled understand the current and historical significance of freedom of speech or have they been attacked into submission from division manufactured by sources that want the repeal of common freedoms?
I think your vision of free speech in the past is off, compared to my born in the 60s memory. There didn't used to be racist hate speech on the news or widely disseminated widely like there is today on reddit in certain groups. If there ever was a crowd saying things to say keep black kids out of their local school yelling, the news would probably minimize it. Hate speech wasn't common. It was happening of course, but not ever-present, but today it is very easy to see it.
Today's conservatives in my mind just say it out loud, and the typical news media isn't squelching it, and social media is broadcasting it to get more interaction. Today that hate speech is widely disseminated. That's why today's youths are more open to blocking it - because it's much more ubiquitous.
It's remarkable how you've managed to completely invert the reality.
Please link where racist hate speech is "widely disseminated" on reddit. (Reddit has been strictly controlled speech according to San Francisco values for a decade).
Or please show, anywhere in America, a "crowd saying things to say keep black kids out of their local school yelling".
> Reddit has been strictly controlled speech according to San Francisco values for a decade
This is untrue in practice, often wrapped in dog whistles, or rephrased as "urban" or something else terrible. Reddit is still an extremely racist place and its basically a game to find new ways to be racist.
If racism is the natural condition of humanity, and you need ocean-boiling engines of censorship constantly watching and suppressing content to shape it into some bonsai fiction of humanity that pleases certain people, then we don't deserve otherwise.
I'd rather arrive at that pretty bonsai of humanity through education of society at a massive scale than censorship at a massive scale.
Another place to see it is on twitter. Now that we are in the post-Musk X time, there is much more there, it's not being blocked like it was in the past. The gist of my argument was social media sometimes allows a lot more racist speech, getting to my thought that this is why some young people want censoring of that, because they don't want to be confronted with it. Even advertisers have noticed - https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/16/tech/x-ads-pro-nazi-account-b....
I didn't mean to imply there wasn't racist public speech in say the '60s, of course there was, but it wasn't repeated on the news much. If you went out in a crowd you'd hear it, but the news paper usually gave some nicer repetition.
You said 'another place' but you didn't show us anything in the first two places.
So - you have no links to all that racism you're describing on reddit?
And no evidence of crowds yelling to keep black kids out of their schools either?
Again - You're saying there's so much racism. Substantiate your claims. Please provide the links to show us that what you're describing actually exists.
(It doesn't exist, because all these social networks very strictly police speech to prevent racism, as does society at large.)
You’re referring to the 60s US? The Civil Rights movement? The decade where George Wallace, when inaugurated as governor of Alabama, declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”? The decade Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated? The decade the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and 24th Amendment were passed? When Southern Democrats flipped to Republican over civil rights?
I fear you might be viewing the past through rose tinted glasses.
I think I didn't state my case very well. I was thinking that the news was censoring that, the newspaper and/or walter cronkite didn't repeat the specific racist comments, it wasn't out to the home consumer. Of course they were yelling vile things out loud, people were saying them. But it wasn't repeated in the media.
Today it's repeated in social media incessantly, nazies saying things on twitter is another example.
This is a consequence of what and how we teach and treat our students in school. School is considered to be a safe space where students are shielded from any speech that might offend them. Students who say thing that offend, or might offend, are punished.
No surprise that this carries over into broader public policy as those students become adult voters and officials.
It could be that millennials are more familiar with the paradox of tolerance, at least in practice if not in name.
It aligns with the relatively widespread notion that equality and equity are not the same thing.
Simply put, a blanket freedom of speech for everyone can and will stifle the speech of some who do not feel safe speaking out, and/or who do not feel safe as a consequence of what others say.
That means there is no such thing as a complete and total freedom of speech. So the question becomes not if speech should be restricted, but how.
Within this conceptual framework, "free speech absolutists" are not only arguing for something that cannot exist, but they're arguing for something that harms others. So the solution that would lead to greater freedom of expression among the largest portion of the population is to paradoxically restrict speech that discriminates based on innate attributes.
I'm sure many here will disagree. I'm not writing this to get into an argument, but to explain a possible reason for the millennial polling. In the conversations since BLM, I do think this type of thinking is reasonably widespread.
I happen to agree with that viewpoint while also being quite concerned about any attempt of the government to stifle dissent, which I view as being antithetical to democracy. I do not see that as oxymoronic. Democracy is not easy or simple.
Paradox of tolerance in the actual book draws the limit at being tolerant of violence. It does not in any way endorse becoming an authoritarian state and removing rights under the guise of heading off possible intolerance. There is a redditism of linking the Wikipedia page but ironically the actual book argues the complete opposite side as you are currently.
Weird comment considering I'm explaining a point of view that many people on several social networks have. There are plenty of thoughtless knee-jerk comments in this thread in support of several different positions. Mine is not one of them.
It's also weird you're framing me as endorsing authoritarianism when I explicitly said how and why the position I outlined doesn't do that. There is nuance here that you're missing.
Cool. Did anyone ask them "how do we decide what's offensive to minorities?" Or "what is a just process for determining how an entire race of people become offended?"
It's such a pitched question it's ridiculous. It's even worse that you're pretending it says anything about attitudes towards freedom of speech.
That is because these same 51% are no longer properly educated about the reasons for the First Amendment to exist.
These same people are taught that speech and violent action are the same, and that words are harmful, rather than actions. Worse, they're taught an equivalence that not saying the "correct" things is also violence.
Not just first amendment, people always forget the fourteenth amendment.
Many state laws are massive fourteenth amendment violations, the problem is the supreme court gets the final say on that interpretation and you can predict how each and every one of those will go down for the next decade or two.
> Many state laws are massive fourteenth amendment violations
Because the application of the 14th amendment is newer and less familiar.
The 14th Amendment's passage is the first time the Constitution and Bill of Rights applied to the states at all. The Federal Government was really this smaller separate thing back then, before a few key events where it essentually subjugated all states. The rationale of extending the 14th amendment to all states was clarified decades later, and in fact is still being clarified in different contexts.
So yes, there are still outstanding 14th amendment violations.
You suggest the Supreme Court is a problem. Outside of 1 or 2 medical procedures it actually isn't that divided on most things if you go and look. Majority opinions are mostly bipartisan, or the whole court agrees. But you can use this less obvious understanding to your advantage over the next decade or two.
Media: State governments can't resist the siren song of censorship.
Unbelievable.
Also, it's amazing how the article left out the most egregious example of state censorship - anti-bds laws. A few dozen states make it illegal to boycott a foreign country.
Can you imagine if china or russia was able to get nearly 30+ states to make it illegal to boycott china or russia? Also, a super-majority of americans are against anti-bds laws and yet most states have them. Makes a mockery of democracy and representative government.
There is a reason why censorship is coming back these days, and its primary cause is technological. Of course, the proponents of censorship are people, but basically, the entire sum of technology behaves as an organism that optimizes for efficiency in its own growth.
Dissenting ideas are impeding the growth of technology now. Moreover, we can roughly gauge how dangerous dissenting ideas are by how strong the push for censorship is.
For example, there is already another post in this thread about the left pushing for censorship for speech if it is goes against their radical identity politic philosophy. But why is that? It is because their philosophy is idea for getting as many as people as possible building technology. Of course, that is not the proximal motivation of most leftists, but the technological system is giving them a voice because it helps technology progress.
(Note, I am not right-leaning, nor do I intent to advocate one political point over the other. I never vote for conservatives, as I hate their anti-environmentalist philosophy. The right and left have one goal in common though, and that is to push technology forward. Thus both will be in favour of policies that push technology forward, but in different ways.)
I find it funny how people have to clarify "I'm not right-learning btw" to lend more credence to their claims, and to not be attacked. Shows where we're at.
Nah, it just shows where that person's mind is at. HN, in particular, has plenty of strong opinions from both sides of the metaphorical aisle. Particularly in this discussion.
> Dissenting ideas are impeding the growth of technology now.
This is extremely naive. Much of modern science and industry is built from dissent, people seeing that things are different or should be done different. Is your comment to say we have moved past a need for dissent? Remember, Galileo dissented and was censored.
While you're right, I'd say a good dictator is better than a good "council". Dang (and whoever helps him, if anyone) does a good job of keeping meaningful debate alive here, and shunning useless commentary and unwarranted hate.
Ever wonder why a post is stuck at the bottom of the front page or falls off so quickly? There are stealth censorship controls built into the platform to adjust or remove discussions they do not want here, often times, discussions about censorship. Bias is present in moderation most places you go.
We are having genuine discussion, it's just that certain people are trigger happy with flagging anything that goes against a certain narrative.
I have had multiple instances where my account was flagged because I expressed a contrarian view, and I couldn't actually participate because I was rate-limited.
No censorship also does not mean "genuine", 4chan is an example of this; virtually everything sans CSAM is "allowed", but genuine discussions are not happening because of trolls.
Ultimately, you will most likely not have a genuine discussion online, and irl you need a particular group of people who are capable of entertaining differing opinions.
In the span it took me to write this comment, GP received -3 and two other comments -4 total, proving the point.
I tried to respond to sibling chain, and to none's surprise, I have been rate-limited again and I am effectively banned from discussing anything in this thread :).
Simply statistics will tell you that bots and incentivized actors even exist in this thread. Agenda based sentiment analysis for voting and flagging can indeed be done by computers. Can we identify it? No, but it does exist in most places we go to in this digital landscape.
Communities become echo chambers as malicious means are used to crush opinions that dissent from the pushed narrative. Who wants to engage in a hostile environment? Most don't and will simply isolate or try to find another community.
Not really. Censorship on a legal/state-wide level is different from a single community having constraints or standards - nothing prevents certain types of discussion that aren't allowed here from happening somewhere else.
Also, taking casual shots at HN rules or moderation isn't so much contrarian or anti-censorship as being disrespectful of the community and its expectations - downvotes shouldn't be surprising in such a case.
It should be fairly obvious that I am not taking a jab at Dang, I am taking a jab at "people" who flag or downvote me as a form of censorship and stop conversations mid track because they are interested in pushing a certain narrative.
I chose to submit to this censorship, because HN is actually not very censored at all. The very fact that we're having this discussion right now proves that HN takes a light touch, but regardless: HN is not a government, nor a monopoly, so you can always go elsewhere.
The fact that people get rate-limited and conversations stop mid-track, in the process preventing dissenting opinions from propagating is censorship. All of that is happening not because of Dang and mods, but because it's trivial to use bots and whatnot to push a certain narrative.
I merely pointed at the irony of the situation and said the quiet part out loud, effectively calling the hypocrites out :)
From a local high school history textbook (commenting on the the first amendment):
> Just how liberty should be limited is a matter of debate. For example, most
of us support freedom of speech, especially when it applies to speech we agree
with. But what about speech that we don’t agree with or that hurts others, such
as hate speech? Should people be at liberty to say anything they please, no matter how hurtful it is to others? Or should liberty be limited at times to serve a greater good? If so, who should decide how, why, and under what circumstances
liberty should be limited?
Interestingly, there's a bunch of little asides like this. And most of them have this glaringly obvious lean to them, where they choose examples to comment on very conveniently. Personally I don't think niche political aspirations to "reinterpret" the first amendment have a place in a textbook for high schoolers
Well, blindly espousing the benefits and design goals of the current system's design is also a glaringly obvious lean, it's effectively an endorsement of the status quo, especially when you do it to literal children!
it's actually quite problematic to go presenting civics as "wow, our system of checks and balances, how wonderful!" and ignore the part where overuse of checks and balances and requiring supermajority control of every single branch and chamber of government to do anything produces grinding deadlock and inability to respond to changing situations and an overall changing world. The benefit (prevent rash action and ensure control of a single branch/chamber/etc does not lead to negative outcomes) are effectively being presented while the downside is not, and people then go on to blindly chant these merits in their adult life and political life too.
Things like the president being elected (rather than the leader of the party) also result in these "split government" outcomes that can also leave the government paralyzed, even if they increase the "expressiveness" of the political outcomes.
Optimizing for a system where nobody is in the drivers seat has always struck me as a baffling design goal. Would you ever have a ship (or even a hospital operating room) with nobody in command? Perhaps it would be better to optimize for somebody being in the driver seat but then try to optimize the system so their actions are representative of the public's desires/needs, rather than simply optimizing for inaction and assuming inaction is usually best. We can always try again at the next election, but having 30-40% of the public able to drag the whole system to a halt is a bad design even if it springs from well-intentioned goals.
Obviously not a third-grade civic lesson but for high-schoolers or AP civics/history courses? yeah, it probably should be discussed. But then, this also bumps into people who don't want citizens to receive training on critical thought in the first place, when that might lead to questioning authority (civic, religious, family, or otherwise).
I think this is a situation where if the ideas are so fundamentally and obviously good, then they should be able to withstand a little bit of discussion and debate, no?
> The benefit (prevent rash action and ensure control of a single branch/chamber/etc does not lead to negative outcomes) are effectively being presented while the downside is not, and people then go on to blindly chant these merits in their adult life and political life too.
I feel like you're just ranting against a strawman here. I did public k-12 in a deep red state with teachers who were vocally conservative, and I remember them teaching the trade off (which is: checks and balances slow things down and make government more rigid, but can protect against abuse of power, especially from the executive). The thing is, most likely neither of us actually knows what's being taught in K-12 classrooms and we can only really speculate
> but having 30-40% of the public able to drag the whole system to a halt is a bad design even if it springs from well-intentioned goals.
It's only bad design if you don't agree with that 30-40%, else it's a lifesaver. Similar reasoning where you advocate for empowering the execute branch. In certain rare cases like FDR you could make the argument that it's beneficial and it wouldn't be far off, but FDR is the exception, not the rule
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadI'm not from Canada and taking a cursory look at what this bill does I don't see any censorship here. Could you explain?
Having said that, it's a very stupid law.
Put another way, if it should be legal for Google to do whatever they want with copyrighted content, I should also be able to do whatever I want with Google's intellectual property. You've got a status quo bias by looking at C-18 as "aggressively pushing for censorship" but ignoring Google's successful "censorship" of people who would copy other copyrighted works.
You are right I do have a bias. I'm not particularly trusting of Google or Meta, but in this particular argument I would side with them (even though as you point out Google in particular has been successful in other types of censorship)
Those who qualify as "news businesses" and are eligible to impose mandatory purchase of their news products, will have government-mandated carriage on social media platforms operating in Canada. Their news and stories will reach much further and with more spread, than those who do not qualify or participate.
In practice it benefits the major corporations like Rogers and Bell Media, and will not likely be of benefit to your local town newsletter, or someone trying to blow a whistle on the government. Unless it's a qualified "news business" as defined in the act, that content is now required to be de-emphasized, so you and I are less likely to see it.
Political censorship is not the intent of C-18, nor is it likely a consequence. (The real point of it is to subsidize the ailing major media corporations in Canada.) But when you start picking which messages will be amplified, you are implicitly turning down the volume on other messages, and it is, I think, by the broadest definition, a type of censorship.
If anyone is wondering the criteria for being deemed a Digital News Intermediary, there are two requirements: 1. a platform must be in a position of a “significant bargaining imbalance” between themselves and the news businesses. This is determined by the CTRC / Heritage Minister and is based on several factors (outlined in section 6 of the bill): e.g. "whether such an imbalance exists, including the size of the platform, whether the market gives the platform a strategic advantage, and if the platform occupies a prominent market position. According to Rodriguez (the Heritage Minister), only two platforms meet this standard: Google and Meta. This is why platforms such as Microsoft (with Bing and LinkedIn), Twitter, and Apple are not subject to the law even though they feature news links. 2. The second requirement is that the digital news intermediary must make news available content available to persons in Canada. If the platform does not make news content available, it is not a digital news intermediary.
"For example, California presents its Age-Appropriate Design Code as a privacy regulation. Yet, the law imposes obligations on websites to deploy algorithms, designs, and features in a certain way or face fines. Of course, algorithms, features, and designs are the means by which websites develop, display, and disseminate speech."
I know a lot of people will say, “but there’s a good reason and that censorship is justified.” It is still censorship.
It culminated in the Disinformation Governance Board: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/29/disinform...
Recent attempts to regulate "misinformation", "disinformation", and the new "malinformation" are all mechanisms for censorship as well. In the United States, the Disinformation Governance Board was created by the lefty government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Boar...
Ironically, during a hearing on censorship, RFK Junior was set to testify. The Democrat senator from Florida moved to stop the session and censor his testimony citing something else he had previously said that the senator did not like.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4108865-rfk-jr-hearing...
>Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) made a motion to move the committee into executive session — closing the hearing to the public — over concerns about Kennedy’s recent statement on COVID-19.
i.e. in a hearing specifically on censorship, the Democrat senator moved to censor Kennedy's testimony. I am not saying that I agree with what Kennedy said, but this is an obvious attempt at censorship.
The lefty government in Europe just started enforcing the DSA, and to quote Wikipedia:
>Swedish MEP Jessica Stegrud argued that the DSA's focus on preventing the spread of disinformation and "harmful content" would undermine freedom of speech.[58]
As evidenced by the Twitter Files, before Musk took over the left was censoring right leaning accounts heavily, corresponding directly with US federal agencies and taking orders to "investigate" specific accounts that were critical of lefty politicians.
But let's not forget the censorship around the hunter Biden laptop story and the censorship of lab leak theories for covid. Both completely legitimate topics, both completely blocked out during an election year. The right wasn't calling for or defending those actions, the left was.
From the article:
"For example, California presents its Age-Appropriate Design Code as a privacy regulation. Yet, the law imposes obligations on websites to deploy algorithms, designs, and features in a certain way or face fines. Of course, algorithms, features, and designs are the means by which websites develop, display, and disseminate speech."
It's quite easy to spin up a few hundred social media accounts, pretend to be left wing, make stupid arguments, then jump on right wing media and pretend those accounts represent left wing policy.
And rubes lap it up because its formatted in memes they have been trained to accept without questioning.
You say you "don't want to on anyone's side" but then repeat right wing talking points like "not being pro left enough". It's not about being"left enough" but about how their actions make lives of most vulnerable people even worse.
And remember who benefits the most from inaction of good people.
Just to point out, you are offering left-wing talking points as a refutation of right-wing talking points.
But even if you take a more narrow definition of it (ask your government to change its ways), does that mean you can stand outside your Congressman's house at 1am with a megaphone?
Would it be censorship to stop that?
This is separately handled by the tort of nuisance, from common law; the content of the speech or the political office of the person hearing it is irrelevant. What's relevant is that it's a large noise disrupting someone's reasonable sleep hours.
> the content of the speech or the political office of the person hearing it is irrelevant.
It SHOULD be irrelevant. In practice, it is often relevant: whether it's legislators (politicians) passing laws or mayors/ governors/ other executives (politicians) enforcing laws, there is a distinct partisan bent where they protect speech they agree with and target speech they don't.
This is also done by government agents in non-political roles, such as teachers and police: they protect speech they agree with and target speech they don't.
Sure, if a case ever makes it to a federal court, judges will take a more neutral view on the content of the speech, but how many folks can afford to do that?
These days, that seems to depend entirely upon which cause you're protesting. If you're campaigning about the climate or against racism, you'll probably get away with it. But for many other causes, you'll probably be dragged away in handcuffs.
Meanwhile, also in the UK, a lone anti-abortion campaigner has been arrested on more than one occasion for silent prayer outside an abortion clinic.
Under normal circumstances, it seems reasonable to limit protest in locations where patients visiting the clinic could be directly harassed, but at the same time, other protesters are permitted to repeatedly cause traffic chaos all over London, and are disrupting major events with no indication of any particularly harsh consequences.
I think that you have it the other way around. The minority that doesn't want censorship hasn't thought through what it actually means to not have censorship. Either that or the two groups are working with totally different definitions of censorship.
It is terrible what people say, do, have said, and have done to minority groups, but this sort of logic is a slippery slope to abuse. This means incentivized actors can intentionally identify with a group to pursue thought control over others. There should be a line in the sand when it comes to invading minds and forcing thought.
Treatment of minorities has gotten better over the trajectory of time through natural behavioral changes and intelligence growth. Why now more than ever do we need such progressive controls?
We live in a time where even the wolves do not necessarily have to be real to tell a story and now those stories can be used to force patterns of thought through censorship.
With all due respect, innocent people are dying because certain individuals incite violence against them.
It's easy to express you support free speech when you are not on the receiving end and don't need to deal with insane people who think you are the devil-manifest.
Would you be okay if your friends or family died in a shooting from an individual who consumed a particular class of content?
Reality is that nothing is done in a vacuum, every action matters, every discussion matters, everything we utter matters.
This does not fall into the fallacy aspect as it is already happening, groups are already being exploited for ulterior motives to control thought. Part of having a background in security research leads one to detect vulnerabilities. This is a gaping vulnerability.
> With all due respect, innocent people are dying because certain individuals incite violence against them.
Let us be clear that inciting violence is criminal and not considered protected speech.
> Would you be okay if your friends or family died in a shooting from an individual who consumed a particular class of content?
Less people are dying today than have historically died from hateful conduct. You cannot crush hate out of a society with censorship. Driving hateful behavior underground only emboldens the extremists. Only through education and the ability for an individual to observe how consensus genuinely rejects their hate can you change such attitudes.
You also cannot defeat an assumed logical fallacy with a different one, you are appealing to extremes when you take into account statistics and history.
Part of being a minority is being afraid to walk in the streets because you don't know what kind of media a random person has been consuming [1]. Examples like [1] are many and will only become more frequent as some people succumb to hate and others exploit them.
> Let us be clear that inciting violence is criminal and not considered protected speech.
Of course it is, but why won't anyone think of the children, wink wink, nudge nudge. If only there was some hero to save us all from those monsters!
That line of speech is frequent in certain circles and a certain class has been hearing this on repeat for a few years now.
> Less people are dying today than have historically died from hateful conduct. You cannot crush hate out of a society with censorship.
I am not keen on crushing anyone, I am keen on continuing living. Being visibly trans in a backwards country with crazy people is terrifying. I do not recommend.
> Driving hateful behavior underground only emboldens the extremists. Only through education and the ability for an individual to observe how consensus genuinely rejects their hate can you change such attitudes.
What more consensus from broader society does one need than literally telling them that their speech and actions are harmful and they need to stop?
> you are appealing to extremes when you take into account statistics and history.
The funny thing when you think about statistics is that those events that people conveniently aggregate to cutesy little numbers are happening to real people with real friends and families, with their own dreams and aspirations.
For you I am just a statistic, a tiny minority that you can look from afar. But for me, it's my life.
[1] https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/05/23/woman-86-beaten-wheel...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/10/us/jussie-smollett-trial-guil...
A deliberately fabricated hate crime to advance what agenda?
> What more consensus from broader society does one need than literally telling them that their speech and actions are harmful and they need to stop?
Is algorithmic and incentivized actor driven censorship considered consensus? From your perspective you support one thing through censorship but want to deny what consensus tells you in other aspects of reality. Censorship driven echo chambers support some opinions while they crush others. In some respects, we need more confrontation of opinion in society. Too few are forced to question themselves in current times, emboldened by these digital echo chambers, opinion solidified in thoughts and actions.
I genuinely hope that we can find a way to end this age of artificial division. Too many agendas being programmed into brains, too little reality driven truth.
> https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/10/us/jussie-smollett-trial-guil...
> A deliberately fabricated hate crime to advance what agenda?
See, the difference is in one case a person was beat-up, and there's evidence, their life was possibly in danger, and in what you presented you have a hear-say. A false report. The difference is that one has the potential to cause harm, and the other is actual harm caused.
> From your perspective you support one thing through censorship but want to deny what consensus tells you in other aspects of reality.
From my perspective I fear for my life. This is what is on the line here. Not my ability to commit hate-crimes, not my ability to spew bigotry. Consensus - actual people - on average are understanding. On the other hand, there's a trigger-happy, outrage-addicted, gun-owning, self-proclaimed-terrorist and outright blood-thirsty minority who is angry because the broader society doesn't accept their bigotry.
I will repeat, to you, it's some imaginary threat that has the potential to happen 60 steps down the road if you concede that hate-speech is bad for everyone and pushes people to commit atrocities, and to me, it's my life.
> See, the difference is in one case a person was beat-up, and there's evidence, their life was possibly in danger, and in what you presented you have a hear-say. A false report. The difference is that one has the potential to cause harm, and the other is actual harm caused.
Bad actors harm everyone, rights protect against bad actors from breaking true consensus. In that case, they went a step further than a false report and actually staged the crime as well for "evidence". This is not the only occurrence, but one of the most high profile occurrences to have been caught.
> From my perspective I fear for my life. This is what is on the line here. Not my ability to commit hate-crimes, not my ability to spew bigotry. Consensus - actual people - on average are understanding. On the other hand, there's a trigger-happy, outrage-addicted, gun-owning, self-proclaimed-terrorist and outright blood-thirsty minority who is angry because the broader society doesn't accept their bigotry.
I am sorry you have personally experienced hatred like this. Even with experience, such fears should not fuel oppression of the world. Many are dying daily from war but personal experiences like this supersede actions against that, why? Please at least see the choice and selection biases in this, fear for your life at minimum invokes an emotional component. If you are unsafe there are likely actions you can take outside of intentionally trying to disrupt the rights of everyone else. Without personal compromise? Maybe not. Much as they want to force their opinions into reality, you want to force yours.
> I will repeat, to you, it's some imaginary threat that has the potential to happen 60 steps down the road if you concede that hate-speech is bad for everyone and pushes people to commit atrocities, and to me, it's my life.
It is not imaginary, it has happened and will continue to happen as long as there is incentive. Hate crimes against minority groups have lessened over time, but I will agree with you in that fear of such has been amplified. Some selectively amplify group positions to intentionally fuel hatred. This serves in two ways, for profit and distraction. Media could not profit from fear unless victims AND threats exist, thus they intentionally amplify opinions that provoke such threats.
We cannot solve the hate problem with censorship and removal of rights. The bad actors do not simply disappear because you no longer allow their thoughts in your reality. You have a right to be you up until violence and they have a right to be them up until violence. Many humans still operate from instinct, maybe the solution to hatred is to teach more to separate instinct and approach reality with logic? That would certainly upset our desire driven sales fueled world of individualization.
Not at all, I am fairly open about it because I am making a statement. The statement is that there are bad actors in this forum who silence discussions to push a certain narrative. Dang and whoever else moderates this is very much free to ban me, but they haven't.
> I am sorry you have personally experienced hatred like this. Even with experience, such fears should not fuel oppression of the world.
See, I have a desire to live a life just like you, I have siblings, I have a mother, and they love me and I love them. How will they feel when they will have to bury me because some rando decided to murder me?
You see, in this conversation you are putting the blame on me, for what you believe that I am doing - which I am actually not, if you read my comments in this thread I am very much against censorship as long as it doesn't devolve to hate-speech. My desire to live a life in decency will always trump your desire to enable harm - because those are the consequences - by allowing everyone and anyone to say anything they want and amplify that.
That is what you are doing. Instead of asking what the consequences are for hate-speech, how being bombarded with such speech changes your very own view of reality - just as any other interaction does because such is the way the brain behaves - you are more concerned with telling me to suck it up for being afraid for my life.
In your mind you have vilified me and put me in a position I never did myself. You did all that implicitly. Notice that in none of comments did I directly support censorship. What I support is accountability for the consequences of one's actions - that accountability includes stochastic terrorism.
You can't assume that everything and anything you do happens in a vacuum, people are not closed systems, everything we do matters. I wouldn't be in this position if I was allowed to be in this world, just like you are.
> If you are unsafe there are likely actions you can take outside of intentionally trying to disrupt the rights of everyone else
You are literally putting the blame on me for - let me check my notes - potentially getting murdered by a crazy person, and not on the person who pushed the crazy one over the line, gave them a gun, and pointed at me. You are literally blaming me for my inability to be invincible, and for wanting to live a life of the same quality as you are.
Sure, I can go get locked in an apartment - god knows I am already doing that because I am terrified - what more can I do? Do I not deserve the chance to live a regular life?
Why are you not blaming those who put me in this position in the first place? Why aren't you blaming those who actively cause harm and instead blame the victim for dying or getting assaulted, or harassed or worse?
> Maybe not. Much as they want to force their opinions into reality, you want to force yours.
What opinion am I forcing on anyone? That murdering people is bad? That minorities deserve to live regular lives as everyone else?
> Hate crimes against minority groups have lessened over time,
Really because I see the opposite. Minorities are being denied treatment that existed for decades because of fear mongering despite all actual evidence to the contrary. Is this not a hate-crime? Attacks against trans people have skyrocketed, and so have murders [1,2].
Please tell those families that you are okay with their children getting murdered, because a person can't handle not spilling vitriol.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/homicide-rate-trans-people-doubled...
[2] https://time.com/6131444/2021-anti-trans-violence/
2. Hate shifts over time. As soon as old targets becomes stale, the manufacturing of narrative amplifies new opinions to shift hate to. With amplification of opinion comes more dissent against opinion. Further reach comes with further responsibility. Censorship does not solve this. Hate crimes have gone down at large but have increased against your particular group, which allows you to somehow throw out the overall statistic showing progress? Talking to other groups that have historically experienced hate might add some perspective for you as to how things have indeed gotten better.
3. Taking action to infringe upon rights many respect, only generates more dislike for the group pursuing infringement. We should find solutions to lessen hate without infringement on any group's rights. Violence is not a right, there is not a "freedom of violence" constitutional amendment. The current state of censorship attacks much beyond hate, but uses hate as the primary scapegoat, amplifying the abuse of minorities along the way.
4. I am going to disengage at this point. The use of multiple personas in a single thread to promote your opinions causes questions as to your true intent here. You seem to be fairly solidified in your stances regardless. I wish you the best and a life free of fear.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/11/20/40-of-mil...
2: http://campaignforfreespeech.org/new-poll-free-speech-under-...
I do not have a better response than this. Some people never learn anything from history...
You are indeed making the “things that work in other places won’t work in America because of differences in race and ethnicity” argument.
This is a fairly lazy analysis that plays on America’s often unspoken cultural beliefs around race. While it is true that race is a major cultural marker in America, this fact is not innate and the oft repeated argument that “homogenous” societies can do things that we can’t amounts to little more than “we can’t do it because we are different”.
The determinants of diversity in the sense that it might be relevant to a discussion on free speech depend on a multitude of cultural factors. You can’t just say “well they aren’t diverse because they don’t match the criteria set out and defined by _America_”.
95% of Americans speak English. If half the country didn’t speak English well that would make for a very different society and culture than the one we have now.
Whether or not such changes lasts through several dozen generations is still undecided though.
You italicized innate so I assumed you meant to put special emphasis on that part?
For example, it's at least theoretically possible for someone who had ancestors a few generations ago that were enslaved to suffer some bonafide inherited and disadvantageous epigenetic mutations.
Or for those who has ancestors who got shell-shocked in past wars, got involved in serious car crashes, etc...
I'm not sure if such factors should be considered legally, lest competition turn it into some kind of pity olympics, but there's a non-zero chance large segments of the population came out of the womb genuinely, innately, disadvantaged slightly.
Emphasis on theoretically.
> there's a non-zero chance large segments of the population came out of the womb genuinely, innately, disadvantaged slightly.
may be slightly affected. Again, how is this relevant to a discussion on free speech?
My point was that there is no innate reason why race would lead to politically divergent opinions, at least not to the degree that it would lead to such major discord that it would require a fundamentally different model of free speech in society.
It's somewhat relevant since these epigenetic mutations can increase the probability of someone being a misanthrope, for example, that just hates other people and who doesn't care about their lack of free speech.
Or vice versa, someone with increased anxiety/nervousness/etc., and would be exceedingly disturbed by even small regressions in free speech rights.
White western Europeans have very similar cultures and societal norms due to their shared history. A Frenchman, Swiss and German are likely to have generally similar views on what would be acceptable speech for example.
But not all Americans have a shared culture and history that would influence their ideas. That's because, from even the very beginning, we have had a very civic minded form of nationality that 300 years ago was unheard of. And today is still fairly unique. But if I am a Presbyterian New Englander my cultural norms and what would be considered socially acceptable behavior will differ than a Baptist Southerner, A Catholic West coaster or an Atheist Midwesterner. There different regional cultures, religions, and cultural influences from our immigrant ancestors are going to shape things quite a lot. When I was growing up we called this the American melting pot. I don't know if that terminology is still used.
When you have a nation of immigrants they are going to have different ideas they want to express. Usually you will have one majority but many majorities. Traditionally that majority was rooted in the descendants of early English colonists. Sometimes derisively called WASPs. America has had a lot of strife between different groups interacting such as the large Irish influx during the potato famine. German and Italians during periods of upheaval in the late 19th century. Chinese immigrants on the west coast around the same time. Interactions and immigration both ways with our northern and southern neighbors. The consequences of the African slave trade. It goes on and on.
I'd love to hear an argument about how Switzerland is heterogeneous, but here's what I found:
Switzerland is a country of ~8.5M, or the same population as New York City, or 2/3 the population of the rest of New York State, or less than the population of Virginia and 11 other states.
And Switzerland is ~40k km², a bit less than New York State.
What I'm saying is it's very small compared to the US, with 330M people across 9M km² of land.
As for homogeneity, Switzerland doesn't have birthright citizenship (where the US does), so foreign nationals may remain foreign for multiple generations; it's also part of the Schengen, permitting EU members to travel and reside without a visa or other permission. All of this makes an apples to apples comparison with the US much harder.
Switzerland is ~75% Swiss nationals, with ~25% foreign nationals, but ~85% of those are from the Schengen area.
About 15% of the US population is foreign born, but almost half of those are naturalized citizens -- there's also 10M+ foreign nationals in the US illegally (more than the pop of Switzerland), though any children they have in the US will be natural-born citizens (unlike in Switzerland). If we include the first US-born generation, it jumps to 28% of the US population. And when we look at where those immigrants come from, two of the top three origins are in Asia (India and China).
Again, I don't know how to make an apples to apples comparison. It's likely that Switzerland is more heterogeneous than some places in the US, while less so than others. But if I had to make a broad statement, yeah, Switzerland is much more homogeneous than the US, and I'd love to hear an argument against it.
Already the direct-democracy bills of county elections destroy me. The _majority_ has voted to steal from me to pay for their daycare, housing, and other non public good subsidies every single voting cycle.
A direct democracy allows majority theft with no recourse or limit. It's proposterous!
There was a reason for voting qualifiers at the founding of the country. I say we bring them back if we want to switch to direct democracy so that only those with skin in the game get to vote: restrict voting to only those persons that pay income taxes on agi.
The phrase “tyranny of the majority” was rarely used by writers and thinkers in the founding period. It was alluded to in one of the 85 essays that made up the federalist papers and the coining of the phrase is generally attributed to a French writer several decades later.
Your characterization is largely historical revisionism.
I think Peter Thiel made some remark (maybe in his poorly moderated student youth period) along the lines of "Freedom is incompatible with democracy" which has an uncomfortable amount of truth to it assuming the state you are in remains actually committed to protecting those freedoms.
It is very similar to the rhetoric I hear when the left talks about attacks on democracy. They don't seem to actually mean democracy. They seem to mean their version of it, as in those voters that are aligned with them.
Absolutely. The big questions are if the transition to this state is inevitable, and once the transition has occurred are you better or worse off than under the Swiss system.
Going by the state of both societies the Swiss one seems to have a lot going for it.
Also, how is a minoritarian rule of the rich (plutocracy) a more just system than democracy? Yeah, they have skin in the game, and the game is protecting their wealth instead of contributing to the commonwealth. There's a happy balance to be found in there, of course, but you don't want to arrive at it via pitchfork.
Certainly, but if the government doesn't have regular election cycles it's an all-or-nothing approach.
Consider MBS. If he doesn't want to play ball with the cia, he won't, and there isn't much the cia can do about it. He's not going anywhere anytime soon, or potentially ever during his lifetime. Contrast that against a gov that holds regular elections. The cia gets the opportunity to influence the election outcome (chance 1) and then gets a chance to influence the winner if they're not already captured (chance 2), all the while knowing if they fail chances 1 and 2 they will get to try again in a handful of years.
> Also, how is a minoritarian rule of the rich (plutocracy) a more just system than democracy?
I don't consider it minoritarian rule. The minority can only say no change. They can't craft change of their own. This helps prevent the tyranny of the majority problem. However, the majority is what is needed to actually make changes, or more aptly a super majority. This helps to make change slow and harder, which is not a bad thing in my opinion, especially considering how the ruling parties tend to oscillate every decade or so. The change that happens trends to be good for both parties, not just one.*
*Obviously a lot of things pass that are terrible (e.g, inflation protection act), but at least it required more than just 51% agreement.
Burning the Koran is offensive, should it be restricted? No! Freedom! Next they'll stop us watching old westerns and doing fancy dress etc! We have to be able to prevent this being extended to things which affect me.
Burning the Koran is offensive, should it be restricted? Yes! If we allow it then they can burn the flag/constitution/bible/effigies of the president/??? we have to be able to prevent this being extended to things which affect me.
"First they did x" construction works in both cases non?
This is the status quo and it's accepted by nearly everyone on the free speech side. There is no sequence of future reductions in human rights to prevent.
That poll is from 2015 (and the other from 2019), not necessarily representative of current views. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/upshot/millennials-pollin... millennials are becoming more conservative as they age (and many were radicalised by the covid response).
1: https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767...
Also: even if Millenials were becoming more conservative (which would be very strange for a lot of economic reasons alone), the definition of “minority” held by the media may not really apply if nearly half of the generation identifies as non-white. (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2015-pr/cb15-113.ht...)
The problem is that it's impossible to prove a negative of this nature because you are always met with no-true-scottsman responses.
Reality is, if you press any human hard enough, you will find something, that's just how things are.
You are just projecting your inability to use data on everyone. Some people don't think like you.
So we're not really arguing about whether speech should be restricted, but where that line should be drawn.
I would agree that Millennials support drawing that line a little more broadly, but there is also a difference about which speech should be more restricted. The pew research piece you linked was specifically about offensive statements about minority groups, but what if you asked about whether trans educational material should be banned or whether the word "cis" should be considered a slur? I suspect that the demographics would be flipped.
In meatspace, these concepts are distinct: You can speak all sorts of horrible stuff while being peaceful and conducting yourself well. You can also say nice things while being violent and belligerent. Government surely has the right to stop you from being violent and belligerent. On the Internet, there is no difference between speech and conduct. You conduct yourself by speaking/writing. So how can we enforce good conduct without regulating speech? The states are trying to draw the line between speech and conduct, and that's not easy (maybe impossible) online.
:)
These types of comments make me smile. The government is an idea is the minds of people. It doesn't/can't have rights. It's a non-existent entity.
And yet. People believe that it has the ability to create 'rights', and people will be somehow beholden to its pronouncements. Is government 'God'? I think to most people the answer is yes. It is their authority; such individuals are not an authority of themselves.
The proper answer, imo, is that nothing except for my own heart and reason can guide me as to what is morally right or wrong. No work of man (law, religion, government) can say anything to me. All these works (law, government) are badly bent towards a self-serving elite, for the extraction of wealth from those that believe in these phantasms.
We laugh at those in history who we are told tithed 10% of their work to their local lord in the feudal system, and 10% towards the church, but don't blink at paying 40% to the government.
There are really only individuals, but the mind control in most is very effective.
I think if we had the ability to trace the origin of each belief about what is right and wrong you would be surprised by how greatly law, government, and religion have influenced you.
Edit:
> There are really only individuals
This must be why solitary confinement is considered such a great privilege when incarcerated.
Ha! Nice line.
But, in all honesty, totally controlling another person, confining them, is only an example of control.
But, if not in the individual, where do you think meaning or anything of value, occurs? The feeling/meaning/thought, is only within oneself, surely?
The newer generation seems to be okay with moving from a blacklist -> whitelist approach where the range of acceptable opinions and topics are set by the group and things outside of that range are labeled offensive, bigoted, racist, something-phobic, or harmful in some other way and banned.
Responding specifically to your point about trans educational material, free speech absolutists are 100% okay with allowing trans educational material that says anything at all. I'm not kidding, think of whatever offensive thing you want to say about cis people, free speech absolutists are okay with you saying it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is something I, and other free speech absolutists, truly believe.
You'll have to specify when this golden age existed. I suspect that if you name any specific date, we could find all sorts of respects in which freedom of speech was much more restricted in the US at that time than it is now.
I know this to be true because my parents and grandparents told me that that is what their generation valued, and what they thought the definition of free speech should be.
If the majority of the people in a culture decide that they care about free speech then the minority of censorious bad people in power can be overcome.
How do you think the left got the power they have today? By being allowed to write whatever they want in opinion columns, make movies that insult corrupt politicians, write plays about evil industrial fat cats poisoning the water supply, marching through the streets with megaphones dissenting to war mongers.
Now we are saying it's okay to silence these people as long as we label them as "harmful" or "bigots" in some way. Even being anti-war is now somehow becoming associated with the alt-right taboo people that must not be talked about.
What we are seeing now is a generation of people who do not share the ideal of free speech, and are okay with censorship and an ingroup/outgroup by default.
Can you imagine a situation now where CUNY was unable to appoint someone to an academic position because the Catholic church canceled them?
As another example one might mention the vast reduction of censorship in movies. Movies can be shown now that would have been unthinkable in at least the first half of the 20th century.
Granted, there may also be instances of present day censorship that wouldn't have happened historically. But it's naive and completely ahistorical to see any past period as some kind of bastion of free speech absolutism. Believe me, lots of people in your grandparents' generation also wanted to restrict free speech (particularly with regard to e.g. sexually explicit content, or anything that might be vaguely connected with Communism).
Conditional upon that, why wouldn't we strive to correct the implementation? The opposite seems to be happening.
The OP was discussing the ideology of free speech, not the implementation. My response was an attempt to bring the topic back to the ideology of whether free speech should be allowed in absoluteness, in contrast to your deviation towards implementation.
I fear for the near future.
For example very noticeably: the most powerfully tyrannical developments in the modern US are the retributive legal system, state violence against poor and minorities, crackdowns on sexual and reproductive healthcare, oppression of sexual minorities. And these policies are overwhelmingly supported by the same people who purport to value so highly their ability to fight tyranny with guns.
And at the same time we're seeing a growing grass-roots racial terrorism campaign, again enabled by the same people & policies. Lotta "lone wolves" out there who independently decide they need to shoot up a bunch of black or asian or jewish people.
So again it's not that we're fucking stupid. We just see that you're not willing to use that power for us, and we want your friends to stop using it to kill our folk instead.
2. You assume the whole military would be unified in drone striking their fellow countrymen. I wager a large chunk, likely more than half, would splinter.
3. There's not much point in nuking the place you wish to rule. There won't be much left to rule.
We depend on us to protect us from bigots. And it's more effective and less morally compromising to do this when the bigots don't have guns. As it is an honest self defense class for my people starts with "have someone who knows how prison commissary works" and ends with "get right with the lord" because that covers the full spectrum of likely outcomes when a nonwhite person defends themselves with a weapon in the US.
As the saying goes, better to be judged by 12 than burried by 6.
Even then, it's not a very strong right, since for the past 30 years at least, the common reason for cops to shoot people is "I thought he had a gun" with suggestions that people carry bright orange wallets to avoid being mistaken for having a gun
But I think this overlooks how we've won our freedoms over the last century. Suffragettes didn't take mayors ransom. Labor unions didn't march on DC with firearms. Civil rights activists didn't surround police departments with shotguns. Protests against the draft were literally flower power.
The idea that rights flow from violence in today's world just doesn't track. It's way more likely you secure your rights with strikes, marches, and protests than with armed resistance. The truth is the idea of a noble rebellion violently struggling for freedom is a Confederate fantasy, which is the aesthetic preference of a certain demographic. It's maybe less romantic to them to run boycotts and strikes (and actually win the popular vote), but that's how things work these days.
You're right, marching with guns doesn't resolve civil issues most of the time. That's not the point. It's for when all other options are exhausted. And we won't truly appreciate it for what it is, until that time comes, by which point I hope we haven't complacently thrown it away because we couldn't learn from history (again).
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." ~ JFK
It's really based on "hasn't happened to me, so it probably won't happen to me" logic. Which is stupid when you're setting rules for generations to come. All good things come to an end, and the US will too. It will be a slow boil until we realize we're in a seriously corrupt and unrepresentative state that can only be fixed through force. It has happened time and time again, and to think we won't meet the same fate is incredibly naive. At least we have an enshrined fighting chance to reset the way we want.
> It will be a slow boil until we realize we're in a seriously corrupt and unrepresentative state that can only be fixed through force.
There's no evidence this is happening, certainly not to the degree we should suffer the current level of gun violence to combat.
Metal detectors in school can still come in handy for things like knives, unless you intend to ban those too. Way more people die from car accidents and drug overdoses, and those numbers don't have millions of legal self defense encounters to balance them out. Cops will always be concerned about their safety. You can kill someone if you simply gain physical control over them. An unarmed person charging you is just as dangerous as an armed one, in terms of use-of-force continuum.
Perhaps the greatest example is the race riots, specifically LA where the police completely abandoned areas and local shop keepers used their own weapons to protect their livelihood.
Furthermore, the right to bear arms is heavily limited, automatic weapons have been banned for around 50 years at this point, getting any gun is subject to background checks in basically every case, age limits are also in place, "dangerous" things like suppressors require additional fees and paperwork in order to own.
In every case where they have been successful, a radical movement with the will to violence at their flank is what brings the other party to the negotiation table. The plausible threat of a mutually destructive protest movement with unconditional demands makes the measured compromise of the peaceful group seem acceptable by comparison.
Look at the environmental movement for what happens without this. Decades of nonviolent protest and resistance, but without a plausibly violent fringe there is no reason for anyone to capitulate to its demands, and so no one has.
Today's conservatives in my mind just say it out loud, and the typical news media isn't squelching it, and social media is broadcasting it to get more interaction. Today that hate speech is widely disseminated. That's why today's youths are more open to blocking it - because it's much more ubiquitous.
Please link where racist hate speech is "widely disseminated" on reddit. (Reddit has been strictly controlled speech according to San Francisco values for a decade).
Or please show, anywhere in America, a "crowd saying things to say keep black kids out of their local school yelling".
This is untrue in practice, often wrapped in dog whistles, or rephrased as "urban" or something else terrible. Reddit is still an extremely racist place and its basically a game to find new ways to be racist.
If racism is the natural condition of humanity, and you need ocean-boiling engines of censorship constantly watching and suppressing content to shape it into some bonsai fiction of humanity that pleases certain people, then we don't deserve otherwise.
I'd rather arrive at that pretty bonsai of humanity through education of society at a massive scale than censorship at a massive scale.
I didn't mean to imply there wasn't racist public speech in say the '60s, of course there was, but it wasn't repeated on the news much. If you went out in a crowd you'd hear it, but the news paper usually gave some nicer repetition.
So - you have no links to all that racism you're describing on reddit?
And no evidence of crowds yelling to keep black kids out of their schools either?
Again - You're saying there's so much racism. Substantiate your claims. Please provide the links to show us that what you're describing actually exists.
(It doesn't exist, because all these social networks very strictly police speech to prevent racism, as does society at large.)
I fear you might be viewing the past through rose tinted glasses.
Today it's repeated in social media incessantly, nazies saying things on twitter is another example.
No surprise that this carries over into broader public policy as those students become adult voters and officials.
It aligns with the relatively widespread notion that equality and equity are not the same thing.
Simply put, a blanket freedom of speech for everyone can and will stifle the speech of some who do not feel safe speaking out, and/or who do not feel safe as a consequence of what others say.
That means there is no such thing as a complete and total freedom of speech. So the question becomes not if speech should be restricted, but how.
Within this conceptual framework, "free speech absolutists" are not only arguing for something that cannot exist, but they're arguing for something that harms others. So the solution that would lead to greater freedom of expression among the largest portion of the population is to paradoxically restrict speech that discriminates based on innate attributes.
I'm sure many here will disagree. I'm not writing this to get into an argument, but to explain a possible reason for the millennial polling. In the conversations since BLM, I do think this type of thinking is reasonably widespread.
I happen to agree with that viewpoint while also being quite concerned about any attempt of the government to stifle dissent, which I view as being antithetical to democracy. I do not see that as oxymoronic. Democracy is not easy or simple.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Weird comment considering I'm explaining a point of view that many people on several social networks have. There are plenty of thoughtless knee-jerk comments in this thread in support of several different positions. Mine is not one of them.
It's also weird you're framing me as endorsing authoritarianism when I explicitly said how and why the position I outlined doesn't do that. There is nuance here that you're missing.
It's such a pitched question it's ridiculous. It's even worse that you're pretending it says anything about attitudes towards freedom of speech.
What was the wording of the questions?
These same people are taught that speech and violent action are the same, and that words are harmful, rather than actions. Worse, they're taught an equivalence that not saying the "correct" things is also violence.
Free speech is table stakes for a free people.
Many state laws are massive fourteenth amendment violations, the problem is the supreme court gets the final say on that interpretation and you can predict how each and every one of those will go down for the next decade or two.
Because the application of the 14th amendment is newer and less familiar.
The 14th Amendment's passage is the first time the Constitution and Bill of Rights applied to the states at all. The Federal Government was really this smaller separate thing back then, before a few key events where it essentually subjugated all states. The rationale of extending the 14th amendment to all states was clarified decades later, and in fact is still being clarified in different contexts.
So yes, there are still outstanding 14th amendment violations.
You suggest the Supreme Court is a problem. Outside of 1 or 2 medical procedures it actually isn't that divided on most things if you go and look. Majority opinions are mostly bipartisan, or the whole court agrees. But you can use this less obvious understanding to your advantage over the next decade or two.
Media: We demand online censorship.
Media: State governments can't resist the siren song of censorship.
Unbelievable.
Also, it's amazing how the article left out the most egregious example of state censorship - anti-bds laws. A few dozen states make it illegal to boycott a foreign country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
Can you imagine if china or russia was able to get nearly 30+ states to make it illegal to boycott china or russia? Also, a super-majority of americans are against anti-bds laws and yet most states have them. Makes a mockery of democracy and representative government.
Dissenting ideas are impeding the growth of technology now. Moreover, we can roughly gauge how dangerous dissenting ideas are by how strong the push for censorship is.
For example, there is already another post in this thread about the left pushing for censorship for speech if it is goes against their radical identity politic philosophy. But why is that? It is because their philosophy is idea for getting as many as people as possible building technology. Of course, that is not the proximal motivation of most leftists, but the technological system is giving them a voice because it helps technology progress.
(Note, I am not right-leaning, nor do I intent to advocate one political point over the other. I never vote for conservatives, as I hate their anti-environmentalist philosophy. The right and left have one goal in common though, and that is to push technology forward. Thus both will be in favour of policies that push technology forward, but in different ways.)
Nah, it just shows where that person's mind is at. HN, in particular, has plenty of strong opinions from both sides of the metaphorical aisle. Particularly in this discussion.
This is extremely naive. Much of modern science and industry is built from dissent, people seeing that things are different or should be done different. Is your comment to say we have moved past a need for dissent? Remember, Galileo dissented and was censored.
But yeah, it is censorship.
I have had multiple instances where my account was flagged because I expressed a contrarian view, and I couldn't actually participate because I was rate-limited.
No censorship also does not mean "genuine", 4chan is an example of this; virtually everything sans CSAM is "allowed", but genuine discussions are not happening because of trolls.
Ultimately, you will most likely not have a genuine discussion online, and irl you need a particular group of people who are capable of entertaining differing opinions.
In the span it took me to write this comment, GP received -3 and two other comments -4 total, proving the point.
I tried to respond to sibling chain, and to none's surprise, I have been rate-limited again and I am effectively banned from discussing anything in this thread :).
Communities become echo chambers as malicious means are used to crush opinions that dissent from the pushed narrative. Who wants to engage in a hostile environment? Most don't and will simply isolate or try to find another community.
Also, taking casual shots at HN rules or moderation isn't so much contrarian or anti-censorship as being disrespectful of the community and its expectations - downvotes shouldn't be surprising in such a case.
I merely pointed at the irony of the situation and said the quiet part out loud, effectively calling the hypocrites out :)
> Just how liberty should be limited is a matter of debate. For example, most of us support freedom of speech, especially when it applies to speech we agree with. But what about speech that we don’t agree with or that hurts others, such as hate speech? Should people be at liberty to say anything they please, no matter how hurtful it is to others? Or should liberty be limited at times to serve a greater good? If so, who should decide how, why, and under what circumstances liberty should be limited?
Interestingly, there's a bunch of little asides like this. And most of them have this glaringly obvious lean to them, where they choose examples to comment on very conveniently. Personally I don't think niche political aspirations to "reinterpret" the first amendment have a place in a textbook for high schoolers
it's actually quite problematic to go presenting civics as "wow, our system of checks and balances, how wonderful!" and ignore the part where overuse of checks and balances and requiring supermajority control of every single branch and chamber of government to do anything produces grinding deadlock and inability to respond to changing situations and an overall changing world. The benefit (prevent rash action and ensure control of a single branch/chamber/etc does not lead to negative outcomes) are effectively being presented while the downside is not, and people then go on to blindly chant these merits in their adult life and political life too.
Things like the president being elected (rather than the leader of the party) also result in these "split government" outcomes that can also leave the government paralyzed, even if they increase the "expressiveness" of the political outcomes.
Optimizing for a system where nobody is in the drivers seat has always struck me as a baffling design goal. Would you ever have a ship (or even a hospital operating room) with nobody in command? Perhaps it would be better to optimize for somebody being in the driver seat but then try to optimize the system so their actions are representative of the public's desires/needs, rather than simply optimizing for inaction and assuming inaction is usually best. We can always try again at the next election, but having 30-40% of the public able to drag the whole system to a halt is a bad design even if it springs from well-intentioned goals.
Obviously not a third-grade civic lesson but for high-schoolers or AP civics/history courses? yeah, it probably should be discussed. But then, this also bumps into people who don't want citizens to receive training on critical thought in the first place, when that might lead to questioning authority (civic, religious, family, or otherwise).
I think this is a situation where if the ideas are so fundamentally and obviously good, then they should be able to withstand a little bit of discussion and debate, no?
I feel like you're just ranting against a strawman here. I did public k-12 in a deep red state with teachers who were vocally conservative, and I remember them teaching the trade off (which is: checks and balances slow things down and make government more rigid, but can protect against abuse of power, especially from the executive). The thing is, most likely neither of us actually knows what's being taught in K-12 classrooms and we can only really speculate
> but having 30-40% of the public able to drag the whole system to a halt is a bad design even if it springs from well-intentioned goals.
It's only bad design if you don't agree with that 30-40%, else it's a lifesaver. Similar reasoning where you advocate for empowering the execute branch. In certain rare cases like FDR you could make the argument that it's beneficial and it wouldn't be far off, but FDR is the exception, not the rule