People should have the freedom to be persuaded to believe things that you don't agree with. It's OK to have a "wrong" opinion. Let people say what they want and believe what they want. I'm stunned that I still have to defend freedom of expression.
So I disagree. It isn’t right to form a gang on the street and attack someone, and it isn’t right to form a gang on the internet and incite violence, or strongly disrespect a person or people. Even if you take at first step the difference between actual physical harm VS a ‘bytes on the internet’ approach, the mental health harms to the persecuted group are real and have lead to suicides in individual examples, or actual violence as demonstrated in the article.
Speaking from a medical perspective, I don’t draw a difference between physical and mental harm (precious snowflaking aside).
Sure it’s a grey area but carte Blanche in this domain is damaging.
If Joe Blow tweets "kill the kikes", nobody cares.
If someone with millions of devout followers says the same, there will eventually be blood.
Or in your case, if a person with influence tells their fan club to harass someone, the victim may suffer actual mental health issues when enough of them act on it.
The whole idea seems to be: murder and genocide are so bad, that any legislation that either statistically reduces them, or even just seems like it might do, is worth it. I'll grant that I can see how a reasonable person might think this. Then it's a question of values. Remember that one of our great American heroes literally said, "Give me liberty, or give me death," immediately after doubting that life is dear enough, or peace sweet enough, in themselves.
As far as that goes, I'm old and it saddens me that we keep going from one oppressive cultural regime to another. When I was young, there were also things you couldn't say, they were just different things. But I will say that this is the first time in my life that freedom of speech itself has been explicitly challenged by a significant bloc in the US.
You're misunderstanding what the idea is. The idea is to show german children:
That person has that opinion and they may think it, but the opinion is wrong. We had a huge big argument over it, some people call it WW2, and the result was: Their opinion is wrong. So we decided to let that be the last argument about it and not let them start another argument, because the question has been answered at length.
I was referencing one of the original comments made by a German far-right politician on Facebook that started the debate about the responsibility of platforms like Facebook in moderating hate speech which in turn resulted in the law the article describes:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
It's not a slippery slope in this case. I admit it's a bit unfair to reduce psyc's argument to this but the language the law covers is entirely in the category of "people openly demanding that certain other people be killed or subjected to violence". Facebook dragged their feet to moderate comments like these and the law is a response to create a legal tool to force companies like Facebook to moderate hate speech or face serious fines.
I guess I can see why Americans would object to it: political hate speech is weaponised speech and Americans are ridiculously obsessed with being allowed to own weapons. It's that absurd idea that when the time comes and the others have infiltrated the government, the common man will take to arms and overthrow it (because presumably the military will defect and not just kill everyone).
It's true, I'm advocating some limits on people's freedoms. I don't think people should enjoy the freedom to launch campaigns of genocide, for example.
The Treaty of Versailles was crippling the economy, the royalists felt betrayed by the social democrats who ended the Great War by surrendering, the Great Depression destabilised the banks, and so on. Even a bullet in the brain wouldn't necessarily have "stopped Hitler" at the time (the reason we talk about "stopping Hitler" is that Hitler wasn't stopped so we don't know who'd have taken his place and where that would have led the movement at the time).
But this is irrelevant because 2010s Germans aren't 1920s/1930s Germans. West Germany underwent a massive process of Denazification, we entered into and established ourselves in the European Union and Germans who grew up in post-war Germany are used to the idea that incitement is a crime and racial hatred has no place in a civilised society.
It's irrelevant whether criminalising incitement ("censorship") would have stopped Hitler in the 1930s because a single law doesn't instantly transform society. It's 2018 and this is not a new law. But we'll never be able to tell whether it stopped Hitler today because if we stopped him we won't know who he is because he'll never ascend to the same significance in history in the first place. It's a strawman.
You also seem to be under the false presumption that you having legal "freedom of speech" means you can express anything you want without consequences. As is being pointed out all the time, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, just freedom from direct legal consequences.
If you hold no significant political power and say something other people find disagreeable, you will be called out at best and ostracized at worst. In fact, freedom of speech might actually help those seeking to harm you because they have the righteous fury on their side.
If you hold significant power, there are plenty of examples in US politics how that usually works out (though time will tell how it works out for Trump in particular).
Fun side effect: dehumanising people also makes it easier to justify war. The US has been in a perpetual state of war since WW2. Do you even remember how to recognise propaganda and war rhetoric if it's been part of the mainstream since before you were born?
You seem to understand that speech can persuade people of wrong things. Do you think it's possible you've been wrongly persuaded to hold the belief that free speech trumps all?
Maybe the same people that persuade you that you need free speech above all are also those that have the most to gain from being able to persuade you freely of whatever they want?
If you think incitement should not be a crime and likely think libel and slander should not be a crime, where do you draw the line if fee speech trumps all? What about lying under oath?
I'm going to guess (based on your name and the demographics of HN) you're American. Your nation's history is entirely written by itself and its only revolution was a secession which it was able to defeat.
Maybe your country just hasn't learned the lesson Germany has?
Just a thought: https://thenib.com/the-good-war
I don't think libel and slander should not be crimes, I don't think lying under oath should not be a crime. I believe in freedom of expression.
I especially encourage those people with the absolute worst most harmful ideas to speak often and loudly and publicly, so that everyone has a chance to hear their ideas and think about them and come to understand for themselves how bad they are.
Freedom of expression means I can sit back and let Westboro Baptist Church explain to everyone what terrible people they are much more eloquently than I could ever hope to do. Neo Nazis, please, have a rally and explain to everyone in your own words that you latch onto pathetic ideas of racial superiority for lack of any accomplishments of your own to be proud of.
Why do you want to restrict freedom of expression? Do you find it hard to refute somebody's argument? Do you not trust people to sort out good ideas from bad themselves? The solution to bad speech is more speech. I thought we'd settled this decades ago.
But history is replete with examples of people not doing that, and instead going ahead and implementing the really terrible idea. The Holocaust. The Killing Fields. The Rwandan genocide.
Neo Nazis, please, have a rally and explain to everyone in your own words that you latch onto pathetic ideas of racial superiority for lack of any accomplishments of your own to be proud of.
Some neo-nazis in the UK yesterday attempted to perform a 'citizen's arrest on the mayor of London', complaining about his being a Muslim and saying rude things about Donald Trump. Eventually the police showed up, declined to assist, and they were laughed out of the room.
It wasn't realized until later that they'd brought along a mobile gallows and parked it outside. I'll give you three guesses as to what they planned to do with it had they been successful in laying hands upon him.
Do you find it hard to refute somebody's argument? Do you not trust people to sort out good ideas from bad themselves? The solution to bad speech is more speech.
No, not really, and I'm not so sure about that. We don't live in a society of angels and educating everyone to think in enlightened terms is a slow and uncertain process. I don't like any sort of state coercion and would prefer to see prison abolished too, but I do not fool myself that crime would cease to exist if I could force that outcome. Consider Graham's law from economics, which holds that bad money drives out good; a small number of bad actors can undermine the reliability of the economy for all participants.
I must have missed the part in WW2 where the Axis surrendered because Hitler lost a debate with Churchill and all the concentration camps were shut down because the guards realised they were the bad guys.