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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

> Right. That’s why I included articles on people being arrested. Being arrested is very much a harm.

The mere existence of an arrest or the general fact of any legal consequence does not demonstrate that a law is harmful.

Presumably you don't believe that being arrested for theft is a demonstration about how property law harms people. Presumably you don't believe that punishments for perjury would demonstrates how some legal obligations to speak truthfully constitute harm.

This is a conversation about the value of free speech and the contention that hate speech laws have eroded that value. If there's a case for that, it has to be demonstrated with examples of meaningful discourse that has been barred or otherwise suffered.

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How do you propose somebody demonstrate that something did not happen because of hate speech restrictions? It is very difficult to prove a negative. What we can do is reason over the situations that have cropped up. Do you think it's a net benefit to society that a teenager was arrested and had to wear an ankle bracelet for posting lyrics of a song on Instagram in remembrance of someone that was killed? Because I don't think that's good for society. I think that she's now much less likely to speak her mind on the future, because she has essentially already been punished for doing that in the past.

>Presumably you don't believe that being arrested for theft is a demonstration about how property law harms people.

Theft is demonstrably bad for society and it is generally easy to separate theft from non-theft. Therefore punishing theft is a net good for society, because we want to discourage theft.

I've not seen someone demonstrate that hate speech is bad for society. Furthermore, hate speech is not easy to separate from regular speech. This means that if you discourage hate speech you'll likely discourage some regular speech as well.

You haven't demonstrated why theft is bad for society though? If Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor, is that bad for society simply by virtue of theft being seen as generally wrong?

You really can't see how hate speech is bad for society? You don't think calling minorities racial slurs affects society negatively? The difficulty of separating it from "regular speech" or satire really isn't important for there to be laws against it, that is why there are courts and judges and juries to settle cases and set precedents.

I also think you're highly overestimating how easy it is to separate theft from non-theft. Again, not that the complexity in separating a crime from a non-crime should in any way be a deciding factor in whether a law against said crime exists.

>If Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor, is that bad for society simply by virtue of theft being seen as generally wrong?

It is. Theft causes harm to society because it deprives property from somebody that legally owns it. Humans can't survive without property in nature, which means that theft harms their survival. Furthermore, rampant theft in society means that individuals will spend a lot of effort on securing their property, effort that could've been used for better effect. Hate speech, on the other hand, is about being offended. Offense is taken, not given. Remember that speech that intimidates or harasses is already illegal and not part of hate speech laws.

>that is why there are courts and judges and juries to settle cases and set precedents.

This is still punishing. I imagine that most of us on this site agree that copyright law is not in a good spot right now, because justice is often only had when you spend a lot of money defending yourself. Courts, judges, and juries do not seem to make the process fair. And I believe many feel the same thing about hate speech laws in the UK, where a teenager was arrested and had to wear an ankle bracelet for quoting song lyrics on Instagram.

> Humans can't survive without property in nature

This is a loaded statement. Humans can absolutely survive without property, they did so for hundreds of thousands of years before the concept of property was defined.

What is speech that harasses covered under, if not hate speech? I would argue that the only reason why hate speech came into being was because so many harmful remarks didn't qualify as harassment in the same courts you question the fairness of.

Let me be clear and say that I don't doubt that any of these things are tough to define once you really start looking at possible edge cases. My problem with your statements are more about how you think things are black and white, but hate speech is all grey. If I sing lyrics of a very violent song directly at a passer-by in the street, is that not threatening? Do you think that action should fall under harassment?

> Courts, judges, and juries do not seem to make the process fair.

If you don't trust courts, judges and juries (and I'm not saying I do), then you really can't rely on them, nor politicians, either to define what is lawful and what is not, and that includes theft, murder or whatever other offenses.

There's no such thing as hate speech. You have the right to hate, and expressing it helps. It's often the things you hate that need to be talked about the most. You shouldn't be scared to say it, it should be encouraged, especially if you are wrong.

> There's no such thing as hate speech.

There most certainly is, you just don't like any of the definitions of it.

You're also confusing dealing with personal psychological problems and causing duress to another person based on your own fears and biases.

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