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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29044863.
What does rights have with tolerance? ACLU were trying to protect the rights. Now they do it only if that isn't interfering with their moral standards.
I see this as a change of scope. Once their scope was rights of all, now it's rights of a particular group.
In contrast the country where the Nazis actually came to power, Weimar Germany, had some of the most extensive hate speech codes of any Western nation in the 1920s.
Further back we had punitive taxes on newspapers, laws on blasphemy, laws on obscenity, laws against "sedition" and most kinds of assembly..
The idea that the UK is a bastion of liberty is mostly a confection, really. The only thing we are a bastion of is liberty for the very wealthy - and only in the last twenty years or so have we really had a strong conception of rights in law. Our supreme court only got created in 2007: in all those historic free speech cases before then (and all the rest) the outcome was decided by literal aristocrats who had inherited a title.
By freedom of speech you might consider that law enforcement does not take actions against someone speaking its own mind.
But if companies and activist groups are retaliating against someone by denying employment, conducting business, acquiring goods, home rental, even instigating against that individual to the point of asking for violence, because he expressed his thoughts, then "free speech" might be pointless because very few will dare to speak their minds.
If authorities aren't going to punish someone, then some groups will.
I agree freedom of speech is never absolute, and it is not equally guaranteed/protected.
But the idea of free speech is not pointless, even when very few will dare to exercise it because of those realities. Those few being there, despite the grave consequences from non-government or even governmental groups, are part of what makes their speech powerful and inspiring. That's why Damore or Snowden were actually boosted by those groups' retaliation.
Freedom of speech does not mean everybody can say whatever without any repercussion, or that government will help defend you. It means government won't retaliate against you, and you have to strategize how you are going to execute it.
> It means government won't retaliate against you
No, that's the meaning of the first amendment. Free Speech is a principle of tolerance not limited to the government.
If society as a whole believes in Free speech, that society as a whole will be more tolerant, both in private and public spaces. Not absolutely tolerant, but more tolerant. The first amendment is the codification into law of this broad principle.
The other thing, which is not talked about nearly as much, are the forces opposed to free speech. You have, basically, a tug of war. On the one hand, society believes that "free speech" is a valuable principle. So it does things like having a generous moderation policy on hacker news and laws like the first amendment are passed. But then you have the opposing forces, the ones who say "free speech is nice, but issue X is so important we must punish people who speak against it". That has traditionally been things like advocating violence.
Now if the set of such issues fills up all of life, then you will lose free speech. So the real problem is not people exploiting free speech -- the paradox of tolerance is a purely intellectual exercise that almost never manifests in the real world. In the real world you have the principle of intolerance, that more and more aspects of ordinary life are put into the "this is violence" bucket and so used to restrict free speech, up until people claim that speech itself is violence. No society has ever come close enough to valuing free speech so much that the paradox of intolerance could possibly kick in.
I agree with you on the argument "paradox of tolerance" - it talks about an extreme situation that mostly does not happen, as a reason for general policy. This argument seems often misused as a reason to come down hard on any speech that is objectionable to some group.
More sane policy would be to adopt a default of free speech, be tolerant, and only then decide on exceptions on case by case basis, like about promoting Nazism in Europe. I don't think promoting Nazism should be protected the same way other free speech is, because of the concrete example of tragic consequences we have where it lead and the cost whole world had to pay.
The United States has had plenty of limits on free speech throughout its history. Letting Nazis or the KKK or whomever speak their mind and publish their literature doesn't mean we have absolute freedom of speech, just fewer restrictions on speech than elsewhere.
And it's worth pointing out that the paradox of tolerance was written as a reaction to Nazi Germany. The Nazis were the kind of intolerant group that paradox was arguing shouldn't be tolerated, not because of their speech alone, but because of their willingness to use violence, and refusal to tolerate any speech but their own.
If one side incites violence with their speech and the other side merely tolerates them for the sake of free speech the violent side wins. That was the relevant lesson of Nazism, not that the Nazis never would taken power in a Germany that allowed them to speak and publish freely, because they did.
This is why the KKK is allowed to march, but not allowed to make terrorist threats or incite violence (which they would be, if the US had absolute free speech,) because even tolerating the speech of scoundrels has to have a limit.
And yet all the countries who forbid and condemn nazi speech tolerates the communist speech.
Source: I spent part of my childhood in a communist country.
I don't think the Church has any hope to regain the power they once had.
These days my biggest fears are communist regimes (like China) and Islam spreading in Europe (we already have some courts partially applying Sharia laws in the UK).
We're not a hundred years from anything except gaslights.
Are you actually serious? You don’t know which race the US discriminated against in the past 100 years?
The answer is black people aka African-Americans (as well as Chinese but that’s just outside the 100 years) [1]
You do realise that black people did not have freedom of speech for almost all of America’s history?
The idea that America is some bastion of free speech is utter nonsense, when you consider that a significant portion of its population was denied this (and much more) based only on the colour of their skin.
I mean if you think about for most of America’s history it’s been a literal fascist state.
Japanese people.
Who got their expensive real estate in places like Santa Monica seized during WW2 and were placed in camps?
Native Americans.
Who stole pretty much all of their land, sent them on death marches [1] and kept them out of politics with discriminatory policies?
In that case, we agree and are talking past each other.
What is legally protected as speech and what is actually speech cannot be equal. For instance, speech that involves property damage is not protected, even though that is a common kind of speech in certain circumstances (e.g. graffiti "Romans go home")
Conversely, some groups abuse free speech protections in order to intimidate others, e.g. Westboro Baptist church picketing funerals. I would call this an action because the primary intention is not expression but rather intimidation.
It may be that such actions must be legally recognized as speech in order to maintain the enforceability of speech protections, as intent is a nebulous concept, but it is not obviously so and many jurisdictions don't recognize such things as speech.
The argument you're making is that free speech is important so we need to protect it by censoring people who advocate imposing censorship.
But then you're advocating imposing censorship, which implies you should censor yourself. Which is why it's a paradox.
You still have to choose between "don't censor things" and "censor things" with the knowledge that if you choose "censor things" it's not just you who will be adding to the list of banned knowledge.
"The 4–3 ruling, overturning a Court of Appeal decision, upheld a San Jose injunction that barred the gang members from "standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering or appearing anywhere in public view" with each other in a four-block radius. "Liberty unrestrained is an invitation to anarchy," Justice Janice Rogers Brown(appointed by Bush)"