One opinion I've heard in Germany is that the free speech absolutism and value neutrality of the constitution of the Weimar Republic allowed NSDAP to take power in the first place.
It's the constitution, innit? It's a confusing document, with many compromises. But many US citizens treat it like the Shroud of Turin. The German laws are tied up with Germany's history in the 20th C. In other parts of Western Europe, restrictions are less stringent and less specific.
Obviously there are types of "harmless" speech that are likely to provoke a violent response. Personal abuse is an example, but so is the language of the likes of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech. Do people really think that speech that's likely to cause public disorder is OK?
I like the author's distinction between "cultural" and "legal" freedom of speech. I instinctively dislike restrictions on speech; but provided they are used mainly to nudge people into treating their fellow citiziens with respect (and with an explicit exception for satire), I see them as an overall good. That is, you can use legal restrictions, with a light touch, to encourage an atmosphere of cultural restraint.
Arresting that guy who protested Charles III's accession by holding up a blank sheet of paper: that's not a good thing.
> It's the constitution, innit?
Is it? I wasn't aware that hate speech was explicitly singled out as protected in the Constitution.
> Do people really think that speech that's likely to cause public disorder is OK?
Public disorder, no. But innocent people getting heard? Well, maybe. Lots of speech that hurts innocent people is already banned. Things like libel/slander. Threats. Blackmail. All of these can hurt someone, silence someone, inspire someone else to hurt someone. I don't think anyone ever objected to these being banned, and even punishable with real prison sentences.
> Arresting that guy who protested Charles III's accession by holding up a blank sheet of paper: that's not a good thing.
Did that happen? That's a silly thing to arrest someone for. It calls back to Putin arresting people for holding up blank sheets of paper.
Those are civil offences; they're not "banned", the victim has to sue for damages.
> Threats. Blackmail.
Those are indeed banned, i.e. criminal. They are both effectively threats. It's a criminal act to threaten a criminal act.
> Did that happen? That's a silly thing to arrest someone for.
Oh yes, it did:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/police-arrest-blank-paper...
"Silly" is rather a gentle way to characterize it; it was oppressive. But this country is very silly about it's monarchy - as the USA is about it's constitution.
I am a republican (small 'r'), and using the police to suppress anti-monarchist sentiment is offensive, and to me scary. Anti-monarchist opinions have a long tradition here; there was some other king called Charles, that we decapitated 400 years ago.
[Edit] No threat to Charles III intended; got to be careful what you say, if you can be arrested for holding a blank piece of paper, maybe you can be arrested for having a blank mind.
Is that not still a form of punishment? And a reason why most people would refrain from saying these things?
> > Threats. Blackmail.
> Those are indeed banned, i.e. criminal. They are both effectively threats. It's a criminal act to threaten a criminal act.
A threat is a threat to do something illegal. Blackmail is a threat to do something that's often completely legal, but sufficiently embarrassing that it would still make the target change their behaviour.
But as with libel and slander, the fact that they're illegal doesn't mean they don't happen. In fact, there's plenty of people threatening others online. And often it takes a judge to decide whether or not that threat counts as a credible threat. And then there's indirect threats, where the threatener doesn't directly threaten, but directs others to do it. Possibly in an unspoken way. And sometimes the vague things someone says can still inspire a mob to storm the Capitol with a gallows from which to have the Vice President.
Where do you draw that line? And can you only draw it after people act on it? These issues are incredibly complex, and very context dependent. And pretending they're simple is going to make us ignore all the edge cases. And there's a lot of those.
No, it's not. It's compensation for damage done. If a bad driver bends your car in an accident, they don't get punished, they just have to pay for your repairs.
> A threat is a threat to do something illegal. Blackmail is a threat to do something that's often completely legal
You seem to have contradicted yourself; if a threat is a threat to do something illegal, how can a threat to do something completely legal be a threat?
> But as with libel and slander, the fact that they're illegal doesn't mean they don't happen.
There is such a thing as criminal libel, for which you can be punished; but in the general case, neither libel nor slander is "illegal". They are torts, or "wrongs", for which a victim can demand compensation. Criminal libel has been abolished in my jurisdiction. I don't think it ever existed in the USA. [Edit] I'm wrong; some states apparently have criminal libel statutes.
> And can you only draw it after people act on it?
"Threatening behaviour" is a criminal offence here. It generally means placing someone in fear of physical or mental injury. You don't have to actually injure them to commit the offence.
> make us ignore all the edge cases
I guess that's why libel cases often cost lots of money in lawyer's fees. Equity and tort are two fields of civil law with lots of edge-cases. People litigate these cases precisely because the lines aren't drawn clearly. They tend to turn on issues like fairness, issues that are ultimately a matter of judgement.
But you're still being held liable for that damage, despite the fact that you did not cause any physical damage. It was just words, and yet their effect is considered damaging.
That's aside from the fact that there's also a thing called "punitive damages", so that still is quite explicitly punishment. So these are words that do damage, and they're punished for.
> if a threat is a threat to do something illegal, how can a threat to do something completely legal be a threat?
I guess I should explain the terms I use a bit better. You're right that words can mean different things, and I'm talking about the legal concepts of threat and blackmail, but in my too-brief explanation of blackmail, I use the word "threat" in one of its other meanings.
So here's what I mean by threat and blackmail:
Threat: expressing an intend to hurt someone. Here, hurting someone is illegal, but expressing the intention to do so is illegal as well.
Blackmail: expressing an intend to reveal embarrassing information about someone unless they do something, in order to coerce them to do that thing against their will. Here, revealing the embarrassing information might be totally legal. In fact, if the information is about a crime the target committed, revealing it might even be the right thing to do. And yet saying you're going to reveal it unless they do a particular thing, is illegal.
In any case, I think we have established that there are forms of speech that are illegal, are considered damaging, and/or are sufficiently harmful or damaging to warrant compensation or punishment.
So to get back to the original topic: is hate speech damaging? And is it sufficiently damaging to warrant compensation or punishment? And if we were to conclude that they are, legislating that is not necessarily a more significant infringement on the freedom of speech than the existing laws against libel, blackmail and threats are.
It is a complete defence to an accusation of libel that what you wrote is true.
That is, libel means publishing damaging lies about someone. In most jurisdictions, it also means that the lies were malicious: the writer or publisher intended to cause damage. Damages are assessed as lost money; if the lies hurt your feelings, you won't get damages. But if your hurt feelings required therapy, you can sue for the therapist's fees.
It's annoying (understatement) that damage to reputation is assessed in this way; it means that rich, famous people get much larger awards than ordinary people, because they lose more money from damage to reputation (they have more money to lose, for one thing). You can't sue someone for torpedoing a $1M deal if you aren't the kind of person that makes $1M deals.
Obviously. It would be a bit too dystopian if the truth was illegal (though in oppressive regimes it often is). I agree that it's a problem that harmful lies about rich people are punished harder than lies about poor people, because they can attach a larger monetary value to the damage. That's of course a product of the fact that it's a civil issue and revolves around damages. Getting rid of that artefact would probably involve making all lies illegal, and I think everybody here agrees that that would be a couple of steps too far.
And then there's the fact that the entire justice system is simply far more accessible to rich people. And they do sometimes use it to try to suppress inconvenient truths.
Libel and slander are civil matters in the United States.
You're allowed to think whatever you want, but you're not allowed to publicly say it, unless it's within the bounds of legal opinion (which are pretty wide, it's not like you're only allowed to state one opinion, but they are also clearly limited). Insults, while clearly speech, are forbidden and it's part of the penal code (up to one year in prison, but it's usually settled by fines), so not a civil matter.
What Germany certainly doesn't have is a culture of free speech. It's important to remember that the last totalitarian dictatorship in (East) Germany only ended 30 years ago, and there was very little freedom of speech there, and the limits were violently enforced.
German culture highly values conformity, and it's no accident that the spiral of silence was proposed by a German researcher (Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann), it essentially argues that people check their views for majority-compatibility and will stay silent if they find that they're not accepted. Because they stay silent, others who think like them will find their ideas not accepted in the majority and will also stay silent etc etc, as an act of social survival (which it certainly is in Germany, but isn't as much in countries with a culture of free speech).
> speech absolutism and value neutrality of the constitution of the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic had largely the same fundamental laws regarding freedom of speech as the Federal Republic of Germany today: you're allowed to say what isn't outlawed by a law, and you must not be punished for saying it.
So in legal practice the right to human dignity overrides the right to free-speech.
For example, if you look at countries like Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, etc... what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian.
Whereas in a lot of Europe it is illegal to promote only extreme ideologies but apart from that the democratic discourse is as messy and varied as you'd expect it to be. (And due to variety of electoral systems I'd argue that political discourse in much of Europe is mush more varied than in places like the US.) We have countries swinging from left to right wing governments and even powerful political parties that started as far right wing or terrorist groups.
What we all see is how the balance can be tipped from fragile democracy to repressive authoritarianism e.g. Hungary.
Democracy is a constant effort, requiring constant vigilance. These are all discussions worth having, at least in good faith.
Here's former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser in a podcast at 1:49:10 [1], transcript [2]:
> Times writes back and says, we can't publish this ad because we – because you criticize Nixon and it's 1972, and it's in the middle of an election campaign, and if you criticize Nixon, unless you have his permission, it counts against the ad – the expenditure limitation of his opponent. I said, I have to get his permission in order to criticize him, what are you, crazy. It's the same issue that Cambodian bombing ad...
> So, we file a lawsuit, we win that lawsuit, and we strike the law down for the second time. This goes on over and over again, and I'm saying to myself, this is a law that is supposed to get in the way of nasty rich folks, and the only two times it's been used so far is against these three aging radicals and the ACLU on totally legitimate, core First Amendment speech, how can that be, and that's how we get into this issue, and why we see it so clearly as a free speech issue. It goes on and on and on and on, and they kept coming back, doing it again, and again and again and again in 16 different versions.
Earlier in that podcast episode he makes a good case for campaign finance being like the right to travel around 1:36:10 [3]. Have a listen, you might learn something. The embedded player on this page [4] lets you skip around the episode without subscribing to Soundcloud.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/so-to-speak-the-free-speech-podcast/f...
[2] https://www.thefire.org/news/so-speak-podcast-transcript-for...
[3] https://soundcloud.com/so-to-speak-the-free-speech-podcast/f...
[4] https://www.thefire.org/news/so-speak-podcast-former-aclu-ex...
This is an argument against laws, corruption, and government. It is not, however, an argument against any particular position on speech. A capricious supreme court could revert to the speech precedent the US had for the first 150 years of it's existence, which we both presumably agree is flawed. Laws can be written and misapplied.
Neither of those things being possible suggests that, as a value, free speech maximalism is superior to free speech...almost maximalism. It's clear that you can have stability and discussion and support for fairly extreme ideologies under the more restrictive speech standards of Europe.
No, it's an argument for studying the history of law and understanding that some are good and some are bad. They don't come with a cover sheet saying so. You need to figure it out for yourself.
> Laws can be written and misapplied.
All the more reason to study them and give careful consideration to how they have been misapplied in the past. We're in agreement there.
You're a different commenter than above, so I'm not sure if your main point is to agree with them, disagree with me, or both, and on what exactly.
> It's clear that you can have stability and discussion and support for fairly extreme ideologies under the more restrictive speech standards of Europe.
I think any anti hate speech laws are more experimental than the American experiment. The point of free speech is to protect minority voices. It was championed in the '60s when the left needed it, and it rose from the ashes in the early 1900s after Comstock tried to surreptitiously-but-not-so-surreptitiously squash it. The censor never calls himself a censor.
The modern American jurisprudence on speech is fairly recent, as I alluded to above. There's tons of cases through the 18th and 19th century where the supreme court upheld blasphemy and obscenity convictions, allowed the federal government to censor speech, favor Christian religion and churches over others, and even consider libel a Crime.
As late as 1951 (Dennis v. US) the Supreme Court ruled that members of the US Communist Party could be imprisoned because socialist organizing was a threat. And it took 20 more years for Brandenburg to cement the modern jurisprudence, 200 years after the American experiment began, and only 50 years ago.
> No, it's an argument for studying the history of law and understanding that some are good and some are bad.
No, my point is what is socially acceptable goes beyond simply what is legal. And this is always and has always been true. Many laws can be used for tyranny. If you want to avoid the potential for tyrannical laws, you can't have any laws, and that doesn't work either.
Like again, this whole thing comes down to the fact that Western European countries (and the US!) have had more restrictive definitions of free speech for far longer than Brandenburg has been the law of the land, and they aren't tyrannical.
Do you agree with how US jurisprudence has drawn the lines on free speech? If not, what would you do differently?
>...what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian.
What happens in democracies (or at least in the US) is that this just gets branded as "mis" or "disinformation", or worse a "conspiracy theory". A formulation I'm fond of is "this isn't happening, and it's good that it is", because it's a pattern repeated throughout political discourse. Depending on who is talking, something is either a crazy extremist conspiracy theory, or something we should all be cheering on.
Societal totalitarianism is a very real concern. In its benign form it leads to quirky cultures and in its extreme leads to total suppression of any opposition to the zeitgeist, even without a fully authoritarian government. Unfortunately there's a massive fuzzy grey boundary between the two and it's up to the people of a country to course correct when they can, as getting back from a restrictive society is difficult.
This is a good phrase; I'm stealing this. I agree with your diagnosis of it, as it can indeed be benign and result merely in "people being weird".
It's a feature of humanity from where I stand. People crave both stability and change. Beating them over the head to force stability doesn't work so well, nor does changing too quickly. The idea of a system that encourages peaceful transitions is to find some balance. Of course, that balance can also be disrupted.
Sure, and America hasn't become a country of hate speech or devolved into tyranny yet either, despite what some claim, so do those laws actually add any value? Seems speculative at best.
> One opinion I've heard in Germany is that the free speech absolutism and value neutrality of the constitution of the Weimar Republic allowed NSDAP to take power in the first place.
Some of their first moves after taking power was crack down on speech and imprison people that spoke out against them. What would have happened if free speech was a strongly held principle among the people such that they wouldn't have tolerated that? What if dissenting voices had been permitted to speak about and expose the secret death camps?
Hate speech spewed by the likes of Tucker Carlson caused a mass shooting like a week ago...
Furthermore, drawing a causal link between Tucker and the shooter is speculative at best.
Also, the people who watch his show agree with his speech and probably don't consider it stochastic terrorism because they also want to genocide trans people. It's not a hard concept to grasp. It's a hate-hour for a very specific slice of the population. And that slice is committing more and more acts of violence.
Do I think Tucker is DIRECTLY responsible for the shooting? Maybe not, like you said it's speculative. But do I think there is a casual link between the entire "Trans people are evil" rhetoric crowd and the shooting? Absolutely, I think it'd be difficult to argue the other direction, we have studies and statistics on trans hate crimes already.
And then do I think Tucker Carlson is part of the "Trans people are evil" rhetoric crowd? yes, hard to deny that imo. And you said it yourself, he's the largest voice out there in that crowd. So I think he definitely shoulders some blame.
Also, speculation turns out to be more and more true each time. conservative talk show hosts are cited in conservative domestic terrorists manifestos all the time. This "hour of hate" is absolutely directly contributing to violence.
This is what happens when you form ideas divorced from any evidence. More Democrats watch Fox News and Tucker Carlson specifically than any of the more liberal-leaning networks. Do most Democrats want to genocide trans people too? Or are you claiming they're watching Tucker ironically?
> And then do I think Tucker Carlson is part of the "Trans people are evil" rhetoric crowd? yes, hard to deny that imo.
It's easy to deny it actually, he has never called for violence against trans people to my knowledge, and in fact has always condemned violence. People are not so circumspect if they think they're legitimately fighting evil.
If bluntly disagreeing with progressivism makes you blame-worthy for mass-murderers, well then we should throw all conservative media hosts in indefinite prison. Or execute them.
"The extent of some liberal ideas" is a really soft way of putting "open racist and transphobe" He literally did a segment on the "Great Replacement Theory".
He's a white supremacist. He can get absolutely, thoroughly, and without lube, fucked.
Tucker Carlson thinks that immigration is ending the white race. That's a direct quote, go watch the segment.
I didn't hear this "direct quote" of yours anywhere. Tucker doesn't mention the "white race" at all, he speaks about government policies and how they influence native population growth (Americans born to Americans), and about the rate of immigration. If I missed your direct quote, then please provide a timestamp. While I find many of the supposed factual claims there debatable, this argument that too much immigration can be destabilizing is not obviously false.
What I've seen time and time again in situation like this, from both sides, are claims of "dog-whistling", wink-wink-nudge-nudge "we know what you're really talking about [insert-person-I-hate]".
I'll also note that "demography is destiny" has been an unofficial Democratic party tag line for decades now. The notion that Democrats have more vested interest in increasing immigration is not exactly a conspiracy theory, although given how the Latin population is now leaning Republican I think they're realizing that that tagline is deeply flawed as an actual strategy.
Here's a short one minute blurb, should be digestable enough for you.
"Legacy Americans" "The Great Replacement"
These are not dog whistles. They're not subtle. He's just being racist.
> You seem like a positively delightful person.
At least I'm not a racist xenophobe.
But I am not a historian and cannot reconcile the articles content with what you’re stating here.
https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
You're as free as any historian to form an opinion and share it. The rest of us can take the fact that you're not one into account while reading it.
Thank you for sharing a link to this series, I was not aware of it.
Imagine saying this about microbiology or something.
Dismissing people by saying things like "imagine joe six pack sharing his opinion on microbiology" is part of what made the anti-vax or vax-skeptical crowd so upset. In many circumstances, the rest of us did not meet them where they were. That requires listening, and yes, encouraging uninformed people to express their opinions.
It can be popular to behave dismissively online because it seems like you don't need to deal with the aftermath. When everyone does it, that adds up.
I'm not saying everyone needs to be out there correcting misinformation, just that we deal ourselves a better hand when we accept that other people get things wrong. It's okay for people to be wrong, even in the absence of being corrected. Telling people to shut up doesn't nip the virus in the bud, it is the virus.
I hear that a lot nowadays too. I wonder why that is?
There are plenty of critics living in those countries who think it's a bad idea to limit free speech beyond limiting imminent incitement of violence. Nadine Strossen discusses this in, I believe, her appearance on the Higher Ed Now podcast [0], including this excerpt,
14:20: "Countries like Germany which were in the vanguard of enacting and enforcing laws against hate speech were in the rear guard when it came to outlawing actual discrimination against people in the workplace, in places of public accommodation in housing. It wasn't until very shockingly recently that Germany was dragged kicking and screaming by the EU to adopt those laws… targeting expression is only a superficial manifestation of a deep-seated problem, and it also is divorced from the actual real world consequences of discriminatory and violent conduct."
> One opinion I've heard in Germany is that the free speech absolutism and value neutrality of the constitution of the Weimar Republic allowed NSDAP to take power in the first place.
The Weimar Republic had hate speech laws. Nadine makes the case [1] that photos of Hitler imprisoned for running afoul of those laws helped him rise to power.
It's not so unlike Milo receiving attention for being prevented from speaking at campus. The protesters do not realize their dogmatism and censorious behavior bring Milo more followers. Protesters should consider how their behavior will be perceived [2] by someone who knows nothing other than the fact that one person wants to speak, there is a willing audience, and that protesters either: stopped that conversation from happening by being noisy, or responded with counter speech and letting haters bury themselves [3]. If you are shouting over someone, you become a hater. It doesn't need to be that way.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nadine-strossen-free-s...
[1] https://youtu.be/J1iZffRFs8s?t=2838
But in terms of equality, I'd say what we get in practice *today* in Germany and Switzerland (don't know about Austria) is a society that is arguably *more* equal than the vanguard.