That something is legal does not force it to be acceptable by any business whatsoever.
Reddit gets to choose whether it will be one of those platforms and it looks like they have.
You can boycott Reddit for that choice but why not boycott the US for permitting speech you disagree with too?
But being legal and being able to exist are totally different things. If you're a business owner, you can disrupt white supremacists by denying them the use of your business. Hotels do this all the time, to the point where it's difficult for militant white supremacists groups (that aren't, say, the police) to find places to meet (maybe the police will get theirs eventually).
I'm okay with this because there are a lot more hotels than governments, and they're a lot easier to replace. If a hotel I wanted to go to started prohibiting communists from using it, I'd just use a different hotel. Or AirBNB. It's a great world we live in.
To put it in a word, the government and private entities are different, so they should obey different rules. This is not a hard concept to grasp, but very frequently people literally do not think about these things, they pattern-match on the first argument that leads to what they want. Which in this case is the ability to objectify, harass, and sexually assault women.
There is no inherent good in providing space for all opinions. Free speech is not an end in itself, but rather a means. You are confusing the two.
No, I'm pretty sure that free speech is an end in itself. It's how we as humans maintain our integrity in a social context. That's why it's seen as a basic right.
In any case, I have no problem with the fact that you disagree with me on that and I have enough basic respect for you as a human (and even for racists) to be willing to let everyone talk have it all sort out (or not). Marginalizing people only makes them more bitter. It doesn't solve problems.
Europeans understand this, which is why they've outlawed Nazism. It's to express as a society that such a thing is not acceptable.
By expressing that it is acceptable, you are participating tacitly.
In contrast, expressing at every point, in every interaction, that white supremacy in all its forms (radical white supremacy, institutionalized white supremacy, cultural appropriation, colonialism, imperialism) is fucked up and fucking wrong and disgusting, you are chipping away at the fascists' resolve. People have a tendency to conform; it is physically difficult not to. In experimental settings, people who have to act nonconformingly feel physically uncomfortable and experience a fight-or-flight response. After experiencing this enough, people will stop being fascists.
In contrast, it's been demonstrated time and again that "rational" argument does nothing but solidify people's pre-existing ideas. So if you want to increase the chance a Nazi stays a Nazi, continue to debate with them. But remember that unlike your high school debate club, the Nazi will, empowered by his strengthened beliefs, go out and kill people. And their blood will be on your hands, because you had a chance to weaken his beliefs instead of making them stronger and you made them stronger.
I think humans maintain their integrity by rejecting all forms of oppression, from patriarchy to white supremacy to homophobia to capitalism, and I think that you sell your integrity away by capitalizing on your privilege and oppressing people, either actively and directly, by being a nazi; actively and indirectly, by arguing for a liberal concept of free speech; passively and directly, by ignoring opportunities to fight when you could; or passively and indirectly, by remaining silent and therefore complicit.
You are wrong, empirically, on every claim you have made, and you are wrong morally, because you have been given a chance to eliminate injustice and have chosen to back the side of oppression.
History is a tidal wave; you can either ride it or be crushed by it. The choice is yours.
On the Mexican-American border with assault weapons, picking off migrant workers trying to find work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minuteman_Civil_Defense_Corps
In Greece, leading a prominent political party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_%28political_party...
And in America, dressed as police, shooting any black man they care to.
This isn't the greatest part of white supremacy or homophobia but it does exist and to claim it doesn't is either ignorance or (now that you don't have that excuse) willful complicity.
False equivalence is a wonderful thing, isn't it?
Making them hide their bigotry will seem like a solution in the short term, but it never ends well. And on a personal level, I would rather the bigots be open about it so I can avoid them. As long as they're not voting away my rights or being violent, the psychological harm is manageable.
Wait, back up. Who said they don't exist? Your claim was that letting people be bigoted makes it worse, not that it creates the problem in the first place.
>>Where are the violent neo-Nazis? I don't see it.
I definitely deal with less homophobia now than I did five or ten years ago, and most of it came from engaging with homophobes and changing their minds. Racism is still almost as bad as ever, but it seems like that's mostly because the instigators (racists) never interact with their targets (people visually and culturally dissimilar from them).
The only difference I see is that one improved more than the other because people engaged with bigots and changed their minds. Which goes against your (as of yet unproven) assertion that engagement makes it worse.
If you live in the US you're clearly in the wrong country.
> I think that you sell your integrity away by capitalizing on your privilege and oppressing people, either actively and directly, by being a nazi; actively and indirectly
Zero to Godwin's Law in, what? Two posts. Goodbye.
I think I'm in the right country, because as an aware, conscious person, I can act against oppression in a place where it needs to be struggled against. One day, the United States will also outlaw Nazism, and that will be a great victory for humanity.
Democracy requires us not to use the apparatus of the state to suppress opinions by force. But that's it.
It certainly doesn't require us to provide material support for all opinions, no matter how toxic. Neither does it require tolerance of speech that goes beyond opinion. Incitement to riot, for example, is a crime. So is making threats, or conspiring to commit other crimes.
A large part of the problem is people, like you, who view all of this as someone just expressing their opinion equally with others. That has nothing to do with targeted harassment and death threats to one's family.
In real life, people get prosecuted for this stuff. Unfortunately there's so many obstacles and hurdles to prosecuting Internet harassment that it only happens if the harassee is someone famous.
The difference between what a business allows and what a state allows are so different as to not really be illuminative here.
I could decide that no one watches animated cartoons in my house, and no one is really harmed by that in any significant way. A state that declares that no one shall watch animated cartoons, however, is quite a different thing.