Comment by fennecfoxen
9 years ago
> They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed.
If they have the power to? Yeah, in a heartbeat. But they're not the only ones, or the most powerful ones, just the most ostentatiously intolerant.
> 1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech.
If both Nazis and (as an example) Communists have free speech, then I can be supremely confident that I have free speech, and that I can use it without being expelled, jailed, or killed. (Chastisement, well, as long as you mean the verbal kind, I'll just have to cope.) I sure as Hell don't defend their rights because I like them.
Have you never actually felt your ability to speak out meaningfully threatened by the society around you?
A white supremacist killed someone at the weekend for protesting. If their free speech gives you supreme confidence, then you are simply wrong.
The evidence is fresh. You will have free speech - as long as you only go to the right places, say the right things, wear the right clothes, have the right colour skin.
Over time, supremacist movements reduce that free space in greater and greater amounts. This is what the evidence of history tells us, very clearly. We can see it happening now.
If despite the hard evidence that these groups are opposed to free speech and willing to kill those exercising it, you still defend their right to try and subjugate or kill people merely because of their DNA, you are not defending free speech. What you're really doing is celebrating your own virtue - you're defending their rights because you like yourself. You are taking a calculated risk with other people's lives to do so. Even if they're not even trying to speak at all, but just walking down the street while being the wrong race/gender/religion/etc.
Fundamentalist free speech advocates make an implicit assumption: that a race of billions of social animals can completely avoid situations where one group makes another even feeling uncomfortable. It's purist nonsense. Occasionally feeling you aren't entirely free to speak is part of being a social animal.
Part of living is learning when keeping your trap shut means you're being oppressed or censored, and when you are just being respectful to someone else's house, or a workplace, or suffering beyond your experience.
You can't use a civilised person's inevitable experience of "well, I didn't want to cause offense" to justify Nazis.
And this is why in Germany you can't protest with any guns, military swat gear, masks, or other weapons. Doing so is illegal because a large group of people with weapons can intimidate another group into not being able to exercise their free speech.
How did that work out at the G20 protests?
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> A white supremacist killed someone at the weekend for protesting. If their free speech gives you supreme confidence, then you are simply wrong.
The GP said no such thing. He talked about speech, and you changed the subject to violence.
If the white supremacists limited themselves to speech, then yes... their free speech should be protected. And, it serves as an indicator that we truly have free speech.
The whole point of free speech is to give freedom to views you disagree with. The alternative is the Soviet Union / North Korea bullshit of "everyone has free speach, but only one viewpoint is allowed".
No, the alternative is Germany: a wide range of viewpoints are allowed, but actual Nazism isn't, because last time it was allowed millions died.
Not everything is an excluded middle, a bi-directional slippery slope that has to end up at one extreme or the other.
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The problem with discussing Neo-Nazis in terms of free speech is that violence is their core value. They are explicitly, and not even secretly, organizing for the violent overthrow of the US government to impose a white ethno-state. If the President helps them along, all the better from their perspective, but they are not organizing to give speeches, they are organizing and training to commit mass murder.
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> A white supremacist killed someone at the weekend for protesting.
Well, yeah, there's been an awful lot of death and injury at protests of late. Charlottesville is easily the worst, but isn't where it started, and it's not where it's going to finish. There were thugs at UC Berkeley smashing property, lighting bonfires, and putting pepper spray in protestors' faces.
Now, I wouldn't want to bring that up first thing like I'm some sort of spineless "both sides!!" equivocator (coughdonaldtrump) after some fucking Nazi runs people down, because it's obviously materially worse than any previous incident to date. But hey, if you we want to articulate a policy of ad-hoc censorship of speech because it reduces the free space to express opinions, let's go there! Why aren't you calling for content providers to root and and destroy all the publications telling us that "speech is violence" and should be met with violence? Where's the pressure for Reddit to drop /r/antifa? Can I get a statement condemning the shenanigans at Evergreen State College, where a professor got death threats for saying he was uncomfortable with a proposed "Day of Absence" which would see him excluded from the campus on account of the colour of his skin? Can we see Huffington Post's cloud service suspended for defending the student protestors who did so?
I can't say I like Berkeley's leftist thugs much more than I like Charlottesville's Nazis, but I'm damn uncomfortable with censorship that targets either. (And yes, it's censorship, even if it's not government censorship.)
But yea, you're right about one thing, it's a sucky time all around if you care about free speech.
> You can't use a civilised person's inevitable experience of "well, I didn't want to cause offense" to justify Nazis.
Well no, you don't justify Nazis period. You use them as the legal equivalent of a meat shield.
> Fundamentalist free speech advocates make an implicit assumption: that a race of billions of social animals can completely avoid situations where one group makes another even feeling uncomfortable.
"Completely avoiding situations where one group makes another feel uncomfortable" sounds more like a conservative caricature of political correctness than any component of fundamentalist free speech advocacy.
> there's been an awful lot of death and injury at protests of late.
Do you have more details regarding deaths at other recent protests?
> A white supremacist killed someone at the weekend for protesting.
> these groups are opposed to free speech and willing to kill those exercising it
This is a false equivalence. His group was not calling for violence, let alone murder. You're using the same logic that the right-wing all over the world uses against Islam.
> A white supremacist killed someone at the weekend for protesting. If their free speech gives you supreme confidence, then you are simply wrong.
Let's ban Christian websites then. Christians have killed lots of people over political and moral issues. Of course not those specific Christians, but who ares.
That is whould shold be careful about how ware ou go with cenrsorship.
>A white supremacist killed someone at the weekend for protesting
This person will be prosecuted and very likely jailed for his crimes. The ACLU is not rushing to defend this.
> The evidence is fresh. You will have free speech - as long as you only go to the right places, say the right things, wear the right clothes, have the right colour skin.
Applies to recent Google memo leak pretty well. Or other left-leaning cases. This is a problem with people who can't have a civil discussion and tolerate different point of views. Rather than left or right issue.
I'm sorry, was the government preventing Daily Stormer from starting a hosting company or CDN? I'm pretty sure it wasn't so they have the same free speech that everyone else does.
CloudFare has free speech rights too. They are excersizing those rights by saying they don't want Daily Stormer on their network.
All it takes is a few key fascists in government positions to tear all of this down. All it takes is one false flag terrorist attack to justify the systematic persecution of a group of people. This is what happened in Germany. Recently in Turkey. And it can happen here just as easily.
If you know your history, you know that liberal democracies have more enemies than fascists (particularly of the hick nazi variety).
>If both Nazis and (as an example) Communists have free speech
That's where the argument become null, communists ideas have been banned from the US political landscape for a long time and even mild socialists propositions are a call for arms for many USians.
They aren't banned in any sense whatsoever - there's a communist party in USA, they're free to publish their views, do rallies, advocate their position, run for elections, and they're "banned" only in the sense that almost noone votes for them or supports their views.
That's the exact treatment that Nazis, ISIS, North American Man/Boy Love Association and all kinds of other disgusting groups should get - they should be free to associate and state their views publicly, so that the public can hear them, be disgusted, and vote against them. If some of them do violent acts or incite violence, then those particular people can and should be charged appropriately, but not the rest of the group.
You are technically incorrect (the worst kind of incorrect).
See, for example, the [Communist Control Act of 1954][0], various [state laws][1] [that prohibit communists from holding office or working in state jobs][2], and [exclusion from anti-discrimination laws][3]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/22/anti-communist...
[2]: https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/repeal-the-anti-communist
[3]: http://employeeatty.blogspot.com/2012/12/time-to-repeal-anti...
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