Comment by thrance
4 months ago
How would you feel about receiving daily credible death threats to you and your family? Should that be tolerated too in the name of the first amendment?
Point is, we must draw the line somewhere. It's never "everything goes". Tolerating intolerance always ends up reducing freedom of expression.
Look at the US, the government is doing everything it can to shove trans people back in the closet, their voices are silenced and government websites are rewritten to remove the T in LGBT. By the very same people who abused "the first amendment" to push their hateful rhetoric further and further until it's become basically fine to do nazi salutes on live TV.
"Free speech absolutism" is a mirage, only useful to hateful people who don't even believe in it.
Death threats are not protected by free speech. I know you are trying to make a hyperventilating political point but it’s just not a genuine thing. I am a little surprised at the anoint of those on HN that are against free speech. I mean, don’t you realize that without it, a government you don’t like could imprison you for “denying basic facts oh biology” just as another country does for “denying historical events”. It’s madness.
Yes, death threats are not protected by your free speech, that was my entire point that you completely missed.
Why then not allow them but allow flurries of racial slurs? Or harassment? Or foreign propaganda? The line is never "anything goes", we have to draw it somewhere. So, why act like anything other than "anything goes" is "literally 1984".
In Europe, it's "La liberté des uns s'arrête là où commence celle des autres" (Rousseau). Americans should simply stop trying to impose their different conception of freedom that just led them into a violent kleptocracy.
No that’s just nonsense. The line is drawn at actual death threats. Anything else does lead to 1984.
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I mean, you are also making a hyperventilating point in your sarcasm not true. It may be true that illegal immigrants tend to be of ethnic minorities but it fallacious to say that collecting and deporting them, for being in the country illegally, is the same as “rounding up minorities”. That is offensive to the memory of those times over a hundred years when that did actually happen in this country. I don’t see any political enemies being “rounded up”. The issue at hand is about free speech and whether it makes sense to have a literal, without hyperbole, Orwellian approach that so many here seem to relish.
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