It's not the we the people are not deserving of free speech, it's the idea the right to 'free speech' supersedes other rights and should go unchecked at the expense of others that undermines the concept for so many. Besides, it wasn't free speech or lack thereof that's causing Voat to fold. Apparently no one wanted to pay to hear what they had to say. Everyone has a right to free speech but everyone else has an equal right not to listen to it if they don't want to.
Curious about this, what right does anti-Semite/racism rhetoric removes from others? How can words affect your rights as a person?
someone somewhere must believe that they should do something about these bad people.
your argument at best is in bad faith
I disagree (although this was a question more than an argument)
>Constant dehumanization of people does not eventually lead to physical violence?
What it might lead to is irrelevant, the act of speech does not impede anything and a lot of things have the potential to lead to violence, yet legalizing it is arbitrary at best
[edit] A citation: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.asp...
Edit: i also understood the basic rights to be a property of the system rather than the actions of people; e.g. you should be free whatever people think of you; right to happiness whatever enemies you have, etc. If words can deprive you of dignity, then it seems as though the system is not giving you the feeling of safety in your rights that you should be expecting. This seems like a more logical application of the rights; since you cannot force respect out of others but can force the system to honor its promises.
On the other hand the problem is not about "thinking" hateful things (and there is a distinction about hateful and respectful that you seem to gloss over) but saying those things with the specific intention of lowering a person's (or group of persons) sense of self and dignity.
It absolutely does. It leads to a climate of fear for those affected by it, especially once it becomes widespread.
I agree with words being able to elicit strong emotional response in people, but I disagree that this should serve as a basis for legislation. I do not think it is a strong enough basis to risk affecting the spread of ideas and discourse.
Remember the holocaust
I'd posit the words weren't the things affecting people, but whatever actions they took
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1928
In any case, it would not happened without people would defend them each time they could, who would made up what may opponents said just to make opponents sound bad, who pretended that nazi are not danger, that nazi are just little misguided young men meaning well or just trolls.
It is also possible this was a prevailing thought, or that the environment was encouraging of such thoughts, in that nation at that time; that something caused division, and that the nazi used this as a way to assert power and spearhead their ideology.
To think people can just tell you to participate in a genocide and everyone will follow is not recognizing the agency of human beings. The WW2 was a dramatic period that had a lot of factors, but having restrictions on free speech is unlikely to be one that would or even did matter much.
Edit: plus, the restrictions on free speech are executed and decided by the oligarchy, and when the nazism was its most vicious it had little reason to restrict that kind of speech. The idea that free speech restriction help in preventing propaganda is wrong; it prevents only some subset of propaganda which does not further the elite, which imo is worse than not restricting it at all. And even then, free speech restrictions cannot stop the spread of ideas and prejudice, whatever they are.
Doesn't this exactly confirm the original claim that words do lead to actions and therefore affect people's rights?
Try and avoid generalizing from one example. Free speech forums worked pretty well from 1995 to 2010.
Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech.
I find beauty in the principle of FoS: we would never have e.g. legalized same-sex marriages without it - and this is why we need it for future ethical advancements, possibly (as one hypothetical example), the right to die/destiny. Advancement of the moral zeitgeist is impossible without it.
The utter impossibility of it in practice is unavoidable. There are few more willing to violate the rights of others than those who demand the right to speech.