1. Every time you restrict what people are allowed to say or write, you are in effect restricting what people are allowed to hear or read. I read and listen to many things I disagree with. Sometimes I even find the content abhorrent. But I don’t want the government saying what I can and can’t read.
2. Who decides? Any government body with such powers is ripe for abuse. And do you expect such officials to be unbiased in their application of the law? My bet is that each administration would use it as a cudgel against their political opponents.
3. What about religious texts like the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah? All of them contain commandments to do violence to women, children, and animals. All of them command the reader to kill homosexuals. Hell, all of them are pro-slavery. By any sane reading of your proposed law, they’d be banned. And if you carve out an exception for them, you realize that such restrictions are impossible to apply objectively.
The original proponents of free speech weren’t dogmatic, they were pragmatic. They simply thought the world would be better off if government agents couldn’t arbitrarily restrict what people were allowed to read.
Is there any advocation of violence that you think should be blocked? F that guy, lets roll over there and kill is just fine? I think people who believe there is nothing that justifies that aren't someone who is vulnerable.
But to get at your point about legality: the definition of a true threat is quite narrow. In Watts v United States[1], a draft protestor said, "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." The Supreme Court deemed that threat to be legal under the first amendment. Posting someone's address (which is already public info in most tax records) is usually unethical and immoral, but it's not a crime and I'm fine with that. There are many immoral acts which are not criminal, such as cheating on one's spouse or lying about serving in the military. We can use other methods to discourage such behavior (such as shunning). Passing a law against something means that men with guns will come to people's homes and put them in cages. That's one hell of an escalation, and I'm not willing to endorse that unless the perpetrator is extremely dangerous.
1. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/707/watts-v-uni...
So because you personally don't want something, you're arguing free speech should be completely unrestricted even if it's demonstrably causing harm (shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre)? You're OK with the government restricting how you can physically interact with others (assault/battery etc.) but somehow you believe that the way you verbally interact with others can't conceivably lead to similar levels of harm/danger? Almost all countries do have government-determined restrictions on what you can say/broadcast in public and at least in liberal democracies with the right checks and balances there simply isn't the abuse of those powers that you seem to fear. As for the Bible, I would have little problem with restrictions on how parts of it should be publishable today, and I'm reasonably convinced many passages in it have caused tremendous amounts of harm. However there is a decent argument for treating material written in a very different day and age as a special case - I think it's important that we have a good understanding of historical cultural norms, warts and all. If Bible study were about truly understanding what parts of it reflect attitudes that have now been consigned to history that would only be a good thing, but that doesn't mean I think it's justifiable to be able to preach from any part of it to an uncritical audience.
Just wanted to remark that this is the "free speech absolutist" strawman, which basically attempts to imply that if a person believes a single restriction on speech should be opposed, then they must logically also believe that any and all restrictions on speech should be opposed, no matter how heinous the speech is. This is, of course, obviously not true and such invalid rhetorical tactics should be pointed out where ever it occurs.
People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
The free speech principle is about setting the bar such that everyone agrees on the right for everyone else despite that meaning it will protect speech nearly everyone agrees is terrible.
It draws a real distinction between speech and actual violence and it’s an important one. The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong.
Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech. I think policy like cloudflare’s approach where they try to make distinctions between application level and infra level tools is generally better than capricious enforcement. Still, this issue is a real one and a result of the local max we’re trapped in because of incentives that lead to our centralized tech stack. We need better tools.
There are also some other restrictions too (mostly around targeted harassment of individuals). Few things rise to this level imo.
A secular amen to that, brother!
The question of what speech is ok to ban is THE question. I think we all agree there's a line somewhere. I think it's more than one line, it's a bunch of line.
Private expression, public expression, public expression for monetary gain (ads), public expression without age-wall, ...
> People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
No need to imagine, it's what I currently see happening.
Damnit, companies should have no recognized "right to speech". Citizen's United is a bloody scourge. A corporation is a vehicle for risk distribution, and should have never been allowed to become anything more. Theoment we started inferring rights to legal fictions we started going stark raving mad.
But they're always right about when to limit physical activity (violence etc.)? It's just as conceivable that we'd be better off as a society if certain forms of physical violence by private citizens weren't illegal vs certain actions of "verbal" activity (publishing child pornography, or classified military secrets) being permissible by law.
Some forms of violence of private citizens are not illegal (self-defense), but I think we're better off in a society where violence is default illegal.
Speech and violence are pretty different things.
The wrong part is that you didnt read the Popper's book because that million-times repeated internet argument is a complete and total misunderstanding of his point, based on a small part cut out of the bigger context.
Well for starters you are quoting him wrong and by the formulations that you, yourself are using, you, yourself, ought to be silenced through violence.
When Popper talks about tolerance he is talking about tolerance of ideas not tolerance as in yay oppressed groups, it's not a paradox unless you use that meaning. Even the Wikipedia article points to this.
As long as you can talk about things you ought to use that, it is when a group tries to forcefully silence other that that group, specifically, has to be repressed through violence, because otherwise they are able to impose their intolerance of ideas upon the system and will eventually overtake it.
That is the paradox. In order to be as tolerant as possible you must not be as tolerant as possible.
This formulation is very often misquoted, interpreted to mean that a tolerant society must repress bigoted beliefs. That leads to no paradox at all, the term "tolerance" is used with different meanings in order to misconstrue a formulation. In doing so, people misquoting are being what the first, correct formulation warns us about.
It is a quite ironic phenomenon, people use an argument of authority that actually states the complete opposite of what they want. I don't think it is hypocritical to support the correct formulation and, thus, silence people positing the incorrect one.
Not that I downvoted him, not that I can, not that I would, I believe these matters to be better left out in the open, but I don't think it's hypocritical.
It seems to me that those people just prioritize a different virtue than what that “correct” formulation would have you prioritize.
If the poster is saying that "no one should tolerate any person who is intolerant", by definition, that includes themselves. The poster has waived their own right to tolerance from the POV of literally any group who views said poster as "intolerant" according to the very principle they are advocating. It is a practical demonstration of the glaring flaw with that tiresome Popper misqoute; it can be wielded from any POV, no matter how ridiculous.
So there is no hypocrisy; they have asked for something and it was given to them. Hopefully the lesson sinks in and we hear no more misapplications of the paradox of tolerance.
Here’s an analogy. Group A says “violence is never ok”. Person B says “No, it’s ok to beat the shit out of someone if they say something you disagree with”.
Group A proceeds to beat the shit out of Person B
Two things are true. Person B has nothing to complain about. Nothing happened to them that they didn’t say is acceptable. Also, Group A doesn’t believe the thing they said they believe.
Setting aside that using violence as the example of harm done is prejudicial, this flaw in this analogy is the "never ok", which is a hidden assumption of the mythical "free speech absolutism" that nearly no one subscribes to. As I have remarked elsewhere in this thread, believing that interfering with speech in some situations is wrong does not logically imply a belief that interfering with speech in all situations is wrong. So there is, at least in my opinion, still no hypocrisy.
Voting has very little to do with anything in these discussions, and it has been that way for years now.
Immature undergrads shouting down speech they disagree with on campus has been going on for years too, no?
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
As long as there are more tolerant than intolerant, then everything’s ok, right?
Why does a society create intolerance? maybe we should remedy that.
Typification is the psychological process of simplifying human behavior into causal chains. It is an expression of the desire to deacribe, compress, and explain human actions without an infinite number of edge cases and suffers from the bias variance tradeoff as it is an inherently predictive activity.
Legitimation turns the descriptive rules of typified behavior into normative rules of how people ought to behave eg: that person didn't meet my expectations, therefore their behavior is wrong.
Instutionalization codifies these normative behavioral rules into social systems eg: justice, educational, scientific, medical, &c.
And finally reification externalizes the process entirely and frames it instead as a natural product of facts and reality (either secularly or religiously, or a combination of both). The end result is a subjective internalization of such an externalized reality used to justify legitimation at the individual and/or institutional levels.
Intolerance arises as a reaction to the breaking of such behavioral norms in that either specific behaviors or their embodiment in groups of people are incompatible with the internalized norms. Rather than adjust ones norms, the behaviors or people embodying the violated norms are sought to be extinguished.
At this point you should have a working model of the process and can begin to imagine what it would look like to throw a spanner into the works.
Note: I've purposely skipped over essentialism and some other topics that could be useful in understanding the process well enough to disrupt it, but this comment is already getting too long.
But actually making it illegal is worrisome -- because that goes both ways (cue "religious freedom").
The best compromise today seems to be deplatforming, which in a sense is nothing new as we've long had the saying "power of the press belongs to those that own it".
The rabid hate speech of the right has done serious damage to the fabric of this country, and it is couched in such a way that making it illegal would be dangerous AF.
It bothers me to no end that free speech absolutists that refuse to recognize that some speech should not be amplified.
The problem is, you're advocating for essentially the weaponization of the middle box. Networking works, because everyone in the middle cooperates to get messages from A to B. No one is wealthy enough to individually backbone their own network connection beyond much more than a local municipality.
To hell with that in short. The General Purpose computer combined with desktop publishing and internetworking puts the power of the press in everyone's hands. The problem is, some groups don't agree with other group's use of it, and want to pressure everyone else to cut off unpopular group's access to the technologically facilitated medium.
These people are nothing short than the most brazen tyrants of our age, and should be resisted at every turn. We need nothing new to deal with horrible people than for our currently equipped LE edifice to do their damned jobs. We have process. It should be followed. This short circuiting through mob pressure to deplatform is nothing more than pulling the plug on the fundaments of the civilization that bore us to the point we're at.
I'm certainly curious what rules you expect LE to enforce and to whom they would be applied.
Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
If your expression is promoting violence, especially violence against a vulnerable group (children, minorities, I'd say even animals), I'm okay with drawing up laws against such things. Thereby reducing freedom of expression.
Advertising for instance. If every building/land owner or municipality could put ads on 'm promoting drinking and smoking, that'd be bad for kids. Limiting that would reduce freedom of expression right?