To just think that a bunch of people not liking something means that something is inherently bad is missing the context for why those people think something is bad, and who told them to think that.
If a billion people think you're an asshole for no objective reason, then you are just doing something they are emotional about.
Maybe it's easier to see if you're not American and thus aren't covered by the first amendment.
https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/in...
Plenty of methaforical ideological death marches on different topics could have been avoided by social gatekeepers not having the social power to silence their friends or party co-members.
Pretending the question is really about someone being rude is patronizing by XKCD.
The concept of 'showing the door' is fine for practical reasons but the other present at the party need to follow in protest on any just so slightly transgression of power.
So now when authoritarianism and racism are in fashion again in ”the West”, those political movements that oppose it are in a quite bad spot, since freedom of thought and expression have been turned down to do a shortsighted delay of the shift in the first place.
Of course unless you are trying to win an internet argumet about free speech with a gotcha that makes you feel smart then you will realize that free speech doesn't just mean preventing the government from directly interfering with your speech but is a much broader concept.
Really because all the people I've seen who bitch about both the lack of their freedom to speak and of being accused of hate speech never shut up, in fact it's seemingly their entire career now to make public appearances at venues and complain about how silenced they are, into hot microphones, for an audience.
And turns out very few people want actually free speech. We're in a forum with strong moderation and the discussion is better for it. Most communities self-enforce norms even without central moderation. There's no easy answers when you have to reckon with the real effects speech has. Germany wasn't special, they weren't even alone at the time. What folks call "fascism" naturally precipitates under the right conditions and I can't think of any time in history where it's been dealt with by the socratic method and not violence of a kind.
But once you have a word you can accuse someone of with actual repercussions folks acting in bad-faith try to fit people they don't like into the mould. We think ourselves so much better than those silly puritans accusing people of witchcraft but we just changed the words. I'm sure you could name five off the top of your head that people level without any kind of justification.
Big online forums with any kind of global popularity already have an inherent problem despite the moderation, not because of hate speech but because of ragebait and other forms of grifting. Especially with anonymous users.
Firstly, that Germany's descent into fascism and anti-semitism were both helped by the lack of free speech. Blasphemy laws prevented the anti-semitism preached from the pulpits to be challenged, and hate speech laws actually helped the Nazis publicise their movement[1].
> Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews.
As to norms, they can be self-enforced because free speech allows such a choice, otherwise it would be the case that those norms were imposed or not even available. Most likely, they'd be someone else's norms.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v... Interview with Fleming Rose about his book.
I guess the analysis about Nazis in the Weimarer Republik are far more complex than a matter of free speech. It tells a lot that I never heard historians seriously discussing it in this context.
> It tells a lot that I never heard historians seriously discussing it in this context.
If you got the first part wrong then the second is only telling in the other direction.
It's difficult to explain why this is wrong because the very premise that ideas are even in competition in the manner you're suggesting just isn't true. There isn't some arena where scribes record victories and losses. And even on the individual level it doesn't work, that someone when presented with the truth will change their opinion. People won't even change their opinion even when it stands to benefit them personally.
I think folks get this idea of "marketplace of ideas" in their head and assume that "fitness" for an idea correlates with correctness. That better ideas spread and survive. No — entertaining ideas, ideas that conform to our existing biases, ideas that we were conditioned to think, ideas that get repeated over and over by someone with a big enough megaphone, ideas that sound plausibly correct, ideas that make people feel clever for thinking them, ideas that fit a particular narrative you believe, propaganda that is spread far and wide.
Being right has never and will never be enough. No one, not you, not me, not anyone is immune to taking on bad ideas. It took 40 years of the entire god damn western world organizing itself around a single message to get a critical mass people to believe that homosexuals were regular people and it still hasn't fully worked. Women have the rights we do because of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Slavery was abolished in 1865 and folks still think black people are inferior.
You're taking on the fallacy that progress just happens and isn't the result of a fuckton of work and sacrifice by people who consciously made it happen and who are out in the fields weeding constantly.
"When your crops are so bad you need to use herbicides to kill weeds lest they immediately take over your farm, it's time to change your crops."
Progress is relative.
In real life on the other hand I want to be able to say stupid things and even if I might be more sensible to others' "hate speech" I would not want that to be banned.
I’m also in this camp and have been down-voted into oblivion many times for just saying something like “I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
It’s not fun to be a defender of truly free speech because you get painted into the same camp as the bad guys.
If you disagree with me on major issues, I will defend your right to state that. But if I find myself in a place full of hate, be they nazis, or tankies, or whatever, I leave and don't come back.
> Would you defend my right to call your little brother or sister terrible disgusting names? Threaten you or your family's lives? Say that your entire ethnicity doesn't deserve to exist?
Out of these three examples, the first and third are totally legal in the U.S.
I don’t agree with or like any of the things you say but I would rather live in a world where you can say them instead of being arrested.
How about just political opinions? How quickly we forgot "free speech zones." This is the government actually limiting public speech in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
BTW, I am not for this regulation in any way. I just don't see the connection to hate speech.