...I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Flying Squid

Well yeah. Exactly how long do you think it takes someone to vote?

[email protected]

Where's the part where they act on these detestable ideas & we're powerless to stop these acts & hold people accountable for their actions?

Unless you exterminate everyone you disagree with, people with ideas you disapprove of will always exist.
Better to know who they are by letting them tell us.
Civil liberties & a right to exist apply as much to them as to you.

As you wrote, people are malleable.
They don't need the input of others to develop incorrect ideas & common biases on their own especially from an early age.
As that article on early childhood development of racial prejudices points out, avoiding talking about discriminatory biases or delaying the topic is not the answer.
Early intervention with active, explicit conversation is important to correct biases & misconceptions acquired from implicit social factors, which suppression of speech will not prevent.
With appropriate work, people can & often need to be corrected.

Agreement through suppressing opposing ideas is unreliable & inadequate.
It doesn't correct self-learned biases.
It assumes people will only hold unopposed ideas, which indicates they never reliably held them.
If an idea has any merit, people should hold them despite flawed challenges, because we did the work of educating them properly.
Choosing to compromise freedoms instead is flat out lazy & an insult to everyone's dignity.

Finally, it's pretty asinine to assume we need to sacrifice civil liberties to gain civil liberties.
In the United States, the free speech & civil liberties movements gained together.
That happened despite worse racism then with Jim Crow laws & white supremacists speaking freely.
If we were able to gain civil liberties then under harsher conditions, then we shouldn't have to sacrifice them now.

Yggstyle

First and foremost - Yes: Thank you. I noticed your comment initially when skimming before my big response... and thought "this person gets it."

I have nothing meaningful to add to what you said: you understood the importance of discussion - you had opinions and expressed them. You spoke up against something you perceived as incorrect.

Cheers. While it's self serving for me to say it: responses like yours give me hope.

Brahvim Bhaktvatsal

What even is people's problem with autism? It can - even and does - make people super smart, after all.

Yggstyle

@[email protected] correctly identifies this. Any ideals can be interpreted in bad faith to infer something that was not intended. If I said I prefer tea - someone would be more than happy to infer that I hate coffee.

My statement was a profession of what I believe to be correct. It is a brief summary of what I was taught and what I determined to be correct based on my experiences... and I stand by them. Admittedly I did bait a hook for a particular kind of person and am not displeased with the result. It appears to have yielded several great examples of what I was talking about.

Addressing your post despite the rather "loaded" opening which I imagine you know shouldn't warrant a response:

Hate speech doesn't exist until it is uttered. The damage is immediately done. It isn't - then it is. How do you propose stopping that? I'm genuinely curious. You appear to be holding my beliefs accountable for not employing precrime or espers... which admittedly, I don't factor in. They do, however, propose the solution: support the victim and admonish the person who was out of line. There are demonstrations of this, in action, in this thread.

People are social creatures: standing with someone is more powerful than simply removing an undesirable statement after the fact. It removes the isolation from the victim and provides support. It says: we, this group, will not stand for your actions. It isolates the perpetrator and makes them, consciously or not, aware that something is wrong. As I stated before: this may not change everyone but the net result is positive.

I'm happy to continue this discussion but it only seems fair that you expand on how you / your views would solve hate speech as it seems to be something you are passionate about... right?

Yggstyle

Very well put.

Hate speech is a favorite topic of people looking to derail a topic or trip someone up. It is a complex issue that is difficult if not impossible to prevent. Someone who wants to express hate will undoubtedly find a way to do so. That is why, in my opinion, the reaction to it matters so much. Discussion allows for a community to rally and support when needed - and teach or correct if the opportunity is presented.

Yggstyle

Hateful people will find each other regardless of my or anyone else's views on free speech. Very ominous statement though.

With that said:

Forcing the discussion into the open is not where any hate group wants to be. It forces them to find proof and facts where there are none. It makes them look bad.

[email protected]

Chicken and the egg, he would have been defeated in the marketplace of ideas, if he didn't seize power and destroy the marketplace of ideas. If the German population held freedom of expression, equality for all under the law, etc., as sacrosanct, and Hitler wasn't able to manufacture a legal mechanism to seize power, nothing would have happened. But they were missing that kind of unity and enough psychopaths organized around Hitler such that he was able to enforce his mandates. Ultimately the question is about whether or not a political paradigm can gain enough traction to have its followers come out on top of everyone else. And not always "domestically", either, war and colonialism take a very similar shape. just as a projection from one region into another.

[email protected]

The comic is actually self contradictory, because the top-left panel satirizes being tolerant with Hitler, while the bottom left satirizes accepting some wars. No wars would mean letting Hitler just go around annexing countries and creating concentration camps wherever he wants.

[email protected]

You cited an example from a society that thinks handguns are a right yet doesn't fight for basic human rights like healthcare

That's absolutely not a modern society

Queen HawlSera

"The Marketplace of Ideas" is such a scam, all that phrase accomplished was getting Bill Nye to debate creationists, who then gained followings because "The TV Box said that the Creationism and Evolution are equal ideas worth debating and considering the merits of!"

Don't let them make you think that Piss belongs on the shelf with Pepsi.

Queen HawlSera

There's also the fact that Germany's Nazi Speech ban is heavily criticized for not taking context into considerations, with various media getting on a blacklist solely for having a swastika, even if it was meant to be educational or shown as a demonstrably bad thing.

This is why so many WW2 games avoid showing the Nazi Flag, even if re-releases of games that previously did, because Germany won't hear of it.

Flying Squid

Ok. What society do you consider modern? France? Germany? Sweden? Finland? I can show a politician saying something just as horrible. Maybe not the one in high office, but elected politicians. I sure can't think of a nation that doesn't have at least a handful of racist assholes that get elected.

[email protected]

This isn't about the paradox of tolerance; the paradox of tolerance refers to a social contract, not a legal framework.

You have the legal right to spew hate and vicious trash. You do NOT have the right to be free of social opprobrium should you do so. As soon as you start legally limiting speech based on what you think is acceptable, you create a legal framework for other people to do the same.

[email protected]

There is no 'hate speech' exception to the 1st amendment of the US constitution. That's a well-established legal precedent that no succeeding court has been willing to overturn.

If you decided to make hateful speech illegal, then it would be perfectly reasonable for Christians to claim that my advocacy for my religion--Satanism--was hate speech.

[email protected]

The tool you use to kill is irrelevant, because the tool has no intent. Mens rea is, with the exception of a very, very few strict liability crimes, a requirement for an action to be criminal. A tool can not have intent.

[email protected]

The paradox of tolerance is a concept, not a unique conclusion.
Philosophers drew all kinds of conclusions.
I favor John Rawls':

Either way, philosopher John Rawls concludes differently in his 1971 A Theory of Justice, stating that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls qualifies this assertion, conceding that under extraordinary circumstances, if constitutional safeguards do not suffice to ensure the security of the tolerant and the institutions of liberty, a tolerant society has a reasonable right to self-preservation to act against intolerance if it would limit the liberty of others under a just constitution. Rawls emphasizes that the liberties of the intolerant should be constrained only insofar as they demonstrably affect the liberties of others: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."

Sacrificing freedom of speech is unnecessary for self-preservation in extraordinary circumstances as speaking one's mind is not an act that directly & demonstrably harms/threatens security or liberty.

[email protected]

Okay, so then do you really want the Trump administration deciding on what speech to ban? Freedom of speech isn't just about defending monsters. It also can save us from them.

[email protected]

"While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."

This is the entire thrust of the argument I am making. My position is that you cannot tolerate extremes that pose a legitimate threat as posited by the quote you selected.

You are arguing that freedom of speech should be tolerated as long as possible. I already clearly stated that this is a position my argument already states.

I don’t know why you felt the need to reiterate what I said.

[email protected]

Nobody said it was a legal framework. I am applying the paradox to how we should frame it legally.

The rest of your argument was already covered in my post.