Censorship of hate speech is an unconditional surrender to hate.

[True Blue Door]

Hatred is an emotion that happens to human beings, and like all emotions it has exactly the power over us that we allow it to have. Do you think men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. chose the path of peace and justice because they had no hate in their hearts, or because some authority would have punished them for it? Quite the opposite: They were both tempted by hate, both could have delivered a message of hate powerfully and persuasively, and in Gandhi's case had plenty of people trying to pull him in that direction, but they chose a better way. They chose it - it wasn't imposed on them by threats from the state.

History is brimming with examples of the folly of trying to legislate the human heart, not least the fact that the most vehement and consistent advocates of political censorship are precisely those who want to protect lies from the truth. How is "hate speech" not an infinitely corruptible concept as a legal standard? Gandhi said the British were oppressing Indians - there you go, "hate speech," calling the British oppressors. Saying that proponents of segregation were bigots - "hate speech," they frequently insisted. Please, Mr. Government Man, Sir, tell me what is and is not true, and punish me for saying anything you deem to be outside that box.

How many more people on the streets of Baltimore would have been arrested if the police had the authority to judge the moral content of signs and chanted slogans? How about anywhere, ever? Oh, some jerk has a picture of a pig eating donuts - HATE SPEECH! Arrest him! And of course since they now have the power to do that, resistance to the arrest becomes grounds for violence. At that point it's just a short hop, skip, and jump to summary execution because someone "disrespected" authority on the streets - a common enough problem without giving it the imprimatur of defending morality.

The evil inherent in political censorship is so profound I have to question the motives, if not the sanity, of anyone who sees it as a valid option - let alone one that serves the values of liberal democracy. At absolute best, it is an admission of a crippled society so completely infested with hate and so incapable of rational self-governance that it needs the medical device of such methods to survive at all. And since the case I'm thinking about when I say that is Germany, whose brief initial experiment with democracy led to genocide and global war costing on order of 50 million lives within a couple of decades, any comparison with the United States and its problems is so irrational that it must be driven by some level of hateful viewpoint itself.

The long and short of it is that advocating de jure censorship of hate speech is an authoritarian hypocrisy by people who would loudly denounce any such imposition against their own expressions - even if they legitimately rose to the level of hate speech by rational standadrs - while passionately seeking to wield that power against others. This is just common sense, and basic moral foundation stuff to a liberal and progressive mind: You don't demand to limit other people in ways that you yourself are not willing to be limited, and I for one have no intention of surrendering my liberty and human autonomy for the sake of anyone else's feelings.

I do not surrender my weapons of fact, logic, argument, and yes passion. If I hate something or someone, and I allow that emotion to overtake my reason in how I express opinions, then I am in error - certainly not a criminal. And if I am genuinely in error, then someone else can show me that error through conversation, and either (a)persuade me toward a more constructive viewpoint, or (b)discredit me as someone who does not listen to reason, and whose views should not be influential.

This is so fundamental to basic Enlightenment concepts of liberty and ethics that I shouldn't even have to argue for them. They should be obvious to any remotely decent and intelligent person. But that doesn't mean I would censor those who advocate censorship: Because unlike them, I can win arguments.

[beam me up scottie]

1. k&r

From the ACLU:

Free Speech

Over the years, the ACLU has frequently represented or defended individuals engaged in some truly offensive speech. We have defended the speech rights of communists, Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, accused terrorists, pornographers, anti-LGBT activists, and flag burners. That’s because the defense of freedom of speech is most necessary when the message is one most people find repulsive. Constitutional rights must apply to even the most unpopular groups if they’re going to be preserved for everyone.

[cali]

2. I oppose criminalizing hate speech, but

what is the line between hate speech and incitement? No, I'm not suggesting that Pamela Geller crossed that line with her odious faux cartoon contest, but she dances on that line all the frickin' time.

If, for instance, someone went out and killed a Muslim and later said that they had been persuaded by Geller's comments on her blog that he had to take action against Muslims, she wouldn't be held accountable in a court of law.
I'm conflicted about that.

[beam me up scottie]

3. Should the RCC/Westboro Baptists be held responsible for anti-lgbt hate crimes?

Their anti-lgbt propaganda qualifies as hate speech, imo.

[Bluenorthwest]

33. As you know, any mention of Phelps or the Pope sends this crew packing, she will never even try

to explain why it's ok for the Pope to say God is at war with gay people and that others must fight that war for God if comics about a long dead historical figure are so massively insulting that laws must be passed. That poster says she loves Francis, loves him. Francis says gay rights come from Satan, he says our families are by their nature a form of child abuse and he says this as the leader of an organization attempting to hide their own child abuse. Francis says LGBT are 'inherently disordered' and 'disfiguring God' and his words are answered with hundreds of anti gay acts of violence each year.

The same straight religious people who did nothing to oppose Phelps for years on end, hundreds of attacks on funerals and other events, are simply livid about comics about a historical figure. They did not mind LGBT people being subjected to all of that extreme venom, at least not enough to take action. Threads about anti gay violence or actions on DU are met with little interest, and the contrast between those threads and these is frankly very hurtful to witness.

[CBGLuthier]

4. If a muslim kills someone and says the Koran commanded it would you ban the Koran

as an instrument of hate?

If a christian blows up an abortion clinic killing everyone inside and says their preacher told them abortion is wrong would you arrest the preacher? Ban the bible?

People need to be held accountable for their own actions. No one MADE the texas terrorist twosome attempt to shoot up her little cartoon show.

Those two assholes went and got guns got in their car and got their dumb asses killed because they were two dumb assholes. Blame is a waste of time.

[True Blue Door]

5. Every power is double-edged.

Even when it's true that incitement has taken place - Fox News, for instance, has very clearly played a role in a number of murders and massacres - the question is not of their guilt, but of the price of legally asserting that guilt beyond civil suits.

If we held them accountable, how easily could they pervert the standard it established, and say that peaceful protesters against police violence are guilty of inciting someone who shoots a cop if their rhetoric is in any way angry? The slope is steep and slippery, and they would exploit that to the hilt.

So the practical standard for pursuing incitement charges is understandably very high. I would say "Let's do something within our rights because violent psychopaths threaten us not to do it" is pretty far from meeting the incitement standard.

It's actually a slightly encouraging sign that right-wingers have learned that concept, since it's the foundation of nonviolent protest. In past decades they would have just formed lynch mobs and gone out looking for Middle Eastern-looking people to hang or beat to death. Instead they decided to exercise Constitutional rights and wait for psychos of a foreign ideology mirroring theirs to come after them - which is perfectly legitimate.

You can't be accused of incitement if what you're inciting is violence against yourself for exercising your rights. We should be flattered that they're cribbing our playbook.

[Lee-Lee]

27. Using your logic they should be rounding up the clerics and other Islamic scholars

and activists who led these guys down the fundentalist path and planted the idea people must die for cartoons into their heads.

Because, in the end, that's who would be guilty of incitement in this case- not Geller.

[Shoulders of Giants]

38. The people guilty are the people who shot people with guns.

Cartoons and religions are not guilty. They are merely ideas.

[X_Digger]

34. Imminence. Incitement isn't what many are thinking it is. n/t

[Scootaloo]

6. Do you consider being free to use a city's bus service to promote hate "censorship"?

If you do not, then don't worry, Saint Gellar of the Poorly-Formed Argument and here adherents are not being censored.

if you do feel that having court rulings that city buses must accept your "ads" of gibbering hate speech constitute a form of censorship, then jesus fucking christ, do the doctors know you have escaped the facility?

[True Blue Door]

7. Everyone has an equal right to the public space.

So either disallow any political speech whatsoever in public-subsidized media (someone might be deeply offended that you support Bond Measure X to fund city parks), or it's all legit.

Your personal emotional reactions to things are not the standard of public welfare. I probably agree with most of your reactions, but I know why I have a problem with those opinions and can actually articulate it instead of just huffing, puffing, and trying to shut people up.

I can't imagine how little one has to be acquainted with one's own reasoning to not be able to instantly debunk someone like Gellar. Do you think if you just shut her up, that her and people like her will not exist? Hide it and it's not there, like an infant's game of peek-a-boo?

I want to keep bigots right where I can see them, loudly announcing themselves.

Censorship as an issue is also a nice litmus test, exposing counterfeit liberals who wear progressive ideals like a skinsuit they shed at the first inconvenience.

[Scootaloo]

8. Do you believe being free to put ads on buses constitutes censorship, or not?

it's a very simple question.

[True Blue Door]

10. Only if the limits are imposed by law and are politically selective.

Like I say: Disallow advertising in general on that medium, and that's a valid limit. Disallow some speech based on some authority's judgment of its moral content, that's not a valid limit.

The standard of equal protection under the law is pretty clear. I don't understand your extreme reaction, and I don't think you do either.

[Scootaloo]

11. So no, Gellar is not being censored.

So what in the world are you even going on about/ is someone else being censored? is hate speech being barred somewhere?

My "extreme reaction" is simply the logical reaction to someone saying something profoundly stupid about absolutely nothing. Also, your bad history. you know the Nazis didn't come to power through democratic process, right? No, no, if the places you go for information tell you Gellar is being persecuted and denied free speech (you know, what with her books and blogs and expos and bus ads and prime time news appearances), then odds are they tell you the nazis were a democratic movement, too. You might want better sources of information.

[beam me up scottie]

13. .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026645252

[Scootaloo]

15. No one is being censored there, are they? No Free speech is being infringed, is it?

No, it's someone who has a different opinion than you. Which apparently you feel is terrible and offensive.

Without even a drop of irony evident from you, let's note.

[beam me up scottie]

16. I posted a link to an op re: banning hate speech so you'd know what inspired the op.

But feel free to keep attacking me for trying to help, it seems to be a hobby of yours.

Not worth my time.

[Scootaloo]

18. In response to me asking where someone was being censored

There is no censorship there. Simply someone with an opinion you do not agree with.

Apparently they must be silenced, huh?

[Warren DeMontague]

20. No, they're free to express their extremely wrong-headed ideas about the 1st Amendment.

And the rest of us are free to go "um, fuck that"

[beam me up scottie]

21. I didn't alert on that op, did you?

Who the fuck is trying to silence them?



Issues, man.

Some people have them.

[Warren DeMontague]

24. No, not me.

I almost never alert. Almost.

[Scootaloo]

25. Agreed. Like people who imagine censorship where there is none

I mean, well, unless one counts the pro-Palestine bus ads that are barred from running. Or the media getting corralled by the Baltimore PD. or the mass arrests of protesters. Or any of the numerous other violations of free speech that didn't seem to rile you guys up at all.

It's always the hate speech. That's always your line in the sand. The one bastion of free speech that demands defense above all others. Why is that, I wonder?

...well, no I don't actually wonder. Much as gun nuts are terrified that the gub'mint is going to take away their guns, so too are bigots always worried that the lib'rulz are going to take away their hate speech.

[True Blue Door]

14. The topic of criminalizing hate speech was raised earlier.

I thought it prudent to chip in my own thoughts on the matter, and they were too extensive to just be a comment.

As for your Putin-esque attempts to Godwinize liberalism, you may have noticed that the Nazis themselves practiced pretty rigorous political censorship.

And if there had been hate speech laws on the books in other countries, how likely would a statement like "The Germans have gone mad and are about to soak the world in blood" have been tolerated rather than suppressed as anti-German bigotry?

You may be aware that such arguments (calling objective assessments of Nazism "anti-German&quot were indeed made by Hitler's defenders in the United States against his critics, but somehow their position was unpersuasive - probably because Mein Kampf was not censored here, and people could see for themselves what was going on, at least well enough to resist domestic fascist movements.

[Scootaloo]

17. "As for your Putin-esque attempts to Godwinize liberalism"

My what? You mean, by telling you the nazis did not seize power democratically?

Also, you're the one who brought that stupid shit up in your OP:

And since the case I'm thinking about when I say that is Germany, whose brief initial experiment with democracy led to genocide and global war costing on order of 50 million lives

You start an OP bitching about literally nothing. You do so on the premise of the current nonexistent crisis of al lthe censorship that isn't happening. All on the basis that you really fucking hate that someone has an opinion you disagree with. You bring up the Holocaust to help your point, then claim I'm "Godwinizing" after I point out your history is bad?

Are you really just throwing out random buzz words and hoping they form into something resembling an argument?

[True Blue Door]

26. Floating the specter of Nazism doesn't work when the main reason it failed

in this country was free speech, and the main reason it was able to secure power in Germany (regardless of being seized undemocratically) was that Germans were accustomed to and comfortable with authoritarianism.

And shrieking that it's "much ado about nothing" isn't very persuasive when it's you making the "ado," and you act like our society is about to become the Fourth Reich because Pamela Gellar draws cartoons and hurts your feelings.

Your sole contribution to the conversations you invade is to remind liberals what we're not. And for that I thank you.

[Scootaloo]

29. You're the one raising naziism first off

I only referred back to it to correct your factually wrong claim that it came to power through democracy. it did not. Hitler reached his position through an appoitnment made possible mostly through threats and intimidation, then expanded and secured his party's total power after the reichstag fire. Democracy had nothing to do with this. So no, despit a (weirdly) popular meme, Hitler was not elected to a damn thing.

Second, you are trying to boil down an extremely complex issue into something that you hope will fit the narrative you have already set up. if the ONLY DIFFERENCE between the United States and the Weimar Republic was free speech laws, you might have a case.

...Except of course that the Weimar Constitution guaranteed individual freedom of speech

Germans are entitled to free expression of opinion in word, writing, print, image, etc. This right cannot be obstructed by job contract, nor can exercise of this right create a disadvantage. Censorship is prohibited. (Article 118)

In fact this guarantee was one of the few points of similarities between the Pre-nazi german republic, and the United States of the time. Actually the Germans were ahead of the US on this one, as the Sedition Acts were still very much in palce...

Your history is bad.

[True Blue Door]

32. I mentioned Nazism to deflate it as an argument I knew someone like you would raise.

You obliged.

So no, despit a (weirdly) popular meme, Hitler was not elected to a damn thing.

The Nazi Party won a large minority in open election. Hitler was then accepted into government as part of a governing coalition. Part of their argument for assuming dictatorial power was to end the civil violence they themselves were usually responsible for. Funny that, how people with a violent agenda try to sell it by blaming the victims.

...Except of course that the Weimar Constitution guaranteed individual freedom of speech

Anyone can write anything on a piece of paper. Respect for liberty doesn't arise from the strength of laws - it's the other way around. The Weimar Republic, the Bolivarian constitutions of 19th century Latin America, and post-Soviet Russia made that abundantly clear.

Your history is a stewpot of factoid-driven ignorance and deliberate evasions.

[Pooka Fey]

39. Great post about the Weimar constitution

It takes effort and time to correct the manipulations of the historical record that some people resort to, for the purpose of supporting their political arguments. I've had posters make extraordinary false and stupid claims to me. There's an avalanche of distortion of history online, to try to clean up. So thank you for setting the record straight on this point.

[Pooka Fey]

37. Scholars have written volumes on the subject, there are hours of documentary footage available

and you seem to be trying to sum it up in a DU post.

Many people who have studied this topic would never dream of saying something so inane in a public forum. If you care to study the German resistance movement, including the 14 assassination attempts on Hitler made by Germans, you might learn something. Germany was one of the most progressive and artistically liberal countries in Europe when Hitler came to power - Hitler eliminated his political opponents by violence. His sophisticated propaganda machine is a model of how to manipulate the masses. Knowing this actually makes Hitler's rise to power EVEN MORE astonishing.

Your statement here is false, a real whopper

...the main reason it (Nazism) was able to secure power in Germany (regardless of being seized undemocratically) was that Germans were accustomed to and comfortable with authoritarianism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Resistance_to_Nazism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Adolf_Hitler

PEOPLE everywhere are comfortable with authoritarianism. It's called human nature. You're skating next to the "American Exceptionalism" belief system, which is so very threadbare and tiresome. Our so-called "free speech" laws in America are great, but they don't make us super-citizens.

[True Blue Door]

41. I'm aware of the history, and of people's attempts to rewrite it for ideological purposes.

Thank you for adding yet another example.

The German resistance "movement" was a loose fringe of individuals breaking ranks with the government spread over a period of years, and only extended to a higher level of organization and potency when the inconvenience of losing the war became evident to his military accomplices. They were quite happy with the murdering tyrant who was going to deliver them glory and riches; not so happy with the author of their nation's destruction.

Attempts to exaggerate the extent of domestic resistance have largely been driven by a need to rationalize German society as being other than what it was, and to a large extent still is: A culture renowned since the Holy Roman Empire for its obsessive, suffocating regimentation of life. One late medieval joke about travel through German states was that you had best hold your breath unless you see a sign explicitly permitting you to breathe.

So then we get to the 20th century, Germans as a unified nation lose a Total War, are made crushingly poor by economic reparations, but are given the official right to bitch about it. Surprise! They found the situation chaotic and responded with either muted criticism or outright enthusiasm to the first tyrannical vermin smart enough to speak the language of Order and Vindication. Their experiment in democracy - one imposed on them by force - ended 14 years later in the furthest undemocratic extreme imaginable.

As to "American Exceptionalism," every nation has its own history and personality, just like individuals. No one is fundamentally anything, but their actions reveal them. Unless you wish to be guilty of the opposite extreme, fetishizing Germany and demonizing everyone else of similar size and influence who never became that monstrous, you can't just deny facts you find inconvenient.

Acknowledging differences in history does not deny similarities in fundamental humanity. Don't be so reactionary.

[Pooka Fey]

42. Let me analyse just one sentence of your above post, because I only have 45 minutes.

Here is the one sentence:

Unless you wish to be guilty of the opposite extreme, fetishizing Germany and demonizing everyone else of similar size and influence who never became that monstrous, you can't just deny facts you find inconvenient.

I pointed out the existence of the German resistance movement, a word which you inappropriately place in quotation marks. Pointing out its existence does not make me "guilty", (an interesting and telling word choice) of "fetishizing" (another interesting and telling word choice) Germany.

...you can't just deny facts you find inconvenient.

Refusing to condense the history of 20th C Europe into a DU-sized post does not merit a response claiming that I am "denying facts". It's false, and a baseless thing to say online. Truly pitiful.

...and demonizing everyone else of similar size and influence who never became that monstrous

I can't even respond to something that makes no sense and is so incoherent. Demonize who, and how do you claim I did this? I don't say this often, but the above is literally an insane statement.

...but their actions reveal them

This little bit you got right, from a previous sentence. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[True Blue Door]

44. France had a resistance movement. Germany had a few random people defying Hitler

for personal reasons until he pissed off the military by losing battles they felt could have been won with better leadership.

The single strongest element of German society was the military, and that had been true throughout German history. First as warlike tribes, then to warlike feudal states whose people infamously served as brutal mercenaries in other countries' wars (including our own Revolutionary War, against us), then to a warlike unified state that tore Europe to shreds - that is the context into which Hitler arose. Germany did not fall from grace. It fell from being a brutally authoritarian society almost directly into being a Satanic totalitarian one, with barely a hiccup of liberal democracy between the two.

Refusing to condense the history of 20th C Europe into a DU-sized post does not merit a response claiming that I am "denying facts".

So we should ignore history if we can't communicate its entirety in one post? Isn't that the epitome of proudly ignorant know-nothingism that history revisionists always resort to when reality doesn't suit them?

Every statement is an "overbroad generalization," every fact "taken out of context" if it's inconvenient. We are supposed to simply trust on faith that the revisionist has some sort of mystical obscurantist insight into the truth of the past that mere education can't exceed or dispute. I'm not saying you specifically are a revisionist, but you are leaning very heavily on their tropes to make a seriously dubious argument.

Demonize who, and how do you claim I did this? I don't say this often, but the above is literally an insane statement.

Your interpretation of my saying that Nazi Germany had something to do with Germany was to suggest I was engaging in "American Exceptionalism." That is "literally" (i.e., figuratively) "insane."

This little bit you got right, from a previous sentence. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Actually a broken clock is wrong always. You just aren't aware of its failure twice a day.

[Pooka Fey]

45. Stating that a German Resistance existed does in NO WAY condone or excuse the evil of the 3rd Reich

and you cannot possibly know or understand how deeply I loathe and despise anyone who would propose something so vile in writing.

Moving on to your next ridiculous claim:

Germany had a few random people defying Hitler for personal reasons until he pissed off the military by losing battles they felt could have been won with better leadership.

(1) http://www.amazon.com/Disobeying-Hitler-German-Resistance-Valkyrie/dp/0199927928/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431205150&sr=1-1&keywords=german+resistance

(2) http://www.amazon.com/Honourable-Defeat-History-Resistance-1933-1945-ebook/dp/B00RDBXUWO/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431205358&sr=1-2&keywords=german+resistance

(3) http://www.amazon.com/German-Resistance-Hitler-Peter-Hoffmann/dp/0674350863/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431205381&sr=1-3&keywords=german+resistance

(4) http://www.amazon.com/History-German-Resistance-1933-1945/dp/0262080885/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431205458&sr=1-5&keywords=german+resistance

(5) http://www.amazon.com/Contending-Hitler-Resistance-Publications-Historical/dp/0521466687/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431205417&sr=1-6&keywords=german+resistance

(6) http://www.amazon.com/Power-Solitude-Life-German-Resistance/dp/080329915X/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431205504&sr=1-7&keywords=german+resistance

(7) http://www.amazon.com/Plotting-Hitlers-Death-German-Resistance/dp/0805056483/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431205556&sr=1-8&keywords=german+resistance

It would be difficult to amass so scholarship over a what you claim are a few random people defying Hitler for personal reasons. I wonder how much scholarship on this topic has never been translated into English?

[True Blue Door]

47. The scholarship on the subject is massive because the need to find humanizing details

in so massive a horror is overwhelming.

Never has a nation had to be so thoroughly sifted for evidence of its basic humanity, and what came up were essentially anecdotes: People here and there helped Jews, others here and there said "Fuck Hitler" and got shot for it, a few small groups printed leaflets and got thrown away or shot or sent to the Eastern front for it.

And then in the midst of Germany's collapsing fortunes a decade and 10-20 million corpses late, some military officers finally got on board the humanity train, and suddenly there's a "German Resistance" because Hitler proved too insane even for bona fide fascists.

My only point in even bringing up the subject was to say that Germany was a rare case where censorship was proven to be a medical necessity, the way that immuno-compromised patients have to be carefully isolated from infections. The analogy extends in both directions: Societies that are healthy need routine exposure to psychotic ideas so they can recognize what they are and dismiss them, developing intellectual immunity.

Even Germany itself may some day be able to develop such immunities; trust itself and be trusted by other nations again on the same level as countries that never did that. But it will still be a while. As for the United States, free speech that includes the rights of bigots has by and large been a virtuous cycle.

[vaberella]

9. Fine...however without consequences hate speeches lead into actions.

Hitler started off with hate speech. Had there been censorship of his nonsense and enforcement of the rights of people, I wonder how far he would have gotten. Ultimately for me, words have or can lead to dire consequences ---and when I say this, it is for speech that reinforces the subjugation of people.

[True Blue Door]

12. All speech has consequences. Not all speech leads to actions.

If all speech led to actions, there would be no reasonable distinction between speech and action. But clearly there is.

As for Hitler, Mein Kampf has never been illegal in the United States, and yet somehow it failed to resonate as it did in Germany - a society that for all of its history prior to the Weimar Republic, including as a disparate set of local tyrannies, had rigid controls of all political speech.

Perhaps the lesson in the fact is that hate speech is less powerful where all speech is respected. The fact that anti-Semitic viewpoints are far more common in Europe where they're officially illegal to express than in the US where they aren't, and that Islamic radicalism is far more prevalent in Middle Eastern countries that ban it than in countries that rigorously defend free speech is pretty strong evidence to that conclusion.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if your opinion of someone else's speech being hateful is right. If you concede the power to suppress it, you give governments the power to suppress any speech they consider remotely disruptive. And ultimately it would be used by bigots themselves to stop people from calling them bigots - the exact opposite of the intended result.

[Warren DeMontague]

19. I'm not convinced the metro bus system couldnt have other options for regulating ads than

Making a 1st amemdment/not 1st amendment argument.

IF they are accepting paid political opinion or "issue" ads, it becomes more difficult to make arguments about regulating the message content of some ads, and not others.

But what it seems you're trying to do, here, is move the ball onto a different field, where the layout is more favorable. Discussions on DU around this stuff for the past few days haven't been about the bus ads. They've been about people who think it should be illegal to draw blasphemous cartoons or "insult a deity".

DU has several people wildly misinformed and off base about the 1st amendment, not the least of which are the folks who seem to think that if someone says something that they know might "make" someone so angry that person was "forced" (???) to commit an act of violence, then the person doing the speaking is the criminal.

I know, fucked up, right? Doesnt make any sense. Basically it says that anyone ought to be able to censor any speech - a heckler's veto- they dont like, merely by becoming violent over it.

But what you're doing here is, you seem to be trying to make this a censorship argument that no one is, currently, having.

[Scootaloo]

22. But is it censorship to have those ads?

And the book deals.
And the websites.
And the expos.
And the TV interviews.
And the youtube channel.

The OP is talking about censorship. i want to know what censorship.

if this is just a meta thread whining about people who don't agree with the OP about something, then well, I expect some self-crucifying martyrdom about the barring of meta threads in GD.

[Warren DeMontague]

23. Oh ffs.

It's DU, people argue about all sorts of stuff. I'm sure you've gotten all bent out of shape about opinions held by others, here, at some point.

People are making the argument that speech they don't like, speech that might make someone mad, speech that "insults a Deity", etc. should be criminalized. Outlawed. The speakers, arrested.

I'm sorry, but that is an incredibly wrong-headed position to take (particularly for people who claim the mantle of liberal or progressive or what-have-you) and given that the 1st Amendment is the fucking linchpin of liberty in our Constitution, fuck yes I'm going to sit here all damn day if I have to and dispute those arguments.

Sorry, just like I'm sorry if some people's rigid belief system "forces" them to freak out when someone draws a cartoon of their Deity.



Ok, actually, I'm not that sorry.

[Scootaloo]

28. I try to restrain my pissed-offness for things that are actually happening

If I got pissed off about every single thing that someone on the internet imagined was happening, I would pretty quickly find myself a hollow shell of a person consumed by nothing more than deep hatred and paranoid fear that someone else might not hate as much as I do. Know what I mean?

Pamela Gellar is not being censored. Someone on the internet thinks she should be. You disagree. Hooray. But the fact is, she's not censored at all. in fact, given how many dead Muslims the United States generates annually, I would say quote the opposite; instead of being suppressed, she's being openly endorsed.

Imagine if that pissed you off as much as someone on the internet calling for censorship.

[Warren DeMontague]

30. I didn't say she was being censored. Neither did the OP.

however, civics is important. The US Constitution is important. the 1st Amendment, important.

at least, I think so.

[Scootaloo]

31. Is it?

Again, it only seems important to you and several other posters when it's anti-Muslim hate speech. The rest of the time, I don't see or hear anything from your crowd.

It kind of creates the appearance that free speech is only important to you when it's hate speech targeting a minority group that is already established as an acceptable target on DU.

Weird, huh?

[Bluenorthwest]

36. I watched Straight Religious people stage hundreds and hundreds of attacks on LGBT funerals while

the larger Straight Religious community did nothing to oppose or counter the attacks and also by the way, offered no protection to the victims, they did not offer to stand with us, they also did not take up signs to say 'God Loves You' to balance the message. They just let it go on and on and on.
So what I notice is that Straight Religious people are in some cases the creators of aggressive hate speech and in other cases the silent assistants to the nastiest most insulting speech imaginable and yet when it is Straight Religious people 'offended' over a comic about a historical figure, Straight folks become very passionate. A highly situational ethic they have running.

I assume that your desire is to allow religion to endlessly denigrate others while religion is protected from any and all commentary, criticism, mockery or parody. Because your words taken in the context of actual history strongly suggest that to be the case.

[beam me up scottie]

46. It's different because it's offensive to religious people, Blue.

The thread about christian leaders threatening lgbt people sunk like a rock for a reason.

I'm capable of being offended by all kinds of hate speech, not just the stuff that hurts people who are just like me.

[Warren DeMontague]

43. Uh, hardly, dude.

One, I don't have a "crowd".

Two, if there is one common thread you can follow through my over 10 years at this place, it has been unapologetic defense of the 1st Amendment.

Three, I cut my 1st Amendment teeth on the ACLU defending the right of Nazis to march in Skokie. As someone who comes from a family of Jews, that seems to not gel real well with me only being interested in "defending hate speech against people I don't like" or whatever-the-fuck.

[ellennelle]

35. the sake of argument

i certainly agree with most if not all your points. however, in your insistence that argument will win the day, you assume that rational argument removes the need for limits on free speech. this assumption is based on the further assumption that all parties involved are directed and moved by rational logic.

would that this were true. not even the most logical among us can always agree on what is rational and logical. just check out the recent email debate between chomsky and sam harris. (though most would agree sam made a most irrational ass of himself.)

that said, i have to make sure you do understand that there do in fact exist limits to free speech, right? we can't wantonly slander or defraud, and we can't yell fire in a crowded theatre if there is no fire.

these actions have pernicious intent, employing lies to achieve nefarious goals.

i would submit - just for the sake of argument - that open hate speech falls into this category.

consider the case of julius striecher, the only non-official, non-military nazi to be hanged at nuremberg. his crime? here is his condemnation by the jurists when he was sentenced to hang:

"... For his 25 years of speaking, writing and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as 'Jew-Baiter Number One.' In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution. ... Streicher's incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.”[15]

wiki

to my mind, they make a powerful point, which if generalized, would not only indict geller, but fox news and the whole of murdoch's propaganda enterprise, limpboy, savage, coulter, hannity, and all the rest of them. how else, for example, could the bulk of our populace, and all but a handful or our congress, be so "incited" as to engage in the "active persecution" of all muslims after 9/11, to the point of invading two sovereign nations and occupying their land, oppressing their peoples?

how can we feel so incensed at the immorality of the rightwing propaganda machine while defending any and everything that comes out of their mouths? we really cannot have it both ways. not because we must adhere to the letter and death the enlightenment principle of free speech, but because we must also adhere to the even higher enlightenment principle of requiring the greater good for all in each and every action. and we must do this rationally; when faced with the facts of what happens when "free speech" without constraints runs amok (e.g., swindling and stampedes and genocide, oh my!), we are called upon to make judgments in the interest of the greater good of all.

merely having the belief that someone is evil and/or dangerous is not enough for their free speech to be infringed, nor would it be for them to have discussions and even public display of these beliefs. but, that speech must also be understood as having no iniquitous intent or goal for the greater good of all. when one's belief targets an identified group (i.e., race, color, gender, creed, etc.) for suppression or attack or even eradication, their public speech about it is subject to the question of whether or not it serves the greater good. i submit that, at that point - at that clear, bright line - it does not. so, if this criterion of the greater good is not met, we must as a society at least consider that to be a limit that cannot be crossed, just as we set the limits for fraud, slander, and shouting fire in a crowded theatre.

this is where we can see the difference between protecting the free speech of pam geller as opposed to protecting the free speech of charlie hebdo; geller targets muslims, with persecutory language, while charlie hebdo is an equal opportunity satire machine. for them, everyone is fair game. which is as it should be; we need the power of parody and the court jester to throw our contradictions back in our collective face. it offers critical perspective. geller and her ilk, on the other hand, have no such intention, no goal but to single out a targeted group and tar them with the broad brush of "other," with hate and incitement.

as a cautionary aside, i would add that the 99% must remember to apply these fine distinctions when we target the 1%. so far, as long as we are careful to maintain the calls for the end of social structures that support the elite oligarchy in the name of the greater good (which seems so - rationally - obvious), we remain on good footing. if we target the crimes that are committed, within the framework of justice for all, and avoid swooping up the innocent simply because they are "privileged," then we have a prayer of maintaining civility. if we ever even tilt in the general direction of the mob rule that exploded in the french revolution with the guillotine and arbitrary imprisonments, we are doomed by our own judgment. better to lean hard into the reconciliation direction of south africa, imho.

and yes, these are all moral judgments; what could be more steeped in the enlightenment than that? we are called upon as individuals to make these judgments every day, and we ignore them at our peril. should we abandon this ethic at the social, public level?

[True Blue Door]

40. I'm aware that rational argument is insufficient, but it is definitely indispensable.

Quite obviously most people are not directed entirely by logic, and some are motivated by its nemesis. But identifying and immunizing society against psychoses requires exposure to them, and to intellectual combat with them.

Otherwise those who are rational will be weak when the power calculus is not in their favor: They will be tempted toward nihilism and moral retreat, behaving as if all ideas were equally corrupt, and cede the field to competing monsters whose only debate is what method civilization should use to commit suicide.

And while there are limits to speech based on the murky borderlands between speaking and action, those limits definitely do not apply to speech whose only negative consequences are in the criminal actions of its enemies rather than its supporters.

Take some of the 1960s Civil Rights protests, for instance - whites and blacks sitting together at lunch counters despite local and state laws prohibiting it. These were deliberate provocations against the violent racist establishment, and the locals usually obliged. Showing that they were peaceful and the segregationists violent was the entire point of the exercise.

Now, not every segregationist was violent, but the fact was that the South was far more tolerant of terrorist garbage like the KKK than they were of black people simply wanting to be treated like human beings, and that was what the protests meant to prove. They did so. And the racist establishment cried foul, blamed the protesters for the violence against them, and said they were "inciting" it and defaming the South in the process, but it was simply exposing the truth.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a black and a white person sitting together, and nothing inherently wrong with drawing a picture of a historical figure, so if either of these things "provokes" violence, then the problem is clearly with the individuals and political movements preaching the violence, not the non-violent movements that simply defy it.

consider the case of julius striecher, the only non-official, non-military nazi to be hanged at nuremberg. his crime? here is his condemnation by the jurists when he was sentenced to hang:

This was incitement of his own party to commit violence against others, not merely defying the violence of others. The problem here is that people are confusing the roles in the historical analogy. Nazism was the violent party; the non-violent party whose fundamental rights "offended" and "provoked" them to violence were Jews and liberals.

It's a very simple standard in most circumstances: Who is being violent, and who is not being violent? And it's pretty easy to see through the ludicrous moral equivocations that always follow, implying that speaking an "offensive" opinion is in a similar moral ballpark to threatening or carrying out murders against those who offend. The two are not even in the same moral cosmos.

While I agree that Fox News and others of their ilk have indeed been guilty of incitement to murder, I don't think holding them legally accountable is an option beyond civil lawsuits, and for precisely the reason outlined above - that right-wingers would abuse that standard to blur and eliminate the distinction, and end up using the power to prosecute incitement as a way to prosecute the victims of politically-motivated violence.

Republican prosecutors would charge people protesting against police violence with the deaths of police and their own fellow demonstrators at the hands of police. They would charge people protesting against racism with "hate speech," as they already routinely accuse the accuser.

Their constant desire to charge people who protest against wars with "treason" would be strengthened, since they could argue precedent in such speech laws - that opposing foreign policies of a government inherently weakens its ability to carry them out, and thus through some convoluted chain of logic say that protesters deliberately caused the deaths of US soldiers.

Evil is not something you can destroy or silence. Millennia of self-righteous tyrants, priests, censors, and radical mobs failed to improve the lot of humankind, because you cannot uproot flaws inherent to the human condition. Any kind of freedom requires the intellectual humility to understand that being right - no matter how right - carries no entitlement whatsoever beyond every other idea, nor should anyone who truly believes they are right need or expect such privileges.

I personally would have no interest in living in a society where people were superficially pleasant by force of law, because I would know their hearts would be brimming with unexpressed rage and hatred, sublimated resentments and crazy thoughts that festered for lack of open examination. It would seep into everything they do, poisoning their minds and leading to horrors the moment that suffocating social control relaxed or failed.

Conservative Islam, with all its oppressive rules and hypocrisy, produced radical Islam from the suppressed humanity of its millions of involuntary followers, and any form of conservative/authoritarian policy in Western societies would also lead to radicalism in the same vein. At best, if instead there were a rebound in the opposite direction, the reaction is often just as radical and oppressive - insane purity trolls like Robespierre and Lenin, crushing humankind in a vise-grip between their violence and that of their right-wing doppelgangers.

The only limits to freedom apply to situations where people recognize it's already been subverted: A liberal society doesn't start a war, but it can acknowledge when a war has been started and fight for the sake of some day not having to fight. A liberal society doesn't limit speech, but acknowledges when speech has gone beyond political expression and been merely a tool of violence.

Saying "give me your money or I'll kill you" is a crime because it strongly compels another's actions. Replying to the armed robber, "Fuck you, go rob someone else" does not compel the robber to pull the trigger. Even if you deliberately walked into a bad part of town in your best clothes hoping to find that situation, it's still 100% on the robber if they rob and/or shoot you.