You must live in a particularly violent place.
I've never experienced what you claim.
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Non-crime hate incidents - yet another not-at-all-Orwellian reality
- Thread starter icehorse
- Start date
I've never experienced what you claim.
PureX
Veteran Member
Then why do you have a gun?
I prepare for what's possible.
To have, & not need
is better than
to need, & not have.
But this is not to enforce speech
restrictions upon anyone.
The law is.
Civility is pretty common and freely given.
Though that is in actual face to face meeting with folks.
Spending too much time on social media, I can see where that'd get you thinking otherwise.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Old but revelant I think, but it gives an idea....
Where the world sees limits to free speech
In principle, most people around the world support freedom of expression. But there is a fine line between general support for freedom of speech and support for specific forms of expression.
www.pewresearch.org
Secret Chief
Degrow!
No, it doesn't answer the question I asked you - for a list of what YOU consider to be totalitarian countries.Old but revelant I think, but it gives an idea....
Where the world sees limits to free speech
In principle, most people around the world support freedom of expression. But there is a fine line between general support for freedom of speech and support for specific forms of expression.
PureX
Veteran Member
Or just watching the news.
How much you wanna bet those idiots that shot up the parade in KC were "enforcing civility"?
How much you wanna bet someone gets shot to death in Chicago today because someone else felt they were being "disrespected" by something they said or did?
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Different culture on the South Side of Chicago from where I live, fortunately.
Hitler was a master of propaganda, no doubt. And I would agree that he used propaganda to incite people to that horrible violence. But words are NOT violence, that's a woke idea that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
And, fwiw, in the US free speech has limits and does not allow speech that incites IMMINENT VIOLENCE. So I would say that Hitler's speech was of a different category than the speech we're debating here.
I think that test of IMMINENT VIOLENCE is one we need to keep in mind when we're talking about offensive speech. I think the phrase "hate speech" is too vague and subjective to be useful. If you disagree, can you provide a definition of hate speech that's mostly objective?
For example, several years back Sam Harris said on TV "Islam is a mother lode of bad ideas". (I agree). Is that hate speech?
I've never heard that said before,
My wife was the victim of misogynistic threats so violent that we left our home and moved 1500 miles away.
Again, I support the long standing test of IMMINENT VIOLENCE.
Perhaps you can point to societies in which censorship is rife AND the society is flourishing? To my knowledge, censorship always goes hand in hand with totalitarianism.
PureX
Veteran Member
It's not just Chicago. It's cities and towns all across the country. Chicago is actually a ways down the list of places where people routinely murder each other. And it almost always begins with someone feeling "disrespected" by someone else.
Sorry to hear about your wife's troubles. I would have thought something like that would have changed your attitude to hate speech
How does one test for imminent violence is violence has not (yet) occurred?
As the OP shows, the UK has laws against hate speech and society is flourishing.
France has laws against hate speech and society is flourishing
Germany has extremely strick laws against hate speech and, you guessed it, society is flourishing.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
The list is long so im only giving you 6 that are at the top of my head.
China
North Korea
Russia (USSR)
Iran
Iraq
Saudi Arabia
It's not preemptive. Just because something isn't considered a crime doesn't make it necessarily legal or acceptable.
Your country has infractions that are illegal but not considered criminal, too. Think of parking tickets as an example: you really have committed an illegal act, but the government responds with a process that's less than a criminal process.
Sounds like the UK terminology is a bit opaque and arcane, but the description doesn't sound that different in practice than how things with with our Human Rights Tribunals here in Canada, which I think work fine.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Some interesting information those "flourishing" countries....
France is not the free-speech champion it says it is
The horrific murder of Samuel Paty, the French teacher who showed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a class on freedom of expression, sent shockwaves throughout France. It also forced a difficult conversation about freedom of speech and who has the right to exercise it. President Emmanuel...
www.amnesty.org
Censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany - Wikipedia
What is free speech? One of the most important human rights explained.
Freedom of speech is the right to say whatever you like about whatever you like, whenever you like, right? Wrong.
Not in the least. There are costs associated with living in a free society.
As I understand it, it goes something like this. Let's say a bad actor is making a speech in the town square:
1 - If he says "All Jews should be exterminated", that's protected. He's talking about some undisclosed time in the future.
2 - If he says "Bob over there is a Jew, hang him now", that's illegal, that's an IMMINENT threat.
This OP is about a particular law, one that gives citizens the right to accuse others of hate speech with no evidence necessary. That's a new addition to whatever hate speech laws they already have on the books.
Do you think censorship is rife in Canada?
We have laws that are similar to the UK laws you're arguing against in this thread, but I'd say we're "flourishing" as much as any other western democracy (and often do better than the US on those "freedom index" reports).
PureX
Veteran Member
There’s a weird kind of cultural psychosis going on in the U. S. that has a significant portion of the population really excited by the idea of seeing other people insulted and humiliated. Not to get too political about it but it seems to be a bit of a neo-conservative obsession this wanting to see people they perceive as being ‘liberals’ or ‘woke’ or ‘snowflakes’ insulted and humiliated publicly. And they flock to anyone that they see acting as their verbal gladiators. Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, … they really like watching these people insult and anger and humiliate the people that they think are loathsome and deserving of it. Their ‘lessers’.
It’s weird and very mean-spirited and it’s been going on for a number of decades, now. And right wing politicians seem to have no qualms at all in engaging in it because they know they will be touted as heroes by their neo-con constituents.
A lot of the worship of “freedom of speech” in the U. S. is really just these same people trying to protect their desire to see people they loathe being treated and spoken of badly in public. Free speech to them is the freedom to insult and humiliate your lessers for all the world to see and appreciate.
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The "psychosis" I see is people who conflate insults
with threats, & want to have government threaten
force to prevent them.
I don't trust our government with this increase in
power. Remember....it might be power wielded by
Trump next year. You trust him with that?