> So you want it to be legal to stand in a public square in Germany and yell that Hitler did nothing wrong

Yes.

> but you don't personally want to do that.

No.

> Why don't you want to?

Because I think Hitler was a dictator who committed genocide, which is the most terribly wrong there is.

> What does it say about the people who do want to do those things?

That I strongly disagree with those people? That those people are likely mentally ill, lunatics or malevolently evil?

I'm not following your reasoning here. It's like you're trying to box me into some contradictory position which just isn't there. You seem to find it unimaginable I could sincerely, passionately, and even, seethingly despise the words and sentiment behind "Hitler did nothing wrong" with every fiber of my being, yet not want to give government bureaucrats the absolute power to subjectively decide which free speech to punish. Those are not contradictory positions. In fact, they are the most consistent positions on free speech and here's why...

Hitler was only able to commit genocide because he seized the power to censor free speech first. Free speech is always the first right tyrants must suppress. That's literally why they made free speech the "First Amendment", all the other rights can be undermined without it. If the U.S. didn't have absolute free speech guarantees enshrined in our constitution and culture, if we had a "hate speech" law like the EU, I have no doubt Trump would already have hundreds or thousands of U.S. citizen students who protested Gaza in jail right now charged under that "hate speech" law. To paraphrase your question to me, here's a question for you: "So you want it be legal for Trump to put Gaza protestors in jail for hate speech?"

It's naive to believe people you agree with will always be the only ones in power. Someday someone with views you despise will be in power. Because power always attracts tyrants. Government is THE ultimate centralized power. Government has a monopoly on legally deploying lethal force against citizens. While I deeply despise what a few of my fellow citizens use their free speech rights to say, I also understand the best response to hate speech is exercising my free speech rights to protest against what they said. To point out how wrong, stupid and dangerous their words are. Taking everyone's free speech rights away based on what a few lunatics say is the most dangerous response to hate speech. I'm willing to tolerate the despicable, evil speech of a handful of lunatics because tolerating that is the price of protecting free speech for everyone.

While some well-intentioned people claim "Oh no! I only want to stop the bad speech, not reasonable protest", that's been proven impossible. The U.S. courts tried to find a way to code those good intentions into law and precedent in a way that would not also allow a racist police chief, anti-gay mayor, anti-trans governor or warmonger president to imprison someone they disagree with based on their speech. Our best legal minds tried many different approaches and compromises for over a hundred years - and failed. As awful as tolerating the speech of lunatics is, it is the least bad solution guaranteed to protect free speech from abuse by the worst few out of thousands of good police chiefs, mayors, governors and presidents. Because, eventually, a bad person will get themselves in power and bad people in power always find a way to claim protest speech against them is "hate speech." That's the day when the rest of us will all need the right to march in the streets chanting words the new government has suddenly decreed are now "hate speech." Rights are lost an inch at a time and it always starts with the most reprehensible, least sympathetic people, spouting the most offensive things - because no right-thinking, morally good person will defend the awful shit they're saying. The problem is too many right-thinking, morally good people confuse strongly rejecting "what was said" from tenaciously defending "the right to say it". I'm not willing to risk losing free speech forever to silence a few lunatics today.

I call this the "good things are good and bad things are bad" fallacy (rather, it's the rejection of that statement which is the fallacy). Good restrictions on speech are good. Bad restrictions on speech are bad. You are advancing the idea that either all restrictions on speech are good, or all restrictions on speech are bad, which is untrue.

The guy who stands in the public square handing out fliers purporting to explain why the Jews deserve to be gassed should be punished for his speech (proportionately of course). The guy who hands out fliers that Hitler was an evil madman should not be punished. One is good, and one is bad. Punishing good is bad, and punishing bad (proportionately) is good.

It's naive to believe bad governments follow the law. They just do what they want to and shoot you if you don't. Avoiding things bad governments could do, during times of not-bad governments, doesn't stop bad governments from doing them later anyway. In Weimar Germany, you could say that Jews did or didn't belong in gas chambers, as you pleased. Yet in Nazi Germany, you could only say that Jews did belong in gas chambers, because saying the opposite could get you put in one yourself. No free speech law in Weimar Germany could have stopped Hitler from putting people in gas chambers for saying things he didn't like. Especially because Hitler was willing to break into people's homes and assassinate them and burn down buildings to get his way.

If Hitler had been killed or locked up based on his speech, it's possible Nazi Germany would never have happened. I'm not suggesting that I know for sure that it would've right to execute Hitler in 1930 based on what people knew in 1930 (since Nazi Germany hadn't happened yet), but it's utterly crazy to not make any attempt to see if you can balance that fact against everything else. 70 million lives is quite a lot.

If rights are lost an inch at a time, that's great. That means after every inch we pause and get to decide whether this is the correct number of inches, or if it should be more or fewer.

<... cont from above >

I think perhaps you default to trusting your local police, courts and judges to enforce a "hate speech" law clearly and consistently far more than I do, or at least enough to think they'll make a difference beyond merely having a law on the books as a form cultural virtue signaling. Based on my experiences, perhaps I distrust the competence of local and state police and courts too much. I sincerely doubt they have the skills to consistently interpret a hate speech law with enough nuance that it does much good (and, please, "Hitler did nothing wrong" isn't an instructive example. Where such laws fail is when things get a little more challenging like deciding if "Gaza is Genocide" or "Trans-Women Are Not Females" qualify as jailable hate speech). I fear that any such law, after the first dozen court cases and appeals, will boil down to a list of "23 Words and Phrases You Can't Say" or, in the other extreme, remain so broadly vague no one is quite sure what might get them arrested, leading to lots of local abuse and endless court cases which fund lawyer's golf club memberships for decades. While the 'broadly vague' option might actually trip up the occasional mini-tyrant who isn't quite careful enough, it'll also effectively silence many other speakers who merely fear the uncertainty and choose to self-censor (as has already been shown to occur under well-intentioned but misguided campus "speech codes" https://www.thefire.org/).

So that's what I trust less than I think you do. On the other hand, what I think I trust more than you do, is my fellow citizens. I was raised in a raucous, fractious, combative, Darwinian marketplace of ideas where everyone is assumed to be completely full of shit unless they can conclusively prove otherwise (and sometimes not even then) and no one gets any respect unless they earn it (which is also only... maybe). Do you remember the movie "Fight Club"? I grew up in a culture that's "Speech Club." The first rule of Speech Club is you don't go whining to Daddy government because someone said something wrong, naughty or mean. You stand up and hit them back with twice as much speech. You eviscerate their stupid arguments with facts and expose what a fucking moron they are in front of everyone. You don't silence them under threat of imprisonment. You beg them to please never stop being so fucking stupid because it's pure comedy gold and mama needs those sweet TikTok clicks. And that's where the trust comes in. While I disagree with my fellow citizens about many things and suspect maybe up to 10%-15% of them are idiots, I've also learned that, on average, most of the rest of them are pretty good at sorting better ideas from worse ideas and spotting nuggets of truth amidst a sea of bullshit. Sure, sometimes they get fooled or swayed by emotion for a minute but, when things get real, eventually they tend to be pretty decent people who don't want to do wrong by others or side with evil. That sense of trust in the underlying good faith and common sense of my average, aggregate fellow citizen is why I feel no need to silence bad, evil, hateful, wrong ideas. Those who strongly feel society must decide which words are too dangerous, too unsafe for "average citizens" to even hear for fear it will corrupt their weak minds, don't think much of their fellow citizens (and must think themselves well above average to assume the role of arbiter of ideas). That feels uncomfortably elitest. Acting afraid of bad ideas is also granting a lot of power to those words and ideas, instead of dismissing them as more random bullshit or just laughing at them when needed.

Finally, if certain ideas are so clearly wrong that speaking them out loud must be stopped by legal force, aren't they also clearly wrong enough for the average person to tell they are wrong? Why can you so easily determine they are wrong yet fear others can't? Logically, it seems the answer must be you know you are smarter than most other people. Or, perhaps you feel you are only average, and thus support allowing those with greater intellectual capacity than you to determine for you which ideas are "hate speech". If so, how will you feel when your intellectual superiors decide an idea is "hate speech" when you are quite sure it's merely controversial? Or, if choosing our collective arbiters of truth by IQ score is too problematic perhaps the only fair way is majority vote? I suspect this is why anyone arguing for "hate speech" laws uses "Hitler/Nazis" as an example, instead of something, you know, hard. The problem becomes clearer with something like "Trans-Women Are Not Female." That's definitely controversial but, depending on exact wording, more than a third of the population feel that's a valid topic reasonable people should be able to at least discuss BUT another (approximate) third are certain it's "hate speech" (note: personally, I have no strong opinion on this one at the moment). In other countries, the percentages swing to over 50% and, depending on which country, it can swing to a majority either way. How do we decide if it should be hate speech in tough, rapidly evolving situations? Should we make it legal or illegal country by country? Or should we ignore it because it's not a slam dunk like Hitler/Nazis? (Sorry trans-friends!) From definitions to enforcement to lack of meaningful impact to unintentional consequences to abuse of power, when I look at the idea of "hate speech" laws, I see nothing but good intentions in concept but thorny problems when put into practice across broad populations and over time.

All that said, you've articulated your points very well. I think I understand your point of view and the foundational assumptions behind it. I doubt we're going to suddenly find common ground, although not for lack of trying! We simply interpret the world through different assumptions based on different experiences and arrive at different conclusions. And further discussion probably won't be productive in changing either of our viewpoints. Fortunately, it's clear we both ultimately want to same thing, a fair and sustainable civil society with equal justice for all. Our differences are in what we choose to prioritize as the best way to achieve that goal. Hopefully, I've conveyed my viewpoint, reasoning and foundational assumptions well enough for you to at least see why I think about this the way I do (despite, obviously, not agreeing with all my assumptions). Not everyone who supports strong free speech rights is a closet Nazi sympathizer (I'm still hurt you went there... such a cheap shot! :-). For my part, I never thought your support for hate speech laws was unprincipled or less than well-intentioned. My goal wasn't to change your mind, just to plant a suspicion there might be a well-grounded position against hate speech laws which, although wrong in your view, is at least sincere, self-consistent and principled. I hope for both our sake that, as the future unfolds, hate speech laws are abused less than I fear and strong first amendment speech protections protect democracy better than you fear.

> You are advancing the idea that either all restrictions on speech are good, or all restrictions on speech are bad

Thanks for the detailed response. First, let me reiterate that I don't believe all restrictions on speech are bad. Far from it. In the parallel response I linked above, I said the U.S. set of laws and precedents balancing first amendment free speech have struck a good balance. Not all speech is protected. There are clear and significant exceptions to the first amendment. For example, incitement to imminent lawless action, defamation, libel and several others. Over many decades the courts have evolved a series of detailed multi-prong tests to determine exactly which speech may be legitimately suppressed by the government. I've read a lot of these rulings and concurrences and together they form an impressively rigorous standard which is clear and can be enforced consistently. Something which, as far as I know, doesn't exist in other countries - at least not yet.

Also, it's important to remember the first amendment only limits which speech the government can punish criminally. Civil liability is a different matter entirely as Alex Jones learned when his lunatic ravings cost him well over a billion dollars. Civil liability can also result in injunctive relief and jail time. This is a substantial deterrent and corrective to stop the kinds of speech we both find offensive and harmful - a legal deterrent I fully support.

> It's naive to believe bad governments follow the law. They just do what they want to and shoot you if you don't.

Bad leaders sometimes choose to break the law and issue illegal orders. Bad staff members and military officers sometimes follow illegal orders. But, as Donald Trump found out on January 4th 2021, a lot of people won't follow illegal orders - even loyal members of his inside circle like Vice-President Mike Pence. Richard Nixon learned the same when his trusted cabinet members and generals refused his illegal orders and he was forced to resign the presidency. The U.S. is somewhat unique in that our politicians and military swear an oath of loyalty not to the president or the country but to uphold the U.S. Constitution - the document that spells out all the things the government can never legally do its citizens. Does that oath always work? Of course not. Some people are as bad as the bad leaders they choose to follow but if you're a tyrant having enough people you're sure will follow clearly illegal or immoral orders has long been a huge problem. Beyond the horrific moral failure of many Germans during WWII, history holds a surprising number of encouraging examples of people choosing their own good moral judgement over immoral orders, from tank divisions in Tienanmen Square refusing to fire to Soviet officers who didn't launch nukes on turned out to be an errant order. Even the past year has seen examples including elite special forces ordered by the President to take over the Korean parliament building from unarmed student protesters and Assad's soldiers choosing not to fire on civilians as they marched on Damascus. Perhaps I'm an optimist but I think there's reasonable evidence, decade by decade, the average global moral climate is slowly improving. Henchmen and jackbooted thugs who can reliably be counted on to perpetrate atrocities against innocents on the orders of tyrants are getting a bit harder to find, especially in Westernized democracies where average education levels and standards of living are reasonable. Of course, in the U.S. every member of the military and police is trained they'll be held criminally accountable for violating their oath to uphold the constitution "against all aggressors", which explicitly includes those in power should they turn against the rule of law, so it's harder to recruit reliable henchmen to shoot at peaceful protestors. Also, there are far more civilian firearms than there are civilians - so, here, the protestors can shoot back and courts won't convict legitimately defending yourself against unlawful lethal force - even by police. I was taught in elementary school "the right to bear arms" is the second amendment because it's the amendment citizens are supposed to use if the government ever tries to take the first amendment away. ;-) Hence, my confidence that, at least in the U.S., it's safer to rely on speaking against evil when it seizes government power than relying on government power through hate speech laws to force evil to speak in less offensive coded euphemisms. And, it's entirely possible, the worst thing to do in response to evil, hateful lunatics shouting evil, hateful lunacy is training them to sound a little less evil and hateful. Certainly forcing evil to adopt more palatable sound bites when in public will help pearl-clutchers feel society has dealt with the problem but it's just pushing the evil into the shadows where it can fester and grow.

> If Hitler had been... locked up based on his speech

As you said, historical hypotheticals aren't exactly productive. If Wiemar Germany had a strong "hate speech" law it wouldn't have stopped Hitler speaking publicly, it would only have made him tone it down enough to skirt any such law by using using euphemisms and other coded signaling. Maybe toning down some of Hitler's most inflammatory rhetoric would have stopped his rise to power but that seems unlikely. Germany's current strong hate speech laws haven't managed to entirely stop neo-nazi skinheads from organizing and even marching and, in some cases, seems to create martyrs and heroes out of losers which only energizes their fringe supporters. I guess it's possible toning down Hitler's worst speech when he was starting out might have stopped his rise however I'm skeptical toning down what he says before he's in power makes much difference. I'm more hopeful that a strong cultural tradition of revering free speech that would have allowed the Jews, gypsies, gays and other undesirables to safely march in Berlin every day while Hitler was in power would have made much more of a difference. The problem is, if the hate speech law doesn't stop Hitler before he's in power, once in power, he certainly would have weaponized that "hate speech" law to jail Jewish protestors. Hitler might have found police corrupt enough to jail peaceful protestors protected under a free speech constitutional right and judges awful enough to convict them. Even if he found military troops immoral enough to fire on unarmed peaceful protestors, Hitler being forced to do that so publicly would also change things substantially. A good example of this is how the civil rights protestors marching in 1960s Alabama didn't change the minds of most Americans in Southern states, it was the photos and film of police illegally using attack dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech that changed everything. Historically, Gandhi had it right, constitutionally protected free speech doesn't usually stop tyrants directly, it's the injustice of what the tyrants have to do to silence legally protected speech that exposes the tyrant as a criminal. Regardless, sadly, Wiemar Germany didn't have hate speech laws or a strong tradition of constitutional free speech protest against the government so such hypotheticals remain unknowable.

Those are the points I wanted to respond to: 1. My support of free speech is far from absolute or unlimited and 2. That "Bad governments will do bad things" cuts both ways, if they'll ignore strong constitutional protection for free speech, they'll certainly abuse hate speech laws to silence dissent. In fact, twisting the definition of "hate speech" may be the single BEST way to subvert constitutional protections for free speech, and 3. The dilemma of "A. Kill Hitler in the crib, or B. Use hate speech laws to force him to sound less hateful in 1931, or C. Use first amendment-like free speech protection to protest march in Berlin every day of 1935 (and force Hitler to illegally shoot unarmed peaceful protestors at noon in front of the Reichstag)" is unknowable and undecidable moral philosopher porn that, in any case, cuts both ways - if it cuts at all.

<Cont in next post>

> they'll certainly abuse hate speech laws to silence dissent

and my main point is that they'll do that whether or not the laws exist. If the laws don't exist, they'll create them, then abuse them. So we should not let this argument stop us from having good laws. Right now, American citizens are getting detained for having anti-Trump social media posts on their phone. They don't need any law to do that - they can just do it. Can you explain how the lack of a hate speech law prevented this thing from happening, even though it did happen?

> it was the photos and film of police illegally using attack dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech that changed everything

No? It was them getting beaten to a pulp in the American Civil War. If their minds were changed by the police response to the protests, why did the war still happen?

> (and force Hitler to illegally shoot unarmed peaceful protestors at noon in front of the Reichstag)

Did Hitler not illegally murder unarmed peaceful protestors? I'd be surprised if that was never something he did. Were the 6 million Jews and 5 million other victims armed; were they not unpeaceful? Would they have been spared if they protested?

> I think perhaps you default to trusting your local police, courts and judges to enforce a "hate speech" law clearly and consistently far more than I do,

Not more than any other law. Right now in Berlin, it's illegal to oppose the Palestinian genocide, because the police see it as antisemitism, and antisemitism is illegal. But that's a problem with every law.

> On the other hand, what I think I trust more than you do, is my fellow citizens. I was raised in a raucous, fractious, combative, Darwinian marketplace of ideas

And we see what that leads to. We did the experiment - we got the results. Doesn't work as described. Leads to tyranny. Time to try something else. Please don't try to gaslight me how it works when we can clearly see it not working like that, plain as day.

> Finally, if certain ideas are so clearly wrong that speaking them out loud must be stopped by legal force, aren't they also clearly wrong enough for the average person to tell they are wrong?

I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer given one paragraph ago.

> All that said, you've articulated your points very well. I think I understand your point of view and....

Good concluding paragraph. Very polite. Probably not quite fitting the usual online conversation format. You're supposed to call me Hitler or something.

> Good concluding paragraph. Very polite. Probably not quite fitting the usual online conversation format. You're supposed to call me Hitler or something.

Sorry to disappoint you! :-) As I indicated in my concluding paragraph, we're not going to change each other's viewpoint, so I'm going to choose not to address your points one by one, and just say some are based on either incorrect or incomplete assumptions and others aren't persuasive from my perspective.

I will add a historical point of fact to clarify one thing. The American civil war and the American civil rights protests are two different events a hundred years apart. The first was in the 1860s and the second in (roughly) the 1960s. The civil war settled the matter of slavery being legal (although there were other issues as well). Unfortunately, losing the civil war didn't change racial prejudice in the Southern states. Blacks there were no longer slaves but they were treated as second-class citizens and subject to grossly unjust non-protection under the law. This injustice persisted because Southern state governors, city mayors and police chiefs colluded to maintain the pretense of enforcing the laws equally while tacitly permitting gross discrimination and mob violence by racist whites against blacks. The civil rights protestors of the 1960s changed this when Martin Luther King adopted the peaceful protest strategies Gandhi used in India against British colonial rule. The violent police over-response against peaceful protestors exercising constitutionally protected free speech was obviously illegal. That undeniable evidence of Southern police and local governments behaving criminally against the constitution, not only as an aberration but systemically, forced both Southerners and the rest of the country to accept this ugly reality existed and make a choice how to deal with it. The horrific photos and films of illegal police violence against peaceful protestors changed public awareness and sentiment nationwide, providing the political support the President needed to send federal troops to Southern states to force desegregation. This was the civil rights protestor's plan, to use their protected speech rights to force the local governments to expose themselves publicly as tyrants. In conjunction with the media using their free speech rights to distribute the photographic evidence, the plan worked (the recent emergence of national live television broadcasts was also a key enabler). These ugly events led to some of our most important laws and legal precedents around free speech and elevated first amendment rights to a place of nearly sacred reverence among U.S. citizens. It's a dramatic historical episode well worth studying to understand American's intense support of free speech rights and deep distrust of government power. I offer this final historical note only as clarification of what happened and when re: "civil war" vs "civil rights protests" (which I think is uncontroversial). It's not intended to counter anything you wrote or to be argumentation.

Thanks for the interesting discussion. Per my prior conclusion, I'll be moving on now...