> 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...
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.