Is hate speech free speech?

[Magical Realist]

Where do we draw the line between what can be said and what should not be said? What kind of speech SHOULD be censored? Any at all? Or is all speech free speech? Does a society have a moral right to suppress certain words and ideas in the sphere of public discourse? Who decides what goes too far? Could one man's religious credo be fighting words for another man?

 

[Arioch]

Well it's quite clear that not all speech is free. Shouting fire in a crowded theater, inciting a lynch mob, and making direct threats on the life of another are all examples of speech which is not only dangerous but also completely illegal. Another example of the limitations we accept on our speech would be libel/slander laws. There are many examples of what constitutes "forbidden" speech.

Personally I have issues with current hate speech laws in that what is deemed "hate speech" seems to me to be rather arbitrary.

 

[Magical Realist]

Well it's quite clear that not all speech is free. Shouting fire in a crowded theater, inciting a lynch mob, and making direct threats on the life of another are all examples of speech which is not only dangerous but also completely illegal. Another example of the limitations we accept on our speech would be libel/slander laws. There are many examples of what constitutes "forbidden" speech.

Personally I have issues with current hate speech laws in that what is deemed "hate speech" seems to me to be rather arbitrary.

I found this definition of hate speech from a legal website:


"Hate speech is a communication that carries no meaning other than the expression of hatred for some group, especially in circumstances in which the communication is likely to provoke violence. It is an incitement to hatred primarily against a group of persons defined in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and the like. Hate speech can be any form of expression regarded as offensive to racial, ethnic and religious groups and other discrete minorities or to women."---http://definitions.uslegal.com/h/hate-speech/

Suppose it is the religious dogma of some that a certain group of people are morally inferior or less deserving of equal rights than most humans. Take the case of gay people by fundamentalist religious and conservative groups. Would the expression of these views in speech or writing be viewed as hate speech? But then see we have a conflict between religious freedom and freedom from hate speech. In reality the law currently respects the rights of religious and conservative groups to express such hate. But might there be cases where it goes too far, as say with the Westboro Baptist Church?

 

[Arioch]

I can understand the "especially in circumstances in which the communication is likely to provoke violence" bit, especially given many of our other laws limit speech for the same reason. Again though, given that "offense"(which appears to be the main criterion of interest) is entirely subjective, this still seems like a very poor way to go about it.

 

[Stryder]

The original concept to free speech was meant so a particular government could have people freely suggest changes to aid that governments path of progression. For instance like putting a decent idea on how to deal with various problems that were currently handled wrong, without fear that the current government would persecute the individual for their reasoning.

To my knowledge it was never meant to become a platform for hate speech or other types of abuse, unfortunately over the years it's polymorphed beyond it's original concept to become an intrinsic tool of misrepresentation. When such misrepresentation is caught out however it's claimed it's "against free speech" to stave it.

 

[billvon]

Where do we draw the line between what can be said and what should not be said? What kind of speech SHOULD be censored? Any at all?

Any speech that directly causes harm, either through false information (i.e. "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or telling a cop "He's got a gun! Shoot him!" when he doesn't) or through incitement to violence (i.e. "Kill Nancy Pelosi's family! Here's her address, and here's where her kids go to school.")

The original concept to free speech was meant so a particular government could have people freely suggest changes to aid that governments path of progression. For instance like putting a decent idea on how to deal with various problems that were currently handled wrong, without fear that the current government would persecute the individual for their reasoning. To my knowledge it was never meant to become a platform for hate speech or other types of abuse

I disagree. The freedom that blacks employed to use "hate speech" against whites in the 1950's was critical to the Civil Rights movement.

 

[iceaura]

As defined, hate speech already comes under the heading of fighting words or terroristic threat, both legally curbed by long tradition.

The problem shows up in persuading obliviously powerful and insular ethnic groups that their bigot speech, however normal for them, is threatening and provoking of violence. So the clarity of a separate category maybe does some good.

 

[wellwisher]

It takes a mature rational person to handle the free speech of others, all the way to the limit. The more neurotic and irrational one is, they can be programmed to overreact to sounds/words while having no mental tools to resist the programmed impact. The dumbing down of America has led to more need to restrict free speech with liberal groups the least able to cope due to irrationality.

The term hate speech, to a rational person, would involve the "speaker" motivated by hate, no matter what he/she say. It is not about the subjectivity of the audience creating motivation that is not there, do to specific noises made. If we wish to judge by the subjectivities of the audience, maybe we can call hate speech, hate listening, to mean those who read motivation that is not always there, due to irrationality and social conditioning.

When I was younger, it was common for a bunch of teenage boys, who were hanging out at the corner, to insult each other. Since this was a bunch of friends, the motivation was not hate, but mischievous comedy. With the crowd of teens rational, and the group motivation clear, any word was on the table, with ethnic slurs and swears part of the fun. It was not hate speech because it did not involving the speaker having hate in their heart. The audience was not tripping out like it does today off in alternate reality, where affordable health care is more expense.

Ask yourself which groups in culture create the most restrictions on free speech. Which political party restricts the most. This will be the least rational. The rational people have the responsibility to resist with the hope you can lead these vulnerable hate listeners forward to the age of reason away from liberal alchemy.

 

[Buddha12]

Speak to others as you would like them to talk to you, be respectful and dignified and if you can't keep your mouth shut.

 

[iceaura]

Ask yourself which groups in culture create the most restrictions on free speech. Which political party restricts the most.

That's easy: the faction now labeled Tea Party (they don't like it when you call them "Republicans"). They're obsessed with it. They even have gag orders on rape counselors these days, scripts written out for doctors to recite, entire departments of State governments censoring and editing textbooks to avoid conflict with their preferred language. They've been doing this for generations now - writing Pledges for rote recitation, blacklisting Hollywood writers of "communist" speech, firing schoolteachers for verbally disrespecting their fond beliefs, etc. Within 25 years of WWII, no one on US television could simply refer to ethnic supremicist, mystically authoritarian, rightwing, militaristic, American politicians as "fascist" - or to this day.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Until recently, the USA had some pretty sensible laws about free speech.

• You cannot commit fraud. This is the process of lying to someone in order to motivate them to do something that benefits you but does not in fact benefit them and generally works to their detriment. This also covers the popular scenario of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. We don't need a separate law for that although in most jurisdictions we do. Look at it this way: The perp lies to the patrons by telling them that the theater is on file. This motivates them to stampede out of the theater, in the dark for at least part of the time. This action benefits the perp: the twisted entertainment value of hearing us scream, watching us trip over each other, and trying to drag the children, elderly and disabled out safely. And it works to our detriment: There are usually at least a few non-trivial injuries in such a stampede, our day and probably our whole week is ruined, and at the very least we've missed the chance to see something we were looking forward to, put off important tasks such as housecleaning, and maybe even lost the price of our tickets. This seems to me a perfect textbook case of fraud!
• You cannot incite people to riot. You must not talk them into breaking the window of a shop that sells pornography or Bibles, tossing Molotov cocktails into police cars, or burning down churches or corporate headquarters.
• You cannot encourage people to attempt to overthrow the government of the United States by force. That's in the Constitution. If you want to change the government you have to do it by convincing more than half of the voters to elect people who want the same things you want. Frankly I see this as merely "rioting" writ large, so it's already covered by the law against incitement to riot. But our laws (like those of every other country) are not entirely logical. We're lucky if they don't contradict each other and at least these two do not.
• You cannot speak "fighting words." This is a gray area, but an extreme example would be walking into a bar in East Los Angeles at 1:45am and yelling, "All you damn Mexicans should be deported!" A reasonable person would expect this to turn into a brawl so fast that he might not be able to make it out the door and into his car before it happens. It is, arguably, a small-scale instance of inciting a riot.
• You cannot conspire to commit a crime. This is a relatively new law and I don't have a problem with it, as long as it's enforced intelligently. It's not easy to foil a plot by organized crime, the KKK, smugglers, terrorists, etc., once it has been planned out and is now in the execution stage. It's a lot easier to catch them in the act of planning it. But what I insist is that the police, FBI, etc. use their heads so they can tell the difference between a meeting of the Mafia or Al Qaeda, and six dumb-shit kids who are trying to build a nuclear weapon out of Legos. Let them blow their own balls off! They'll be a lot less likely to try something worse as adults.
• Finally, we have "hate speech," a new category. Personally, as a linguist, a libertarian, and a reasonably good American, I do not approve of this law. It seems like an abridgment of free speech. Yes, you cannot utter hate speech in that aforementioned bar, because it will cause a mini-riot. And I am kind enough to allow very narrow applications of this abridgment in well-defined circumstances, such as preventing the worthless shit-for-brains so-called "Christian" assholes in the Westboro Baptist Church from chanting anti-American slogans at a funeral for a soldier who died in action, while all of his friends and loved ones are standing there grieving. Yes I have often referred to this generation of American soldiers as "paid professional killers," but even I am not a big enough asshole to say that at their funeral, much less shout it over and over. If people use the N-word or any other ethnic or sexist or Nazi or homophobic or anti-religion slur in a normal milieu where tempers are not running high, or especially in an abstract "space" like print or the internet, as far as I'm concerned it's just free speech. We need to be able to identify those people! As Justice Brandeis said, "Sunshine is the best disinfectant," or as I put it more coarsely, "It's better to let the cockroaches scamper around on top of the linoleum, so we know what they're up to." We don't want to force these people to gather secretly so we don't know what they're planning!

So, this is my take on hate speech. It is awful but I think outlawing it is worse because it's un-American. AND I really want to know who those bastards are!

Besides, I'm positive that in some people's world-view, I am one of those bastards. I HATE racists, homophobes and creationists.

 

[billvon]

Ask yourself which groups in culture create the most restrictions on free speech. Which political party restricts the most. This will be the least rational.

====================
Arizona Republicans Propose Strange Laws Targeting Public Colleges

Tyler Kingkade
First Posted: 03/20/2012

. . .

Legislation proposed in the Arizona state Senate would apply the same restrictions on profanity for college lectures as it would for preschool classrooms.

The so-called "G-rated" bill would prohibit college professors from using language in the classroom that would be violate Federal Communications Commission broadcast obscenity standards. A school would be required to terminate a college instructor who commits three offenses of using curse words in a classroom before students legally able to smoke cigarettes and buy porn.

"The bill doesn't even require that the profanity be uttered in the classroom," Greg Lukianoff, president of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote on HuffPost, "it just generally says that if a professor or, for that matter, a K-12 teacher, engages in FCC-regulated conduct or speech at all, he or she can lose their job. Of course, even if this were limited strictly to classroom speech it would still be laughed out of court as unconstitutional on its face."

Lukianoff wondered how a cinema class could be taught without showing films like The Godfather, The Graduate, Annie Hall, or Pulp Fiction.

There are also concerns about how professors would be able to teach their classes about sexually transmitted diseases.
====================
Michigan Republicans muzzle women

John Rummel
June 15 2012

. . .

After state Reps Lisa Brown and Barb Byrum, both Democrats, courageously spoke out against anti-choice legislation passed Wednesday, Republican Speaker of the House Jase Bolger informed House Democrats that the two lawmakers would be prohibited from speaking during Thursday's legislative session on any and all issues.

What did Bolger use as a pretense to silence debate? On Wednesday Rep. Brown told anti-choice legislation's backers, "I'm flattered you're all so interested in my vagina." And Rep. Byrum was gaveled out of order when she protested Republicans' refusal to allow her to speak on her amendment to require proof that a man's life was in danger before he could have a vasectomy.
===================

 

[Magical Realist]

Ask yourself which groups in culture create the most restrictions on free speech. Which political party restricts the most. This will be the least rational.

Tennessee's "Don't Say Gay" law is back:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...-things-to-know-about-the-tennessee-bill.html

 

[quinnsong]

I agree with you Fraggle, well mostly anyway. The only problem is much of the listening audience in many cases lacks critical thinking skills and are just plain ignorant. Some of these assholes will and do use hate speech as a call to action. \

Regarding the military, my husband is in Public Affairs at the Brigade level and its is a hotbed of politics and officers with only their careers on their mind. I am not a happy wife when it comes to the military(understatement), as I see how these officers make their careers off the backs of the NCO core. BTW the Army is an administrative nightmare, just one example of many, they man training classes (just to fill them) and the subject matter does not pertain to anything that soldier does or may do. I could go on and on but I digress.

 

[Arioch]

Brown told anti-choice legislation's backers, "I'm flattered you're all so interested in my vagina."

That's not actually the whole quote. She went on to complete her sentence with "but no means no". I think that the repubs were likely more offended by the thinly veiled implication that they wanted to rape her than with her use of the word 'vagina', especially given that the bill in question(which I'm glad got shot down) had the word 'vagina' appear in it three times(at least). This is just my opinion, but I don't think that a poorly veiled accusation that one party wants to rape another is appropriate on the senate floor. Just sayin'.

 

[wellwisher]

Ask yourself which groups in culture create the most restrictions on free speech. Which political party restricts the most.

I had in mind PC and liberalism, which invented the misleading term called hate speech, instead of calling it conditioned hate listening for the irrational and hypersensitive.

If you want to insult the tea party and call them anything, you can just do it, since there is no police action to prevent it. We all assume they are not that irrational and can take it. This is not considered hate speech, even if you hate them when you say these things. I could say recite any of a number of PC taboo terms and I will be censored, some even with a police action. Hate listening has to do with highest level of irrationality leading to the irrational need for police enforcement even of there is no hate; liberalism.

 

[quinnsong]

I had in mind PC and liberalism, which invented the misleading term called hate speech, instead of calling it conditioned hate listening for the irrational and hypersensitive.

If you want to insult the tea party and call them anything, you can just do it, since there is no police action to prevent it. We all assume they are not that irrational and can take it. This is not considered hate speech, even if you hate them when you say these things. I could say recite any of a number of PC taboo terms and I will be censored, some even with a police action. Hate listening has to do with highest level of irrationality leading to the irrational need for police enforcement even of there is no hate; liberalism.

Insulting a political party and their policies or policies they stand for is not hate speech.

An example of what I deem hate speech is what O'Reilly did when he consistently verbally attacked an abortion doctor and the abortion doctor ended up dead. O.Reilly was more than irresponsible, considering his fan base (people without an ounce of critical thinking skills). I know hatred and divisiveness when I hear it, but I do not give those people spouting it the time of day, unfortunately there are those that listen and take it as a call to deadly action. In a better educated populace we would not need these laws as no one would heed the words of the hatemongers.

 

[Magical Realist]

Ask yourself which groups in culture create the most restrictions on free speech. Which political party restricts the most.

"Last month ThinkProgress reported that a Missouri high school had banned Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five because religious residents complained that it taught principles contrary to the Bible. Now the American Library Association reports that this year alone, U.S. schools have banned more than 20 books and faced more than 50 other challenges, with many more expected this fall as school starts.

The library association says the number of reported challenges in the past 30 years has hovered between about 400 or 500, but there are many bans they never learn about. While parents have traditionally launched the lion’s share of challenges, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, an attorney with the association, says she has noticed “an uptick in organized efforts” to remove books from public and school libraries.

The top reasons for challenges are sexually explicit content, offensive language and violence. “That’s not what our kids should be reading and learning,” Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America, told USA Today.

A review of the books banned by various schools in the past six months illustrates that eliminating this “objectionable material” actually deprives students of the chance to think and form their own opinions about difficult questions. The banned books include Push by Sapphire, the acclaimed novel about an illiterate 16-year-old girl that was made into the Academy Award-winning movie Precious. Also on the list is a “laugh-out-loud” picture book about a happy rat, and a book by a Pulitzer-Prize winning author that puts a human face on legendary human rights leader Mahatma Gandhi."---http://thinkprogress.org/justice/20...ols-have-banned-more-than-20-books-this-year/


How the Catholic Church controlled Hollywood for decades:

http://www.pajiba.com/think_pieces/how-the-catholic-church-controlled-hollywood.php

 

[iceaura]

Ask yourself which groups in culture create the most restrictions on free speech. Which political party restricts the most.

I had in mind PC and liberalism,

Well that's silly - why would you have liberalism in mind? Most of the PC stuff comes from organizations like Fox News (remember "homicide bomber"?), and almost all the free speech restriction by political Party comes by way of the Republican Party - these are not afflicted with liberalism.

If you want to insult the tea party and call them anything, you can just do it, since there is no police action to prevent it.

Don't be silly. Ignoring the drama queen stuff about "police action", we note that in addition to the standard list of discouraged terms and phrases (which covers them just like everyone else) we can't call them "teabaggers" in the major media (their term at first, but they changed their minds and demanded we drop the term) for some bizarre reason we can't call them fascists, the major media can't refer to them in newscasts as ignorant bigots and their pet sects as cults, and so forth.

The Tea Party folks have been touchier and more arbitrary and less coherent about the terms we are to use in reference to them than almost anyone else - they even object to being called "Republicans" sometimes - and there are more restrictions and tiptoeing around their thin skins involved with them and the major media than anyone else I can think of.

 

[absols]

i love hate speech, i guess i know why for some major facts

notice how the coolest language in the world is always through insults

first fact, one is always against another

try to see it like i picture it

freedom so relative existence cant relate but with objective reality as it is always superior so relative can advance freely

but another is useless reality it is by its fact denyin owns existence

while it is the most one forced to b through, surely bc by itself it is like nothing so easy to direct forever

another force one to stay still bc it cant b with objective superiority perspectives anymore when another freedom is obviously present

im not saying thta others should not exist, im just explainin how hate speech is right, it is a form of true objective realisation that help to get in touch with the true objective reality

anyone is in principle a freedom right or a right to b seen free, moving positively or superior ways or nothing which is the most free

wat i say is in certain perspective confirmed by the world and beyond

since everyone are liars n evil wills meaning to live by killing objective rights or others rights

n even that hypocrisy consensus cant hold anymore, insolence and offense are everywhere the way

so it is true, that one is against another but instead of facing that fact right we are forced to live the worse end of it, especially from what gods so other ones found living doing against us, taking control and possessions of all freedom rights