In Defense of Hate Speech

a reply to: c2oden

pro Isreal. The store owner is Jewish. Instead of shopping somewere else, she decided to let him know how offensive he is.

Back before the 1930s, Jews had the freedoms of emancipation. Some chose to accept the freedoms and equalities offered, to integrate as full citizens of the countries they lived in. Some chose a nationalist way, invented Zionism as a means of retaining a pseudo-ethnic identity religion. Zionism was a small minority, just as Nazis were a minority political party in Germany.

Since WWII, emancipation is almost completely dead among Jews. Identity religion nationalist Zionism is the norm/majority opinion.

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Warning. Non-pc rant:

Zionists state as a reason for having a state is for self determination, ie not at the mercy of Gentile law. Fine, they got it. If they are self governed nationalists of a country foreign to mine, what the hell are they doing here. Let them go to their nation and be nationalists there.

On the other hand, if they have no intention of going there as permanent residents, then they should come out of the closet and bravely declare themselves as anti-Zionists.

MEVA: Make Emancipation Viable Again

originally posted by: LesMisanthrope
a reply to: Asktheanimals

it restricts the individual's rights to say and hear what he wants to.

There is indeed a right to hear what we want to and a right of association. Not in the sense of the US Constitution and association, but in the sense of it being a right to limit speech on ones own property, at an event where the space is rented or leased or in a members only situation where an uwanted interloper is spouting unwanted speech and interfering with others rights.

There is and should be a limit based on does a persons speech, take away the rights of another, or lead to the death of or injury of another.

Incitment is also a valid reason to punish for speech. It is the tool that terrorists use to incite people to action and actions that have deadly consequences. Hitler was a master at inciting with speech, with horrible consequences. A lie can incite a dangerous response and often does.

a reply to: Blaine91555

There is indeed a right to hear what we want to and a right of association. Not in the sense of the US Constitution and association, but in the sense of it being a right to limit speech on ones own property, at an event where the space is rented or leased or in a members only situation where an uwanted interloper is spouting unwanted speech and interfering with others rights.

There is and should be a limit based on does a persons speech, take away the rights of another, or lead to the death of or injury of another.

Incitment is also a valid reason to punish for speech. It is the tool that terrorists use to incite people to action and actions that have deadly consequences. Hitler was a master at inciting with speech, with horrible consequences. A lie can incite a dangerous response and often does.

Yes, one has a right to allow or otherwise remove anyone on his property. I don't find that to be a speech issue.

As for limiting speech as it may take away the rights or injure another, I think that is absolutely false on the basis that actions, not words, leads to those conditions. And I am well aware that not many believe as I do on this topic.

The same goes with incitement, which is a form of magical thinking. Hitler was also a master of censorship, with horrible consequences. I find the idea that he was some magical orator to be specious. I suspect that the bigger contributor was that he allowed no criticism, dissent, and he suppressed information about the very atrocities he was committing.

a reply to: Blaine91555

Theoretical arguments are fine but we're talking about speech in public; we have laws against defamation of character and slander to protect the reputations of people and businesses, in addition to their finances which can be adversely affected. Our rights do not exist in a bubble because in a bubble you wouldn't need rights. It is only in the public sphere where our words and actions have consequences that the debate can be properly framed.

In general our laws are based on personal rights that end when they adversely effect the lives or rights of others. Shouting "Kill the police" at the top of your lungs in the Alaskan wilderness likely will not cause a moose to gallop in to town and attack the first cop it sees. If you have a megaphone and are in the middle of a tense stand-off with police that may actually result in people assaulting law enforcement then you have a problem.

It is the choice of the individual whether to act or not to such incitement but as members of society we have a responsibility to never urge others to cause harm to people or property. Our rights exist within the society we live in as well as the place, the time and the situation where we choose to exercise those rights.

What offends one person may not offend another, but we do not have the right to never be offended. What has been happening is that political interests are tearing away at our rights by claiming emotional injury and distress. Here is where the difference in cultural values between Christians, Jews, Muslims and Agnostics deviate to such a degree that debate and discussion become nearly impossible due to perceived offense.

This is the great failure of multiculturalism, trying force together belief systems that are incompatible. This is the reason why Nation-States have come in to existence and continue to be essential for social cohesion. Every country in the world has a dominant ethnic or religious group and has created the state to preserve it's shared values and culture. Splintering between multitudes of ethnic groups with no shared identity or values is a prescription for ghettoization and National demise as each group fights for ascendancy and control.

The ever-increasing friction can only lead to further government intervention and loss of freedoms in an effort to keep order.

originally posted by: Asktheanimals
a reply to: Blaine91555
It is the choice of the individual whether to act or not to such incitement but as members of society we have a responsibility to never urge others to cause harm to people or property.

Clearly there are times when speech actually crosses a line it should not cross.

Heaven's Gate would be an example of where a group of people were convinced to kill themselves, based only on speech and not force, but instead simple coercion by a charismatic person. Same with the Jonestown massacre.

Intervention due to speech by authority should be very rare and I fully agree with that.

I am a bit unnerved by the idea that placing a painting of Jesus on a fence could be deemed hate speech and a person could actually be charged with a hate crime.

I agree that protecting free speech is of primary importance and that we have no right to silence those whose speech we find offensive, but there needs to be logical limits to that. It is a slippery slope for sure.

a reply to: Blaine91555

The hanging of a painting of Jesus as a hate crime is just stupid.
Jesus was considered a prophet by Islam though images of such are forbidden.
Hardly grounds for a hate crime when there is no victim or damage.

a reply to: InTheLight

Thats why I love ATS! Always more to learn!
Thanks for the info!

This notion, however, is more dogma than fact. Evil words do not necessarily beget evil deeds. Nowadays, one needs only to listen to hate speech to see that he is repelled and not seduced by it. But in one particular analysis, Hate speech legislation was useless, if not contributing to the worst crimes of mankind, in the one instance when there was real justification for it.

Saying "not necessarily" is cheap and simplistic. Why - should be the question, as, for instance, in the methodology of scientists: when asking "why", you need to distinguish one person from another person via an account of relational context and history which for every person is different, thus resulting in differences in affect-regulation.

Take the past and present and then expose a certain person (say, one with a history of abuse) to certain words/themes, and see how those words/themes become reified in their minds, assimilated in the context of "what is necessary for self-regulation as a person" in a society with other's we seek enlivenment from; then, place such a person with pathological needs for enlivenment, within a democracy, and watch, as radical libertarians have shown, how people like this form a fifth column, towards the ultimate goal of undermining the very sorts of conditions which make for a coherent/stable and happy society.

Something far more nuanced is needed to defend your concept of hate-speech than this, and I think it has to do with the way good/evil operate in our brain minds. People need to know the difference between a solipsistic, individualistic, gnostic-based fantasy system, and a semiotic, evolutionarily emergent understanding of human consciousness in terms of an intrinsic primary intersubjectivity, which develops into a transubjective relationship with the world around us.

Again, I am for a certain degree of 'liberty", but I fear ignorance of important facts about reality, in interaction with the interpersonal needs of human bodies (i.e. to elicit behavior in the other so that they come to "recognize" me, and sometimes secondarily, other times primarily, some capacity) is very powerful in interfering with social-dynamics between humans.

I am, for instance, fairly relaxed when it comes to tolerating hate speech, so long as the society one exists within has an epistemologically/ontologically realistic understanding of how our brains-minds-bodies work i.e. semiotically, and so granting a hierarchical priority to positions informed by scientific methods over viewpoints that derive from fantasy (i.e. creationism, libertarian fantasies about individualism, etc).

In the absence of such a situation, and as history has shown, the people who win or come to control society tend to be the "traumatizing narcissists" i.e. people with a psycho-neurological disorder which makes them consciously unresponsive to facts in external reality (particularly those that conflict with their ludicrous fiction that they are somehow "more important" than others), and so, willing to act against others in ultimately damaging ways. If faith, or feeling, comes to be taken by the person as "higher" than reason, as happens so often in all sorts of cults, than society/people suffer.

With that said, hateful speech is not and can never be treated as equivalent to science, inasmuch as a scientific methodology desires to keep semiotic track of all sorts of objective influences on the deciding and judging process, whereas hateful speech is fundamentally careless, narcissistic and fantasy-based (i.e. based in the false hope that my hateful speech will bring about a desired condition for myself and loved ones). In social terms, there is only one right way to raise your children, and that's to seek to help them regulate their own affects - not traumatize them by holding them to the same standards you were subjected to, and so generating in them the same egotistical needs. This "philosophy of being with others", which is today being developed in so many fields of human knowledge, treats the human self as an emergent property of sign-relations between organisms. We have delved deeper into natures semiosis than other's, which is reflected in emergent capacities like "astral travel". But to think, or imagine, that climbing the ladder of being means a loss of the lower rungs, is a mistake: all levels remain connected/relevant to the structuring of higher properties.

In all, the only way hate-speech can be inoculated against and allowed to be expressed is if a corresponding belief/knowledge can be recruited by the brain-mind exposed to the hate-speech, and then neutralize, or process (make sense) how it is incoherent or harmful in some way.

Because the brain-consciousness dynamic is such that they mutually influence one another's organization, unless we build-in ways to make-sense of false claims (i.e. hateful claims), society is doomed.

Libertarianism thus comes with the caveat of responsibility: we can only preserve the right to "be" or 'speak" in any way you want, without dysregulating society, if we are responsive to how the world works, and so protect people/citizen from false views by educating them about intersubjective, subjective and ecological processes in the world.

originally posted by: JoshuaCox
a reply to: LesMisanthrope

So you should be able to tell people to do violence and it still be considered free speech?!?

You mean like that movie the Purge?

We all get it. Rap music is real but your favorite movie is just fiction. I've seen enough physcopaths to know where motivation for evil comes from. Not from the low level hate speech that you're focused on.

No one is dressing up as Dylan Roof for Halloween. Plenty of Jokers going around. Absolutely sickening.