Is it not an offense to post violence provoking rhetoric on the Internet in the US? According to the Supreme Court that is not permitted at all although I daresay not much is being done.
While Neo-Nazis can post and express their sordid positions, they cross the line when they attempt to encourage violence. If the government cares to, I’d surmise they have grounds to pursue legal ramifications. And if any group associated with the government were to post such violence provoking garbage, they can and will try to nail them.
Freedom of speech is absolute as long you are expressing yourself. We think in words. Once you start limiting free speech, you limit the freedom to think. Inciting imminent violence is different. Your intent is not to express yourself, your intent is to cause imminent harm. The same goes for slander.
Going back earlier in the thread and your take on the EU (which I still find severely misinformed), I’m sorry but I agree with the rules of my country that some sorts of dangerous speech - such as negating or praising the horrors of WWII, as you pointed out - are to be suppressed by law. Why should constitute dangerous speech, you say? Well, that’s why we have democratic institutions.
The fact that the State suppresses some sorts of speech does not make a dictatorship in the absolute. It’s the process by which these decisions are made, which will be either in line with democratic institutions, or one of many other signs of an authoritarian society. (And in the above case, we have irréfutable historic proofs of atrocities which should hopefully never happen again in our species.)
Nothing of this will be perfect in practice, but absolutes in politics are usually a sign of disconnection with the human reality, which is unfortunately made of compromises. And that means that some extreme speeches have to be policed, yes. Since you have been putting forward your reading, you must be aware of the paradox of tolerance, that a free society should not tolerate the adversaries to that freedom, using reason first, but force if necessary.
If tomorrow it became illegal for you to say that “freedom of speech is absolute as long as you are expressing yourself”, would you immediately become incapable of thinking that thought? If not immediately, how long do you think it would take you to be unable to conceive of the idea? If you would never forget, why would other people?
Is everybody who grows up in a dictatorship where criticism of the Dear Leader is punished incapable of believing that reform is possible? If so, how do you account for dissidents who risk their lives to express those thoughts? How was Ceausescu overthrown?
Are people who from birth have been unable to speak and are unable to write incapable of thought?
On the other side, do you think that someone who sincerely believes that people who are X should be enslaved or killed does no harm to others by merely expressing that view, even if no-one is killed or suffers violence immediately?
Freedom of speech is the basis of democracy, freedom and human progress. Every successful cooperative endeavor requires free speech, because it allows us distinguishing between good, bad, better or best ideas. Once we start to limit it, we hamper ourself. It is a Pandora’s box. You open it and firstly they limit something you agree with like racism. Then they limit speech about Covid-19. Government starts to be unstable, so they limit political speech of certain kind and slowly start to widen the scope. Freedom of speech is just too important for all of humankind to justify its limiting. Furthermore, it is a natural right, so its suppression is ipso facto unjust.
Anything that says « ipso facto » or puts forward absolute principles as a rule makes me automatically wary, because it assumes a reductionist view of the world, and human reality cannot be modeled that way. Civilization builds itself on compromise and discussion. Absolutism… well, it’s absolutism. I’m French and yet I think Rousseau did a lot of damage to philosophy.
I would recommend you take a deeper look at the paradox of tolerance, which was formulated that way right after WWII and its horrible lessons. There must, you know, have been something there.
No-one here disagrees that freedom of speech is vital for healthy democracies. But that freedom cannot be absolute: some compromises are necessary. You only have to look at the US and the UK in the last five years to realise that democracies can be subverted by those who are prepared to lie to achieve their aims, and who once in power will themselves try to limit other people’s freedom.
Absolute freedom of speech allows the malign to attack democracy, freedom and human progress: do you believe that democracies should have no defence against such attacks?
You confuse freedom to think with the ability to think. People can still think, but they are afraid to think about certain ideas. And if the brainwashing goes on long enough, people really start to loose grip on ideas like freedom. It is an unknown concept for them.
Under dictatorship regimes people start to self-censor, they teach their kids what to say and what not to say. The day is filled with propaganda and the state takes the kids and brainwashes them from a very young age. People suppress ideas, bury them deep and a lot of them just breaks. After a few generations most people just feel that something might be wrong, but they are afraid to think about it. They never knew freedom, they only heard their grandparents talking about it and they know it is dangerous listening to it. The school told them they must report events like this to the authorities. And they were programmed to do what they are told.
Thanks for putting it that way, that’s clearer than what I was trying to get at. It’s the core of the paradox of tolerance. A tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance and has to use civilized means to maintain the discussion, but when it’s a matter of survival, coercion has to be applied or the tolerant society will disappear.
Or, put more eloquently in Spaceballs: « good can’t triumph against evil, because good can’t do evil »
Freedom of speech is the defence. If the ideas are wrong, they can’t win in the free market of ideas. But once you limit the freedom of the said “market” you just removed the best defence yourself.
No, I’m not confusing it at all: I was asking you questions about your statements because to my mind they are too simplistic and conflate a number of ideas, failing to recognise the real complexity of life, and the damage that the malign can do to democracy.
Of course brainwashing can lead to people losing familiarity with concepts: but that’s also the consequence of the brainwashing — the overt propaganda — not just of the squashing of the right to say things out loud. The constant repetition of the lie is just as important — but you appear to say that the constant repetition of the lie is fine because it’s just expression of thought.
A democracy deciding that it should be illegal to express views on the Holocaust to prevent harm and reduce the chances that it should happen again, while educating people so that fewer will think such thoughts in future is working fully towards the progress that we both want. It’s a compromise with absolute freedom of speech which a democracy is fully entitled to make.
Oh, yeah, because there never were any atrocities committed by elected people given full free rein in the 20th century, right? The market of ideas seems to work perfectly without any kind of regulation - as is the case of all markets, obviously.
To further @brookter ‘s point, in France, I have received a full education about WWII. It’s not like nobody discusses it ever. It’s that it’s unlawful to say that the Holocaust is a hoax and that killing people out of ethnicity is a great idea. Frankly, that just seems like common sense.
Luckily such views were refuted centuries ago. Freedom of speech is too essential to democracy to justify its limiting. The Founders understood it and modern form of this is Brandenburg v. Ohio.
All those discussions about the freedom of people to decide is based on a flawed assumption, just like market economy: that people can and will always take informed and rational decisions which will benefit society as a whole.
Humanity does not work that way. It’s striving to, but in the meantime, we have to make do with that inconvenient thing that is reality.
Again, see how that complete free rein worked in democratic societies in the 20th century. This counter example destroys any argument saying that this approach works.
With such crooked logic we can just have anarchy. Nothing is ever perfect, because we are still human in the end. We have strict laws againts murder and yet, murder still occurs. We punish ‘hate speech’ in Europe and yet, such speech is still very common. We should strafe to the best we can accomplish and not use the lack of perfection as an critique. And the fact remains that freedom of speech is a natural law of every human being and the state has no right to limit it. Not even God could take it away without destroying the universe first and create a new one without such right.
Selling poison is not freedom of speech and I agree that journalist purposely lying about Trump supposedly saying that drinking bleach helps against Covid-19 should be held accountable.
Are you seriously suggesting that US is the only arbiter of which speech can be free? Perhaps Senator McCarthy would like to join the conversation at this point?
The reality is that you live in a country, which like all democracies, has to make judgments about freedom of speech: you also have laws against deceitful advertisers, you also have laws against con men. Anything otherwise would be a
Neither KW nor I think banning expression should be done lightly, but neither are we naive enough to think that it should be unlimited — that it is simply a recipe for the powerful being able to oppress the weak.
