>The invitation to provide concrete examples of valuable discourse that's criminalized by hate speech is only one of several avenues available for this.
The parent poster brought up a pretty important example:
>Unreasonable discourse has been instrumental in much of our progress as a society, I can’t imagine why anybody would have so much contempt for it.
If you need even more concrete, then how's this: the civil rights movement could've easily been classified as "hate speech" and legally squashed because it was unpopular when it started. Talk about gay marriage could've been legally squashed, because is was unpopular when the discussion started.
Do you really believe that we have the world so well figured out that there will never be anything controversial in the future that will be unpopular at first? Because if you don't, then hate speech laws are going to be used against those ideas.
If you need even more concrete, then how's this: the civil rights movement could've easily been classified as "hate speech" and legally squashed because it was unpopular when it started.
That is not a concrete example it is a hypothetical, furthermore civil rights activist were literally beaten in the streets for their speech and subject to extrajudicial punishment on many occassions - far worse than the current "hate speech" laws that are afforded due process.
The point is that there would be additional ways to stop their speech through legal means.
>Just give a concrete example, do it!
As said elsewhere: you can't prove a negative. Asking for concrete examples on this topic is like asking for a concrete example about an epidemic that a food safety law prevented. You wouldn't claim that we don't need food safety laws just because you couldn't give us concrete examples of epidemics that were prevented due to that food safety law, would you?
Hate speech laws vary widely from country to country (from none to strict), but I thought the Wikipedia two-sentence summary sounded reasonable:
"The laws of some countries describe hate speech as speech, gestures, conduct, writing, or displays that incite violence or prejudicial actions against a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group, or which disparage or intimidate a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group. The law may identify a group based on certain characteristics."
I'd like to know what kinds of societal discourse is being held back when there are laws prohibiting disparagement or intimidation of people based on their membership in a group.
What are we missing out on, that hate speech laws as described are prohibiting?
I don't believe gay rights activism could in any way fall under that, or any other kinds of pro-civil rights activism, as has been mentioned elsewhere. None of those are focused on disparagement or intimidation, but the opposite: freedom from disparagement or intimidation.
> I'd like to know what kinds of societal discourse is being held back when there are laws prohibiting disparagement or intimidation of people based on their membership in a group
This depends highly on what is being included under the umbrella of "disparagement of intimidation". Some claimed that James Damore's memo was disparagement, and others say that advocating against men who identity as women competing in women's sporting events is disparagement. Others try to put advocating for enforcement of existing immigration laws as disparagement and intimidation.
Once you define a forbidden category, people will try to abuse it to their advantage.
What you're missing is that you're reading a generic summary of laws that are twisted and abused. Elsewhere in the thread an article was posted about a teenager that was arrested and had to wear an ankle bracelet because she quoted rap lyrics in remembrance of another dead teenager. I believe you'll agree that Snap Dogg's lyrics aren't really many to be focused on disparagement or intimidation either. Yet these hate speech laws were used to punish a teenager.[0]
Just look at how the "fake news" label has been abused in the past. You could read a summary on Wikipedia about what it is:
>Fake news is a form of news consisting of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional news media (print and broadcast) or online social media.
This description makes it sound like limiting fake news is a good thing, because it combats disinformation campaigns. Yet that same rhetoric was used by nazis to justify their censorship, which they used to cover to their atrocities.
I do agree the Snoop Dogg lyrics case is a bad application of hate speech laws.
One could, however, find cases of all laws being abused, from eminent domain to property crime laws, drug laws, libel, qualified immunity, you name it. That does not mean that those laws are all categorically bad laws.
(Though I think qualified immunity has shown itself in practice to be categorically bad.)
None of the examples given relate to violence. Quashed for being unpopular, immoral, etc. yes. But well out of the definition of hate speech.
I think the definition of hate speech does a pretty good job at highlighting the core issue: no violence. Doesn't mean your message must be popular or in line with the popular views of society at the time.
I can't find a good reason to advocate violence against a group based on blanket criteria. Can you find one? Any of your examples were more about instigating violence against someone or about receiving more rights?
Hate speech is not about violence though. Plenty of countries have laws against incitement to violence without having hate speech laws. Take the United States as an example. Harassment and incitement to violence can still be illegal without hate speech laws. The Cambridge dictionary says this:
>public speech that expresses hate OR encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
Notice the "or". Simply expressing hate is enough by this definition, which is clearly not violence.
>Doesn't mean your message must be popular or in line with the popular views of society at the time.
Religious people argued in the past that gay marriage is not okay because it goes against their religion. If they had had hate speech laws then they probably would've used them against advocates of gay marriage.
> Simply expressing hate is enough by this definition
But was that definition ever applied as such? I see people arguing that it was but not a single valid example was provided. A case where courts punished someone for promoting hate but no violence whatsoever.
I most certainly meant ‘rationalization’, believing that freedom of expression, the most fundamental building block of a free society, should be restricted to your own idea of reasonable is absolutely something that you need to internally rationalize.
> your apparent supposition here is that lines regarding reasonable discourse should be scare quoted, or are mere matters of entirely subjective speculation.
Reasonable is an entirely subjective quality, there is no objective framework for divining reasonableness.
> If you want to fix your thinking on the topic
The fact that you believe you have some position of authority to dictate to others how they should “fix their thinking”, so that their thoughts are somehow more correct, really says a lot about you.
> The invitation to provide concrete examples of valuable discourse that's criminalized by hate speech
Here you go, legitimate religious speech resulting in a conviction:
Here’s another person receiving a wrongful arrest payout for exactly the same crime, to highlight exactly how absurd these laws are, even to the people enforcing them:
Of course, please feel free to explain to me why none of that speech was reasonable in the first place. Perhaps you could enlighten me with some correct thinking.
> I don't consider Hammond's sign to be legitimate religious speech.
Agree with it or not, his sign contained a message that is part of the religious doctrine of well over half the worlds population. This comment just reinforces the fact that for for all of us who don’t live in a country with such draconian speech laws, we are lucky we don’t have to check with you first to find out whether our ideas are correct before we express them.
> Agree with it or not, his sign contained a message that is part of the religious doctrine of well over half the worlds population.
So just because half the world believes something hateful, that should make it ok?
Regardless, "Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism" is not actually a part of the religious doctrine of all of Christianity. Many denominations have come out as pro-LGBT.
> we are lucky we don’t have to check with you first to find out whether our ideas are correct before we express them
It's words...on a sign outside in public. People assaulted him with water and soil but didn't get arrested. What was on his sign was irrelevant.
The justification by the judge that convicted him essentially said he was responsible for peoples' reaction because they got offended by his sign. That is a complete reversal of logic, and means that you can wrap the definition of "hate speech" over anything that sufficiently large group of people find offensive/insulting.
Consider these two responses someone might make to this sentence:
(1) In discussion where clear examination and exchange of relevant ideas matters most, we make distinctions all the time between reasonable discourse and unreasonable discourse. Students of rhetoric distinguish between ethos, pathos, and logos. Practitioners of logic distinguish between sound and fallacious reasoning. And as I'm pointing out yet again here, the legal field already makes any number of distinctions regarding how speech functions that are related to the degree to which it is protected or not protected.
(2) Your clear failings in this discussion mark you as an irredeemable utter piece of shit, an overconfident idiot who is fit for nothing better than to be dragged out of your house, beaten on livestream to people laughing at you while those watching send in messages of proper encouragement those beating you, until finally someone finally extracts the only worthwhile thing that can come out of the pathetic gray matter inside your skull: marry it to the pavement like Jackson Pollock did with paint and canvas. And the world will be a better place in every way. In fact, the sooner we get rid of people like you, the better.
Which is more reasonable discourse? #1 or #2? I think it's pretty clear that it's #1. I certainly wouldn't consider #2 a contribution to reasonable discourse as anything other than a hyperbolic counterexample. HN guidelines would make that kind of distinction as well (and in fact, even though it should be clear that #2 is a hyperbolic counterexample, it may carry enough baggage that I may have run afoul of the guidelines anyway... but of course, as an ardent defender of absolute speech rights, presumably you're not one to appeal to such guidelines?).
Do you really think that's an entirely subjective distinction? I think consensus is broad enough that it could be said to be objective on a human scale.
Some forms of speech aren't discursive exchanges of ideas.
> The fact that you believe you have some position of authority to dictate to others how they should “fix their thinking”, so that their thoughts are somehow more correct
You know it's possible to be wrong about something, right? You can need your thinking fixed about whether you understand force vector diagrams sufficiently well to use them as tools to get accurate insights into relevant physics, or as most on this forum should know, you can need your mental model of a program corrected by a compiler (or a second pair of eyes). And one might even need their understanding of the values and dynamics involved in free speech issues corrected.
So while we're talking about character in this discussion, let's observe that you're the first person to invoke it with a general ad hominem, on top of this weird idea that your thinking can't be broken.
The idea that thinking can be broken is directly tied up with the main reason why free speech matters. If any idea is just as good as any other idea, if any attempt to bring them into a value framework is purely subjective, then no robust exchange of ideas matters.
> Of course, please feel free to explain to me why none of that speech was reasonable in the first place. Perhaps you could enlighten me with some correct thinking.
If you're looking for enlightenment regarding Hammond, you could start by reading the court case and/or proceedings behind relevant law. Believe it or not, reasoned examination of social philosophy and law is something that can happen in the courts and legislative bodies. If you don't believe that happened here, you could try engaging with the court's reasoning.
But we don't have to involve that much work to start addressing issues in play. If you're particularly dismayed by the prospect of some fundamental human activity like speech being policed or outright curtailed by the law (or even by the suggestion that that it should be) then it should be easy for you to see why Hammond's sign was immediately problematic. It enters a similar assertion regarding sexuality.
Now, you can say "well, the antidote if any for that is more speech" and maybe that's true in many cases. But context matters in at least two ways here: first, the history of legal restrictions and informal violence related to homosexual activity. "Stop homosexuality" takes on a particular character when we're still in living memory of cases like Alan Turing's.
And the other contextual point has to do with the question I entered this discussion with: what's been lost? What can you literally not talk about? Are there no venues in which one can elaborate on desirable vs undesirable dynamics related to homosexuality specifically or sexuality in general? Or even in which it can't be proposed that it might be legally restricted? I'm going to bet the answer is no. Situational curtailing of some forms discourse in some forums is distinct from an attack on diversity of thought.
But let's say it was. Does a society that can't talk about elimination of homosexuality lose anything in particular? Anything that isn't comparable to the loss of a social capacity to talk about the question of whether practice of Judaism (or Christianity, or Islam) should be "stopped" (since, presumably, you're concerned about the exercise of religious liberty)?
> Here’s another person receiving a wrongful arrest payout for exactly the same crime
The article doesn't seem to give enough information to determine whether or not the exact same crime was committed. Do you have other information?
