If only we had European-style Hate Speech Laws on the books, we wouldn't have a white supremacist in
the White House. I firmly believe that to be a fact. He would've been arrested the day after he first opened that scum hole under his nose during the campaign and began spewing hate.
Yeah, I know there are First Amendment implications to consider. However, I consider what he does is to be more akin to incitement to violence, with what occurred in Charlottesville being a prime example of that. Every white supremacist and penny-ante Nazi has been emboldened by this egregious man's toxic presence in the WH.
The other argument I constantly against the implementation of comprehensive Hate Speech Laws revolves around who gets to decide what constitutes hate speech and why. I honestly don't know the answer to that question. However, I'd like to know how is it possible for the Europeans to somehow enforce these laws sensibly and logically but we're somehow incapable of doing the same. Are we dumber than they are? Less civilized?
I dunno. I'm of the opinion that both Hate Speech and Hate Crime laws (which we do, thankfully, have) promotes a level of decency and humanity that all nations should aspire to. Without them, it just seems that we're giving possibly the worst element of our society free reign to verbally terrorize others based on who they are and engage in dangerous, vitriolic demagoguery.
Where am I going wrong here?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Objective measures of civil liberty are not the point. The 1st Amendment doesn't need fixing. The 1st Amendment may not have freed a single slave, but it sure as hell protected the voices of abolitionists.
You want to defend fmr. AG Gonzales's prosecutorial priorities- Tommy Chong, anyone?- knock yourself out, but again I'm not sure the gaggle of goons that comprised the upper echelons of the Bush II administration are really the most shining examples of respect for our Constitutional system. The reality there, is (thanks, google 
) that no one went to jail for THAT video, apparently, and it's not like that dude invented cinematic coprophagy in the first place (Pasolini, helloooo?)
...What Gonzales of course missed in his apparent misguided anti-obscenity salvos, is the Streisand effect, to which more people no doubt know about that video - and have seen it, although I'm not going there, you're welcome to - than ever would have if he hadn't used the resources of the DOJ to go after said nasty smut-producer. In short, whatever anti-"obscenity" shutdowns of speech may apply in theory, in actuality it seems the thing is readily findable on the intertubes.
If, you know, you're into that sort of thing.
As for Canada, speaking of Porn, when they adopted Catherine MacKinnon's ideas about saving women and society from oppressive heteronormative smutty-smut, oddly enough some of the first material that was censored was Lesbian porn. Which sort of dials back into this idea that however well-intentioned (or not) these pleas to "just let us restrict the BAD speech!!!!!!!!", the fact of the matter is those tools can- and, almost invariably will- be used to restrict the speech of the oppressed, the radical, the subversive, or the unpopular.
The Marketplace did prefer VHS over betamax, so we ended up with VHS. I realize beta was technically a better format, but beyond that who cares? We survived.
really? a "very real" difference? One that would make for good legislation?
How many conversations or debates inflame or arouse hatred? "blasphemous" cartoons or a picture of two men getting married, those might inflame or arouse hatred, no? even -gasp!- intentionally?
Jesus, I just say "shit, I support the 1st Amendment, it doesn't need fixing" it seems to arouse hatred.
Some people positively lose their shit at the thought that anyone might 'childishly' object to them running around with a giant fucking list of what everyone else is "allowed" to say, or challenging the derpy notion that if only we would let them clamp down on all this annoying freedom, all our problems would go away.
The fact that many people can't simply deal with free speech - speech, mind you- and need to scramble to find "exceptions" or justify them, that it bothers them so deeply and profoundly- probably indicates something about the human psyche.
These "countless other democratic countries" don't have the 1st Amendment written into their national legal DNA. (the 2nd Amendment can also be read as unambiguous, but unlike the 1A also contains the qualifier about a "well-regulated militia" ) And for all the talk of how wonderful these speech restricting laws are, these countries still have xenophobia, they still have far right political parties- there's no evidence that these laws have accomplished--- anything, really. Even Germany, which certainly has some reasons of their own baked into their legal DNA for forbidding Nazi iconography, ends up using those laws against Chinese tourists who don't even understand what the salute they're making even means. Arresting them does not keep Germany from sliding back into fascism, to argue otherwise is inane.
But, yeah, lets go with that: just a law that outlaws Nazi gestures! Who could be opposed to that? And think of all the problems it would solve... like, real-world problems! Gone overnight through a simple piece of well-intentioned legislation! Right?
...right?
Okay, congratulations. You've just outlawed the funniest episode of Fawlty Towers.
And that's, again, the crux of the biscuit. It's not just that it's impossible to craft a meaningful legal definition of "hate speech" that would work in OUR constitutional framework, it is also that symbiology and speech is so intrinsically tied to context and meaning and interpretation that there is no fucking way you can haul it into a court of law and judge it on a rational, consistent, objective basis.
So what you're left with, again, is jimmying with one of this nation's bedrock principles of liberty simply because some speech pisses some people off. Terrible idea.
...and?
no, seriously.
.............and?
And.... the end result- in entirety- is that everyone knows the now-deceased Fred Phelps and his tiny band of followers are assholes. That's it.
Oh, and they make the rest of the Christian far right look bad.
So you would junk what is, again, a bulwark against totalitarianism just so 10 Westboro Baptist idiots couldn't carry their stupid fucking signs? You're kidding yourself, if you don't see how speech suppression could - would- be misused by the powerful; MOST 1st Amendment cases have to do not with things like Nazis marching in Skokie, but rather things like the pentagon papers. Vietnam war protests.
I don't understand the fetish for getting rid of obnoxious speech (not to mention the delusion that it would only be used by the "good" people against the "bad" speech) I really don't. Yes, it's obnoxious. Yes, those people are assholes. Yes, they have outed themselves as scum on the bottom of the pond of human consciousness.
But shutting them up would accomplish nothing.
And yeah, I respect the constitution and the bill of rights. For all the flaws of the founding fathers, it is a remarkable and incredibly important document. Do I "revere" the 1st Amendment? Fucking A I do.
That'd be worth living in a dystopian totalitarian nightmare, right?
As a Jew I can tell you that no amount of hate speech laws protect anyone. Ask Jews in Europe who are under attack from the usual wannabe Nazis and when they are victims of crimes by others it's said to not be antisemitism.
All hate speech laws do is drive things underground where they fester and grow and become worse.
And yes yes, they'd take away Game of Thrones too. 
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-5/household-healthcare-spending-in-2014.htm
Mean expenditure per household $4,290. That still leaves US households about $7k more disposable income after health care. And that's comparing one of the wealthiest states in the EU with the entirety of America. If you think of the EU as a collection of states like the American states, you'd compare it to a state like Connecticut or Massachusetts. Comparing Sweden to one of our wealthier states and not factoring in the poorest, the gap would be much higher.
Now you know.
Education? The top 100 wealthiest universities in the world, the US dominates. The highest European university is all the way down at #15, Cambridge.
Top 20 universities: 1 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from Europe, 17 from the United States.
https://thebestschools.org/features/richest-universities-endowments-generosity-research/
Don't extrapolate a good healthcare system over the rest of their society. It's misleading.
Incidentally it's amusing that you want to group the EU together as a single unit, when last I checked Mississippi has been part of the United States for over 200 years, while the likes of Croatia have been in the EU for a grand total of 4 years.
Let's roll with it for now though.
Life Expectancy: EU - 80.6 years, US - 78.74 years
Even more interesting when you consider it compared to healthcare spending.
Homicide Rate per 100,000: EU - 1.71, US - 5.9
Suicide Rate per 100,000: EU - 11.0, US - 12.6
Bankruptcy rates: Hell, the US is the world number 1.
Not to mention small things like number of people going without healthcare due to costs:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/united-states-comes-last-again-health-compared-other-countries-n684851
It's interesting by the way that you mentioned the top universities. Right there you zero straight in on the main problem with America. The best of the best available is generally better than anything else in the world. You can get the best education, the best healthcare, the best legal council, the best material possessions. The only trouble is that only a tiny, tiny fraction of people ever actually see those things, because the system is set up in such a way as to focus all the energy at the top. Everyone is told that if they work hard they can have it all, and when the vast majority inevitably fail they're told it was because they didn't work hard enough, or make the right choices, or they just weren't good enough, and because of that they have to make do with shitty conditions that people in the rest of the developed world wouldn't tolerate for a moment.
I'm so tired of it.
The French president Macron is trying to fix their economy to be more like ours, so they can generate the excess wealth like we do.
And that chart is so dumb. That chart also doesn't even factor in things like obesity, which is much higher here than there and is entirely a personal choice. Without factoring in obesity and country of origin that chart is meaningless.
I think it's a bad idea under the best or ideal circumstances, and in a situation when we seem to have authoritarians in charge who have little respect or even understanding of our constitutional system, I think it's a terribly dangerous one.
That said, I would never censor its expression. 
I get it. Look, I make no bones about my believing very strongly in the 1st Amendment, just as I believe strongly in the rights of individuals to control their own bodies and to make their own determinations about their own lives. Probably anyone who has had to deal with me all these years on DU, has figured that out about me by now.
And this topic can set me off- I know that, about myself. I've joked to others here, "if I'm found dead of an anuerysm, put on my tombstone he got sucked into one too many 1st Amendment threads on DU". The ones where people were arguing that the government should be allowed to outlaw "blasphemy", for instance...
But let me try to lay it out--- without getting snippy.
For starts, you just can't outlaw ideas. Certainly not opinions, even noxious ones. For me, that thing about individuals controlling their own bodies? The only principle I would put above that is the right to control ones own mind, ones consciousness, etc. there's a reason why thoughtcrime is one of the darkest concepts Orwell came up with in 1984. And thought and speech are tightly, really irrevocably, linked.
On your first point: the normalization of cruelty, torture, the ideas that SOME people are objects for the pleasure of others. 1) are images really doing that? I mean, objectively, is the world crueller and more torture-friendly than it used to be? 100 years ago, lynching or public executions were considered wholesome weekend entertainment. And it's not clear that a) the presentation of these things "normalizes" them or b) that legislating against those images would impact either public perception OR the intended underlying message, namely that these behaviors are "okay". A big part of the reason the American public turned against the Vietnam War? Because they saw it - really saw it - on their television sets.
Even if one argues that, in the face of statistics (which show the world getting less violent and more tolerant, believe it or not)- say, just because our national conversation has gotten uglier in the past 18 months- are we really certain free access to media is to blame? Countries with high degrees of censorship- Saudi Arabia comes to mind- have very high levels of things like oppression, authoritarianism, repression of women, minorities, etc.
Here's another example: I'm gonna guess you're not a big Game of Thrones fan, but that's a good culturally relevant example. A couple seasons ago there was a storyline that involved a medium-level character who spent the entire season being tortured in an awful, and sometimes graphic way. Does that mean that the show itself was saying "yay torture"? No. It was telling a story, and drawing the character responsible for the torture as one of the series' biggest villains, while also bringing about sympathy for a character who had been growing continually more unsympathetic up to that point.
Now, some people want nothing to do with "Game of Thrones"- that's their right. I wouldn't recommend it for everybody.
I don't believe our society would be any better off if we outlawed it.
In many ways, the question is kind of like abortion- there are many people, many Democrats like Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi, who express their personal opinion about abortion, their personal opposition to it- but what they're not doing is trying to outlaw it. There is a huge chasm between not liking things or even finding them reprehensible, and passing laws against them.
Now, on the topic of "violent porn"- porn is a topic which has been flogged countless times (excuse the pun) on DU, and I have no desire to reopen that can of worms, except to say that, as with the rest of this wider debate, condemning or not approving of something is far simpler than crafting a legally actionable definition of it. In one of DU's many porn threads, a statistic was bandied about saying "90% of all porn contains at least one act of violence"- shit, you say, that sounds terrible! Problem is, that study defined "acts of violence" as, among other things, spanking, say... or the insertion of a body part into the mouth of another.
One does not need to be an expert on human sexuality to see the problem with such a definition.
And then of course, you have varieties of human sexuality like BDSM, which many consenting adults enjoy- to define any porn where someone is tied up, for instance, as "violent"- you're xing off an area of sexuality that a lot of people don't have a problem with and enthusiastically consent to, etc as anyone who has been to the Folsom St. Fair can readily attest.
In short, some people might see a picture of a naked woman flogging a handcuffed, naked man and go "oh my, violent sex". Others might go "hey, look what Jim and Martha did for fun last weekend".
Which ties into a larger, inextricable point in all this- with "speech", you have the speech itself, the intent behind the speech, and the meaning perceived on the part of the person hearing or viewing the speech- all of which can be subjectively interpreted a number of different ways. Which is an interesting point from a semantic and human perception perspective, but makes writing laws about the whole thing really, pointlessly futile AFAIC.
Or else, any legal principles need to deal with objectively concrete legal ideas- "congress shall make no law", "consenting adults", that sort of thing.
I think we could have a conversation about the fairness doctrine, that's no so much a censorship/1A question, but it's relevant. Of course public airwaves are less crucial to the discourse than they used to be, but it's a valid point. I have been unfortunate enough to be subjected to listening to el Rushbo more than once in my life, and far be it for me to defend that corpulent fuck, but I'm sure he and his listeners would go into overdrive explaining about how reasonable-sounding and "not hateful" his stuff is. Like I'm sure he would tell you that he's not on the air suggesting "beating up gay people". So passing laws against hate speech would likely have little effect on the shit he does.
Now, let me add that I come from a family of Jews that had people in Europe that went to the camps. When I see these fuckhats in Charlottesville talking about genocide and ovens, that's me, and more importantly my family, everyone I love most in the world- that they're talking about. Full stop.
I've been to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. know what fascists can do to Jews. So this is not just some abstract philosophical point with no personal relevance to me. Just today I got a mailer from the Simon Weisenthal center that had marchers with swastikas chanting "Jews will not replace us" on the cover. I am DEEPLY distressed by the ugliness and hate that has been churned up by the last election.
But I firmly believe that the protections- specifically protection of dissent- inherent in having the 1st Amendment so central to our system of government, stand as one of our best protections against those people. I think that vastly outweighs any "benefit" we might obtain by censoring objectionable opinions. Letting them speak is not nearly as grave a threat as giving the government- any government- the power to outlaw ideas.
To me the reflexive impulse to go after free speech right now is like wanting to chop a hole in the bottom of the lifeboat, after the ship has sunk.
Define, with objective terms, "hate speech" (and you don't get to say "like the Europeans"
Then, put on your contrarianism thinking cap on and see how/if your definition could work against you.
Then reflect upon your definition utilizing existing and landmark USSC decisions on the 1st Amendment paying particular attention to Stromberg v California, Near v Minnesota, One v Olsen, US v Obrien, Hustler v Falwell, NAACP v Alabama to name just a few
by your logic, that should have caused us to elect Ted Nugent as Governor by now.
