General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I do not condone killing ... [View all]bemildred
(90,061 posts)But the thing is this, there are certain people that you will not shut up without the use of force. So if you forgo the use of force to shut people up, you must perforce let them talk. You don't have to listen, in fact nobody has to listen. Some will get violent to get attention, those you can arrest. The rest you must protect and ignore, lest you give them credibility.
Hate speech laws do not work because you can never get a consensus as to what is and is not hate speech. Even in egregious examples like racism and gender orthodoxy and religious dogmas there is no agreement.
The classic formulation here was the shouting fire in a theater argument, which is related to the terrorist about to blow stuff up argument for torture, it proposes a future subjective hypothetical as justification for present concrete harm now, and this opening will always be manipulated for political reasons.
I think an open and vituperative political debate is preferable to a sanitized one, politics is for grown ups. The Norwegian response. Let them discredit themselves. Bigotry is not really that attractive.
Anyway, that's the argument, and if you want me to get on board with hate speech laws you are going to have to explain how those laws will not be used in the future, as in the past, to suppress forbidden ideas. Governments fear the contagion of ideas, but their fear does not convince me it's a good idea. If your ideas are so hot, you ought to be able to defend them easily in open debate, and that is much less likely to make the problem worse than any unnecessary use of force.