Censorship of hate speech is an unconditional surrender to hate.

[True Blue Door]

40. I'm aware that rational argument is insufficient, but it is definitely indispensable.

Quite obviously most people are not directed entirely by logic, and some are motivated by its nemesis. But identifying and immunizing society against psychoses requires exposure to them, and to intellectual combat with them.

Otherwise those who are rational will be weak when the power calculus is not in their favor: They will be tempted toward nihilism and moral retreat, behaving as if all ideas were equally corrupt, and cede the field to competing monsters whose only debate is what method civilization should use to commit suicide.

And while there are limits to speech based on the murky borderlands between speaking and action, those limits definitely do not apply to speech whose only negative consequences are in the criminal actions of its enemies rather than its supporters.

Take some of the 1960s Civil Rights protests, for instance - whites and blacks sitting together at lunch counters despite local and state laws prohibiting it. These were deliberate provocations against the violent racist establishment, and the locals usually obliged. Showing that they were peaceful and the segregationists violent was the entire point of the exercise.

Now, not every segregationist was violent, but the fact was that the South was far more tolerant of terrorist garbage like the KKK than they were of black people simply wanting to be treated like human beings, and that was what the protests meant to prove. They did so. And the racist establishment cried foul, blamed the protesters for the violence against them, and said they were "inciting" it and defaming the South in the process, but it was simply exposing the truth.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a black and a white person sitting together, and nothing inherently wrong with drawing a picture of a historical figure, so if either of these things "provokes" violence, then the problem is clearly with the individuals and political movements preaching the violence, not the non-violent movements that simply defy it.

consider the case of julius striecher, the only non-official, non-military nazi to be hanged at nuremberg. his crime? here is his condemnation by the jurists when he was sentenced to hang:

This was incitement of his own party to commit violence against others, not merely defying the violence of others. The problem here is that people are confusing the roles in the historical analogy. Nazism was the violent party; the non-violent party whose fundamental rights "offended" and "provoked" them to violence were Jews and liberals.

It's a very simple standard in most circumstances: Who is being violent, and who is not being violent? And it's pretty easy to see through the ludicrous moral equivocations that always follow, implying that speaking an "offensive" opinion is in a similar moral ballpark to threatening or carrying out murders against those who offend. The two are not even in the same moral cosmos.

While I agree that Fox News and others of their ilk have indeed been guilty of incitement to murder, I don't think holding them legally accountable is an option beyond civil lawsuits, and for precisely the reason outlined above - that right-wingers would abuse that standard to blur and eliminate the distinction, and end up using the power to prosecute incitement as a way to prosecute the victims of politically-motivated violence.

Republican prosecutors would charge people protesting against police violence with the deaths of police and their own fellow demonstrators at the hands of police. They would charge people protesting against racism with "hate speech," as they already routinely accuse the accuser.

Their constant desire to charge people who protest against wars with "treason" would be strengthened, since they could argue precedent in such speech laws - that opposing foreign policies of a government inherently weakens its ability to carry them out, and thus through some convoluted chain of logic say that protesters deliberately caused the deaths of US soldiers.

Evil is not something you can destroy or silence. Millennia of self-righteous tyrants, priests, censors, and radical mobs failed to improve the lot of humankind, because you cannot uproot flaws inherent to the human condition. Any kind of freedom requires the intellectual humility to understand that being right - no matter how right - carries no entitlement whatsoever beyond every other idea, nor should anyone who truly believes they are right need or expect such privileges.

I personally would have no interest in living in a society where people were superficially pleasant by force of law, because I would know their hearts would be brimming with unexpressed rage and hatred, sublimated resentments and crazy thoughts that festered for lack of open examination. It would seep into everything they do, poisoning their minds and leading to horrors the moment that suffocating social control relaxed or failed.

Conservative Islam, with all its oppressive rules and hypocrisy, produced radical Islam from the suppressed humanity of its millions of involuntary followers, and any form of conservative/authoritarian policy in Western societies would also lead to radicalism in the same vein. At best, if instead there were a rebound in the opposite direction, the reaction is often just as radical and oppressive - insane purity trolls like Robespierre and Lenin, crushing humankind in a vise-grip between their violence and that of their right-wing doppelgangers.

The only limits to freedom apply to situations where people recognize it's already been subverted: A liberal society doesn't start a war, but it can acknowledge when a war has been started and fight for the sake of some day not having to fight. A liberal society doesn't limit speech, but acknowledges when speech has gone beyond political expression and been merely a tool of violence.

Saying "give me your money or I'll kill you" is a crime because it strongly compels another's actions. Replying to the armed robber, "Fuck you, go rob someone else" does not compel the robber to pull the trigger. Even if you deliberately walked into a bad part of town in your best clothes hoping to find that situation, it's still 100% on the robber if they rob and/or shoot you.