Banning Hate Speech is Dangerous

The term "liberal" as you are using it is a US political term. Very often a straw man type of label. We don't feel we have 'liberals' in Western Europe (or southern, northern, or eastern Europe either). Your biased language betrays your agenda. Your kind of person is always saying that "liberals" are "jumping up and down", "screaming", etc. However, as you say, we need to define "hate speech". I am happy, where I live, with the provisions of the UK Public Order Act 1986, which provides that expression of hatred toward someone on account of that person's colour, race, disability, nationality (including citizenship), ethnic or national origin, religion, or sexual orientation is forbidden. Any communication which is threatening or abusive, and is intended to harass, alarm, or distress someone is forbidden.

Really Centrox, you don't see the danger in this?

Sooner or later you are going to get a government in power in your country with whom you don't agree. That government can ban feminism, or civil rights groups, or Muslim organizations. All they have to do is say that feminists are against men, or civil rights groups are against native British people or Muslim organizations are against Christians-- they just say that they are banning hate speech.

The problem is that that these judgments are made by people; namely the people in power. As long as you agree with the people in power, then all is fine with these arrangements.

But you are giving the people in power an awful lot of power. If you ever get a government in power with whom you don't agree.... you either have to shut up about it, or go to jail.

Hate speech in the US is not banned.

You can express the idea that one group of people are responsible for all the bad in the world, and that they are lower than an ant's navel crawling under the subway track of the Battery Tunnel, and you will have broken no laws. You only break a law when you tell people to physically attack someone.

In Europe, it is different. There, hate speech-running down a group of people without promoting violence against them-can get you arrested. But not in the USA.

Of course, it you do utter statements that blame a certain group of people, the government can't touch you but your boss can fire you, the neighbors can shun you, the paperboy can refuse to deliver to you, and you can't do anything about it. Speech is protected only from the government, how people legally treat you from then on is up to them.

Dog help me for responding to one of this idiot's threads. Hate speech is not banned in the United States, nor can it be based on the first amendment and a library of state and Federal court decisions, including opinions handed down by the Supremes. In Schenck versus the United States, the Court found that speech which is dangerous can be limited. In the famous phrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the first amendment does not protect dangerous speech, and he used the phrase: "falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater." Note the use of "falsely;" speech which is deemed dangerous, but which is held to be true cannot be banned. The courts have walked that fine line with no problem since the Schenck ruling in 1919. The standard is that speech which incites to violence or criminality is not protected; and further, that speech which is deemed dangerous, but can be demonstrated to be true, is protected.

Max claims to be a "liberal" (see Centrox's dismissal of the term). That's bullshit. He's been busily puking up far rightwingnut memes for quite a while now. Voting for Democrats does not make someone "liberal." Hate speech is not banned in the United States. Speech which calls for violence or criminality is banned, and justifiably so. Speech which seems to incite violence or criminality, but which can be shown to be true, is not banned.

My advice to Centrox, and other intelligent and thoughtful people is to give Max and his Nazi buddies a pass.

You can't help yourself, can you. You continue to be one of my biggest fans. Don't worry, It is very interesting Setanta brings up Schenck v. United States... a case that dealt with opposition to a war. Setanta himself is "puking up far rightwingnut memes". Setanta is awesome that way. That's why I love him right back.

Schenck was a socialist who was convicted of convincing men to resist signing for the draft. The case dealt only with "obstruction of he draft". Schenk was convicted for fliers that said (according to Wikipedia).



People take Sentata seriously ... in reality he is one of the most cleverly funny members here.

I just checked my OP. I never said anything close to "Hate Speech is Banned in the US".

I am saying that liberals in the US are calling for hate speech to be banned. I can provide links to this if you would like... but I don't think they are necessary. The ridiculous slogan "Hate Speech is not Free Speech" is pretty common among liberals these days. Of course Hate Speech is Free Speech; that is the point of Free Speech.

Some people talk about certain utterances or communications being "banned" as if there were some kind of codex prohibitorum kept in a government office somewhere, and anyone saying or writing e.g. "women getting engineer jobs is wrong because it makes my balls shrink" or "send them wetbacks and sholos back" is going to get visited in the night by the PC Gestapo and hauled off for re-education of the painful kind.

If you are going to try to make this personal... at least have the decency to spell "cholo" correctly

I have only heard it, never seen it written. It was in the latest episode of American Horror Story, where a restaurant chef says to a brown skinned bus boy "Shape up or I'll fire your cholo ass!" Satisfyingly, the chef winds up on a meat hook in the restaurant's cold store. The show is funny. It's set at the time of the 2016 Presidential election. The central characters are a howlingly silly "liberal" lesbian couple, and you also have a nutty “4Chan” basement dwelling libertarian free-speecher type with blue hair ((Evan Peters) who seems to be mixed up with creepy clowns who cut the throats of people they don't like, including an Asian judge who gave a ruling denying Mr Blue Hair's right to make antisemitic amendments to town council enactments. He spews a bunch of anti-immigrant “facts” he poached off Facebook at the lesbians. As the Independent says, he is a denizen of "That 9th circle of hell of the internet inhabited by white dudes who translated their own insecurities into paranoid delusion and tinfoil hat conspiracies, who talk with the over-rehearsed grandiosity of Greek philosophers because they’re afraid otherwise their own shortcomings will be found out. Someone driven entirely by fear, only now empowered by Papa Bear Trump".

All in all, a satisfyingly silly and funny season, I think.

The season trailer gives a good idea of the flavour...

The word "cholo" is pretty offensive. There are some racial words that White people should think twice before using.

This is a word that was used by the European Spaniards during the colonial period to refer to people with indigenous blood. The literal meaning is "half-breed" (the Spanish colonizers wrote books that use the term "cholo" explaining different racial mixtures). It became used as a synonym of "degenerate", and that is the aspect of the word you are throwing around now.

But... all I am asking is that you spell it correctly.

You can quote them in context sometimes I think. Is it like "mestizo"?

I think it is more like the word "nigger". It is a derogatory word that has colonial, racial roots. These are words that are more offensive when used by White people.

I have never heard the word "mestizo" used, it seems to me like a historical, technical term that you might see in books.

According to Wikipedia, Hispanic people in the USA tend to use "chicano" these days.

Quote max:

I get the idea that it's obsolescent as well. I've never heard it, but have seen it written. I gather it's the Hispanic equivalent of "mulatto" for someone half-black half-white. I've heard black people use the word "mulatto" not knowing its somewhat negative connotation. It's not the most insulting word, but the heyday of "mulatto" was during the period of slavery and legal segregation that we are now trying to put behind us.

The word "mulatto" is not directly derogatory, it is the word used back then by both blacks and whites, but that period was so toxic that people nowadays reject using it. Same for "mestizo".