The censorious political left and free speech

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It’s not inviting violence unless the person calls for attacks on others.

I hate spaghetti, it’s not my fault if someone hears I hate it then goes out and kills people eating spaghetti.

That's a bit different than saying, "Disabled people are a drain on our resources, we should have them put down as humanely as possible as we no longer have the resources to cater to them as well as the non-disabled population!"

And then more and more people begin to spread this rhetoric, mob mentality begins to unfold, and before you know it a political party with an anti-disabled agenda is in power.

It's an extreme example, but I hope you get my point. Words can be dangerous, especially with the right voice and mind (just look at some of the previous leaders throughout the past century).

Your previous comments just said that disabled people are a drain on society
Now you’ve changed it, that’s not fair

Do you think the guy who tweeted “I’ll pay $500 to every person who kills and ice agent” should be locked up? Cause he hasn’t been cause the left thinks that’s fine.

Guarantee if someone said they’d pay people $500 to kill liberals or some Democrat politicians that person be in jail.

Other liberals have said someone should take one for the team and kill trump. That is also inciting violence, yet again that person is deemed a hero by the left.

Antifa attacks people daily and the left cheers them. Just as the left cheers people assuring maga hat wearers. It seems to me the left is perfectly fine with violence and inciting violence.
I hate left and right.

What do you think about the mob who chanted “what do want... DEAD COPS.... when do want it....NOW”
Then few weeks later people killed cops.
Again the left says those people are heroes and brave. They just a angry mob in my view all the “protests” the left does is just angry violent mobs. Nothing like the civil rights protests
Just a bunch of angry people using the protest as a guise to act out their violent desires towards anyone not left.

Ironically they don’t think we should have the right to own guns why showing why we need guns.

When abstinence programs failed to reduce the teenage birthrate, the Bush administration instructed the US Centers for Disease Control to stop gathering data, and also forced them to shelve a project identifying those sex education programs which worked, after they found that none of the successful ones were "abstinence-only".[8]

Here's another example of political censorship

Well, I'm not sure where you are from (I'm unsure as to whether you are being serious with Palestine or not tbh), but in the UK 2010 General Election, one of the parties standing for election had very anti-disabled policies in its manifesto, however, had made an effort to not mention this in any of its interviews, as it knew the backlash it would have received. Fortunately this policy was mentioned in the media, and they were forced to backtrack from this policy. A lot of people are scared to spout anti-disabled rhetoric due to the laws surrounding hate crime in the UK. My point is, if laws against hate speech were rescinded, that parties such as this, and people who support these parties, may begin to try and get more of the public to listen to what they have to say. Everyone loves a scapegoat, and if there is a severe economic disaster, people may try and say it's time to revive eugenics to get rid of the disabled as they are a massive drain on resources which could be better spent on those who are healthy and can properly contribute to society. It's far-fetched, I realise that, but it's still a possibility, which is why I believe that there should be a fine balance between free speech and laws to protect marginalised groups (such as if what was said was meant to incite hatred - it should be punished, but if it was said in a sitcom as a controversial joke, it shouldn't be. It should be based on the context).

I know. I'm a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn (UK Labour Party leader), who is very critical of the state of Israel and a supporter of Palestine, and I agree with him that Israel is essentially pursuing a policy of apartheid against Palestinian Arabs. This should not equate to antisemitism, as it is not criticising Jewish people, rather the government of a Jewish country. What would be next? That we can't criticise African nations because it would be racist? As I said - context needs to always be considered. If it is criticising a nation or its government - and it is not BECAUSE they are Jewish or Muslim or whatever, that they are being criticised, it should not be a criminal offence. IF someone is saying disabled people are ret*ds, are a drain on health and social care and therefore not of use to society, I would say that this is trying to incite hatred and fear and therefore should be classed as hate speech and punished accordingly.



Yes, this is true. My point is that if it is trying to incite hatred amongst people who may then try to cause physical or mental harm to a group due to getting brainwashed by the rhetoric of the people spouting whatever crap it is.

So if they had been more open about it they would have been less likely to get votes. It's not an argument to take freedom of speech away. 'Hate speech' is just a phantom nonsense created to silence dissent. I think the only thing that should be criminalized is a threat and yes that includes inciting violence. Trouble is the establishment plays with what incitement is. And you just did it yourself by saying insulting someone is inciting hatred.

It will come into law that calling Israel a racist state will be a crime.

You're failing to see my point. The facts are they weren't open about it because it is illegal for them to be. If they knew they had the right to say ANYTHING at all, they would have been more open about it. Now, if they had a charismatic enough leader, and if things are bad economically, people want a scapegoat, don't they? For Hitler it was the Jews, primarily. What is there to say in the future that it would not be another group? Blacks, the disabled, Muslims, whoever.

Back to Hitler, the Weimar Republic had no restrictions on free speech, and look what happened there. Does the western world need to go through another disaster before people agree that there should be SOME limitations on free speech?

In America’s political upheavals of the last several years, higher education has been a major battleground. On the left, college activists are leading the fight for a radical vision of social justice. Meanwhile, campus tales of politically correct hypersensitivity and intolerance have become a regular diet of red meat for the right.

Now, two authors best described as centrist liberals — Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Jonathan Haidt, a renowned psychologist who teaches at New York University’s Stern School of Business — have entered the fray with a book which argues that political correctness in the academy is a real problem with serious repercussions for the larger culture.

Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” offers some refreshing insights that avoid both right-wing and left-wing clichés.

One of the book’s major themes is what the authors call “safetyism”: the tendency of campus activists to claim that words or ideas that violate progressive beliefs about race, gender and other identities are not merely offensive or even bigoted, but actually make affronted students “unsafe.” In part, this framing comes from far-left ideology; but the book argues that its growing appeal is also rooted in the “security” fixation that followed the 9/11 attacks and in overprotective parenting linked to paranoia about child abductions.

The authors offer a fascinating if disturbing survey of the past few years’ campus conflicts. Some stories are well known,

Others are obscure, such as the forced resignation of Mary Spellman, a dean at Claremont McKenna College in California who became a target of protests for supposedly insensitive language in an email to a student. Her offense? Mentioning her interest in helping students “who don’t fit our CMC mold.”

The book acknowledges that left-wing critiques of oppression and privilege in American society have addressed very real injustices. But the authors argue that the social justice rhetoric prevalent in the universities today is polarizing and counterproductive. It reduces people to labels, often treating those with “privileged” identities — particularly white males — as the bad guys. The rhetoric also directs far more energy to attacking perceived missteps by professors, staffers and students in progressive campus communities than tackling such problems as police brutality or racial bias in housing.

Worse yet, when social justice ideology declares that words that might perpetuate “oppressive” beliefs are a form of violence, this becomes a dangerous rationale for censorship and stifling of debate. Yet Lukianoff and Haidt also recognize that in today’s volatile climate, speech is also in danger from usually far-right extremists who “threaten and harass students and professors” with opinions they dislike. The authors strongly urge schools to reject “safetyism” in the sense of protecting students from conversation that makes them uncomfortable, but also stress the need for an effective response to actual safety threats.

Concern with freedom of ideas on campus need not be a conservative issue: Lukianoff and Haidt point out that it is shared by progressives like Van Jones, an African-American author, activist and former Obama administration adviser. And yet, predictably, Harvard scholar Moira Weigel has slammed the book in a review for The Guardian that accuses the authors of being too privileged and of agreeing with white nationalists and Donald Trump.

It seems that reclaiming common sense in academics will be an uphill battle.

Indeed. The Trump administration also censors scientific findings like climate change reports. I mean important stuff, not some douche trying to sell a book.

So when all else fails, Hitler. You realise he wasn't keen on freedom of speech either? Not every crooked act or war can be justified by bring up the Nazis. Enough already.

So you want to defeat a possible future hitler by becoming a hitler?
If we enact hitler like policies to stop a possible hitler from enacting said policies what’s the bloody point.

There's a distinct difference between imprisoning people indefinitely for saying "I don't agree with your politics and want a democracy", than convicting them for hate speech (which would generally carry a non-custodial sentence as a first offence) and saying, "You are inciting hatred against a marginalised group and indoctrinating others to your belief, we had best nip this in the bud now before it goes too far".

Too much liberalism will send us back to the Victorian era. As previously stated, there needs to be a balance between protecting marginalised groups, and allowing people to enjoy their liberty.

No cause both are locking people up for disagreeing with you or not thinking the same as you. You just don’t care if people you disagree with get locked up or killed and neither have any dictatorship.

Leave free speech alone or fine yourself locked up. Do you really want trump and the Republican Party deciding what’s hate speech and who gets to speak?
I don’t want the Democrats deciding it either. Anyone who disagrees with the current party in power will be deemed dangerous under your laws

Let me put this another way. Freedom of speech causes a large number of people to start inciting hatred towards a marginalised grouo. The general public then begin hurling verbal assaults at this group. No punishment. They beging discriminating against them. No punishment. They beging to socially exclude them. No punishment. They begin to start committing petty crimes against them. No punishment. People from this marginalised group then become victims of more severe crime. Arson. Assault. Murder. Rape. These people begin to get arrested. Other people turn around and say, "But you were f8ne with us doing X, Y and Z, why are you so bothered now!?"
The issue is legitimising hatred, which then spurns out of control into discrimination and eventually crimes against the person.

Locked up? So you are saying.....if I exercise free speech to criticise free speech, I'd end up in jail? Doesn't that mean that free speech is now restricted?
I'm not American. Whatever Trump does to your country isn't my concern, but if your populace is idiotic enough to enable that man to become President, then you deserve whatever policies he has in store for you.

No, they won't be. The restrictions on free speech would SOLELY be to protect marginalised groups from HATRED and VIOLENCE which is based on the TRAITS that MAKE them MARGINALISED, as long as the CONTEXT shows that the WORDS were used SOLELY with the INTENT to incite HATRED or VIOLENCE (so satirical comments in comedies or whatever would still be allowed). Everyone would still be free to criticise the government, to make jokes, to say anything else they like. But they wouldn't be able to turn around and say, "Blacks are the cause to all of our problems, if we disenfranchised them and enslaved them again it would resolve everything, let's mobilise and make it happen!! !"

The Supreme Court has held that "advocacy of the use of force" is unprotected when it is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and is "likely to incite or produce such action".In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan group for "advocating ... violence ... as a means of accomplishing political reform" because their statements at a rally did not express an immediate, or imminent intent to do violence. This rule amended a previous decision of the Court, in Schenck v. United States (1919), which simply decided that a "clear and present danger" could justify a congressional rule limiting speech. The primary distinction is that the latter test does not criminalize "mere advocacy".

In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), the Supreme Court held that speech is unprotected if it constitutes "fighting words". Fighting words, as defined by the Court, is speech that "tend[s] to incite an immediate breach of the peace" by provoking a fight, so long as it is a "personally abusive [word] which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, is, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction". Additionally, such speech must be "directed to the person of the hearer" and is "thus likely to be seen as a 'direct personal insult'".