Only a person who has never been the victim of something can pretend it doesn't exist.

@redbai
Promoting the idea that there is such a thing as an inherent superiority of one person over another is a LIE

Promoting the idea that there is such a thing as inherent dominance of one person over another is a LIE

Prejudice is a LIE

There is only one race the human race
There is no superior sex there is only gender
There is nothing unnatural in love and attraction between any two people claiming otherwise is a LIE.

Everything people use as an excuse for hate that is not based upon the negative voluntary individual actions of one person to another is a LIE.

I am not not saying there is NO hate, obviously there is and I am not saying people have not been victims of hate, they have (and you are very presumptuous to assume I have never been a victim of hate, you don't know me.)
I am saying all hate comes from LIES
I am saying that blaming Hate on speech, rather than on how people choose to react to that speech is a counterproductive reaction. It makes a perceived victim of the hate monger, it rallies those who are angered at the suppression of the liar to rally to the causes of hate who would other wise have been against it.

You counter lies with truth
Call a liar a liar, accuse that person of their crime, don't make up another one to muddy further the waters of truth.

Call out the vile for being vile
Expose vile lies and mock the liar
Discredit the lie, don't hide it, for nothing grows better in the dark that disease
and above all don't let hatred of the lie, make you a hateful person or else the liar has won.

@LenHazell53 "I am saying that blaming Hate on speech, rather than on how people choose to react to that speech is a counterproductive reaction. It makes a perceived victim of the hate monger, it rallies those who are angered at the suppression of the liar to rally to the causes of hate who would other wise have been against it."

So it is your argument that if someone lies about a group of people and people rally against the lies then people will rally with the liar and force lies onto everyone. That doesn't make sense. But then no argument for hate speech does.

@redbai
You either have not read or do not comprehend my words if you can take anything I have said as an advocacy FOR hate in any form.

If a man expresses a hateful opinion, most people won't listen. if you lock him up to silence him, people will object not to his opinion but to his treatment, HE becomes the victim of a totalitarian action.
If you discredit his hateful opinion with truth, he is humiliated.

Which is better?

@LenHazell53 I think that you believe that will happen without a shred of evidence to support it. There are countries that have such laws and what you are saying will happen does not happen because people are less prone to be associated with the disgusting ideas of the perpetrators than the right of the perp to publicly insult people.

And I would say that when words "hurt, endanger or spread malicious false information" the person using it should be prosecuted in a court of law. You can sue someone for spreading malicious gossip about you that harms your ability to get a job, but you cannot sue someone for speech that denigrates a whole race of people that causes those people to become second class citizens in a "free" country. You cannot prosecute a man for writing articles about how women should be beaten to keep them in their place, but such articles give men who beat their wives facile reasons for justification. You cannot prosecute a person for walking around with a sign that says that their god says all gay people should be killed, but people kill gay people because their god says it's okay.

The calling for the death of a racial minority is not even remotely the same as calling for the death of a single person because of blasphemy. With all due respect, it's this kind of facile reasoning that I find ridiculous. It's not reasoning, it's a cliche that isn't demonstrable at all. Can you point to a single nation in which hate speech was banned and anti-blashphemy laws were the result?

While I agree that some norms under Trump have broken down, I don't agree that the norms regarding speech is one of them. The only difference, IMO, between racism now and racism 20 years ago is that there is a proliferation of camera phones recording real America making it impossible not to notice it.

@redbai

I am not in favor of hate speech laws. I think they are the cultural equivalent of blasphemy laws, regardless of how you try to twist up your language into a near meaningless glob.

@cava As I said, if there's is little chance of hate speech offending you or endangering you, then I can certainly see why it may not matter to you that it is offending and endangering others. If it's nothing except an academic dialog and doesn't actually affect your life it's very easy to minimize how it affects others if their voicing their displeasure of it impedes on you in the least.

Hate speech is only nebulous to those who are not subject to it. Comes from seeing racism, sexism and nationalism as concepts and having the ability to only have to deal with them conceptually instead of them actually affecting your daily life.

@redbai but the criteria in the US for banning speech is not “affects your daily life.” If that were the case, then people would be banning speech left and right. Something cannot even be considered bannable unless it presents a credible risk of physical harm to someone as a result of it.

@Katrik I don't remember using the word "ban".

Please give me a credible examples of the slippery slope you imagine will occur. How will telling people that if you have a rally and gin people up by telling them that black people are inferior and therefore should be killed or kicked out of the country you will suffer legal consequences create a slippery slope?

And again, only someone who does not have a chance of suffering the results of hate speech can possible believe that no physical harm comes to anyone because of it. That's either incredibly disingenuous or naive.

@redbai "ban" was inferred from your stated position in the OP. Additonally I have read in your responses to others here, that you feel that people who use hate speech should be prosecuted. If hate speech is illegal then it is banned. Feel free to correct me with a clarification if you feel I misunderstood your position.

It's not really a slippery slope argument. It's more a problem inherent to any vaguely defined law. There are always people trying to game the system to get the outcomes they want.
If you want examples here is a quick site that lists a few:
[reason.com]
Feel free to google more if you'd like, they aren't hard to find.
The concern is that if you allow speech to be banned if it is considered "hate speech" when that term is as broadly defined as it is, can lead to serious unintended consequences when others try to fit things they don't like under the umbrella.

I'm sure harm does come of hateful rhetoric, I never disputed that. I merely stated that speech cannot be banned unless that speech either a.) wastes public resources (this is why shouting fire in a theater, or calling 911 for no reason is illegal), or b.) is an incitement to violence. No, saying bad things about a group doesn't count either, otherwise every bigoted idiot would also be a criminal by default, regardless of whether they acted on it.

@Katrik Pointing me to an article that makes the same lame assumptions that you do does not make a point. You assume that i haven't dismissed those arguments based on the fact that they are ASSUMPTIONS because it has never been demonstrated. In countries that actually do have such laws the are not "ambiguous" and as such work just fine. Just because Americans have been programmed into believing that they have the privilege of being racists doesn't mean it's some meritorious act.

Every bigoted idiot who decided to mouth off their bigotry in public should be a criminal. If you haven't been aware that it's been my point from the beginning, maybe now I've cleared that up. If you want to be a rampant bigot in your home, feel free, but if you want to be one in public, it should be punished, just like exposing yourself, something else that doesn't fit your a & b criteria, but you can sure as hell go to jail for it.

@redbai Then I’m afraid we are at an impasse. I do not wish to live in a country where opinions can be crimes, and that is not something I can negotiate on. Good day.

@Katrik I am not saying that opinions are crimes, but I understand the reluctance to acknowledge the nuance. We shall agree to disagree.

And if someone could explain to me a single thing that such speech contributes to intellectual intercouse I would agree with him too. But no one has ever been able to explain to me why yelling fire in a crowded theater is considered a threat to public safety and therefore a reasonable limit to freedom of speech, but somehow talking about eliminating a race of people or the benefits of beating women if they don't give in to sex or talking about killing gays or foriegners isn't just as harmful to the public safety.

@redbai that is where i totally agree with you

@redbai
Yelling fire in a public place. WHEN THERE IS NO FIRE is a public order offense,
It is a lie, leading to panic, the lie is the public order offence.
Yelling fire is not the problem, the intent is the problem it has nothing to do with free speech, you cause a panic and people get hurt, you are prosecuted for causing panic.

Hitler to use the classic example, shouting that some groups of people, gays, gypsies, Jews, freemasons, Jehovah's witness and others were destroying the country was the same thing.
Using a LIE to cause panic and on an unheard of scale public disorder.

Free speech is not the freedom to lie. You can prosecute a liar for using words as a weapon to cause panic, hate etc.
You do not need new laws, when you have laws already, you need to use the law that exists.

There is as I said no such thing as hate speech, there ARE such things as lies that encourage hate and disorder.
When you make a law against something that does not exist, you only make lawyers rich fighting law drawn out and ultimately fatuous cases in court.
When you prosecute someone for a crime that does exist, it can be proven (assuming the system to be honest) quickly without the need to prove the offence existed in the first place.

Hate speech is so open to abuse, because it is a licence to lie and to lie about lying, it is a law designed to spread contention and silence voices crying for justice, and is a law that will kill free speech while claiming to protect it.
It basically is a politicians wet dream.

I think it's interesting and naive to believe that hate speech does not endanger public safety. It may not endanger your safety, but I know women and people of color that would disagree based on personal experience.

I think that comparing atheism to hate speech is incredibly flawed.

@redbai I think it's dishonest to imply that I defended hate speech. Your assumptions are not warranted. I never said hate speech doesn't present a threat. However, because you find something offensive doesn't give you a right to ban it, and our government cannot be trusted to regulate speech.

@JimG Well, when I imply it instead of you inferring your defense of hate speech, that will be relevant to the dialog. But since I didn't say that you obviously inferred it which puts the onus for that on you. But also, since you brought it up, stating that "[T]here should be no limitations on free speech other than those I(sic) the interest of public safety" in a statement against criminalizing hate speech does imply that you don't think that hate speech causes harm to the "public safety" which is something that I doubt most people of color or women would agree with.

It won't be up to the "government", it'll be up to the courts in a trial to decide whether or not specific speech is in conflict with specific laws. The problem is the ambiguous definition of "hate speech" because of the resistance to even discuss the issue as a crime.

Damn right.

The SCOTUS has already said that you don't have absolute free speech. Can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Why is that different?

@redbai

Yelling fire in a crowded theater falls under defamation, which is a form of libel. Such a statement is not an opinion or an idea, which free speech protects your right to express. It is a statement which has the capacity to cause direct physical harm to others, which the constitution does not allow.

@webbew1 This may shock you, but hate speech is defaming whole groups of people for no other reason than they share a common immutable trait. The idea that opinions and ideas cannot harm someone is either disingenuous or naive. The idea that hate speech doesn't cause physical harm to others is just naive.

@redbai

Opinions and ideas can only hurt people in one of two ways: Either the individual whom they are directed at give them far more creedence than they deserve, or good people who know better do nothing to expose them for their deeply flawed ideology.

The best way to fight misguided opinions and ideas is not to bury them in legal jargon and allow them to fester in the dark reaches of society in dark web chat rooms and the like. The best way is to drag them out in to the open and to expose them for what they are in the court of public appeal.

@webbew1 The idea that those are the only ways to be hurt from hate speech is incredibly ignorant. It ignores what such speech does to the general environment and how the proliferation of such speech affects legal and social policies when powerful social or political leaders use it.

As far as your assumptions about the best way to fight hate speech, they ignore the success of European countries creating laws and adjudicating it. If you would please, tell me where your solutions have worked. The proliferation of racism has not beem mitigated in the least be a use of "open dialog" and exposing them. Actually, a guy who was exposed as you say was made POTUS. That's how well your solution works.

Hate speech isn't about hurting someone's feelings, it's about creating an atmosphere that is dangerous for those targeted by the speech.

@redbai true, this, but try explaining That to these brainless twits using the speech!