The thread is spot on. The hate speech laws have a very broad and vague definition so governments can act on populist impulses.
In UK, some guys got arrested under this pretext for burning a cardboard pretending it was a Grenfell tower. How is this the governments business? At all?
But people demanded "justice" and so the police stepped in
The UK is a country where it's illegal to offend people. It really isn't surprising that those people would get arrested but actual perpetrators of the Grenfell tragedy get off scot-free.
I remember not too long ago Ireland had blasphemy laws. Does anyone remember what happened to the guy who was criminally charged for mocking God on TV?
Context matters. I assume you left it out for good reason from your throwaway account? The video alone doesn't explain.
Grenfell tower housed mostly a non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths and 70 injured (mostly non-Brits), it's the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire.
His intent is debatable to some and in a court of law. In my opinion he got away lightly for something hateful and racist. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).
"So this is how liberty dies... with thundering applause."
The amount of people defending these laws in this thread is a frightening proof of this.
Everywhere these days you can find someone smart and utterly naive with their "but actually..." argument pushing the Overton window closer and closer to a censorship state, and there are not enough neutral people arguing for free speech itself. Only the weirdos and racist ones which are easy to hate and root against.
So all this playing Devil's advocate is actually helping along the normalization of these free speech bans.
The Overton window will go further than that due to the beliefs of the ideologues pushing to remove "hate speech". They believe that hate speech is literal violence and genocide, as bad as murder or mass murder. I posted a comment warning that this anti-hate-speech legislation may go further as time goes by, towards killing of people, and even further from there, and got 1 comment supportint the "violent removal of bigots from society". These people believe you are committing genocide with your words, why wouldn't we expect them to act as if they actually are preventing genocide?
Here is the comment, before they change or delete it:
Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–]
Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring?
(At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")
This thread and the comments here don't make it clear how extreme the Irish law is. If you're found in possession of anything deemed hate speech, you are legally presumed to be guilty unless you can prove you are using it for law enforcement or academic purposes. Possession is punishable by up to 2 years imprisonment.
It's an enormous amount of power that could allow the government to target literally anyone - if you look hard enough, many texts could be read as hate speech in this law (for example, the Bible advocates genocide against certain ethnic groups).
The phrasing of this feels a little hyperbolic. If you’re found in possession of illegal guns, you’re “automatically assumed to be guilty” unless you can prove you have a valid reason to possess illegal guns. That’s how making things illegal works. You could just say “possessing hate material is illegal under this law”. Which is not a weird thing snuck into the law - it’s literally what the law is about.
Last time I checked, "innocent until proven guilty" was still a foundational principle of Western law. Certain factions may be working hard to chip away that foundation with the intent of enforcing an ideological homogeny, but it's not gone yet.
I think the issue is that by the law’s definition, Huckleberry Finn contains hate speech. And many other items.
So everyone has hate speech and the government can selectively choose who to prosecute. And just the act of defense is punishment enough, so the law is bad on that account.
If everyone in the country has an illegal gun then the law would be similar. In this case the law is not properly able to be enforced. In the US this would render it invalid.
No thing as free speech, there's consequences to saying anything you want. Rightly so hate speech is removed from platforms and those people face prison time. What falls under that is constantly changing.
There's no real debates on whether Nazis should be given platforms on reddit or YouTube.
Hate speech law can be real without any of the interpretation or spin put on it by the threat being real. I’m canadian. Canada has hate speech laws, and has for a long time. The stuff that gets charged under that law is almost always genocidal garbage. A few cases of less extreme (but still pretty extreme) content have been tried and tossed out. Idk if the irish law goes further, but this thread isn’t a reliable gauge of how this law fits into the irish legal system
Hate speech today is amplified by social networks that had been non-existent 20 years ago.
I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.
> I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.
Another comment supporting pain and suffering for the people they disagree with. "You are wrong that free speech does not have consequences" is a common anti-free-speech strawman, a dishonest tactic, and is not even remotely what I said
Readit News
In UK, some guys got arrested under this pretext for burning a cardboard pretending it was a Grenfell tower. How is this the governments business? At all?
But people demanded "justice" and so the police stepped in
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8akk-nZtuk "hate speech"
Grenfell tower housed mostly a non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths and 70 injured (mostly non-Brits), it's the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire.
His intent is debatable to some and in a court of law. In my opinion he got away lightly for something hateful and racist. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).
The amount of people defending these laws in this thread is a frightening proof of this.
Everywhere these days you can find someone smart and utterly naive with their "but actually..." argument pushing the Overton window closer and closer to a censorship state, and there are not enough neutral people arguing for free speech itself. Only the weirdos and racist ones which are easy to hate and root against.
So all this playing Devil's advocate is actually helping along the normalization of these free speech bans.
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU
Here is the comment, before they change or delete it:
Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–]
Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring?
(At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")
https://twitter.com/LFJIreland/status/1652774182210396165
It's an enormous amount of power that could allow the government to target literally anyone - if you look hard enough, many texts could be read as hate speech in this law (for example, the Bible advocates genocide against certain ethnic groups).
That’s what makes this quite a bit different than your gun analogy.
So everyone has hate speech and the government can selectively choose who to prosecute. And just the act of defense is punishment enough, so the law is bad on that account.
If everyone in the country has an illegal gun then the law would be similar. In this case the law is not properly able to be enforced. In the US this would render it invalid.
You talking about Ireland, UK, Europe or ... globally?
There's no real debates on whether Nazis should be given platforms on reddit or YouTube.
Dead Comment
I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.
Another comment supporting pain and suffering for the people they disagree with. "You are wrong that free speech does not have consequences" is a common anti-free-speech strawman, a dishonest tactic, and is not even remotely what I said
Dead Comment