by mrandish | 2025-05-13 03:17:09+00:00
> You are advancing the idea that either all restrictions on speech are good, or all restrictions on speech are bad

Thanks for the detailed response. First, let me reiterate that I don't believe all restrictions on speech are bad. Far from it. In the parallel response I linked above, I said the U.S. set of laws and precedents balancing first amendment free speech have struck a good balance. Not all speech is protected. There are clear and significant exceptions to the first amendment. For example, incitement to imminent lawless action, defamation, libel and several others. Over many decades the courts have evolved a series of detailed multi-prong tests to determine exactly which speech may be legitimately suppressed by the government. I've read a lot of these rulings and concurrences and together they form an impressively rigorous standard which is clear and can be enforced consistently. Something which, as far as I know, doesn't exist in other countries - at least not yet.

Also, it's important to remember the first amendment only limits which speech the government can punish criminally. Civil liability is a different matter entirely as Alex Jones learned when his lunatic ravings cost him well over a billion dollars. Civil liability can also result in injunctive relief and jail time. This is a substantial deterrent and corrective to stop the kinds of speech we both find offensive and harmful - a legal deterrent I fully support.

> It's naive to believe bad governments follow the law. They just do what they want to and shoot you if you don't.

Bad leaders sometimes choose to break the law and issue illegal orders. Bad staff members and military officers sometimes follow illegal orders. But, as Donald Trump found out on January 4th 2021, a lot of people won't follow illegal orders - even loyal members of his inside circle like Vice-President Mike Pence. Richard Nixon learned the same when his trusted cabinet members and generals refused his illegal orders and he was forced to resign the presidency. The U.S. is somewhat unique in that our politicians and military swear an oath of loyalty not to the president or the country but to uphold the U.S. Constitution - the document that spells out all the things the government can never legally do its citizens. Does that oath always work? Of course not. Some people are as bad as the bad leaders they choose to follow but if you're a tyrant having enough people you're sure will follow clearly illegal or immoral orders has long been a huge problem. Beyond the horrific moral failure of many Germans during WWII, history holds a surprising number of encouraging examples of people choosing their own good moral judgement over immoral orders, from tank divisions in Tienanmen Square refusing to fire to Soviet officers who didn't launch nukes on turned out to be an errant order. Even the past year has seen examples including elite special forces ordered by the President to take over the Korean parliament building from unarmed student protesters and Assad's soldiers choosing not to fire on civilians as they marched on Damascus. Perhaps I'm an optimist but I think there's reasonable evidence, decade by decade, the average global moral climate is slowly improving. Henchmen and jackbooted thugs who can reliably be counted on to perpetrate atrocities against innocents on the orders of tyrants are getting a bit harder to find, especially in Westernized democracies where average education levels and standards of living are reasonable. Of course, in the U.S. every member of the military and police is trained they'll be held criminally accountable for violating their oath to uphold the constitution "against all aggressors", which explicitly includes those in power should they turn against the rule of law, so it's harder to recruit reliable henchmen to shoot at peaceful protestors. Also, there are far more civilian firearms than there are civilians - so, here, the protestors can shoot back and courts won't convict legitimately defending yourself against unlawful lethal force - even by police. I was taught in elementary school "the right to bear arms" is the second amendment because it's the amendment citizens are supposed to use if the government ever tries to take the first amendment away. ;-) Hence, my confidence that, at least in the U.S., it's safer to rely on speaking against evil when it seizes government power than relying on government power through hate speech laws to force evil to speak in less offensive coded euphemisms. And, it's entirely possible, the worst thing to do in response to evil, hateful lunatics shouting evil, hateful lunacy is training them to sound a little less evil and hateful. Certainly forcing evil to adopt more palatable sound bites when in public will help pearl-clutchers feel society has dealt with the problem but it's just pushing the evil into the shadows where it can fester and grow.

> If Hitler had been... locked up based on his speech

As you said, historical hypotheticals aren't exactly productive. If Wiemar Germany had a strong "hate speech" law it wouldn't have stopped Hitler speaking publicly, it would only have made him tone it down enough to skirt any such law by using using euphemisms and other coded signaling. Maybe toning down some of Hitler's most inflammatory rhetoric would have stopped his rise to power but that seems unlikely. Germany's current strong hate speech laws haven't managed to entirely stop neo-nazi skinheads from organizing and even marching and, in some cases, seems to create martyrs and heroes out of losers which only energizes their fringe supporters. I guess it's possible toning down Hitler's worst speech when he was starting out might have stopped his rise however I'm skeptical toning down what he says before he's in power makes much difference. I'm more hopeful that a strong cultural tradition of revering free speech that would have allowed the Jews, gypsies, gays and other undesirables to safely march in Berlin every day while Hitler was in power would have made much more of a difference. The problem is, if the hate speech law doesn't stop Hitler before he's in power, once in power, he certainly would have weaponized that "hate speech" law to jail Jewish protestors. Hitler might have found police corrupt enough to jail peaceful protestors protected under a free speech constitutional right and judges awful enough to convict them. Even if he found military troops immoral enough to fire on unarmed peaceful protestors, Hitler being forced to do that so publicly would also change things substantially. A good example of this is how the civil rights protestors marching in 1960s Alabama didn't change the minds of most Americans in Southern states, it was the photos and film of police illegally using attack dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech that changed everything. Historically, Gandhi had it right, constitutionally protected free speech doesn't usually stop tyrants directly, it's the injustice of what the tyrants have to do to silence legally protected speech that exposes the tyrant as a criminal. Regardless, sadly, Wiemar Germany didn't have hate speech laws or a strong tradition of constitutional free speech protest against the government so such hypotheticals remain unknowable.

Those are the points I wanted to respond to: 1. My support of free speech is far from absolute or unlimited and 2. That "Bad governments will do bad things" cuts both ways, if they'll ignore strong constitutional protection for free speech, they'll certainly abuse hate speech laws to silence dissent. In fact, twisting the definition of "hate speech" may be the single BEST way to subvert constitutional protections for free speech, and 3. The dilemma of "A. Kill Hitler in the crib, or B. Use hate speech laws to force him to sound less hateful in 1931, or C. Use first amendment-like free speech protection to protest march in Berlin every day of 1935 (and force Hitler to illegally shoot unarmed peaceful protestors at noon in front of the Reichstag)" is unknowable and undecidable moral philosopher porn that, in any case, cuts both ways - if it cuts at all.

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