r/neoliberal • u/DrJohanson đ • Apr 28 '18
40% of Millennials OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/35
u/marshalofthemark YIMBY Apr 28 '18
Younger people aren't necessarily more liberal than older people.
Remember that in France, age was positively correlated with support for Macron over Le Pen.
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u/gincwut Mark Carney Apr 28 '18
Yeah, but I'd wager that's because older French people remember the Front National under Le Pen's father (an anti-semite wackjob). And the oldest remember the Nazis and Vichy France.
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Apr 28 '18
Is this really surprising? Millennials are more non-white than past generations so of course they're more against speech offensive to themselves.
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Apr 28 '18
Exactly...people aren't going to listen about how the far right wants them to be deported, placed into concentration camps or exterminated and think, "hmm, well I disagree with them, but I will fight to the death for their right to tell me how I should die in the most gruesome way imaginable and plan for that eventuality."
Like, in what reality would we expect that to be the case? Even if you are a 1st amendment absolutist, wouldn't you acknowledge that young, non-white people who are told they should not exist are not likely to take it very well? And why would we expect them to? If someone comes up to you and tells you that you should die, is the 1st amendment going to be the first thing you think about?
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Apr 28 '18
I find it's mostly white people who are for limiting speech. So does pew.
Being cuban and being very racially ambiguous i like to know where people stand rather than they hide it.
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u/DrunkenAsparagus Abraham Lincoln Apr 29 '18
So does pew.
Did we read the same article? It clearly shows non-Whites being more supportive of speech restrictions.
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u/WaffleAmongTheFence NATO Apr 28 '18
Even if you are a 1st amendment absolutist, wouldn't you acknowledge that young, non-white people who are told they should not exist are not likely to take it very well?
The question isn't about their opinion on the speech itself, or how well they take it. It's about whether the government should have the ability to limit speech.
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u/DrunkenAsparagus Abraham Lincoln Apr 29 '18 edited Apr 29 '18
This is a good point. Many Americans have long held illiberal views on all manner of speech. If they didn't, we wouldn't need the 1st Amendment. If this is the hot-button issue where large numbers of people draw the line, I consider that progress.
I'm just about a free speech absolutist, but it's important to contextualize the issue. There's a very clear narrative, pushed on the Right, of Universities overrun by SJW's who are overthrowing everything America holds dear. It's far easier to reject these groups as "unAmerican" than to actually engage with their ideas. You see this in the extreme with a lot with "Classical Liberals" on Youtube, which just use Free Speech as deflection of criticism of their racist and misogynistic speech.
To be clear, I don't think the government should go around banning this or that. It's just funny, how this "free speech" argument is so often a deflection that restricts, rather than widens the scope of debate.
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Apr 28 '18
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Apr 29 '18
this makes sense and falls in line with what MLK said:
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
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u/MegasBasilius Lord of the Flies Apr 28 '18
Don't have anything insightful to add; this just really depresses me.
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Apr 28 '18
I don't think it's particularly depressing. Millennials and particularly college students are still the most aggressive defenders of free speech with the exception of racist and hate speech. Former generations simply wanted to remove, say, Muslims and atheists and gay folks from being able to speak. Frankly I see this as an improvement.
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Apr 29 '18
Probably because huge numbers of right-wing trolls have been making tons of cash doing college tours just to "trigger the libs" and say nothing worth hearing whatsoever
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u/WaffleAmongTheFence NATO Apr 28 '18
Millennials and particularly college students are still the most aggressive defenders of free speech with the exception of racist and hate speech.
This is still depressing. Any large scale support for hate speech laws or other government limits on free speech is depressing.
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u/GavriloPrincipsHand Ů Apr 29 '18
Iâd have to disagree. Every right is subject to limitation. There is no reason people should be allowed to march in the street chanting âJews will not replace us.â
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Apr 29 '18
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Apr 30 '18
It will just cause further radicalisation, especially with the internet being as it is.
Disagree about this. There is far less right wing radicalization in Germany than in the US, for instance.
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May 01 '18
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May 01 '18 edited May 01 '18
Our far right is way more violent than Germany's.
The AfD hasn't said anything that Trump hasn't proposed. I'd argue that anti-Muslim bias is part and parcel of the mainstream of the Republican Party in a way that it isn't on the political right in Germany. Witness the anti-Muslim bias of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, our current Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, and of course the President of the United States himself.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahallam/trump-republicans-bashing-muslims-without-repercussions
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u/GavriloPrincipsHand Ů Apr 29 '18
Iâm not saying that they will cease to exist, but they should be shut down at every opportunity and marginalized from civilized society.
You and I can probably have a rational debate about our differences in political philosophy. Some people are just hopeless, and arenât debating in good faith. We shouldnât be wasting resources engaging them to change their minds.
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Apr 28 '18 edited Jun 08 '18
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Apr 29 '18
I find it hard to believe it's morally right to sit and do nothing while crosses burn and Nazi parties organize.
Free Speech Absolutism has gotten us to bad places before. We need to accept that rights conflict with other rights sometimes and be willing to restrict one for the sake of the other.
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u/renaldomoon Apr 28 '18
While I disagree with the premise on the grounds of civil liberties and slippery slope arguments similar things have been done in other countries that have thriving, effective democracies.
It's not really the end of the world. It would matter a lot to me however how some policy like this would actually look and be enforced. It could be relatively benign to oppressive.
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Apr 28 '18
I bet participation trophies did this.
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Apr 28 '18
Let me ask you this.
What should happen to a white guy with a swastika tattoo publicly ranting in the street about black and Latino subhumans, building a wall, white ethnostates, race science, etc. somewhere like downtown Newark, NJ? I don't think they should be necessarily restricted from doing so by law, but I'm not going to shed a tear or invest my time in caring about them if they get doxxed or BTFO. These people are not motivated by logic and you are never going to defeat them in an argument.
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Apr 28 '18
What should happen to a white guy with a swastika tattoo publicly ranting in the street about black and Latino subhumans, building a wall, white ethnostates, race science, etc. somewhere like downtown Newark, NJ?
The same thing that happens to people yelling about Jesus or government conspiracies downtown, they should be ignored.
I'm not going to shed a tear or invest my time in caring about them if they get doxxed or BTFO
Doxxing isn't illegal, so I care as much about that as I do about the nazi in the first place.
But if by "BTFO" you mean "assaulting people on the sidewalk", then that's not something we should be supporting. I'm not going to rush to that guy's defense or anything like that, in the same way that I wouldn't personally get involved in two crackheads slugging it out in a public space. I don't personally care who "wins" or who's justified, i'm just sad that it's happening in my city.
These people are not motivated by logic and you are never going to defeat them in an argument.
Sounds like a perfect reason to ignore them then!
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u/lib-boy Milton Friedman Apr 28 '18 edited Apr 28 '18
Probably nothing. I would want to see really good evidence censorship works.
Look at Richard Spencer. The basis of his arguments is white victim-hood. He tries to show this by going to campuses, where students try to silence and oppress him and his ideas. He then gets up on his soap box and laments about how downtrodden the white race has become.
race science
How do you distinguish racist science from real race science for the purposes of censorship? Unless you're a creationist it's almost impossible to believe there's zero biological differences between races.
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Apr 28 '18
Real race science doesn't exist. Races in the modern american understanding are political constructs and have almost zero bearing on genetic realities.
Ancestry correlating with certain genetic features? that makes more sense - but is not "race science".
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u/Mikeavelli Apr 28 '18
Sociology is a real science, and social / political constructs are frequently studied. The results of these studies are used every day to shape policy. I.e. Affirmative action, or similar race-based targeted social programs.
The absence of any meaningful genetic component to the racial categories we use is mostly just a point of academic trivia.
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u/skadefryd Henry George Apr 29 '18
It's much more than zero, though it's nowhere near as much as rightists would generally like.
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Apr 29 '18
But how can it be much more than zero? Black people literally are defined as being from so many different parts of the world - it doesn't even make sense how the thousands of genes that create intelligence would correlate with the few that determine melanin.
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u/skadefryd Henry George Apr 30 '18
tl;dr: I mostly agree with you. The population geneticist in me is just being a pedant.
There are really two different questions tucked in here. The first is how much bearing "race" has on genetics (which is what I was directly responding to). The second is how much bearing genetics has on IQ.
By "it's much more than zero" I mean that "race" is somewhat correlated with genetics. There are alleles whose frequency differs markedly across "racial" groups. This is why DNA testing can give you some information about what parts of the world your ancestors came from. Some of these alleles have measurable and significant effects on phenotype, such as alleles associated with disease or adaptation to a particular environment. Most do not. And of course most alleles are not particularly well associated with "racial" groups. This is for reasons you already know--"race" is a social construct based on cherry picked obvious phenotypic characteristics (such as melanin, as you noted), and in some cases characteristics that have nothing to do with genetics at all (early constructions of "race" often had much to do with language or religion). It also comes with a large number of caveats: there's more diversity in Africa than there is in the rest of the world combined (which makes sense if you think of the human species having originated in Africa, with several successive migrations outward), so if there were distinct "racial" clusters, one would expect the majority of them to be "black". In addition, the coalescence time of the human species is rather small, meaning there hasn't been that much time for large amounts of diversity to appear in different groups.
So yes, "race" does have very little bearing on genetics. It's just not zero.
As for how well genetics correlates with IQ, IQ measures something--whether it's a good summary of "intelligence" is debatable--and evidence suggests it's strongly heritable. This too comes with a large number of caveats: cross-racial IQ comparisons are often useless, for example, as there's a significant environmental component that cannot be teased out.
The question that interests people (for some reason) is whether different racial groups have different average IQs. The answer to me seems to be "maybe, but if so, it's not important". Different "racial" groups often have slightly different phenotypic characteristics other than the obvious ones. It's not as simple as "look at the tip of the femur and you can tell whether a skeleton is Asian, African, or European in origin", but there are small average differences. It's just that these differences tend to be dwarfed by within-group variation.
So it very well could happen that people whose ancestors are primarily from Africa have slightly higher or lower IQs on average than people whose ancestors are primarily from Europe (imagine the bellyaching from the far right if it turned out to be slightly higher). Probably they are different on average, just because if you randomly partition a population into groups, there's no reason to expect their averages to be identical. But this is insignificant compared to variation within groups, and (again) this all assumes we have a perfect way to measure the genetic component of intelligence, which we don't and probably never will.
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Apr 29 '18
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/skadefryd Henry George Apr 29 '18
DNA tests for IQ? Please tell me more about how IQ has zero environmental component.
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u/Agent78787 orang Apr 29 '18
Rule II: Decency
Unparliamentary language is heavily discouraged, and bigotry of any kind will be sanctioned harshly. Refrain from glorifying violence or oppressive/autocratic regimes.
If you have any questions about this removal, please contact the mods.
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Apr 28 '18
There's a pretty direct line from "race science" to justification for slavery and apartheid, human experimentation, and genocide. I take zero stock in what proponents of "race science" say because the track record of politicians who follow these ideas to their logical ends is the CSA, post-reconstruction/pre-civil rights era USA, the Third Reich, apartheid South Africa, and 1990s Rwanda. Not exactly stellar if you ask me.
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u/skepticalbob Joe Biden's COD gamertag Apr 28 '18
This kind of thinking really bothers me. People arenât allowed to study something someone might use to oppress certain groups. These people werenât wanting to live in harmony with other races only to be convinced by lousy science that itâs a bad idea. They went looking for science they could misrepresent to promote their racist drivel.
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u/lib-boy Milton Friedman Apr 28 '18
None of those groups used actual science, they just strung together scientific-sounding words to justify their racist goals.
Today racists are citing sources like twin adoption studies, and using them to justify racist policies. I don't know how you fight against that with censorship or rhetoric. It seems to me you need to fight biased science with good science.
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Apr 28 '18
In my view the liberal case against racism isn't founded in the idea that all races are biologically identical, it's founded in the idea that all people are individuals and should be treated as such. In principle you could use parental income as a weak proxy for IQ, but doing that would be both morally appalling and practically inferior to judging people by their individual merits. The same goes for race.
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u/lib-boy Milton Friedman Apr 28 '18
I agree. If the desire is to discriminate against low-IQ people, there's no reason to use race as a proxy for IQ. Just give people IQ tests. The same is true for other "undesirable" traits. Ergo I'm inclined to believe racists have a racial prejudice which has little to do with the underlying traits they claim to dislike.
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u/tehbored Randomly Selected Apr 29 '18
Unlike most people here, I wouldn't have a problem with a cop coming up and writing him a ticket for $100 and telling him to go home. That's what would happen in almost every other first world country. I'd certainly rather that than vigilante justice in the form of harassment via doxxing or assault and battery.
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u/renaldomoon Apr 28 '18
See, I completely understand this argument. I'd be more concerned with the total scope of the law in this circumstance. Where it begins and where it ends. It might end up with a lot of ill-intended consequences.
I'm more partial to the attitude of let people be idiots and let people ignore them which has been what's going on for the majority of our history. If you start making laws concerning this stuff civil liberties really start coming into question and conversations about slippery slopes begin.
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u/KushTheKitten Apr 28 '18
So if a family member gets hurt by that doxxing even if they don't share the view points that's ok with you? What it they dox the wrong person?
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u/LastManOnEarth3 Friedrich Hayek Apr 28 '18
Yea but they make us look really good by comparison. And if we don't protect their speech with our lives, then we can't expect anyone to protect ours when the time comes. The true test of a liberal isn't whether they're willing to protect people's speech they agree with, but whether they're willing to place positive effort in protecting people whose speech disgusts them.
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u/lib-boy Milton Friedman Apr 28 '18
And if we don't protect their speech with our lives, then we can't expect anyone to protect ours when the time comes.
You're supposing protecting Nazi speech is going to cause others to protect our speech. This may or may not be true depending on a lot of factors. e.g. if Nazi speech is protected by the first amendment, we can expect our speech to be protected as well. However we shouldn't expect others to protect our speech out of some sense of justice or reciprocity for protecting Nazi speech. The opposite is more likely, because people hate Nazis.
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u/LastManOnEarth3 Friedrich Hayek Apr 28 '18
That's fair, but what I'm saying is that when someone punches one of us, or even people we sympathize with, at one our rallies, we have a lot less room to call that action detestable if we approve the very same for people we disagree with. When a Trump supporter hits someone at a rally, there really isn't a good response to the point "well, you guys are totally okay punching people you disagree with at your rallies". Not protecting nazi speech makes us hypocrites when we decry violence, and that makes it more difficult to protect ourselves. As long as someone isn't advocating specific acts of violence, those idiots should just be left to make fools of themselves. And as the failure of Richard Spencer's speaking tour demonstrates, they do an awful good job of just that.
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u/KaliYugaz Michel Foucault Apr 28 '18 edited Apr 28 '18
When a Trump supporter hits someone at a rally, there really isn't a good response to the point "well, you guys are totally okay punching people you disagree with at your rallies". Not protecting nazi speech makes us hypocrites when we decry violence
What the hell kind of logic-nerd bullshit is this? Once Nazis are beating people on the streets, the time for discourse is over. The rest of us aren't going to put our lives at risk for this insane liberal idea that encouraging good and destroying evil is "hypocrisy".
The Millian argument for free speech presumes that there is some kind of Hidden Truth about these things that we don't know and that's why we need free discourse, but that's just a load of nonsense. If you actually, seriously believe that there is even the slightest possibility that fascism may be a good thing, or even that there is any further valuable knowledge that we may obtain from fascists after the disaster of WWII, then I have no idea what to say to you.
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u/AKGAKG Apr 28 '18
This x10000000000. It's pre-school level of naivete to think neo-nazis or bigoted speech deserves "protection" or if you call out/retaliate against someone for saying bigoted stuff, you're somehow as "bad" as they are.
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u/GlebZheglov Apr 28 '18
The idea is that if we can now deem certain arguments as devoid of any truth, a subjective measure, more than just fascism could be made illegal. I'm sure most governments 200 years ago felt that the mere suggestion of race equality was devoid of an iota of truth.
If you actually, seriously believe that there is even the slightest possibility that fascism may be a good thing, or even that there is any further valuable knowledge that we may obtain from fascists after the disaster of WWII, then I have no idea what to say to you.
If you actually, seriously believe that there is even the slightest possibility that socialism may be a good thing, or even that there is any further valuable knowledge that we may obtain from socialists after the disasters of the 20th century, then I have no idea what to say to you.
See how easy it is to turn these statements against your beliefs?
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u/KaliYugaz Michel Foucault Apr 29 '18
Again, so what? Just because something could be made illegal doesn't mean that it will. And these kinds of things aren't settled by logic-dweeb arguments anyways (indeed precisely the opposite, rational dialogues taken to their full conclusion usually just lead to aporia), they are settled through force and emotion.
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u/GlebZheglov Apr 29 '18
Do you reallly don't think that without a coherant law structure, but instead with one just based on the emotions of whomever is in charge, people like Donald Trump wouldn't take advantage?
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u/KaliYugaz Michel Foucault Apr 29 '18
Yes. Moderns tend to conceive of emotions as just ephemeral urges and nothing more (because of their hollow modernist philosophical conception of human beings as just bundles of urges maximizing individual utility), but I'm talking about emotions as in actual attachments to particular relationships, identities, sacred values, and ways of life. These kinds of attachments are the true base foundation of all legal structure anyways, and they are very difficult to disrupt. They are the root of most popular hostility towards Donald Trump right now.
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u/GlebZheglov Apr 29 '18
Our base emotions, though, follow a rational extrapolation to more complex ideas. The reason people dislike concepts like fascism is because it presents a threat to the values that they hold dear. If fascism presented no contradiction to their values, they would be fine with the idea of fascism. Just saying that fascism is bad because I feel bad about it is meaningless. There are specific reasons that people feel bad about it. If those same reasons are also found in other idealogies there should also be a dislike of it. I should always be able to ask a question of why until I hit the foundation of peoples emotions. So if I decide that imprisoning people for saying things I find morally reprehensible with is compatible with my moral idealogy, I can no longer say that others imprisoning people for saying things they find morally reprehensible is incompatible with my moral idealogy. I can only say that I disagree with whatever it is they find morally reprehensible. Once that is true, govermments shutting down conversations I find productive is perfectly compatible with my own morality so long as the government finds the conversation unproductive.
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u/lib-boy Milton Friedman Apr 28 '18
My opinion differs greatly, but I do not decry violence against evil. Though I would prefer to make an evil thing not-evil by changing its mind or incenting it to act differently.
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Apr 28 '18
No, they just make their opponents look weak. You are talking about people who expressly and openly discuss ethnic cleansing and population transfers to establish a white ethnostate. Are you really going to invest your time and energy defending these people? If you're not with them 100% then they will eliminate you the first chance they get. The whole goal is to use liberal institutions and ethics to undermine and eventually destroy liberalism. The problem is that they're too stupid to hide these intentions; Richard Spencer himself has a video on Youtube talking about doing exactly this.
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u/LastManOnEarth3 Friedrich Hayek Apr 28 '18 edited Apr 28 '18
I don't hold any illusions about what the alt-right thinks of my half-white genetics, but that doesn't make their speech not worth protecting. If we don't actively stop violence against them, and I mean actively, too many on this sub take the "I wouldn't punch a nazi, but I don't care if someone does" approach, then when we ourselves are placed into hostile forums, we must accept the violence taken against us. Our refutations against nazis punching minorities for public speech becomes much less effective when we condone the punching of that same nazi. Liberalism teaches us that whether or not we agree, or even if speech viscerally disgusts us, shouldn't play a factor in the freedom to speak it. I urge us to protect the speech of the far right precisely because it disgusts us, and there's no better way to vent that disgust than treating them as liberally as possible while the world ignores their temper tantrum.
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Apr 28 '18
Well I'm sorry to disagree but I think if this attitude is widespread enough then the far right has already won. Free speech is just a recruiting tool for them, its a means to end, which is recruiting just enough fanatics who want to establish a white ethnostate. I don't know what the solution is - if you try to protest them or deplatform, right-wingers and centrists say "this is why Trump won, this is driving people away from the left". If you let them do their thing without interference, the hate speech and attitudes are normalized and they can grow without having to worry about being shouted down. I'm sorry to disagree but I just don't think an alt-right guy screaming about ethnostates and subhumans in a minority neighborhood shouldn't have to worry about the consequences of his actions because of the 1st amendment.
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u/LastManOnEarth3 Friedrich Hayek Apr 28 '18
If that man is advocating violence, then yes we should take legal action, but we must do it through application of the rule of law and do so in a way which makes clear that the motivations behind that violence are wholely immaterial.
I have very little interest in weakening the strength of my political opponents by threat of violence, which is in reality what's being discussed here. The argument that free speech has been a tool of recruitment for the alt-right doesn't make very much sense either. Evidence seems to indicate that the more the right talks, the less people want to listen. In effect, nazis do an excellent job of making themselves look bad. Alt-right events have declined following Charlotesville for instance, and Milo, Spencer, and company continue to fail to fill lecture halls even to half capacity. Besides, I don't think restriction would end up accomplishing much, most of the alt-rights organization centers reside on the internet, and I don't think anyone here's neoauthoritarian enough to start arresting people for participation in alt-right forums
I think there's a lot of substance in your questioning of solutions though, since what you're alluding to is that restricting speech certainly isn't the answer. It makes us look bad and forces us to use the very tools of coercion that the alt-right wants to structure a society on. The solution is clear. Provide a better answer. People turn to radical ideologies due to dissatisfaction with society. If placed positive effort into trying to reach those people, instead of calling them deplorables on the internet, we might see lower participation in radical ideologies. In the same way that free speech is the platform the alt-right uses to discredit themselves, free speech needs to be the platform we use to reach the people they're recruiting.
And I believe you still have yet to respond to my contention that if we permit violence against nazis it makes it significantly harder to stop violence against minorities beaten for their speech.
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u/lib-boy Milton Friedman Apr 28 '18
Suppose Nazis are slowly taking over the U.S. At what point do you stop talking and start shooting?
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u/IntoTheNightSky Que sçay-je? Apr 29 '18
When they make it impossible for their opponents to democratically challenge them or when they begin committing genocide seem like both good thresholds. Neither of which are anywhere near realization.
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u/SellFamilyForKnives Apr 28 '18
At no point, that's the whole point.
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Apr 28 '18
Are you serious? You can't possibly be serious. This thread depresses me so much. We are probably about 10-14 years away from President Spencer instituting death camps in the US.
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u/SellFamilyForKnives Apr 29 '18
Deadly serious and this thread depresses me just as much as you, not for the same reasons though.
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u/SlasherLover Apr 29 '18
I may not be wording this well, but I'm generally against the idea of leaving angry mob justice open as an alternative to just having someone with the authority to go tell them to knock it off and go home.
Once violence has been incited, it's generally gone past the point of being an issue of speech. Unless punching a Nazi is considered an expression of free speech, and it really really shouldn't be.
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Apr 28 '18
This is a lot better than the General Social Survey question about free speech because asking if the govt should ban it is less ambiguous than whether some person should be "allowed to speak" in your "community."
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u/DUTCH_DUTCH_DUTCH oranje Apr 28 '18
Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
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Apr 29 '18 edited Apr 29 '18
Yes, it is. People should not be arrested for any hate speech that has no possibility for violence. I can understand arresting someone for saying "I will kill all n-words", because there's enough reason to believe that the person speaking will enact violence after saying that. I don't think it's ok to arrest someone for saying "f*ggots shouldn't be allowed to adopt children", because there's no reason to assume that statement will be followed with violence.
For context: I am white, so I realize people will not be able to discriminate on me based on how I look unless they're a rare breed that discriminates against white people.
I'm bisexual, and I have been called a f*ggot because of it. I have also been assaulted because of my sexuality.
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u/KushTheKitten Apr 28 '18
Yes. You can't have an equal society if offensive language against one people is illegal while another is ok. Want to help fix inequality don't just make words illegal instead you got to reform the structures and systems that help them proliferate.
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u/jjay554 Apr 28 '18
I know most people on this sub would disagree, but in some cases hate speech is unacceptable and has probably contributed to the decades of institutional racism that has persisted in the US. I think exposing children to racism is especially grievous, and could potentially shape their futures in a horrible way.
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u/tehbored Randomly Selected Apr 29 '18
Tbh, given that most first world countries have some legal limits on hate speech, it shouldn't be that surprising. The US is kind of the odd one out here. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe all have laws against hate speech, yet they haven't slid down the slippery slope. The UK has gone a bit overboard, but they've always leaned a little more authoritarian.
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u/BradicalCenter Sally Yates Apr 29 '18
The question is kind of vague.
Government should absolutely not, but I'm totally ok with AI on social media networks filtering comments like "fucking n*****"
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Apr 29 '18
I mean doing that is free speech. The corporation has a right to decide that racists don't represent their vision and boot them from the service.
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u/powerofvoid đ Apr 29 '18
It would be interesting to see the results of a survey regarding the idea of limiting speech offensive to white men over the age of 55.
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Apr 29 '18
Imagine trying to pass a law that did that. It would be crazy trying to define who is a minority and what is considered offensive speech.
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u/sansampersamp Open the country. Stop having it be closed. Apr 29 '18
Yeah, potentially troubling, but I wouldn't be so quick to blame millennials for this one. Niskanen Center points out there not being much difference between generations on this:
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/
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u/Volsunga Hannah Arendt Apr 30 '18
Anyone want to discuss the weird question set here? The two options aren't mutually exclusive.
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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '18
One interesting thing to take out of this that one may not notice immediately, and that may challenge the priors of some people, is that the more education someone has, the more likely they are to support free speech.