Category Archive 'Hate Speech'

26 May 2020

Tyranny and So-Called “Hate Speech”

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The Heritage Foundation recently published a must-read report on the Left’s widely successful effort to first stigmatize, and eventually to criminalize, speech and ideas it doesn’t like, thus shutting down all discussion and debate over very significant cultural and policy issues.

America is the only Western nation that does not criminalize “hate speech.” Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most nations of Europe already do so. The United Nations relentlessly pressures the remaining holdouts to follow suit: “As a matter of principle,” says the U.N. Secretary-General, “the United Nations must confront hate speech at every turn.”

Meanwhile in America, Members of Congress issue their support for speech restrictions, and Big Tech’s digital oligarchs, enjoying a disproportionate power over society, continue to impose speech restrictions in exchange for access to their platforms. So are America’s colleges and universities more and more governed by an aggressive chorus of students, faculty, and administrators who demand and impose speech codes. These fronts promises to grow in size, strength, and confidence in the coming years.

Leading restriction advocates want not only to banish “hate speech,” but also to criminalize it. In the words of Mari Matsuda, an influential professor at the University of Hawaii Law School, “[F]ormal criminal and administrative sanction—public as opposed to private prosecution—is also an appropriate response to racist speech.”

Perhaps most surprising, legal precedents that would bring this revolution fully into existence in America are already embedded in two areas of our legal system: antidiscrimination and harassment laws, and Supreme Court rulings favoring sexual liberation that are based on a new view of “dignity.”

If Americans are to resist this growing movement, they must understand the arguments, the demands, and the consequences of outlawing “hate speech.” No laws of history dictate that America must submit and follow this path.

The debate over “hate speech” reveals a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of America. Either it is political liberty, in which case the freedom of speech is essential for presumptively rational citizens to rule themselves politically and to pursue the truth through science, philosophy, or religion. Or it is the equal self-respect and dignity of marginalized and self-created identities, in which case these must not only be publicly affirmed and celebrated, but also shielded from (even well-meaning) scrutiny and criticism, called “speech violence” or “hate speech.” These two views cannot coexist. Indeed, restriction advocates admit that America’s understanding of speech “comes into tension with the aspiration of equal dignity.”

They want to eliminate the former to make way for the latter.

RTWT

07 May 2019

Facebook Censored the Declaration of Independence

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Washington Post:

[A] small newspaper, based out of Liberty, a Texas town of 75,000 outside of Houston, planned to post the Declaration of Independence on Facebook in 12 daily installments leading up to the Fourth of July — 242 years since the document was adopted at the Second Continental Congress in 1776.

But on the 10th day, the Vindicator’s latest installment was removed by Facebook. The company told the newspaper that the particular passage, which included the phrase “merciless Indian Savages,” went against its “standards on hate speech,” the newspaper wrote.

The story about how Facebook had censored one of the United States’ founding texts on the grounds that it was hate speech has traveled around the world. And it is another glaring example of how the mechanisms that tech companies use to regulate user content — many of which involve algorithms and other automated processes — can result in embarrassing errors. Facebook uses a mix of human work and technological efforts to moderate its content.

Facebook has since apologized to the Vindicator and restored the newspaper’s post.

“The post was removed by mistake and restored as soon as we looked into it,” the company said in a statement distributed by spokeswoman Sarah Pollack. “We process millions of reports each week, and sometimes we get things wrong.”

RTWT

Hilarious, of course. Just imagine the embarrassment in Menlo Park.

But, not really surprising, considering Silicon Valley’s aggressive Politically Correct Intolerance and its penchant for Diversity in hiring. Why should anyone expect a recent Comp Sci graduate originating from Dehli or Damascus or Guangzhou to recognize the text of the Declaration, or identify 18th Century English, by sight?

It seems to me that the inconsistency of the policy is also intellectually even more embarrassing. In the end, Thomas Jefferson (for now) gets a pass. You and I don’t, and outside Facebook, people of the same mentality are right now pulling down statues of formerly sacred heroes from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee to William McKinley.

07 May 2015

Hate Speech and the Left

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HateSpeech1

“It’s free speech if the left hates the target.
It’s hate speech if the left favors the target.

That’s really all they mean. They have no principle of free speech that they support independent of a group identity. Thus:

Criticizing Christianity is free speech
Criticizing Islam is hate speech
Burning an American Flag is free speech
Burning a Gay Pride Flag is hate speech

It’s not the nature of the criticism, it’s only the favor of the target. You can’t argue the legitimacy or severity of the attack. That’s irrelevant. It’s all determined up front by who the target is.

So burning the American Flag is free speech. If you retort that it’s hateful to Americans they’ll say that they are complaining about the system and not the people.
If you burn the Gay Pride (rainbow) flag it’s hate speech. If you retort that you are only complaining about the system of the gay activist elite and their heavy handed tactics, and not gay people, the left will simply dismiss that as a lame excuse to hide your hatred.

Christ in Urine is free speech.
Flushing a Koran is hate speech.

It’s not the act or type of speech. The distinction free speech or hate speech is just determined by whether the left favors the target. That all. Then they make up indignant rationales to justify their position.

If they hate the target, then it’s free speech to criticize them and censorship to stop the criticism… If they love the target then It’s hate speech to criticize them and an act of protection to stop the criticism.”

–- Jeffrey Varasano

03 Dec 2013

European Hate Speech Indictments

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A police helicopter flying over Glasgow, Scotland last Friday lost control and crashed into the roof of a crowded Irish pub, killing three on board and six customers. An additional 32 persons present in the bar were injured.

Apparently, free speech was also a casualty as Scottish newspapers subsequently reported that a teenage male was arrested on Sunday for posting “racist and sectarian comments” on an on-line social networking site.

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Meanwhile, French prosecutors announced today that preliminary charges of “public insult and inciting hate” were filed last month against Bob Dylan for comments made in the course of a Rolling Stone interview last year during which the singer-songwriter discussed race relations in America.

Curiously, the offended parties were the Croats. What Dylan said was:

If you got a slave master or [Klu Klux] Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.

By a curious coincidence, the Republic of France was also awarding Dylan the Legion of Honor around roughly the same time that French prosecutors were indicting him for hate speech.


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