“Let’s see, baseball, rode a bike - that could be me, except for the part where I go out and do something incredibly stupid. All those things - Boy Scout, outdoorsman, right? You know who that is? A lot of people. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, was all those things. Dennis Rader, remember him? He’s the beat, bind, torture and kill guy. He liked to hunt. He was a family man. Everybody liked him. His mother liked him. All that stuff. Dennis Rader and Alex – I’m sorry, but I can’t just pretend because you’re dead, you’re like the superior person.”
Your freedom ends where the freedom of others begins.
This is pure and obvious defamation and is illegal in many civilized countries. That’s how it has to be.
Only in the US people are so obsessed with ‘free speech’ that they actively protect hate speech.
Without this delusional interpretation of ‘free speech’, what Trump is doing most of the time wouldn’t be acceptable or possible.
Of course it is too late when you already have a fascist, authoritarian government.
But to such a government it doesn’t matter anyway. They will do whatever the fuck they want. They will introduce new laws if they feel like it. Putin had no problem to introduce a law which effectively lands you in jail for calling the war in Ukraine a war.
So I don’t buy the implication that even hate speech has to be protected as free speech because the government could abuse it. The real world shows us very clearly that such governments do whatever they like, so that’s just propaganda and wishful thinking at best.
They need to entirely trash the constitution and effectively dissolve the US republic first. Maybe they’re heading that way, but it is a barrier, and the lack of ambiguity of
is the whole substance of that barrier. If you think an exception for hate speech isn’t something that can be abused, look at all the countries right now criminalizing protest of the Palestinian genocide using it as legal justification. Think about the entire situation that is prompting these killings; we have clear legal rights to peaceful protest, and people are exercising those rights, for which they aren’t arrested and charged with speech crimes but killed outright in profound contempt for the law, because they don’t have a legal process to silence them, just the ability to kill people. This is exactly when we need free speech the most, and it makes very little sense to fantasize about removing it so you can silence others when you are the one whose speech is in dire need of protecting right now.
Not American but I’ll throw my hat in.
Look at what constantly fantasizing about “freedom of speech” have brought in America. All sorts of hateful speech that ultimately led to the nullification of the idea of freeze peach itself, starting with examples like ICE and the attempts to take down comedians like Jimmy Kimmel… Exactly what dictatorships do.
The 1st amendment experiment has failed. It died miserably.
Now I’m not saying it’s time to accept unchecked government censorship, but maybe that next time after you resist and defeat it (if that ever happens, Belarus has been under Lukashenko’s grip for over 30 years, right, and that’s just one dictatorial country), don’t worship freedom of speech to the point where you are too crippled from taking actions against scum who will take it away from you as soon as conveniently possible.
It’s under clear attack, but is not yet nullified. I already touched on this but the examples you cite are exactly where it’s doing what it is mean to; the clear illegality of these things is something people can recognize, and courts still have power. As an American, I’ll say that this is the only civic principle with any sort of universal recognition that matters, and it is the biggest thing holding the country back from collapse. What else do we have? Surely not a sense that human beings should be treated with care and respect. If freedom of speech ceases to exist, so does the United States; we must never let it go.
Sorry, you are not making any sense to my little European brain.
You can see how the current US government is doing whatever the fuck they want, right? You can see that for Trump the constitution means absolutely nothing except when it benefits him or his narrative, right? How the POTUS controlling the SCOTUS leads to a situation where there are no consequences for them?
You can see that your interpretation of free speech is being abused constantly and benefits those who have money and spread misinformation and hate, right?
I have no idea what western, civilized countries you are talking about where you apparently are not allowed to protest - you can’t possibly think this is a worse situation than what you have in the US.
And mind you there are tons of pro Palestine protests in countries I have on my radar. The only thing that’s not allowed is glorifying the attack of the Hamas on Jewish people.
But yes, I am not saying there is no way to abuse this. Given a government which is shitty enough and courts which are not independent, obviously it can be abused.
But in no shape or form is it worse than the free speech interpretation in the US, where defamation, hate and lies are literally constantly spread by those with enough power and reach.
This 100% enabled Trump and the disgrace you call ‘political debate’ over there - which is nothing but political mudslinging non stop.
So yes, I think the small chance of hate speech exceptions being abused is absolutely worth the upsides.