Free Speech Absolutism was/is connected with hate speech because sites that hold up such an ideal end up being the landing pad for the very worst people who were banned everywhere else. There aren't enough normal people who vote with their money/time/engagement to reach critical mass on those platforms.
And turns out very few people want actually free speech. We're in a forum with strong moderation and the discussion is better for it. Most communities self-enforce norms even without central moderation. There's no easy answers when you have to reckon with the real effects speech has. Germany wasn't special, they weren't even alone at the time. What folks call "fascism" naturally precipitates under the right conditions and I can't think of any time in history where it's been dealt with by the socratic method and not violence of a kind.
But once you have a word you can accuse someone of with actual repercussions folks acting in bad-faith try to fit people they don't like into the mould. We think ourselves so much better than those silly puritans accusing people of witchcraft but we just changed the words. I'm sure you could name five off the top of your head that people level without any kind of justification.
I don't usually comment on HN because I don't feel like I can bring much value to the discussion in many cases and I would agree to moderate it even stricter even if my (rare) comments would be removed.
In real life on the other hand I want to be able to say stupid things and even if I might be more sensible to others' "hate speech" I would not want that to be banned.
This is such a naive take that I'm honesty not sure how to respond. Like I mean this with zero judgement in the world, are you 14? Because this is word for word what I would have said at that age. And dgmr, I was certain and steadfast that I was correct and everyone else were just idiots.
It's difficult to explain why this is wrong because the very premise that ideas are even in competition in the manner you're suggesting just isn't true. There isn't some arena where scribes record victories and losses. And even on the individual level it doesn't work, that someone when presented with the truth will change their opinion. People won't even change their opinion even when it stands to benefit them personally.
I think folks get this idea of "marketplace of ideas" in their head and assume that "fitness" for an idea correlates with correctness. That better ideas spread and survive. No — entertaining ideas, ideas that conform to our existing biases, ideas that we were conditioned to think, ideas that get repeated over and over by someone with a big enough megaphone, ideas that sound plausibly correct, ideas that make people feel clever for thinking them, ideas that fit a particular narrative you believe, propaganda that is spread far and wide.
Being right has never and will never be enough. No one, not you, not me, not anyone is immune to taking on bad ideas. It took 40 years of the entire god damn western world organizing itself around a single message to get a critical mass people to believe that homosexuals were regular people and it still hasn't fully worked. Women have the rights we do because of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Slavery was abolished in 1865 and folks still think black people are inferior.
You're taking on the fallacy that progress just happens and isn't the result of a fuckton of work and sacrifice by people who consciously made it happen and who are out in the fields weeding constantly.
"When your crops are so bad you need to use herbicides to kill weeds lest they immediately take over your farm, it's time to change your crops."
Surely there must be some reasonable explanation for why you are still right and correct even though your ideas constantly lose to others without censorship. It can't be that you're just wrong.
Wanting free speech on internet forums is different from wanting it at the government level. I'm not sure what Free Speech Absolutism is, but if it means unmoderated internet forums, yeah that usually doesn't end well even if only a small minority has bad intent.
Big online forums with any kind of global popularity already have an inherent problem despite the moderation, not because of hate speech but because of ragebait and other forms of grifting. Especially with anonymous users.
Firstly, that Germany's descent into fascism and anti-semitism were both helped by the lack of free speech. Blasphemy laws prevented the anti-semitism preached from the pulpits to be challenged, and hate speech laws actually helped the Nazis publicise their movement[1].
> Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews.
As to norms, they can be self-enforced because free speech allows such a choice, otherwise it would be the case that those norms were imposed or not even available. Most likely, they'd be someone else's norms.
This post makes no sense. Your both cases are an example where was too much "free speech" (preeches) and too few ( govermental fight against Stürmer)
I guess the analysis about Nazis in the Weimarer Republik are far more complex than a matter of free speech. It tells a lot that I never heard historians seriously discussing it in this context.
The preaching was free but the challenges were not due to blasphemy laws, thus more free speech would allow challenges, which we know reduces the problem of bad speech.
> It tells a lot that I never heard historians seriously discussing it in this context.
If you got the first part wrong then the second is only telling in the other direction.
And turns out very few people want actually free speech. We're in a forum with strong moderation and the discussion is better for it. Most communities self-enforce norms even without central moderation. There's no easy answers when you have to reckon with the real effects speech has. Germany wasn't special, they weren't even alone at the time. What folks call "fascism" naturally precipitates under the right conditions and I can't think of any time in history where it's been dealt with by the socratic method and not violence of a kind.
But once you have a word you can accuse someone of with actual repercussions folks acting in bad-faith try to fit people they don't like into the mould. We think ourselves so much better than those silly puritans accusing people of witchcraft but we just changed the words. I'm sure you could name five off the top of your head that people level without any kind of justification.