Censoring Nazi speech/images is a bad idea

I think that you have something completely different in mind.

If speech is “absolute free” or “free without limit” then it must be legal to tell lies. If it is illegal to lie then “holocaust denial” would be illegal.

I don’t think you’re seeing the differentiation between speech and the action that is slander. Yes all speech is free without limit, but not all action is free.

It’s ok to tell lies so long as you do not know they are lies. If you know they are lies and tell them anyway, then you are putting into action a plan to harm someone or something where no retribution is warranted except out of personal vendetta.

For instance if you say brand X dogfood contains euthanasia drugs and your claim is knowingly false, then all you’ve done is hurt society by damaging the reputation of a legitimate dogfood manufacturer that was otherwise performing a valuable service. But if your claim is true, then you’ve performed a valuable service to the community. Both are actions, but one is good and the other is bad just like helping old ladies across the street is good, but pushing them into oncoming traffic is bad.

But that presumes the holocaust is true and how are we to determine that if discussion of it is illegal? The only possible answer is “Because they said it’s true and I believe them.” Well, that’s appeal to authority. How can you take anyone’s word for anything without verifying the reasoning yourself?

Open inspection is the only mechanism we have to establish truth. The moment something is illegal to discuss, it becomes impossible to establish it’s truthfulness.

A distinction which seems artificial. In one case, you call speech simply speech and in another you call speech action.

Then you are not advocating free speech, you are advocating speech restricted to what a speaker “honestly believes to be true”.

Right away that seems to produce a practical problem : A neo-nazi is speaking on a soapbox denying the holocaust. How do you know if he honestly believes that the holocaust didn’t happen or if he is outright lying? You are basically required to let him talk. If you take him to court then you have to prove that he knew that he was lying. That’s probably difficult and probably also a waste of time and money.

Therefore, people will be able to lie and get away with it.

If you had a law which made holocaust denial illegal, then you would be able to stop him. The assumption is that the evidence is so overwhelming that no rational person could honestly believe that it did not happen so if he is saying it, then he is intentionally lying.

That’s not the issue. They gathered the evidence, found it to be true and then made denial illegal.
And even after it was made illegal, people still have access to the evidence and they can confirm the truth of the matter.

It’s possible to enact laws which make the discussion itself illegal and then it wouldn’t be possible to determine the truth. That’s a question of which laws ought to be enacted.

No it’s not impossible. But there are areas of research which are off-limits in universities. That’s a separate issue because it goes beyond speech.

One of the ironic things about free speech is that it can be used to silence people more effectively than laws restricting free speech.

For example, there is no law in the US or Canada which makes discussion of men’s rights illegal. Yet, when people try to speak about men’s rights, the politically correct mobs come out to shout it down and denounce the speakers with all sorts of misinformation, lies and innuendos. And it’s effective.

It’s not artificial. Most everything I say is an opinion or published fact and there is no action associated with it because all I’m doing is engaging in conversation or I’m on a soapbox broadcasting speech, but if I say you bake babies in the basement, now I’ve done something since I’m not just speaking, but trying to physically hurt you by causing real-world damage to your reputation. Or if I follow you around hounding you with words, that’s action. I can’t scream in your ear and claim free speech.

If someone says something they honestly believe is false, it is more than just speech. The speech part of it is fine, but the action part of it is not.

If I say you bake babies, you suffer damages. If I say dogfood X has drugs, they suffer damages. If a nazi denies the holocaust, who suffers damages? Can the holocaust sue the nazi? The only ones who can suffer are the ones capitalizing off of it. Furthermore, denying the holocaust is just an opinion. To really be slander the nazi would have to falsify evidence against someone. Like, for instance, the claim that the chimney at Auschwitz was constructed by the Russians specifically for propaganda purposes. That seems like slander, if it’s false. If it’s not false, then perhaps the slander IS the chimney since the construction of it could have been “action” against the nazis to help demonize them.

Why would you want to stop him? Why not make moonlanding-denial illegal too? Or round-earth-denial?

Yeah that’s the assumption. Some people say the fine-tuning evidence is so overwhelming that no rational person could believe that god doesn’t exist and for a long time it was illegal to question god’s existence. Cholesterol, sat fat, carbon dioxide, the evidence is all so overwhelming that we may as well assume it’s true.

Who are they? How can they find anything to be true? Who made them an authority on truth? Free inspection is the only thing that can establish truth; not dictations by a supposed authority.

What if someone looks at the evidence and discovers a bunch of holes?

Well if the inevitable conclusion of the discussion denies the holocaust, then it instantly becomes illegal.

If I say something here and no one challenges it, then someone else can conclude that, within a free market of ideas, no one has found fault in what I said so far and therefore what I said might be true. It’s the openness to inspection that bestows the property of truth to statements made.

What about men’s rights? Where is that happening? Surely not here :laughing:

I would call that a design of democratic marxist leaning neo liberalism more than anything and certainly not a glitch. That’s not by accident.

Or anywhere outside of Muslim countries for that matter…

I’m seeing that happening in Poland’s case. Maybe Poland is being too sensitive about the issue. I personally do not see the world as having portrayed Poles as Nazi-supporters, as a whole; nobody was thinking ‘Poland camps’ as a creation of Poles. I think most people understand that it was occupied territory, with people forming multiple allegiances. Nobody is innocent in this story, and there was plenty of blame to go around. I understand it’s trying to protect its image, but I think Poland just shot itself in the foot with this law.
google.com/amp/s/www.washin … petrators/

The real cause also of Germany invading Poland was due to Poland acquiring lands or territories that were originally German prior. Also, let us not forget the killings and murders of ethnic Germans before its invasion that the Polish government completely ignored. I don’t care what nation you are nobody would tolerate a bordering neighbor like that.

I think there’s some imprecision in the way words like “censor” and “illegal” are being used here. What does it mean for speech to be “illegal”? To take Phyllo’s example of slander, in the US it isn’t illegal, to my knowledge, to slander someone, and it could not be. Rather, when you commit slander, you may be liable for the harm that your slander does. But you won’t be arrested or otherwise criminally punished. I may be using too technical a definition of “illegal”, but I don’t see a system that hold people accountable for the harm they do to others to be making those harms “illegal”, and it seem that it makes a theoretical difference.

So too with the men’s rights example. I wouldn’t call it “censorship”, even if its effects are censorship-like. Censorship is the state-run removal of certain ideas or expressions from the public sphere. The moral and political implications of that are very different from a situation where the expression of an idea draws even significant amounts of hate or derision. Even if that response tends to drown out the speech that provoked it, that still seems like someone suffering the social repercussions of their speech, rather than facing criminal liability and state-sanctioned silencing.

And yet moreso the implication that suggesting that an off-topic conversation should be held elsewhere is “censorship”. Indeed, such a request must presume that the off-topic conversation is permitted. It may be wrong for other reasons (for example, contravening UrGod’s claim of despotic ownership of any thread he creates), but it isn’t censorship and doesn’t entail censorship’s moral implications.

Returning to my devil’s advocacy:

The fact that speech restrictions are often a bad idea, and will often have the opposite of the intended effect, does not entail that all such restrictions are wrong. Prohibitions on Holocaust denial did not have the kind of effects that Pandora notes in Poland, most likely because, where Poland sought to prohibit the proliferation of certain truths, Germany sought to face up and own to similar truths in order to recover from them.

The problem with any modern nation now is that all communication platforms are either owned by the government or through corporations with ties to it. If all of them have a united ideological agenda in which case they do censorship whether passive or not is something that isn’t hard to imagine.

Also, freedom to assembly or protest isn’t what it used to be where if there is a gathering the controllers of government doesn’t like it is disbanded rather quickly. We seen this with the Occupy Wallstreet protests most recently.

This is a good point, and a weakness in one of the distinctions in my definitions of “illegal” and “censorship”. I often use the concept of ‘state-like’, where e.g. Google exercises state-like power within its services, and can be properly said to be censoring content there.

But illegality does seem to maintain the distinction so long as Google does not direct the operation of criminal law, since the use of physical force is monopolized by the state. Where the state enforces compensating the victims of harm, that is still not illegal as the state cannot initiate it sua sponte, they must be prompted to act by the parted that is harmed.

Still, your point is well taken: there are times where effective censorship can be tantamount to censorship, and where even effective illegality can be tantamount to illegality (where, say, a monopolistic company can effectively shut down anyone who dares to say certain things).

Indeed, let us not also forget that laws can be interpreted in various manners it that some of them are vague, ambiguous, and non specific where it is very easy with individuals to manipulate laws in their favor with lots of monetary funding behind them.

If it’s not considered “illegal” with all the negative connotations of the word and is relegated to mere “consequence”, then one could slander and pay a fine, slander and pay a fine, etc indefinitely and be rewarded for having good business sense. It would be like a corporation dumping toxic sludge in the river to save millions who is only fined $250k; it seems a good trade to consequently pay $250k for saving millions if we don’t take into consideration the moral aspects.

Most of the time it does result in being censorship because too often the offtopic isn’t worth starting a whole new thread over and it still begs for explanation of why topic-relevancy must be maintained. I’m not sure the reason is speech-maximization because there are more ways to talk offtopic than on. Maybe quality of speech would suffer, but what defines “quality”? Are we aspiring to inspire or trying to walk the straight and narrow?

Incidentally, here’s this:

You Can Now Be Arrested For Sexism In Belgium

[i]A Belgian court fined a man €3,000 ($3,700) for telling a female police officer that she should do a job more “adapted to women.”

The driver was found guilty of three charges: contempt of a police officer, making threats and sexist remarks in public, and a serious violation of another person’s dignity because of her gender.

He was warned that if he failed to pay the fine, a prison term of a month would be imposed.[/i]

And here we are discussing the legality of slander while someone faces jail time for violation of dignity.

Free speech is either all or nothing. The philosophical core of free speech is to promote and respect truth, through your own individual ability and responsibility to either engage or remove yourself. If you have no better ideas, then you shut yourself up. If you keep talking then smarter people will be free to call you the idiot you are and to point this fact out for all to see.

This is something that leftists will never understand. They would rather silence you with force than engage on the same level as the ideas themselves.

You have absolute free speech according to the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Does anyone actually think about what this means? Congress shall make no law abridging [abridge: to cut short, to reduce] the freedom of speech, or of the press. This means that you have absolute freedom to speak and to write in the sense that the government cannot have laws which cut short or reduce your freedom to speak and to write; you can say and write whatever you want where the law is concerned. So having any laws that prohibit saying or writing certain things is blatantly unconstitutional.

Now, remember what I was saying above, that you can still use your speech to commit what is otherwise a crime. Threatening someone with immediate bodily harm can be considered a crime, or blackmailing someone can be considered a crime, or committing fraud can be considered a crime, or slander can be considered a crime; all of these crimes are just that, crimes. The criminal aspect of these has nothing to do with “speech itself”, and legislating against these crimes has nothing to do with “abridging speech”. You are absolutely free to use your speech or writing to threaten someone, blackmail them, slander them, or defraud them, but then you will have become guilty of another crime entirely. The speech/press which you used to commit the crime is not the point, has nothing to do with it. The crime itself is the point.

There can be no laws which say you cannot speak or write certain things. But we do have laws which state that if you use your speech or writing to commit another crime, like those listed above, then you will be guilty of that other respective crime. Again, this has nothing to do with interrupting free speech or free press.

Now, the government could pass laws making new sort of things a crime, for example there could be a law that says it is a crime to hurt someone else’s feelings. In that case, you might tell someone to go fuck off and then become guilty of a crime of hurting someone’s feelings (this is basically what “hate speech” laws are). But even this is not a violation of the first amendment, because again it has nothing to do with your speech or your right to say whatever you want, it has to do with how you committed another crime and just happened to have used some speech acts to perform it.

Of course one would think that we would be sane enough not to pass laws like “hate speech” laws. There should not be such blatantly idiotic irrational sort of laws in the first place, especially in a government which is designed to be minimally necessary and to promote and respect individual self-responsibility. But obviously the American founders underestimated human stupidity.

And by the way, the exact same logic applies to the right to keep and bear arms. The first and second amendments go hand in hand. If you use a gun to commit a crime, you are guilty of that crime itself. This does not mean you no longer have a right to keep and bear arms. You do not somehow lose your right to keep and bear arms just because you used your arms to commit a crime, just as you do not somehow lose your right to say or write whatever you want just because you used your speech/writing to a crime. These rights in the Constitution are not limited or restricted, it is quite clear what “CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW … ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH”, or, “THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” mean.

Basically, the Constitution has already been totally violated. It only exists as a little shadow of its original spirit, and not even anymore in a formal sense.

The crazy leftists have already won.

But I think they will find their “victory” to be quite bittersweet indeed. We will always fight twice as hard when backed against the wall, and truth always wins in the end anyway; truth wins either because it lives through our acknowledgement of it, or because it kills us for ignoring it.

The next iteration of the American Constitutional idea, whether it occurs in the US or somewhere else on earth, will represent an improvement over the current idea. As truth dies (as radical neomarxist leftism, corporatocratic oligarchical neoliberal fascism, and fervent ideological thought all manage to “win”) a vacuum opens up, creating a cascade of increasingly potent incentives for reality to fill that vacuum with new tectonic heights of… truth, of the very thing which is currently lacking.

Well, the nazis gain credibility. The Jews are marginalized, demonized and discredited.
That leaves them vulnerable for other actions in the future.
To say that nobody suffers damages is ridiculous.

Given the huge quantity of film, photographs, eyewitness testimony and physical evidence, if the holocaust can be disputed then there really is no such thing as sufficient evidence for anything.

Historians?

But, yeah, welcome to the internet age when everyone is an expert on pretty much anything. Read a couple of wikipedia articles and you’re an expert on history, rocket science, brain surgery …

Who needs people who study and train for years?

And people wonder why fake news is so common now. They don’t actually have the skills to evaluate the news.