Free Speech
One reader wrote in with regard to my post on this Dutch hate speech prosecution objecting that my criticisms seemed too pragmatic and insufficiently focused on the question of principle.
So to be clear: I think as a matter of principle that people should be permitted to make offensive analogies about the Koran or anything else they care to. That said, I do think that principled belief in free speech is ultimately tied to practicalities. If I was genuinely convinced that for people of diverse faiths to coexist peacefully required an elaborate set of legal restrictions on offensive speech—with the only alternative being bloodshed and many deaths—then I’m not going to pretend that I might not flinch away from principle. But the principle of freedom of expression as a good solution for life in a diverse society has, I think, stood the test of time in the United States of America. And it does work, in part, precisely because it’s understood as a principle, as a civic commitment to a shared value. Which is perhaps a more complicated answer than some people are hoping for, but I think that in the real word questions of principle and questions of pragmatism are more intertwined than people sometimes care to admit.
67 Responses to “Free Speech”
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January 21st, 2009 at 6:07 pm
As Mill showed, liberality really is the most practical and utilitarian way to govern a society.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:12 pm
As one would expect, I have nits, but all in all: fair enough.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Reaching back to your philosophising days, what’s your view on Stanley Fish’s argument, expressed in this interview (and his book There’s no such thing as free speech… and it’s a good thing, too, that “free speech is what’s left over when you have determined which forms of speech cannot be permitted to flourish”?
January 21st, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Rule-based utilitarianism ***rules*** !!!!!!!!
(for all intents and purposes, anyway)
January 21st, 2009 at 6:36 pm
But, isn’t there another alternative, a major alternative? MattY, help me out! Can you articulate that alternative? [MattY strains to move his lips, but Jennifer Palmieri fires the CAP shock collar, constraining him from saying the words].
January 21st, 2009 at 6:38 pm
If I was genuinely convinced that for people of diverse faiths to coexist peacefully required an elaborate set of legal restrictions on offensive speech—with the only alternative being bloodshed and many deaths—then I’m not going to pretend that I might not flinch away from principle.
Another possibility than restricting offensive speech would be to discourage people of incompatible faiths from living together.
If the only way for Muslims to coexist with others in Europe is for their to be an elaborate set of restrictions on offensive speech (and notice that those restrictions usually go in one direction – Muslims are free to offend others, but others are not free to offend them), then the solution is not to restrict free speech but to get rid of the Muslims. Note: by “get rid of,” I mean “get them to emigrate;” I am not advocating bloodshed. More specifically, they should get rid of the ones who are not able to coexist with those who offend them.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:51 pm
I’ve really got my dander on this topic.
Too many liberals have *no* idea just how dangerous demagogury is. Yes, you can apply hate speech laws in bad faith, but this is true of any law.
However, *no* sane, functioning state are without some sort of hate/disruptive speech provision. Most of the time, it’s for the protection of the state. Most of the rest of the time, it’s about preventing Taiping Rebellions.
Hate speech laws that are seperate from the usual anti-state mechanisms(like anti-terrorism) and standing on its own as a civic law does way the hell more good than bad.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:56 pm
That principle didn’t work out so well with the genocide-inciting radio stations in Rwanda.
The principle works in the USA. It may not (and does not) elsewhere.
(And folks, there’s a lot of room for Jennifer Palmieri jokes here. Commetn #5 is only a start)
January 21st, 2009 at 6:57 pm
It is quite possible that those who lived in countries occupied by the Nazis (including Germany) had a different basis for deciding what is practical.
January 21st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
“Too many liberals have *no* idea just how dangerous demagogury is.”
At least I have an idea how dangerous government repression is.
January 21st, 2009 at 7:07 pm
There is another problem with “hate speech” laws that is a practical matter. If we had them in this country they would have been used to put Martin Luther King in prison. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but hate speech is in the ear of the corrupt prosecuter and jury.
January 21st, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Njorl, what the fuck are you smoking?
Can I have some? Anything that damages rational thought and memory must be ecstatic.
January 21st, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Hey, Shah8, way to advance the debate! You’re making me rethink my stance on the value of free speech.
You haven’t made a substantive response to anyone on either thread, so feel free to make yourself scarce.
January 21st, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Note: My post in part 6 was based on the assumption that the reason for restricting speech was to avoid offending Muslims and thus inciting them.
If the concern truly is that non-Muslims will be incited to violence against Muslims, then the point is null.
January 21st, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Martin Luther King was shot once, imprisoned multiple times, and shot again and killed for speaking for tolerance and civil rights.
I don’t know tomemos…I kinda think the historical context makes Njorl’s statement that hate speech laws would have sent MLK to jail sorta, well, batshit insane.
The Dutch have orders of magnitude *more* free speech rights than we do in America (in practice). They can protest freely, speak against the government in major media outlets, they can unionize, and wow, they have lots more leeway to be “funky” than we do here. Yet we worry about their hate speech laws, especially it was probably used appropriately at that…
Sometimes provincialism sucks.
January 21st, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Njorl’s point was that these laws inevitably are abused by the powers that be. In fact, that’s basically what they’re intended to be used for.
“The Dutch have orders of magnitude *more* free speech rights than we do in America (in practice). They can protest freely, speak against the government in major media outlets…”
Um. Who wants to tell him?
p.s. Martin Luther King was only shot once. He was stabbed, is that what you were thinking of?
January 21st, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Your beloved Netherlands, by the way, saw a right-wing politician assassinated a few years ago. Good thing they have hate speech laws to keep bad blood from building up!
January 21st, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Now, I’m even more amused…
1) Njorl used a really bad analogy to prove that hate speech laws are inevitably abused. Even so, if we’re so concerned about abuse of laws, why don’t we talk about vagrancy and public nusiance laws used against King and his movement? Or the drug war? Can you bring up a case in which hate crimes legislation *silences* speech more thoroughly than any number of official and unofficial means of censorship? Fitna, the movie that was censured, certain *does* merit the use of the legal provisions as a work that constitutes defamation in the strong sense.
2) You know what? I really don’t care if he was shot *or* stabbed, does it make one iota of difference to my claim?
3) Who the fuck cares about some gay immigrant basher politician shot by some crazy anti-fur trade activist? Not relevant.
January 21st, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Ikram wrote:
That principle didn’t work out so well with the genocide-inciting radio stations in Rwanda.
The principle works in the USA. It may not (and does not) elsewhere.
There are no hate speech laws in the US, but there are laws against direct incitement to violence. It may be true that even if these Rwandan broadcasts had avoided such direct incitements and merely argued that the Tutsis were the cause of most of society’s woes (as the Nazis did with the Jews), this would have motivated more people to go out and kill than in the absence of any broadcasts. Still, in any country where the political situation has become extreme enough that genocide becomes a possibility, like Rwanda in the 1990s or Germany in the 1930s, I think it’s implausible that public hate speech laws would have made any difference, I’d imagine that kind of extreme and widespread hatred is mostly passed along by word of mouth (and hate speech laws probably wouldn’t be well-enforced in any situation where a large number of people in authority were sympathetic to the haters).
In countries where the political situation isn’t so extreme, I suppose the fear is that while some white supremacist website won’t lead to widespread support for white supremacy or genocide, it might motivate some individual to go out and commit a crime…but really, where do you draw the line? Any violent movie may increase the likelihood of a real-life copycat, after all. And if there had recently been a bunch of crimes committed against religious fundamentalists by atheists, would that justify banning books by people like Dawkins and Hitchens (who do argue that religious fundamentalism is a significant cause of problems in modern society)? To take a similar example from real life, do the hate speech advocates here agree with the Canadian prosecution of Mark Steyn (discussed here in a Glenn Greenwald article along with a few other examples), who I think is an idiot but was nevertheless trying to make a reasoned argument about what he perceived to be the dangers of allowing too many unassimilated Muslim immigrants into Canada?
January 21st, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Sorry, looks like I forgot to close the link tag…
January 21st, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Jesse M,
At the turn of the 20th century, racist plays written by Dixon and which were the basis of Birth of a Nation contributed to an upswelling in anti-black violence.
Devices like Birth of a Nation, the Protocols of Zion, Fitna and many other media items, whether they specifically call for direct action or not, do move the Overton Window of a society for the worse.
Perhaps countries like Post Reconstruction US would never have had hate crimes legislation or it would be as ineffective as the post Civil War Amendments. In the end, though, those Civil War Amendments did come through for black people in a way that would have been much harder to win (and with even more ambiguity)without the 13th, 14th, and 15th admendments.
Hate crimes and hate speech legislation brings the same promise, even though the difficulty is largely the same of recognizing porn. Taking the issues of group defamation and group intimidation outside of whim of state executive actors (who decides mostly in terms of state security) and into the hands of public, civic, realms is something I view as important, no matter what level of societal development. These things can *prevent* or *slow down* descent into barbarousness as well as uplift.
Principle is most valued, when it is gleaned from real events and real memories, and thought through with with intelligence and empathy. Principle, however much it might be associated with ideology, is not *of* ideology.
January 21st, 2009 at 9:54 pm
shah8 wrote:
At the turn of the 20th century, racist plays written by Dixon and which were the basis of Birth of a Nation contributed to an upswelling in anti-black violence.
How do you know they contributed to the violence, as opposed to their popularity being a mere symptom of increasing anti-black hatred? Correlation is not causation after all. And would you support banning Birth of a Nation today, despite its historical importance?
These things can *prevent* or *slow down* descent into barbarousness as well as uplift.
That’s something you believe, but is there any convincing evidence for it? Others might similarly believe that banning horror movies can slow down the culture’s “descent into barbarousness”.
Principle is most valued, when it is gleaned from real events and real memories, and thought through with with intelligence and empathy.
Many of the people who support unlimited expression of ideas would say their reasons for supporting it are gleaned from real history–that’s exactly the sort of practical pro free speech argument that MY was making in this post. You can find plenty of examples showing the real danger of slippery slopes when it comes to banning hate speech, see the Glenn Greenwald post I linked to above for a few.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Jesse M,
Dixon’s plays, and Birth of a Nation directly led to the refounding of the Ku Klux Klan via inspiration and glorification of the original Klan. I’d say that it did contribute to the violence.
As far as banning, well, like The Protocols of Zion, Birth of a Nation has already harvested its bitter fruit. No point anymore.
With the next point about descent into barbarousness, I merely offer up Amy Chua’s work, which sez that empires and countries that stop caring about enforcing a multiethnic civil society disintegrate into a fulment of racial violence. Compare Yugoslavia with Singapore, Iran, Canada, Ghana which all have problems, but they are all multicultural amalgrams that all have *strong* codified legal and social rules on ethnic tolerance. Even through the depth of 1948 and 1979, for example, Iran still has a jewish community. These things matter.
Those people who believe in free speech has never believed in defamatory conduct. That’s why it’s generally illegal. Handling defamation of groups is just a murkey area that has long been used as a loophole for state actors and local opportunists. Closing it and making it a public matter makes our society stronger, not weaker.
I’ve read the Glenn Greenwald post. It’s typical liberal-libertarian claptrap by a person who isn’t really mindful of the concept of race-baiting. Had my fill of those people during the Muhammad cartoons and the New Yorker Obama cover.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:32 pm
also, read the wiki of the film…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation#Responses
People rioted and murdered black people after viewing the film, so it had both an immediate effect *and* a long term effect.
Lastly, note that there was *never* an explicit advocation of violence or *any* change in the status quo. It merely propurted to show *history* in a slightly fictionalized way. Even now, legally, people can make and show movies like Birth of a Nation.
Social norms prevent the success of a modern day Birth of a Nation, but these norms can be reinforced with legal norms.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:45 pm
I have little to add to the defenders of free speech on these threads, which is weird considering my passion for it. One thing…
If there’s any sign of America’s lack of free speech in practice, it is in corporate media.
Remember the Danish cartoons? Le Monde republished them in solidarity. Here in the land of the free, you pretty much had to check the internet. South Park did a parody, and Comedy Central censored part of it.
But it wasn’t out of any devotion to multiculturalism. It was out of fear.
Maybe in a way that’s better; it means our professed commitment to free speech at least remains the norm.
But at least when the Europeans and Canadians restrict the human imagination, they are motivated by the greater good. When we do it, it just shows our moral weakness.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Or you could just assassinate a potential prime minister, like the leftist lawyer did to anti-immigration leader Pym Fortuyn in the Netherlands.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:00 am
Dixon’s plays, and Birth of a Nation directly led to the refounding of the Ku Klux Klan via inspiration and glorification of the original Klan. I’d say that it did contribute to the violence.
It may be true that those who refounded the Klan cited Birth of a Nation as an inspiration, but lots of people who have committed violence have claimed inspiration in various artworks. If Birth of a Nation and other Klan-glorifying works hadn’t been made, are you confident it would have been significantly less likely that some organized racist group would have been founded sometime around the same time period? The wikipedia article on the Klan notes some sociological reasons for its growing popularity at the time:
“In 1915, the second Klan was founded. It grew rapidly in a period of postwar social tensions. After World War I, many Americans coped with booming growth rates in major cities, where numerous waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the Great Migration of Southern blacks and whites were being absorbed. After World War I, labor tensions rose as veterans tried to reenter the work force. In reaction to these new groups of immigrants and migrants, the second KKK preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and anti-Semitism.”
With the next point about descent into barbarousness, I merely offer up Amy Chua’s work, which sez that empires and countries that stop caring about enforcing a multiethnic civil society disintegrate into a fulment of racial violence.
But here you’re just begging the question, equating a failure to pass hate speech laws with no longer “caring about enforcing a multiethnic civil society”. There are all sorts of other ways to try to enforce a multiethnic civil society that don’t involve hate speech laws.
Compare Yugoslavia with Singapore, Iran, Canada, Ghana which all have problems, but they are all multicultural amalgrams that all have *strong* codified legal and social rules on ethnic tolerance.
Would you say that the US lacks codified legal and social rules on ethnic tolerance, especially if we’re talking about policies and laws favored by Democrats?
Those people who believe in free speech has never believed in defamatory conduct. That’s why it’s generally illegal. Handling defamation of groups is just a murkey area that has long been used as a loophole for state actors and local opportunists. Closing it and making it a public matter makes our society stronger, not weaker.
And what about cases where we’re talking about a group defined at least in part by shared beliefs, like religious groups? How do you separate criticism (or satire or other harsh speech) of the beliefs from defamation of the group? You can see an illustration of this problem in the Danish cartoon controversy, for example. And as I asked earlier, what’s to stop hate speech laws from being applied to atheist criticisms of religion like Dawkins’ book, or intentionally blasphemous art like piss Christ?
Also, defamation of individuals is only illegal if the defamatory statements can’t be factually supported. If some racist takes a bunch of cherrypicked facts about a given ethnic group like blacks or Jews, like a list of prominent criminals who were members of that group, should this be illegal even if all the statements are individually correct? It might be hateful and might (according to you) increase the likelihood that some people who read it will take violent action, but an analogous list of cherrypicked facts designed to make an individual look bad would not qualify as defamation.
I’ve read the Glenn Greenwald post. It’s typical liberal-libertarian claptrap by a person who isn’t really mindful of the concept of race-baiting.
Maybe he’s mindful of it but thinks there are better ways of dealing with race-baiting then trying to make it illegal. And even if you don’t wish to address whatever commentary he adds, what about the examples themselves, do you think all of them are indeed deserving of prosecution as hate speech?
People rioted and murdered black people after viewing the film, so it had both an immediate effect *and* a long term effect.
It’s not clear if anyone was killed during those riots, only one actual murder is cited. Plenty of artworks that weren’t hateful like Birth of a Nation have inspired actual crimes/deaths, like the Beatles’ Helter Skelter and the Orson Wells broadcast of War of the Worlds. Likewise, football games in the UK lead to riots fairly frequently. Do you think that intent matters more than actual outcomes, so that even if you could be convinced that hateful works were not really any more likely than non-hateful ones to inspire crimes, you’d still say the hateful ones should be banned?
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:19 am
Shah: I was only bringing up the shooting/stabbing thing for the purposes of clarification (I could have been wrong); I wasn’t trying to nail you on it or make a case on it. Hence the p.s. Back to sarcasm:
“Who the fuck cares about some gay immigrant basher politician shot by some crazy anti-fur trade activist? Not relevant.”
Yes, who indeed cares if the society that you’re holding up as a testament to the merits of hate speech laws for reducing violence and tension gunned down a controversial figure for his political views? I know we’re not a free society and everything, but we haven’t had a major political assassination since John Lennon.
Also, is “gay” no longer a protected minority group? Just curious.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:23 am
This isn’t art, it’s neo-Nazi propaganda.
If KKK propaganda had been illegal in the Reconstruction American South, they wouldn’t have seized elected office for the past 130 years–whites (let alone racist ones) were a minority in many states.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:37 am
Luke- the point (at least the point of the less drunken commenters) is that KKK propaganda never would have been illegal in the Reconstruction American South in the first place, because the KKK wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. And if the KKK didn’t have the power to stop that from happening, it wouldn’t be necessary to outlaw their propaganda.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:41 am
“If KKK propaganda had been illegal in the Reconstruction American South, they wouldn’t have seized elected office for the past 130 years–whites (let alone racist ones) were a minority in many states.”
You know what would have been more effective? Keeping troops down there to keep the KKK from turning the area into a thugocracy. That’s how you prevent violence: with law enforcement to enforce laws against actual crimes, not ideological ones.
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 am
Yes, who indeed cares if the society that you’re holding up as a testament to the merits of hate speech laws for reducing violence and tension gunned down a controversial figure for his political views?
I think what shah8 meant was “who cares about Pim Fortuyn? He’s white, and he was shot for being too right-wing, not for being gay, so everyone knows that civil rights don’t apply to him.”
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:06 am
Uh, Glaivester, shah8 obviously wasn’t saying “civil rights don’t apply” to Pim Fortuyn because he was a white right-winger, just that he didn’t think his death was relevant to the debate about the pros and cons of hate speech laws (I don’t see the relevance either, it wasn’t Fortuyn’s ’society’ that gunned him down, it was an individual nutcase).
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:10 am
Of course free speech can lead to horrible things–murders and hate crimes and rioting. If it didn’t have that kind of power there’d be no point to having a right to it, since no government would seek to ban it. It’s precisely because of this power of free speech to get people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do that it’s important that the government doesn’t have control over it. Free speech is worth the occasional hate crime just like the 2nd amendment is worth an occasional school shooting.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:46 am
Good Lord, I’m having too much fun.
Ok, here’s the overall schema. Just like there is no such thing as a real life “free market” in economics, and no such workable concepts of “self-regulation” in markets or consumer ethics…there is no such thing as a “free market” in ideas, and thus, no such thing as “free speech”. That intimates that there is no such thing as self-regulation of ideas. Transparent discovery and rejection of bad ideas do not happen naturally. Ideas and speech is regulated by someone, whether that be the collective corporate opinion of “worksafe” or government censors (perhaps unofficial) or by some other mechanism. I simply believe that this regulation be public, and not private or obscured.
Now, down to the line-by-line
Jesse M
1) You’re asking me to prove that if Dixon’s plays and Birth of a Nation had not existed, then no other inflamatory media would have taken its place. I can’t actually prove that, because philosophically speaking, that’s trying to prove a negative. However, I *can* comment from comparing the cities that allowed Birth of a Nation to play and cities that banned Birth of a Nation from playing, that suppression of inflammatory media *reduces* the chances of riots and murders. If Birth of a Nation had been banned with the intimation that similar media would be banned as well, I’m reasonably sure that fewer people would have died over the years and that desegregation would have started happening earlier.
2) I didn’t beg any questions. I simply said that Chua’s work shows that regimes that stops caring about preserving the legal and social framework for providing a secure multiethnic polity will disintegrate. I think that *building up* the legal framework can help preserve the framework from dissolution when the nation is under stress. Just like strong laws against torture, even though honored in the breech, helps to show that the Bush Administration is beyond ethical norms without dispute. It prevents torture from becoming a lasting policy of the state wherepon it eats away at the state’s underbelly.
3) Defamation is not criticism. Talking about how all jews are moneygrubbing thieves or how all muslims are violent with the intent to subjugate more dhimmis should not be protected speech. Fitna was castigating muslims, not criticising them. Fitna depicted muslims as a threat other dutch citizens. As for the statement that it comes straight from the Koran, but of course. Just about *all* religious texts have some pretty unmodern sentiments. Fitna also depicted muslims who talked about these Koranic suras. Fitna as a whole is encouraging people to reject muslims as a threat. You can do the same process for any groups, take a few member saying aweful things from their musty books. It wouldn’t be *true*. The kind of evasive tactics that european race-baiters use makes hate speech legislation a useful weapon in preserving state harmony in a way that is accountable to the public. Cherry-picking when it comes to individual defamation goes under it’s cousin “false light” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_light, so yes, it *does* actually count, and would apply in a way that is *specific* to things like Fitna and not Piss Christ or Dawkins because it *easily* meets the malice standard and the level of distortion amounts to a straight defamation tort in many jurisdictions.
4) Glen Greenwald doesn’t offer a specific mechanism or method, and he seems to hint at the people will reject bad ideas meme. That has never been true. Repeating again, I’m about replacing de facto anti-hate speech provisions with de jure anti-hate speech provision. Again, we do not actually live in a non-managed ideaspace, and I would rather not see progress lost when managers are deposed.
5) Hate speech and hate crimes have the effect of chilling discourse and deprives citizens from their legal rights. From there, one can argue large scale effects from that chilling and give a compelling case of the impact on large numbers of people beyond the ones directly injured. You can’t say that of soccer hooligans. You can’t say that of acts intended without malice like Helter Skelter or Orson Welles, because you can’t actually *predict* what crazy or paniced people will do. You *can* show that race-baiters *intended* to intimidate a group of people.
tomemos
1) Again, the politician who was murdered doesn’t actually have a bearing here. Not any more than John Lennon’s murderer does, even though it happened in a context of civil strife. A demostrably crazy sounding person killed him over an obscure issue. Not any oppressed minority who was offended by his advocacy or anything like that.
tomemos and luke
1) The original KKK did not use propoganda as a key element of their methods so far as I know. There wouldn’t have been much media to suppress. Moreover, it was very controversial even among white people, and denounced as terrorists. So that group got suppressed even as anti-black violence spiraled. The reconstituted KKK did use and benefit from propoganda, and there were things that could have done. The Supreme Court at the time during Reconstruction and through to the New Deal played a huge role in making it difficult to prosecute racial terrorising.
oh damn was this fun…
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:32 am
Firstly, will you please stop conflating all Northern European countries? Denmark (from where I come) has very few limits on free speech. And were better off for it. All European countries have differing criminal laws. There is no such thing as “Europe” when it comes to these things.
Secondly, there are differences in the hate speech despite our common experience with German occupation in ww2. We just drew different conclusions from it around Europe.
Thirdly, the anti-immigrant populists in Europe rightly see this as the PC leftists joining with anti-democratic muslims in political persecution. This sentiment is far more damaging to peaceful coexistence with the muslim populations that Fitna, a movie that practically noone has seen and noone cares about.
The problems with immigration in Europe is NOT that the native populations run around beating up the immigrants, but that the immigrants take up far to much space in our welfare systems and our prisons. There are far more incidents of immigrants inciting violence, even committing violence and calling for limitations in our liberties than vice versa. Unfortunately misguided PC has joined with anti-democratic muslim forces to limit our ability to discuss these very real problems in our society. The native Europeans understandably are pissed off at this. Therein lies the real problem, the limitation on our liberties is the culprit, not the use of those same liberties.
Luckily Denmark has avoided any real limitaion on our traditional broadly defined right to say anyhting we want, but neither Sweden nor Holland has fared so well.
To be clear, I do not see islam playing any particular role in our problems, they stem from the construction of our welfare states. I heartily dislike how the populist nationalistic collectivists discuss these matters, through films like Fitna. But the banning of Fitna and prosecution of Gert Wilders is a far greater problem. There should be no legal limit to free speech outside a very narrow wish to outlaw actual threats.
“The common good” excuse provides hapless politicians with far to much leeway to fuck up.
/Limagolf
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:16 am
this article summed it up quite well
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:17 am
this article summed it up quite well
http://www.broowaha.com/article.php?id=4488
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:21 am
For the record, such limitations on free speech can also serve the interests of the dominant culture–e.g. Singapore
“If I was genuinely convinced that for people of diverse faiths to coexist peacefully required an elaborate set of legal restrictions on offensive speech—with the only alternative being bloodshed and many deaths—then I’m not going to pretend that I might not flinch away from principle.”
My wife is Singaporean and she would tell you that such reasoning is easily abused. In fact, as anyone who’s spent time in Singapore could tell you, a great deal of effort is spent distributing propaganda that suggests the existence of a united society where none exists. And politically active Malays, who are not Islamist nor violently revolutionary, find it difficult to find venues in which they can even address the discrimination that their community faces. Such expression, so fears the Singaporean gov’t, might excite racial violence of the kind Singapore experienced in the 1950s and 60s. It is, therefore, not allowed.
I’m sure that Mr Yglesias would not abridge all potentially controversial political speech, as he is not an unreasonable man, but once we begin to abridge expression on the assumption that it will lead others into committing violent acts, where do we draw the line?
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:43 am
Jesse M.
As a Canadian, I’m quite familiar with the antics of Steyn and company. And I also don’T worship at the alter of free speech. Free Speech is an instrument or a tool to reach and maintain a liberal society, not a goal in itself. I’m not an American.
And you should read up a little on Rwanda — the radio stations played a key role int eh genocide, and the line between hate-speech and incitement to violence is not always clear.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Shah8, it’s funny to me that you reject as ridiculous the idea that repressed, under-the-surface hate speech could be more destructive than public, ridiculed hate speech…but take it as common sense that under-the-surface regulations of speech are destructive whereas public regulations of speech are honest and salutary. I don’t see how your position has any more justification than mine; we’re just applying the public/private standard at different places.
You also say that Glenn Greenwald: “seems to hint at the people will reject bad ideas meme. That has never been true.” Actually, that is true every day that TV broadcasters and movie producers reject stereotypical or hateful projects because they don’t want the bad PR. Disney will never re-release “Song of the South,” and you still haven’t responded to my point that Amos ‘n’ Andy failed on its own when its foundation of racism was rejected by—yes—the marketplace of ideas.
People will never universally reject bad ideas, that’s true. And that will be true whether or not they’re made illegal, like drug prohibition.
I’m also still waiting to hear how you couldn’t prosecute Kevin Smith’s Dogma, on the same grounds. It was certainly more defamatory to Catholics than the Danish cartoons were to Muslims.
Ikram: “Free Speech is an instrument or a tool to reach and maintain a liberal society, not a goal in itself.”
Free speech is one of the defining characteristics of a liberal society. That’s like saying that the ballot is a tool to reach and maintain a democratic society. It’s not a tool, it’s the sine qua non.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Freedom of speech in America is a myth. Here’s a thought experiment for you. What would have happened if the same kind of film was made about Jews and Torah?
Hint: Anti semitism avalanche, ADL jumping up and down like monekeys on Ritalin, AIPAC making case for another war, Marty Perez declaring a Fatwa to kill all Muslim, Sheldon Adelson would hire a hit man himself and the list goes on and on and on.
Lose the hollier than thou attitude. America is in a bigger pile of shite than you can possibly imagine.
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Farid,
Let’s look at your list of horribles:
“Anti semitism avalanche, [unclear but appears to mean that some people will criticize Judaism. Why is that a problem?]
ADL jumping up and down like monekeys on Ritalin, [Mostly just insulting, but refers at best to members of a political organization stating they are upset. Why shouldn't they?]
AIPAC making case for another war, [Against who? film makers? And in any case, so another political organization allegedly attempts to convince the United States, now in two wars, to start a third. Unlikely to succeed, but allowed by normal political discourse]
Marty Perez declaring a Fatwa to kill all Muslim, [You theorize a right wing pundit will say something stupid. Big deal. And is it your contention that there is an army of believers prepared to execute Perez's "fatwa's"? Since when?]
Sheldon Adelson would hire a hit man himself [you theorize someone else will commit a criminal act. I am not familiar with Adelson, but is this something he's done before? And would a movie about Jews and the Torah make him do so now?]
and the list goes on and on and on. [Really? Name one actual likely act of suppression of free speech similar to state prosecution in the Netherlands]
If your goal is to claim private individuals getting upset in America at an unfavorable depiction of jews is just the same as people getting jailed in the Netherlands, (or I supposes officially approved riots in other countries) for criticisms of islam, than your examples are not convincing.
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Farid, yes, there would be a shitstorm if a film compared the Torah to Mein Kampf. There was a shitstorm over the Muhammad cartoons, too. How in the world does that prove anything about free speech, or the lack thereof, in America? A shitstorm is itself the exercise of free speech.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Glen
Case in point is Norman Finkelestein. A child of Holocaust survivor who lost his tenure after he questioned the premise of Zionism.
I’ll bet you that Dershowtiz and Abe Foxman combo of hatred would put the producer behind bars had this been done to Judaism.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
We should be careful to hold all nations accountable equally for their failures in allowing for free speech. –Stephen
—–
Author jailed for insulting Thai king
BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) — An Australian author was sentenced Monday to three years in prison in Thailand after falling foul of a Thai law that makes it a crime to insult the country’s royal family.
Harry Nicolaides was arrested last August over a 2005 book called “Verisimilitude,” which includes a paragraph about the king and crown prince that the authorities deemed a violation of the Lese Majeste law. … Other cases are pending against both foreigners and Thais.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
If your idea of free speech is only conceptual not practical then I agree with you.
There’s absolutely noway that this could be done to Judaism with impunity. The producers WOULD BE BEHIND BARS.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:38 pm
That’s just untrue. Give us one case in which someone has been imprisoned in the US for a film like this one, or leave us alone.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Why don’t you make one and see what happens? all you need is a cheap video Camera and some time to hang around the Upper East Side.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Ah, I see. Your view is that the Torah and the Jews actually are evil.
In threads about Gaza, I always skip right past your comments (also those of SLC), but this one caught me with my guard down. I won’t make that mistake again.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Farid,
Losing tenure at a university is not as bad as being jailed.
Also DePaul is a private Catholic university. It’s decision to deny tenure (though stupid from what I can read)is not an act of state.
Dershowitz and Foxman, so far as I know are private citizens. They can’t put people behind bars. I suppose they could write an article calling for people to be put behind bars and you could write an article calling them fascists and some prosecutor somewhere, mindful of the Bill of Rights and contemplating facing a judge, also mindful of the Bill of Rights, could decided to draw up an indictment of your theoretical, brave anti-Zionist filmmaker on some legal ground that I cannot even imagine. However, I doubt it, and you provide no examples to lessen my doubt.
The whole point of your comments appears to be either 1) that the potential criticism of prominent jews of a film maligning judaism is just like imprisoning or official threats to assassinate (see Rushdie) critics of islam or 2) that makers of a film maligning jews will, in real life, in the United States today, be jailed.
The first idea is silly. The second point is also silly.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Glenn
You seem more interested in the mechanics of oppression than the oppression itself.
Dershowtize like would bring the poor sap in court and argue that such film is an incitement on par with Nazi Germany behaviour
Like I said, I challange anyone to pull off something like this in the US. Jail time would be the last thing the producer of such film should worry about.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Farid,
The mechanics of oppression are actually important to those being oppressed. And I am not sure how the mechanics of oppression are distinguished from oppression itself. Do you contend that being yelled at or being fired by a private employer is really on par with, say, jail time, beatings and death?
If Dershowitz showed up in court attempting a [civil] case against your theoretical filmmaker arguing, I suppose a hate speech case, or group defamantion case, akin to the one against the dutch filmmaker and contended for by some commentators above, he would be thrown out of court because U.S. law doesn’t support that kind of litigation. If you don’t know U.S. law you should probably be more careful about opining on it.
And if jail time is less a problem for your hypothetical filmmaker than other unspecified evils than just say it, and stop claiming the poor guy is going to jail.
As for whether he or she would have a worse or at least equally bad time in the U.S. maligning jews as a person in the Netherlands, Jordan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan or Egypt would have presenting a film maligning muslims is open to speculation. But the recent history of the world doesn’t support the idea.
Oh, and I should have writtent “Its” not “It’s”. Free speech is rarely free from error.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:45 pm
“….as a person in the Netherlands, Jordan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan or Egypt would have presenting a film maligning muslims is open to speculation.”
We are discussing US not all those countries you mentioned. What I am arguing is that a hate speech lawsuit would be unleashed upon the “theoretical” producer which would most likely result in severe punishment for the producer who was under false impression that he’s protected under free speech.
Law can only protect you if you are with us – not with the enemy and terrorists.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Sorry Farid,
When you made this comment:
“Lose the hollier than thou attitude. America is in a bigger pile of shite than you can possibly imagine.”
I jumped to the conclusion that you were making an invidious comparision between America and other less shitely places where there was genuine free speech and people could malign jews and muslims and not fear repercussions of any sort at all, whether jail time, loss of job or criticism . My bad.
Anyway, back to your main point that your hypothetical film producer would have a “hate speech lawsuit” unleashed against him or her, “most likely” resulting in severe punishment, you’re still running a little low on actual examples of anything like that at all. The best I can think of are situations such as the Boy Scouts in New Jersey or the Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade, where public accomodations laws were used to attempt to force large private groups not to discriminate against gays.
But they are not quite comparable to a proposed lawsuit against someone making a film, and in any case, the Boy Scouts and homophobic Irish won.
If you actually have a U.S. example existing outside your imagination, let us know.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Glenn, don’t bother. Farid’s just inveighing against the Great Zionist Satan again. His mind is incapable of contemplating anything else.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Thanks, tomemos,
I admit it’s a light day at work, but really I should be helping to bring about the age of responsibility and putting away childish things like, for example, having the last word.
I liked your comments above.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:15 am
shah8 wrote:
Ok, here’s the overall schema. Just like there is no such thing as a real life “free market” in economics, and no such workable concepts of “self-regulation” in markets or consumer ethics…there is no such thing as a “free market” in ideas, and thus, no such thing as “free speech”. That intimates that there is no such thing as self-regulation of ideas. Transparent discovery and rejection of bad ideas do not happen naturally. Ideas and speech is regulated by someone, whether that be the collective corporate opinion of “worksafe” or government censors (perhaps unofficial) or by some other mechanism.
This seems like a big strawman argument–when people talk about “free speech” they aren’t denying that people may be discouraged from saying what’s on their mind due to social pressures, the possibility of job loss, etc., they just mean “free” from direct government interference (this is why the term ‘free market’ is indeed a bad one in contrast, since it would imply a total laissez-faire approach to business which no country actually takes). Likewise, it’s not clear what you mean by rejection of bad ideas not happening “naturally”–what is “natural” in human society? If certain ideas are just ignored or considered stupid because of “conventional wisdom”, is this natural or unnatural? Does it make a difference if “conventional wisdom” is disproportionately shaped by certain opinionmakers? How about if people don’t say certain things out of fear they could get fired, is that natural or unnatural? It just seems like a poorly-defined term–all that free speech advocates are arguing is that you shouldn’t be coerced into not to say certain things by the legal threat of being put in jail (the government’s unique legal authority to wield bodily force against you), not that you don’t feel pressured in any mental way whatsoever by other non-state forces.
1) You’re asking me to prove that if Dixon’s plays and Birth of a Nation had not existed, then no other inflamatory media would have taken its place. I can’t actually prove that, because philosophically speaking, that’s trying to prove a negative.
I may have phrased it as a negative, but what I was really getting at is whether there’s any compelling reason to believe that racist works like Birth of a Nation significantly increase the likelihood of people forming organized racist groups or committing acts of racist violence. If the answer is that it doesn’t significantly increase the likelihood of these things, that racist opinions and actions are driven primarily by peer groups and word of mouth, then the fact that the founders of the revived Klan took inspiration from the movie is just a sort of accident of history, like Manson taking inspiration from Helter Skelter, rather than evidence of the danger of such works.
However, I *can* comment from comparing the cities that allowed Birth of a Nation to play and cities that banned Birth of a Nation from playing, that suppression of inflammatory media *reduces* the chances of riots and murders.
But this is true of non-racist entertainment like soccer matches…if the death/serious injury increase associated with soccer matches was really significant they might very well be banned, but as long as it’s fairly negligible, we accept that a slight increase in the probability of such tragedies is not worth this restriction of people’s freedom.
Also, Birth of a Nation is of course kind of a special case because it was the first time anyone had seen a full-length movie with all the slick new editing techniques invented by Griffiths, a basically new form of entertainment. I imagine that movie would have made far less of a dramatic impression if it were first shown 10 or 15 years later.
If Birth of a Nation had been banned with the intimation that similar media would be banned as well, I’m reasonably sure that fewer people would have died over the years and that desegregation would have started happening earlier.
That’s a very bold statement, how can you possibly be “reasonably sure” about that? I find that no more plausible than the idea that there would be significantly less violence if all violent movies were banned.
I didn’t beg any questions. I simply said that Chua’s work shows that regimes that stops caring about preserving the legal and social framework for providing a secure multiethnic polity will disintegrate.
Yes, but you gave that as a response to my question about what basis there is for believing banning racist works “can *prevent* or *slow down* descent into barbarousness” (your words). Unless you *assume* that a failure to ban racist works can be equated with no longer caring about protecting a liberal multiethnic state, then Chua’s work provides no support for that belief whatsoever.
3) Defamation is not criticism. Talking about how all jews are moneygrubbing thieves or how all muslims are violent with the intent to subjugate more dhimmis should not be protected speech. Fitna was castigating muslims, not criticising them. Fitna depicted muslims as a threat other dutch citizens.
Was it saying “all” muslims are a threat? I’d guess the creator would argue it’s saying that believers in Islam are more likely to hold violent beliefs and act on them in the name of religion, and therefore that letting too many Muslim immigrants into the country will increase the rate of such violence even if not every Muslim is violent. Perhaps this argument would be disingenuous, but do you think the type of argument I suggest above should be banned, and if not, how do you distinguish between it and an “all Muslims are violent” propaganda piece? Many of the atheist works criticizing religion *do* argue that religion motivates a lot of the violence in the world and that there’d be a lot less without it, if some religious people wanted to ban these books as hate speech and a sympathetic religious judge took the case, are you confident the law would be clear that these books *cannot* be treated as hate speech?
As for the statement that it comes straight from the Koran, but of course. Just about *all* religious texts have some pretty unmodern sentiments.
Yes, and you can find similar compilations of violent quotes from the Bible online, like the ones in this article. Again, are you confident that laws involving hate speech are can be written with sufficient clarity that there’s no chance something like this could get banned, or are you just relying on the hope that judges hearing these cases will be nice secular types who would have the personal good judgement to see this as legitimate criticism?
Cherry-picking when it comes to individual defamation goes under it’s cousin “false light”, so yes, it *does* actually count, and would apply in a way that is *specific* to things like Fitna and not Piss Christ or Dawkins because it *easily* meets the malice standard and the level of distortion amounts to a straight defamation tort in many jurisdictions.
Wasn’t aware of false light laws, thanks. Still I have no idea how you can be confident that the law itself would distinguish between something like Fitna and something like Dawkins’ book (which many religious believers say does involved cherrypicked examples of the dangers associated with religion), or how it would distinguish between something like Piss Christ and something like the Danish Muslim cartoons (do you think the Muslim community in the Netherlands would have reacted with less anger to a paper publishing a photo of a ‘Piss Muhammad’?)
4) Glen Greenwald doesn’t offer a specific mechanism or method, and he seems to hint at the people will reject bad ideas meme. That has never been true.
Of course it’s not true en masse, just like it’s not true that all people reject creationism. Still, the best approach to convincing the most people that creationism is wrong and evolution is true is probably to put as many good arguments against creationism and for evolution out there as possible, rather than to try to censor creationist works.
In any case, I specifically asked you to address the examples Glenn Greenwald gave, not his own commentary about them. Do you in fact think all (or any of them) deserve prosecution as hate speech? Mark Steyn’s article is quite stupid in most respects but I do think it falls more into the “there will be bad consequences for society if too large a slice of the population is made up of unassimilated Muslims” category rather than the “all Muslims are terrorists” category.
Again, we do not actually live in a non-managed ideaspace, and I would rather not see progress lost when managers are deposed.
We do live in an ideaspace where the “managing” that is done is not by the government with threats of physical force (putting people in jail).
5) Hate speech and hate crimes have the effect of chilling discourse and deprives citizens from their legal rights.
Hate crimes deprive them of their legal rights, sure, but I don’t see how hate speech does so. Nor do I see hate speech “chilling discourse”, it tends to make the discourse a lot more heated from what I’ve seen.
From there, one can argue large scale effects from that chilling and give a compelling case of the impact on large numbers of people beyond the ones directly injured.
A “compelling case” would presumably involve some actual hard evidence like statistics, which I doubt you can actually point to.
You *can* show that race-baiters *intended* to intimidate a group of people.
And again, my basic issue here is that there is no good way to distinguish between “intending to indimidate” and merely making a scathing (perhaps mocking and derisive) critique in the manner of Piss Christ, the Danish Muslim cartoons, Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” (which some conservative Catholic groups did deem ‘hate speech’), Richard Dawkins’ book about the ills caused by religion, etc.
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:53 am
tomemos said:
Free speech is one of the defining characteristics of a liberal society.
That a very American perspective. Germany, Canada, and many other countries that are perfectly liberal (in whatever sense) have speech restrictionc. They work for each particular society, according its particular history. The American ‘on-size-fits-all’ appraoch of teling other countries to be like America of you’re illiberal is insulting.
It’s the Obama era. Stop being insulting.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Free speech has served its purpose. It was useful for offending and breaking down those shared moral standards and community principles that got in the way of open-minded lifestyles and just viewpoints. As long as those lives and opinions are freely lived and expressed there is no longer any need for there to be free speech. It becomes merely a nuisance and obstacle to further progress and true freedom.
As the man says, it is time for all of us to put childish things away.
We should all be as brave as Matt and refuse to be oppressed by needless absolute “truths” and “rights” any longer, especially when they get in the way of the common moral and religious beliefs that can unite our cultures and society.
What’s practical and works by not rubbing people the wrong way or dragging us into pointless debates, is a much more sophisticated standard than allowing just anyone to say anything.
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