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‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat (www.politico.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/politics@beehaw.org
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[–] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Absolutely nothing about this is surprising to me in the least. What is surprising, however, is how much people recognize this is a serious problem that seems to continue to get worse, and yet people will insist that free speech is more important. We've placed restrictions on yelling fire in a theater when there is none, because it causes harm to society to do it. Why, similarly, can we not place restrictions on obviously hateful and intolerant speech? Certainly those which have larger platforms and opportunity to sew this intolerance and erode democracy should have more scrutiny, no?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    People do not understand freedom of speech. All it means is that the government cannot arrest you for saying somethnig, it does not mean "freedom from consequences" or that anything that is not the government cannot shut that shit down, which they absolutely should do.

    Social shaming and banning of certain speech should absolutely be done.

    As for the government, well, we aren't a fan of them, but we're also not a fan of cops, jails or the injustice system, so it's better that way for now.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    All it means is that the government cannot arrest you for saying somethnig

    Actually, it means a lot more than that.

    It means you're entitled to a platform - that you can say things into a microphone to a large crowd gathered for any reason on federal land that's open to individuals... including to talk about how other humans are deserving of hate. We don't owe them a space to spread hate speech. We can do better.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Right, well we are obviously against free speech as we have said many times, though not necessarily here, if it includes that as a definition.

    We don't believe every hateful thing should be able to be said, published etc. However, we're also not statists, so have no real way to stop it beyond not allowing it in our communities, never writing, publishing or letting anything hateful be said, and using social pressure to stop giving hateful people and groups a platform, or to stop others listening to them.

    This is because we don't believe in using the injustice and legal systems in order to stop such things.

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