The American Exception

[marcus_sez_vote]

LARP season is over and school is done...now vacation! Except there's this whole housing debacle. Oh well. At least bitsyboo and I have fun outings planned too.

This article is quite interesting, as it talks about hate speech in other countries versus the way that the First Amendment operates in the U. S. I have mixed feelings about the situation. On

Comments

[tashewolf]

We absolutely need freedom of speech, and we absolutely need to be better -- broad scale -- at the education that MUST go alongside it.

I think the vocabulary of hate falls under the umbrella of "yes, it would be nice if this sort of thing didn't exist in the world -- much like war, famine, disease, etc." Being that it does, I think it's important that it sees the light of day to spark more constructive discussion.

My nickel; shall refrain from going on and on. Suffice to say that I don't believe more severe restrictions would be positive even in the short term.

[dunriver]

Free speech is such an essential part of a truly free society that it astounds me that nations that are typically far more liberal than we are... restrict it so heavily. I find it ironic, that here in the US it also tends to be people from the far left that are most insistent upon limiting free speech. It seems antithetical to what Liberal is supposed to stand for, at least to me.

Hate speech is best combated by letting the idiots speak, the more publicly they speak the better... so the public can openly mock them and their ideas for the fallacies they represent. Will it find an audience? No doubt... but at least some of those exposed, if not the majority; will be turned away from it as they are also exposed to the counter opinions in the same free market of ideas.