Mars doesn't have dirt- it has regolith, an abiotic rock dust that can't support most plant life, even if it weren't full of volatile poisons
Those "volatile poisons" happen to be a valuable oxygen source among other things. So a considerable quantity of viable Martian soil would come out of any oxygen extraction process.
And abiotic is so easy to change, it's not funny. Just handling it with human hands would add a fair portion of the necessary bacteria. Bringing a little soil from Earth and some earthworms from Earth as a starter. Compost food, human waste, and any biodegradable plastics, for example, with that Earth-based soil, mix it in with your de-poisoned Martian soil and there you go.
I assume we would feed them food which magically makes its way to my mom's fridge and then to my basement lair. Just make sure they have fridges and the rest will follow.
More seriously, Mars has all the nutrients plants need, sunlight, and dirt. Whatever you can already grow in a greenhouse on Earth, you can grow in a Martian greenhouse as well.
I don't see how his statement requires one to assume wealth inequality (WI) is an important metric. He's just saying one consequence of WI is what we're seeing.
And the consequences of aren't important? Let us recall he claimed a pretty big thing:
When you let the rich have all the money they've got very little left to spend it on besides conquest.
He also claimed that things were different for the last century due to a "rapid onset of technology".
What's so odd about it? If something is seen as bad, there is no such thing as a "desirable" level it. Do you have a "desirable" level of turd in your sandwich?
Everyone who eats sandwiches implicitly has a desirable level of turd in their sandwich. Small enough that they never know it's there by taste, smell, illness, etc.
But wealth inequality doesn't even come close to the disagreeability of the turd-free sandwich. Virtually everyone agrees that someone who tries should have better ability to accumulate wealth than someone who doesn't try. That leads to an inequality which near universally agreed upon. The connotation of wealth "inequality" deceptively implies that the ideal of wealth "equality" is better, but few actually buy into that unlike the ideal of the turd-free sandwich.
Actually, rich people would be LESS successful under such conditions. All those poor people can't afford to buy the luxury stuff that richer people would buy, limiting what new businesses the rich people can create, which means less new jobs for poor people, which creates a downward spiral.
Utter fantasy. We only need to look at the developed world to see that you aren't even remotely accurate. Rich people got richer because capital, the primary sort of wealth of rich people, continues to climb relative to the wealth gathering value of labor. It'd be nice, for example, if my wages had tracked the NASDAQ Composition, for example. My minimum wage of $3.65 per hour in 1987 would be roughly $50 per hour today.
You're also using a particularly erroneous version of the demand-driven model of the economy. Somehow it's really important that developed world people have a weak inflation-adjusted increase in their wages, but not important that the far more numerous developing world workers have massive increases after inflation in their wages.
But even if we ignore that, demand is not just driven by consumers. It's also driven by employers who always get short shrift with this particular model. I consider that a major error of the model just on its own.
If left alone, this would eventually decreased wealth inequality (e.g weaker businesses close down, the rich become not so rich anymore). So the fact that it has shifted so little is a sign that the elites are propping up the system, preventing the market from correcting itself.
And it has in the developing world. But it hasn't in the developed world. The excuses are numerous, but I think I nailed it with global labor competition.
You're begging a lot of questions here. The biggest is assuming that wealth inequality is an important metric. I think wealth inequality became a popular metric in the first place because it is something that can always be said to be a problem and thus is an evergreen measure of inequality.
Notice also that there is no desirable level of wealth inequality. Isn't it kind of odd to have a control system without a set point?
Finally, why do you think wealth inequality is out of control? The US has been suffering from heavy labor competition with parts of the world that are a large factor cheaper. Rich people should be massively more successful at accumulating wealth in such an environment than people whose wealth is solely labor-derived. It's surprising that wealth inequality has shifted so little which indicates to me that you're just missing outright the successful control of wealth inequality.
Well, for starters how about stuff that actually happened. Here's a story from 1984 a year after the AT&T break up. It notes a decline in long distance prices (around 5% decline) combined with somewhat sharper rises in local service costs (but 16% increases rather than your bullshit 300% increases). One could buy their own phones and telecom equipment.
And cell phones are a huge benefactor of the breakup. AT&T had been sitting on cell phone technology for years. Within the decade, its pieces had set up viable cell phone networks.
Not really: mod games as you put it are not a waste of time in that sense. Man readers only read the highly upvoted comments or scan for remarks about that. How things are moderated does influence what people see.
How many are "many readers" again? You're speaking of hypothetical people who read the comments, but are unaware somehow of mod bombing and the other mod games. Needless to say, I think we want our foes to waste their time on this particular readership.
Are you really arguing that if a solution is not 100% perfect then the best option is to do NOTHING about a problem?
You do realize that if the solution is far enough away from perfect, then yes, doing nothing can be better. Building a wall sounds like one of those things that is that imperfect.
The rise of a right-wing group on Slashdot which downvotes pretty close to any information they don't like as trolling or flamebait is deeply worrisome.
Sarcasm right? Mod games are a colossal waste of time. We couldn't wish for a better scenario than to have our enemies waste their time and effort with such things.
Last I checked, Airbnb wasn't renting out homes for fertilizer plants. But that's sounds a great business opportunity. I'm filing the patent as we speak.
I'm just saying if anyone benefits all who paid should profit. Why would you have a problem with that?
Why should that be the case? Money isn't always helping, especially when a) the research would happen anyway, or b) you're paying scientists to do less productive work? Those two problems are particularly common with publicly funded research.
You should have said "If we ignore the legal issues" instead of "Regardless of..." because the legal issues of remotely disabling a car and the subsequent resources consumed in lawsuits and payouts to customers are a part of the logistics cost.
Billions of dollars spent on hardware, and some fuckup software dude sends the whole thing crashing to the ground. Come on guys, was this not checked, double-checked, and tested? This pisses me off. This is not a CTRL-ALT-DELETE 'oh shit'. This is enormous sums of money and peoples careers. Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
I suggest ten years for writing that low wattage post. It's humane, but still sends a message that we won't put up with those idiots who second guess tough engineering problems without bothering to think.
You claimed that hate-speech laws were either ineffective or actively contributed to the holocaust.
I still do. Note in the quote I gave that the three top pre-war propagandists all had been tried for hate speech. Julius Streicher even made a career of it with two jail sentences and 36 appearances in court by himself or his editors. The trials just generated massive free publicity for the Nazi cause.
My view is hate speech law doesn't even slow down the worst abusers. It's a reward not a punishment. Instead, it's a typical secret police kind of law to force normal people to watch their words because some informer might be in earshot. Best to just not have the law in the first place so that people can freely speak their minds no matter what nastiness is in that mind.
I'm not surprised you're resorting now to a "think of the children" argument. The answer remains "no". Corporal punishment is not speech. Schools which refuse to address bullying aren't speech. Brain changes due to stress are not speech. Characterizing brain changes as "scarring" are not speech.
Everything I've seen you or the rest of the world say about hate speech is that you are trying to ban certain speech that you don't like (and every example you've given so far is something I wouldn't like either). But my view here is that hate speech crosses the line from banning harmful behavior to banning peoples' ability to speak their mind (no matter how many spiders dwell in that mind). If that additional freedom means somehow more brain "scarring" than before in young adults, then sorry, that's a consequence I find acceptable in order to have the necessary level of free speech.
But having said that, I don't believe hate speech laws will actually do anything to prevent harm to children any more than they prevented the Holocaust. Even when such laws are successfully enforced, society loses in many ways.
Your denial of the fact that hate speech
1) Is violence
2) reduces equality from the law and
3) endangers people
What I think is going on is that you are trying to censor legitimate speech and failing hard for the most part. Saying speech is "violence" is meaningless since speech in itself can't cause bodily injury. Saying it reduces equality from the law is vapid since speech doesn't have anything to do with equality of the law. Procedures and actions of the legislature, regulators, law enforcement and the courts do. And of course, you have yet to show that hate speech endangers people.
So not only do I deny your claims, but I believe reality does as well.
The horror of the Holocaust serves as the founding narrative legitimizing European integration, and it's the key motivation for hate-speech laws on the continent. The European Union has called on all its member states to pass laws criminalizing Holocaust denial. This European narrative is based on a widely accepted interpretation of what led to the Holocaust. It basically says that anti-Semitic hate speech was the decisive trigger, that evil words beget evil deeds, that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists' verbal persecution of the Jews in the years prior to Hitler's rise to power, then the Holocaust would never have happened. I was confronted with this argument during the Danish cartoon crisis, in 2006. People condemned the cartoons as Islamophobic, and warned that the demonization of Muslims might trigger mass violence. "We know what happened in the twenties and thirties," critical voices argued, referring to the seemingly inevitable link between speech and violence.
Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. 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 Streicherâ(TM)s campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
Reading the history, Hitler's trial for treason was a flagrant failure which devolved right away into a propaganda exercise for Hitler that made him known throughout Germany. The authorities apparently never bothered him about hate speech as far as I can tell and given the consequences of the treason trial, it may have been well that they did not. So in that point, I was incorrect. I had thought that hate speech laws had been applied as part of his trial for treason.
2) No laws had anything to do with Hitler gaining power. Because his gaining of power was entirely extralegal. Contrary to popular belief the NAZIs NEVER won an election. The best they ever did was 11% in 1929. That did, however, gain them some seats in parliament. The conservative government panicked and hoped to appease and quiet the extreme fringe by giving Hitler the presidency. In theory a good move since the presidency was almost entirely a ceremonial role. The president did get to appoint the chancelor but only if the current one resigned, retired or died. Other than that - almost no real power
I have, the supreme court has, so has the supreme courts and constitutions of the entire free world. The right to safety, to equality before the law, to freedom from violence - those are all violated by hate speech and anything that does not violate those is not hate speech and you pretending it is, is merely an attempt by you to construct a strawman by painting these laws as if they outlaw mere 'naughty' speech.
Once again, you haven't shown anything. A right to safety, equality before the law, and freedom from violence are not furthered by hate speech laws. In fact all three are undermined by hate speech laws which allows the the state to make you very unsafe and impose violence on you for what you say (violating the first and third rights you mentioned), and the notoriously biased and arbitrary application of hate speech laws (violating the second right you mentioned).
It's right there in the article. I'm not missing it, you are.
No, it's not. It's a lazy ass assertion by a bureaucrat. Let's reason this out. Does removing the advertising or changing the branding label remove the feature from the vehicle? No, it doesn't. So the driver can still use the feature to be as inattentive as they can get away with.
There is no credible reason to removing the advertising or changing the name from "autopilot". It's not misleading or false advertising. It doesn't change driver behavior. Thus, it turns out to be completely irrelevant to the actual problem such as it is.
How the hell did you come up with that one ? You think saying "these laws harm innocent people' somehow puts the blame on the innocent people ?
It's damn obvious. The people committing the alleged hate speech aren't going to blame themselves clearly. And here's some hapless person that they've always hated and supposedly about whom they can no longer say naughty things. Use that gray matter to think about it a little bit and ask yourself who's going to get blamed and just how faithfully are the haters going to follow the laws.
Do you think that the abolitionist movement was making black people a scapegoat for slavery too ?
Slavery was a real harm. And guess what? A fair number of blacks probably did suffer because there were abolitionists out there. For example:
During the mid-19th century, some states outlawed the education of slaves. In 1841, Virginia punished violations of this law by 20 lashes to the slave and a $100 fine to the teacher, and North Carolina by 39 lashes to the slave and a $250 fine to the teacher
This was in large part to prevent slaves from gaining power or escaping. Abolitionists would have had a hand in both enabling the escape of slaves and in educating former slaves.
It absolutely is - because firstly, such laws reduce the incidence of these events. Secondly - it sends a clear message that society does not approve of this, that the people saying these things are not representative. That may be an even more beneficial effect.
Just like it did in the Wiemar Republic? Hitler was jailed for the terrible things he said and did. That didn't stop him from gaining power. Also, you can send clear messages without passing terrible laws. You're doing it right now, for example.
You have not actually shown any evidence whatsoever that hate speech laws are 'bad law'. They tend to be very narrowly defined, and even more narrowly read by courts. Thus far their history really does not back up your claim - not in the US or anywhere else. As the UK has proven - you're more likely to get bad laws out of overly broad libel laws than he speech laws - and the US does have libel law.
Bullshit. Canada has run wild with their version. And of course, there's the French example which as you noted has been used to ineffectually harass National Front leader Marine Le Pen.
You continue to blow off the obvious problem with hate speech law. It's an unwarranted imposition on everyone's freedom of speech for no gain. It does nothing to halt real illegal activity.
Hate doesn't stop just because you throw arbitrary and capricious rules on speech down - especially when those rules become unenforceable due to widespread disobedience and martyrdom which is always a danger with this stuff. But I suppose it is better for the law breakers to have free speech than those who obey the laws, eh?
It very often is. Emotional abuse consists entirely of speech. But if you think abuse is NOT speech - then neither is hate-speech. No hate speech law yet has outlawed anything that isn't abusive.
Abuse is a pattern of harassment which can include speech, but it is not speech. Hate speech explicitly includes the word "speech". And of course, we already have laws against harassment, extortion, threatening behavior, vandalism, etc. There is nothing here for "hate speech" to cover which is not already covered by civil and criminal law.
Here's an Canadian example which I think illustrates my point. There are three quotes in turn from a local Canadian politician, David Ahenakew. The first is part of a speech:
The Germans used to tell me, and I got to know them well because I played soccer a
Bullshit. Firstly 'naughty' is a seriously excessive euphemism - which is doubly dishonest as it makes it sound as if hate-speech laws are far more broad than they ever actually are.
It's how serious I believe we all should take your concerns.
Secondly - in a democracy hate speech laws protect the vulnerable from abuse by the powerful
That is a new claim. Do you have any evidence that this is true? Or is this just another baseless assertion?
And that's even before you consider the considerable abuses that the state can exploit with hate speech laws by making disagreement hate speech and hence, illegal.
Since that isn't a valid example of hate speech - you will have no shortage of liberals working as your allies to overthrow such laws if they get passed. We LOVE forcing the repeal of unjust laws. If we'll do it for unregarded minorities - what makes you think we would NOT do it for ourselves ?
"Abuse" does indicate it's going to be invalid, right? But given that you're all for banning hate speech in the first place, I don't buy that you have the judgment to repeal even more unjust interpretations of unjust hate speech laws. You are already failing on that.
>We already have examples of the abuses inherent in hate speech laws in Canada and Europe
Not that this has stopped the rise of Marine Le Penn - it clearly has zero impact on the actual politics.
To the contrary, I think hate speech laws have actually strengthened her. Standing up to a corrupt, incompetent bureaucracy on the matter of free speech, is an easy win. But I guess you never thought about the consequences of badly enforced hate speech law, did you?
But even so - in a democracy there are ways to get rid of bad laws or get them ammended to make them better. That a law could potentially be abused is not and is never an argument against having it because ALL laws can be abused. You would have no laws whatsoever. The argument you need to prove (and haven't and cannot) is that the law has no benefits for society AND can ONLY be used in an abusive manner. Otherwise the right approach is to change the law and improve it, not to get rid of it. Slavery met those criteria. Hate speech does not come close.
The easiest way to get rid of bad law is to never embrace it in the first place.There's no benefits to society, unless of course, you think the free speech rights of the public have't been trampled enough or far right nationalists like Le Pen don't get enough free publicity.
They have as much a right to say what they think as you do.
That's not a given. Your right to do anything ends where my rights begin. That includes your right to say things - at the point where they intrude on my rights, they stop being your right.
You have yet to show a right of your violated by so called hate speech. Sorry, that's the way it is.
Exactly. Start by changing your mind. I can't do that from over here. You got to do it yourself.
If that means you specifically have to be slightly less free so that on average more people have more freedom - that's a tradeoff every non-asshole would make.
Don't be stupid. Hate speech laws aren't about prohibiting khallow to say naughty things, it's about prohibiting anyone to say naughty things. It's straightforward restricting the free speech of everyone.
And that's even before you consider the considerable abuses that the state can exploit with hate speech laws by making disagreement hate speech and hence, illegal. Better to not even give them the opportunity.
This is not hypothetical. We already have examples of the abuses inherent in hate speech laws in Canada and Europe. Sure, much of it is ugly people saying ugly things. But so what? They have as much a right to say what they think as you do.
Schools and bullying are the least of the problem. An entire society full of people constantly diminishing them, insulting them, denying their humanity, calling them an abomination - that's the problem. Schools are a tiny part of it.
Even if we suppose that's true, we're just setting up trangenders as scapegoats for terrible laws that shouldn't exist. You're not making it even a bit better.
And do you think that teenagers don't hear what adults say among each other ? Do you think they do not know when those things apply to them ? Do you think they don't read the news ? They don't know about the state governments that are making laws targetting them ?
I think the real question here is do you think? None of that is made better with hate speech laws. There are consequences to bad law.
Do you think verbal abuse is not violence ? Go speak to any survivor of domestic abuse - I've yet to meet one who didn't consider the verbal and emotional abuse the worst part. When did it become a matter of freedom to protect your right to be violent ?
We'll see if you start thinking first before continuing this discussion. Abuse is not speech.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't know what we'd have to "wash out" of the regolith.
But we do know that washing will work.
it really is nearly delusional to think that what we've learned on Earth (and orbital experiments) will be *all* we need to know
Sorry, the laws of physics haven't changed. It's the same chemistry on Mars as it is on Earth.
Mars doesn't have dirt- it has regolith, an abiotic rock dust that can't support most plant life, even if it weren't full of volatile poisons
Those "volatile poisons" happen to be a valuable oxygen source among other things. So a considerable quantity of viable Martian soil would come out of any oxygen extraction process.
And abiotic is so easy to change, it's not funny. Just handling it with human hands would add a fair portion of the necessary bacteria. Bringing a little soil from Earth and some earthworms from Earth as a starter. Compost food, human waste, and any biodegradable plastics, for example, with that Earth-based soil, mix it in with your de-poisoned Martian soil and there you go.
I assume we would feed them food which magically makes its way to my mom's fridge and then to my basement lair. Just make sure they have fridges and the rest will follow.
More seriously, Mars has all the nutrients plants need, sunlight, and dirt. Whatever you can already grow in a greenhouse on Earth, you can grow in a Martian greenhouse as well.
I don't see how his statement requires one to assume wealth inequality (WI) is an important metric. He's just saying one consequence of WI is what we're seeing.
And the consequences of aren't important? Let us recall he claimed a pretty big thing:
When you let the rich have all the money they've got very little left to spend it on besides conquest.
He also claimed that things were different for the last century due to a "rapid onset of technology".
What's so odd about it? If something is seen as bad, there is no such thing as a "desirable" level it. Do you have a "desirable" level of turd in your sandwich?
Everyone who eats sandwiches implicitly has a desirable level of turd in their sandwich. Small enough that they never know it's there by taste, smell, illness, etc.
But wealth inequality doesn't even come close to the disagreeability of the turd-free sandwich. Virtually everyone agrees that someone who tries should have better ability to accumulate wealth than someone who doesn't try. That leads to an inequality which near universally agreed upon. The connotation of wealth "inequality" deceptively implies that the ideal of wealth "equality" is better, but few actually buy into that unlike the ideal of the turd-free sandwich.
Actually, rich people would be LESS successful under such conditions. All those poor people can't afford to buy the luxury stuff that richer people would buy, limiting what new businesses the rich people can create, which means less new jobs for poor people, which creates a downward spiral.
Utter fantasy. We only need to look at the developed world to see that you aren't even remotely accurate. Rich people got richer because capital, the primary sort of wealth of rich people, continues to climb relative to the wealth gathering value of labor. It'd be nice, for example, if my wages had tracked the NASDAQ Composition, for example. My minimum wage of $3.65 per hour in 1987 would be roughly $50 per hour today.
You're also using a particularly erroneous version of the demand-driven model of the economy. Somehow it's really important that developed world people have a weak inflation-adjusted increase in their wages, but not important that the far more numerous developing world workers have massive increases after inflation in their wages.
But even if we ignore that, demand is not just driven by consumers. It's also driven by employers who always get short shrift with this particular model. I consider that a major error of the model just on its own.
If left alone, this would eventually decreased wealth inequality (e.g weaker businesses close down, the rich become not so rich anymore). So the fact that it has shifted so little is a sign that the elites are propping up the system, preventing the market from correcting itself.
And it has in the developing world. But it hasn't in the developed world. The excuses are numerous, but I think I nailed it with global labor competition.
You're begging a lot of questions here. The biggest is assuming that wealth inequality is an important metric. I think wealth inequality became a popular metric in the first place because it is something that can always be said to be a problem and thus is an evergreen measure of inequality.
Notice also that there is no desirable level of wealth inequality. Isn't it kind of odd to have a control system without a set point?
Finally, why do you think wealth inequality is out of control? The US has been suffering from heavy labor competition with parts of the world that are a large factor cheaper. Rich people should be massively more successful at accumulating wealth in such an environment than people whose wealth is solely labor-derived. It's surprising that wealth inequality has shifted so little which indicates to me that you're just missing outright the successful control of wealth inequality.
Phone bills quadrupled almost over night.
Well, for starters how about stuff that actually happened. Here's a story from 1984 a year after the AT&T break up. It notes a decline in long distance prices (around 5% decline) combined with somewhat sharper rises in local service costs (but 16% increases rather than your bullshit 300% increases). One could buy their own phones and telecom equipment.
And cell phones are a huge benefactor of the breakup. AT&T had been sitting on cell phone technology for years. Within the decade, its pieces had set up viable cell phone networks.
Not really: mod games as you put it are not a waste of time in that sense. Man readers only read the highly upvoted comments or scan for remarks about that. How things are moderated does influence what people see.
How many are "many readers" again? You're speaking of hypothetical people who read the comments, but are unaware somehow of mod bombing and the other mod games. Needless to say, I think we want our foes to waste their time on this particular readership.
Are you really arguing that if a solution is not 100% perfect then the best option is to do NOTHING about a problem?
You do realize that if the solution is far enough away from perfect, then yes, doing nothing can be better. Building a wall sounds like one of those things that is that imperfect.
The rise of a right-wing group on Slashdot which downvotes pretty close to any information they don't like as trolling or flamebait is deeply worrisome.
Sarcasm right? Mod games are a colossal waste of time. We couldn't wish for a better scenario than to have our enemies waste their time and effort with such things.
Last I checked, Airbnb wasn't renting out homes for fertilizer plants. But that's sounds a great business opportunity. I'm filing the patent as we speak.
I'm just saying if anyone benefits all who paid should profit. Why would you have a problem with that?
Why should that be the case? Money isn't always helping, especially when a) the research would happen anyway, or b) you're paying scientists to do less productive work? Those two problems are particularly common with publicly funded research.
You should have said "If we ignore the legal issues" instead of "Regardless of..." because the legal issues of remotely disabling a car and the subsequent resources consumed in lawsuits and payouts to customers are a part of the logistics cost.
The mass bleaching of the great barrier reef where 20% where bleached and died off in one year would tend to disagree with you
Unless of course, that happens all the time, including before human-caused global warming. Then I guess it wouldn't tend to agree with you.
Billions of dollars spent on hardware, and some fuckup software dude sends the whole thing crashing to the ground. Come on guys, was this not checked, double-checked, and tested? This pisses me off. This is not a CTRL-ALT-DELETE 'oh shit'. This is enormous sums of money and peoples careers. Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
I suggest ten years for writing that low wattage post. It's humane, but still sends a message that we won't put up with those idiots who second guess tough engineering problems without bothering to think.
You claimed that hate-speech laws were either ineffective or actively contributed to the holocaust.
I still do. Note in the quote I gave that the three top pre-war propagandists all had been tried for hate speech. Julius Streicher even made a career of it with two jail sentences and 36 appearances in court by himself or his editors. The trials just generated massive free publicity for the Nazi cause.
My view is hate speech law doesn't even slow down the worst abusers. It's a reward not a punishment. Instead, it's a typical secret police kind of law to force normal people to watch their words because some informer might be in earshot. Best to just not have the law in the first place so that people can freely speak their minds no matter what nastiness is in that mind.
I'm not surprised you're resorting now to a "think of the children" argument. The answer remains "no". Corporal punishment is not speech. Schools which refuse to address bullying aren't speech. Brain changes due to stress are not speech. Characterizing brain changes as "scarring" are not speech.
Everything I've seen you or the rest of the world say about hate speech is that you are trying to ban certain speech that you don't like (and every example you've given so far is something I wouldn't like either). But my view here is that hate speech crosses the line from banning harmful behavior to banning peoples' ability to speak their mind (no matter how many spiders dwell in that mind). If that additional freedom means somehow more brain "scarring" than before in young adults, then sorry, that's a consequence I find acceptable in order to have the necessary level of free speech.
But having said that, I don't believe hate speech laws will actually do anything to prevent harm to children any more than they prevented the Holocaust. Even when such laws are successfully enforced, society loses in many ways.
Your denial of the fact that hate speech 1) Is violence
2) reduces equality from the law and
3) endangers people
What I think is going on is that you are trying to censor legitimate speech and failing hard for the most part. Saying speech is "violence" is meaningless since speech in itself can't cause bodily injury. Saying it reduces equality from the law is vapid since speech doesn't have anything to do with equality of the law. Procedures and actions of the legislature, regulators, law enforcement and the courts do. And of course, you have yet to show that hate speech endangers people.
So not only do I deny your claims, but I believe reality does as well.
>Just like it did in the Wiemar Republic? Hitler was jailed for the terrible things he said and did. That didn't stop him from gaining power
Every single word in that is a flagrant lie.
Learn grasshopper:
The horror of the Holocaust serves as the founding narrative legitimizing European integration, and it's the key motivation for hate-speech laws on the continent. The European Union has called on all its member states to pass laws criminalizing Holocaust denial. This European narrative is based on a widely accepted interpretation of what led to the Holocaust. It basically says that anti-Semitic hate speech was the decisive trigger, that evil words beget evil deeds, that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists' verbal persecution of the Jews in the years prior to Hitler's rise to power, then the Holocaust would never have happened. I was confronted with this argument during the Danish cartoon crisis, in 2006. People condemned the cartoons as Islamophobic, and warned that the demonization of Muslims might trigger mass violence. "We know what happened in the twenties and thirties," critical voices argued, referring to the seemingly inevitable link between speech and violence.
Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. 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 Streicherâ(TM)s campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
Reading the history, Hitler's trial for treason was a flagrant failure which devolved right away into a propaganda exercise for Hitler that made him known throughout Germany. The authorities apparently never bothered him about hate speech as far as I can tell and given the consequences of the treason trial, it may have been well that they did not. So in that point, I was incorrect. I had thought that hate speech laws had been applied as part of his trial for treason.
2) No laws had anything to do with Hitler gaining power. Because his gaining of power was entirely extralegal. Contrary to popular belief the NAZIs NEVER won an election. The best they ever did was 11% in 1929. That did, however, gain them some seats in parliament. The conservative government panicked and hoped to appease and quiet the extreme fringe by giving Hitler the presidency. In theory a good move since the presidency was almost entirely a ceremonial role. The president did get to appoint the chancelor but only if the current one resigned, retired or died. Other than that - almost no real power
I have, the supreme court has, so has the supreme courts and constitutions of the entire free world. The right to safety, to equality before the law, to freedom from violence - those are all violated by hate speech and anything that does not violate those is not hate speech and you pretending it is, is merely an attempt by you to construct a strawman by painting these laws as if they outlaw mere 'naughty' speech.
Once again, you haven't shown anything. A right to safety, equality before the law, and freedom from violence are not furthered by hate speech laws. In fact all three are undermined by hate speech laws which allows the the state to make you very unsafe and impose violence on you for what you say (violating the first and third rights you mentioned), and the notoriously biased and arbitrary application of hate speech laws (violating the second right you mentioned).
It's right there in the article. I'm not missing it, you are.
No, it's not. It's a lazy ass assertion by a bureaucrat. Let's reason this out. Does removing the advertising or changing the branding label remove the feature from the vehicle? No, it doesn't. So the driver can still use the feature to be as inattentive as they can get away with.
There is no credible reason to removing the advertising or changing the name from "autopilot". It's not misleading or false advertising. It doesn't change driver behavior. Thus, it turns out to be completely irrelevant to the actual problem such as it is.
So? What does advertising have to do with less attentive drivers? You're still missing a huge cause and effect thing here.
How the hell did you come up with that one ? You think saying "these laws harm innocent people' somehow puts the blame on the innocent people ?
It's damn obvious. The people committing the alleged hate speech aren't going to blame themselves clearly. And here's some hapless person that they've always hated and supposedly about whom they can no longer say naughty things. Use that gray matter to think about it a little bit and ask yourself who's going to get blamed and just how faithfully are the haters going to follow the laws.
Do you think that the abolitionist movement was making black people a scapegoat for slavery too ?
Slavery was a real harm. And guess what? A fair number of blacks probably did suffer because there were abolitionists out there. For example:
During the mid-19th century, some states outlawed the education of slaves. In 1841, Virginia punished violations of this law by 20 lashes to the slave and a $100 fine to the teacher, and North Carolina by 39 lashes to the slave and a $250 fine to the teacher
This was in large part to prevent slaves from gaining power or escaping. Abolitionists would have had a hand in both enabling the escape of slaves and in educating former slaves.
It absolutely is - because firstly, such laws reduce the incidence of these events. Secondly - it sends a clear message that society does not approve of this, that the people saying these things are not representative. That may be an even more beneficial effect.
Just like it did in the Wiemar Republic? Hitler was jailed for the terrible things he said and did. That didn't stop him from gaining power. Also, you can send clear messages without passing terrible laws. You're doing it right now, for example.
You have not actually shown any evidence whatsoever that hate speech laws are 'bad law'. They tend to be very narrowly defined, and even more narrowly read by courts. Thus far their history really does not back up your claim - not in the US or anywhere else. As the UK has proven - you're more likely to get bad laws out of overly broad libel laws than he speech laws - and the US does have libel law.
Bullshit. Canada has run wild with their version. And of course, there's the French example which as you noted has been used to ineffectually harass National Front leader Marine Le Pen.
You continue to blow off the obvious problem with hate speech law. It's an unwarranted imposition on everyone's freedom of speech for no gain. It does nothing to halt real illegal activity.
Hate doesn't stop just because you throw arbitrary and capricious rules on speech down - especially when those rules become unenforceable due to widespread disobedience and martyrdom which is always a danger with this stuff. But I suppose it is better for the law breakers to have free speech than those who obey the laws, eh?
It very often is. Emotional abuse consists entirely of speech. But if you think abuse is NOT speech - then neither is hate-speech. No hate speech law yet has outlawed anything that isn't abusive.
Abuse is a pattern of harassment which can include speech, but it is not speech. Hate speech explicitly includes the word "speech". And of course, we already have laws against harassment, extortion, threatening behavior, vandalism, etc. There is nothing here for "hate speech" to cover which is not already covered by civil and criminal law.
Here's an Canadian example which I think illustrates my point. There are three quotes in turn from a local Canadian politician, David Ahenakew. The first is part of a speech:
The Germans used to tell me, and I got to know them well because I played soccer a
Bullshit. Firstly 'naughty' is a seriously excessive euphemism - which is doubly dishonest as it makes it sound as if hate-speech laws are far more broad than they ever actually are.
It's how serious I believe we all should take your concerns.
Secondly - in a democracy hate speech laws protect the vulnerable from abuse by the powerful
That is a new claim. Do you have any evidence that this is true? Or is this just another baseless assertion?
And that's even before you consider the considerable abuses that the state can exploit with hate speech laws by making disagreement hate speech and hence, illegal.
Since that isn't a valid example of hate speech - you will have no shortage of liberals working as your allies to overthrow such laws if they get passed. We LOVE forcing the repeal of unjust laws. If we'll do it for unregarded minorities - what makes you think we would NOT do it for ourselves ?
"Abuse" does indicate it's going to be invalid, right? But given that you're all for banning hate speech in the first place, I don't buy that you have the judgment to repeal even more unjust interpretations of unjust hate speech laws. You are already failing on that.
>We already have examples of the abuses inherent in hate speech laws in Canada and Europe
Not that this has stopped the rise of Marine Le Penn - it clearly has zero impact on the actual politics.
To the contrary, I think hate speech laws have actually strengthened her. Standing up to a corrupt, incompetent bureaucracy on the matter of free speech, is an easy win. But I guess you never thought about the consequences of badly enforced hate speech law, did you?
But even so - in a democracy there are ways to get rid of bad laws or get them ammended to make them better. That a law could potentially be abused is not and is never an argument against having it because ALL laws can be abused. You would have no laws whatsoever. The argument you need to prove (and haven't and cannot) is that the law has no benefits for society AND can ONLY be used in an abusive manner. Otherwise the right approach is to change the law and improve it, not to get rid of it. Slavery met those criteria. Hate speech does not come close.
The easiest way to get rid of bad law is to never embrace it in the first place.There's no benefits to society, unless of course, you think the free speech rights of the public have't been trampled enough or far right nationalists like Le Pen don't get enough free publicity.
They have as much a right to say what they think as you do.
That's not a given. Your right to do anything ends where my rights begin. That includes your right to say things - at the point where they intrude on my rights, they stop being your right.
You have yet to show a right of your violated by so called hate speech. Sorry, that's the way it is.
I care what makes the most people, the most free.
Exactly. Start by changing your mind. I can't do that from over here. You got to do it yourself.
If that means you specifically have to be slightly less free so that on average more people have more freedom - that's a tradeoff every non-asshole would make.
Don't be stupid. Hate speech laws aren't about prohibiting khallow to say naughty things, it's about prohibiting anyone to say naughty things. It's straightforward restricting the free speech of everyone.
And that's even before you consider the considerable abuses that the state can exploit with hate speech laws by making disagreement hate speech and hence, illegal. Better to not even give them the opportunity.
This is not hypothetical. We already have examples of the abuses inherent in hate speech laws in Canada and Europe. Sure, much of it is ugly people saying ugly things. But so what? They have as much a right to say what they think as you do.
Schools and bullying are the least of the problem. An entire society full of people constantly diminishing them, insulting them, denying their humanity, calling them an abomination - that's the problem. Schools are a tiny part of it.
Even if we suppose that's true, we're just setting up trangenders as scapegoats for terrible laws that shouldn't exist. You're not making it even a bit better.
And do you think that teenagers don't hear what adults say among each other ? Do you think they do not know when those things apply to them ? Do you think they don't read the news ? They don't know about the state governments that are making laws targetting them ?
I think the real question here is do you think? None of that is made better with hate speech laws. There are consequences to bad law.
Do you think verbal abuse is not violence ? Go speak to any survivor of domestic abuse - I've yet to meet one who didn't consider the verbal and emotional abuse the worst part. When did it become a matter of freedom to protect your right to be violent ?
We'll see if you start thinking first before continuing this discussion. Abuse is not speech.