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  • #31
    Originally posted by Whateverman View Post
    So your whole point in responding to this thread was to change the subject. Got it.


    There's been actual on-topic / constructive discussion of the thread topic, while you've been whining about people with agendas, and the laws in Canada.
    I was talking about how word meanings change. Just like you we're doing in the op. Although your op was pure mockery.

    If there's any melodrama, it's all yours, sugar-britches.
    Is that what you call your wife? The women you work with? You are a sexist pig.


    Securely anchored to the Rock amid every storm of trial, testing or tribulation.

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    • #32
      The New Zealand government is talking about introducing a hate-speech law sometime in the next couple of years.

      I'm not sure if I support it or not. Hate speech laws are difficult to get right and inherently involve trade-offs between different rights and freedoms and values. There haven't been any headline-making instances of hate speech in New Zealand since the legalization of same-sex marriage 7 years ago - though some nasty things said at that time made me think a hate speech law might be a good idea.

      This new push seems to be being motivated by a foreign white supremacist's terrorist attack on a local mosque for immigrant Muslims last year, and is being requested by the victims' families. They claim that hate speech leads to hate crimes... but that logic doesn't hold up in this instance in the sense that it wasn't any hate speech in New Zealand that radicalized the foreign white supremacist or motivated his actions, so banning it here wouldn't have helped. The direct cause was lax gun laws and that's been dealt with now (he came to NZ in the first place specifically because we had laxer gun laws than Australia and he wanted to learn to use guns so he could do a terrorist attack which he anticipated doing in Europe). So it's not clear to me that the motivation for this push is logical or sensible.
      Last edited by Starlight; 10-16-2020, 04:17 PM.
      "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
      "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
      "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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      • #33
        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
        The New Zealand government is talking about introducing a hate-speech law sometime in the next couple of years.

        I'm not sure if I support it or not. Hate speech laws are difficult to get right and inherently involve trade-offs between different rights and freedoms and values. There haven't been any headline-making instances of hate speech in New Zealand since the legalization of same-sex marriage 7 years ago - though some nasty things said at that time made me think a hate speech law might be a good idea.

        This new push seems to be being motivated by a foreign white supremacist's terrorist attack on a local mosque for immigrant Muslims last year, and is being requested by the victims' families. They claim that hate speech leads to hate crimes... but that logic doesn't hold up in this instance in the sense that it wasn't any hate speech in New Zealand that radicalized the foreign white supremacist or motivated his actions, so banning it here wouldn't have helped. The direct cause was lax gun laws and that's been dealt with now (he came to NZ in the first place specifically because we had laxer gun laws than Australia and he wanted to learn to use guns so he could do a terrorist attack which he anticipated doing in Europe). So it's not clear to me that the motivation for this push is logical or sensible.
        I sympathize with both sides of this general argument (aka. not just the one you've listed in your own country). Racist / nationalist / cultural violence is often preceded by inspirationally-hateful rhetoric, so it should be used as a predictor - and yet such predictions are almost doomed to be wrong and thus deprive the rights of otherwise law-abiding (but hateful) citizens. It's very difficult to find some middle ground between the two injustices that doesn't itself result in injustice.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by Whateverman View Post
          Racist / nationalist / cultural violence is often preceded by inspirationally-hateful rhetoric, so it should be used as a predictor - and yet such predictions are almost doomed to be wrong and thus deprive the rights of otherwise law-abiding (but hateful) citizens.
          I haven't seen evidence that banning hate-speech successfully reduces hate-based violence (doesn't mean it isn't out there somewhere, just that I personally haven't seen it). So I'm not sure, empirically speaking, if that alleged justification for hate-speech laws makes any sense.

          However I do know that humans are social animals and that excessive bullying from others in society does eventually get to people on a mental health and physical health level. People can cope fine with a few negative comments occasionally, but if they're getting it all day every day from heaps of different people the damaging health effects really snowball. People have a right to live their lives without being constantly harassed and demeaned by those around them. So I can understand a motivation for hate-speech laws where the government tries to protect groups that society happens to have a tendency to say nasty things to and about on a constant basis, by banning hate speech to try and limit the barrage of negativity these people are being exposed to, to something more humanly tolerable. But that's quite a different motivation to the idea of trying to reduce actual violent hate-crimes.
          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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