[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

Well, no, but I hold extreme bias on that particular issue. My wife and in-laws are all Jewish, and they lost family in the holocaust.

The other issue of course is that one of the law's purposes to generate political good will internationally and indicate contrition of the German state for it's heinous crimes. For that reason it will never be rescinded.

And of course, that law is there because that particular viewpoint being held continues to lead to hate crimes, so there is a strong correlation between the belief and illegal activities. Hence, the crackdown. If no illegal behavior came from the belief, I don't think it would be an issue.

So there can sometimes be perfectly legitimate reasons to censor some speech?

But if you're asking me to put my bias aside and address philosophically whether or not we should have a law like that? I tend to think it's not a good idea. The better thing to do is to expose the terrible nature of that position in open discourse. Letting it hide in a corner without being exposed just creates a festering subculture, often leading to hate crimes anyway.

I don't think stopping people from having an online megaphone to blast lies into the eyeballs and eardrums of hundreds of millions of people instantly, means that we're pushing discussions into places were we can't find out what their arguments are. Groups like white supremacists, white nationalists, ultranationalists, social darwinists, laissez-faire capitalists, fascists, Nazis, and neo-Nazis have been around for quite some time, their views are publicly available, and the lies they spread are not some tightly-held secret.

Climate change deniers, election deniers, same kind of thing, we know what the lies are, and providing debunkings and fact checks have had limited effectiveness in reducing the spread of these lies.

After 9 years of Donald Trump in US presidential politics, even after herculean efforts to fact check him and debunk his lies, the 2024 presidential race is still basically a tie. This in and of itself should be quite the indictment of the idea of "counter speech with more speech" or "the best way to combat lies is to tell the truth".

Improving and bolstering the education system will help. But it's a long, expensive process that takes a lot of time before you start seeing results. And right wingers are hell bent on continuing to sabotage the education systems in the US. I applaud any and all efforts that are made to stop the right-wing attack on education systems, but I'm not sure how much optimism I have that the right wing will be defeated in the long run.

I think my position is a pretty simple one: Police the actions of people, not their thoughts.

When a person spreads messages that they know are lies, and peddles them in a fearful and sensationalized way, and makes money doing so... do we still consider that to be just having thoughts, or do we see it as taking actions?