[tmorton]

> For a lot of social issues, being given the midpoint solution is like being given half a baby.

I think this cuts to the heart of the issue - and demonstrates the problem with this line of thinking.

I also think you're missing the point of the Solomon story. When Solomon proposed that solution, one woman said "No, no - give her the baby." That woman was willing to compromise. She was willing to compromise all the way, to lose the entire dispute, to preserve the important thing they were fighting over.

Solomon didn't actually plan to cut the baby in half. On many social issues, there is a negative-sum, "burn it all down" solution that leaves both sides worse. Which side reaches for that option? Which side is willing to sacrifice the deeper issue in order to "win"? That's the side that deserves to lose.

[close04]

In the Solomon story one woman was 100% right and one was 100% wrong. Are there many social issues where the 2 sides that meed this criterion?

I think a better visualization of the problem is "you can't cross a canyon in less than a single bound". Sometimes there is no meeting half way.

Last but not least, compromising is sometimes not an option. It's like the paradox of tolerance where the only thing you have to be intolerant to is intolerance. Because allowing that is basically killing your options. It's like allowing bacteria to kill you because you are pro-life and not willing to kill them.

In the case of free speech, anything that would lead to someone else losing their freedom for the same should not be allowed just to have "a compromise". Hate speech is not free speech any more than contract killing is just a financial transaction. And just like contract killing, hate speech should be punished the same as the crime it instigated to. You instigate violence, you have to be put in the same jail cell as the people who threw the punch.

[InfiniteBeing]

Groups of people tend to label the speech of their opponents as "hate speech." It seems like more and more speech today is being labeled as "violent" speech.

For any mass murder you can find people blaming some ideology or another as being the root cause.

It's a dangerous path to follow when a party in power wholly believes in jailing people for "hate speech" as they will be silencing and jailing their ideological opponents.

[pjc50]

> For any mass murder you can find people blaming some ideology or another as being the root cause

Yes, there nearly always is an ideological "cause" or justification for mass murder? That's why everyone's so concerned about it in the first place, it's both a warning sign and a facilitator of genocide.

[pfschell]

>Hate speech is not free speech

There is no such thing as "hate speech." It has no legal or rational construction. Hurt feelings and strenuous objections are no basis for law.

[close04]

> It has no legal [...] construction

That must be a real conundrum in countries that have laws against it. Presumably clearly defined. I think you're onto some paradox here...

Hate speech is not about hurt feelings. But if that's what you understand from it with almost the entire human knowledge available to you a simple internet search away I'm sure no comment here can provide you some relief.

Telling me my shoes don't match the belt is not hate speech. But instigating people against a whole class (race, religion, ethnicity, etc.), usually suggesting violence or some otherwise harmful methods, is. And it ends up with people hurt, lives and whole communities destroyed. You'd understand a lot better if you were at the receiving end of it. Things are very easy to overlook when they never hit close to home.

But just in case, lmgtfy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech

[atlantic]

> Hate speech is not free speech any more than contract killing is just a financial transaction.

Personal anecdote.

When I moved to the UK in the 1970, there was a little platform in Hyde Park called Speaker's Corner. Anyone could step onto it and make a speech about anything, anything at all; they could do so in the strongest terms, without being bothered; there was always a small audience standing around, and often lively debate would result.

Most of what was said on that platform would now be characterized as "hate speech" by people of your ilk. And the times were not exactly peaceful; there were IRA bombs going off in England at least once a week. Yet the authorities made a point of not interfering, because memories of WWII were still recent, and the right to free speech was considered sacrosanct.

Draw your own conclusions.

[dang]

> people of your ilk

Unfortunately you set off a flamewar with that personal swipe. Please don't do that. Your comment would have been great without that bit, and there would have been no need for the nasty tit-for-tat of the below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[rjplatte]

That's healthy, and we need more of that, especially face-to-face

[crtasm]

Speaker's Corner still exists, I can't say if it's still possible to voice any opinion there though.

[pjc50]

Ah. The halcyon days of free speech when certain elected MPs were banned from speaking on television; the Zircon affair, the prosecution over Spycatcher, the McLibel trial, and so on?

Perhaps you were free to be racist, but certain kinds of speech affecting the power structure were definitely not free.

[walterbell]

We need that with a livestream and queuing mechanisms to reduce the risk of monopolization.

[close04]

> people of your ilk

I think the conclusion can be drawn even without the rest of the comment. There will always be some bigot dying a little inside seeing the world is evolving and they're left behind.

Spewing out some hate for a couple of other bigots is not that much of a big deal. But today's "Speaker's Corner" has an audience of (tens of) millions. And the bigot doesn't stand up in front of anyone, they do it from afar, in anonymous comments, in podcasts, from behind a mask. If you can't understand how much of a difference that makes than maybe you belong to that age and not this one.

And there's one thing your ilk doesn't understand: you're free to make that hate speech. You shouldn't be free of the consequences. Which is why I said it should be punished, not censored. If it's censored then people might mistakenly take those bigots for worthwhile human beings :).

You'd understand the power of hate speech better if enough voices called for violence against bigoted sexagenarians or something like that.

Oh, one other popular thing in the '70s was KKK which you obviously fully support because it happened so it must be right.

Draw your own conclusions.

[atlantic]

> Draw your own conclusions.

I would conclude that you don't know how to argue, and that's why you prefer to take away your opponents' right to express themselves.

On the flimsiest of evidence, you label me with a number of repugnant attributes (bigot, sexagenarian, left behind, stupid, hateful, KKK), and then, having established guilt by association, you politely suggest I shut up.

I could demonstrate to you my political positions are actually further left than yours, but I won't bother, because in a discussion, what counts is the strength of the arguments themselves, not the identities and group affiliations of the speakers.

My identity, my convictions, are irrelevant. My arguments are what matters. And you haven't engaged with the central argument: that democracy cannot function without unrestricted free speech.

[grkvlt]

> repugnant attributes [...] sexagenarian

You do realise that a sexagenarian[0] is just someone in their sixties, right?

0. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sexagenarian

[close04]

> I would conclude that you don't know how to argue, and that's why you prefer to take away your opponents' right to express themselves

And I would conclude that you believe actions have no consequences when it comes to whatever you like to do. That being free to say or do something means being free to get away with anything that comes out of that. The political position is relevant, this is a combination of character traits and education. Or lack of. You all google "free speech" and only bother to read the first line. Just like the other hicks who think democracy is the right to do whatever the heck they want. You're free to call for violence against others just as you're free to be punished for the consequences of that call.

Well guess what, freedom of speech also considers the harm principle. This is further down the page, too much for most of those people to absorb. [1] "Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else".

Speech is like a weapon. They're not prohibited, and you're free to use them any way you see fit but you have to bear the consequences of misuse.

But the further you go towards the extremes (left or right) you find that people are having a harder and harder time understanding this concept of consequences. It's in perfect correlation with the drop in education and usefulness to society. Low education, low income, spineless, always blaming someone else, and running from the consequences of their own actions.

You're here to "negotiate" something that is already law and principles already accepted by many for centuries. To give a nice shine to something every person with the least bit of decency and education knows is wrong. You even have a hard time understanding the difference between not having your actions censored and not suffering the consequences for those actions. You have no arguments, you have a keyboard and an internet connection, and you don't even take full and productive use of those.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle

[atlantic]

> Speech is like a weapon. They're not prohibited, and you're free to use them any way you see fit but you have to bear the consequences of misuse.

Agreed. And there are laws on the books for this; there always have been. The more recent concept of "hate speech" (to return to your original post) is entirely redundant, unless its intended use is censorship.

[bufferoverflow]

You're confusing speech and actions. Contract killing is bad not because of speech (after all, the contracting can be done in complete silence), but because of someone actually doing the killing.

Another problem, a much bigger one, is most of what people claim to be "hate speech" these days simply isn't. Post certain factual stats on race or Islam on HN, and you will get banned for hate speech. It's hurt feelings, and they often clash with reality.

[_8j50]

I think he got the point just fine. She was willing to compromise because half a baby is a dead baby. She would compromise on whether or not the baby was in her possesion but she could not compromise on the state of the baby.

It is better to lose the whole war than to lose what you value the most. Losing could mean many things,not just loss of possession.

[lotsofpulp]

Can you provide a specific example(s) of a side sacrificing a deeper issue in order to win, in recent history? I'm having trouble coming up with examples.

[tmorton]

I can think of many cases where "the other side" refused to compromise, creating a negative-sum game. But let me cite an example where "my side" was in the wrong.

I'm a liberal-ish person, and I think most states could use more tax revenue. I'm also concerned about climate change. This is a pretty mainstream set of positions.

In 2016 there was a ballot initiative proposed in Washington state that would levy a tax on carbon emissions, and offset it with cuts to other taxes. The result would be revenue-neutral (or slightly revenue-negative). It was opposed by the usual suspects (energy companies), but also some environmental groups and the state Democratic party.

Part of the liberal argument was that the initiative wasn't perfect. Given a new source of revenue, liberals saw many needs that could be met, instead of tax cuts. But that wasn't the deal on the table. The initiative failed, and we got the "dead baby" of no carbon reductions, no spending on other needs, and a less efficient tax system.

Details here: https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Carbon_Emission_Tax_and_S...

[yourbandsucks]

Not to get too 2016 about it but a lot of Republicans would've told you in 2015 that their top 3 beliefs were family values, cutting gov't spending and free trade.

[wu-ikkyu]

How about the US government in the 1960's conceding to civil rights demands in order to avoid a violent revolution?

[close04]

Are you saying that the people who were fighting for civil rights actually deserved to lose because they were willing to... fight to get them?

[wu-ikkyu]

No.

[lotsofpulp]

That doesn't make any sense as a comparison that I'm trying to find between real life politics and the the above commenter's analogy about sacrificing a baby just to "win".

[Jordrok]

Two words: Donald Trump

[tway4567]

We have a couple recent examples. If you think that the freedom of speech on the internet is important and foundational, then FOSTA appears to be us trading a deeper issue for a shallower one. Leaving aside the fact that it's not even likely to fix the problem it's trying to solve.

A similar example: the recent court cases by state AGs to ban certain types of CAD files from being published.