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by mpalmer
1490 days ago
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Separately from my other reply, I'm curious whether you'd agree with the statement that the solution to bad speech is more speech. Because along with the most extreme views tend to come the most extreme solutions, most commonly suppressing undesirable speech. Boycotts are the most widely accepted ways of achieving this, but they don't usually work when the public doesn't agree with the boycotters. And it's clear (to me anyway) that if one believes speech leads to violence, and if less extreme measures don't achieve the results you want, one will eventually attempt to have speech such as Chapelle's comedy routine legally defined as incitement of violence. It is decidedly not incitement, according to the current legal definition, which I endorse. What do you think? |
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I don't think this follows from the current jurisprudence on speech at all. I.e. we have a long a successful-ish tradition of sorting out speech that does or does not lead to violence without making blunt judgements like you describe. There's a long legal history of untangling legally censurable speech from speech that might incite violence but that incitement is not clear enough to use the law to restrict it.
I do not personally feel that Chapelle's comedy routine invokes violence (FWIW I have never spoken to anyone else before, it just did not seem like a big deal) - the root of this thread was "I feel like I can disagree with someone without being hateful" and I was just pointing out how they could do that (and also that the view they disagreed with wasn't generally held by the group they attributed it to). So...if you don't want to be viewed as transphobic, it's a bad strategy to claim staw-man the arguments trans people are making.
That said there's a lot to talk about here and clearly I haven't been fully successful in communicating what I want!
In general, I would say that the idea of "a solution" to bad speech is kind of questionable. Speech acts are part of a tapestry of ideology and rhetoric that can be engaged to all sorts of ends. Treating it as an isolated action feels out of sync with reality to me. Different kinds of bad speech will have different responses - often depending on how much power and influence the speaker has. For instance, there are many people who advocate pretty extreme reactions to Chapelle that I don't think are warranted - but the chance of them going into effect seem very small so I don't spend much time on it. It's not enough info to just look at the text - you have to also look at context.
P.s. sorry for the late response, I had a busy day yesterday.