I have never understood this type of statement. If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech.
If you're all for free speech, the "nazi at the bar" problem isn't a problem because free speech would allow you to battle it out in a propaganda (the neutral definition) war.
I don't think a whole lot of people are actually pro free speech, but I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that.
>If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech.
I strongly disagree. Support for freedom of speech means being anti-censorship. It's perfectly coherent to believe that particular speech does harm, and also should not be censored.
Suppose you and I are top medical researchers, and we disagree about the best way to treat a disease. It's perfectly coherent for me to believe that your speech is killing people by promoting a treatment which is suboptimal/counterproductive, and also believe that your speech should not be censored.
If person A's lies have clearly and demonstrably hurt person B's reputation, relationships, livelihood, and personal safety, should they have any recourse?
Semmelweis's lies demonstrably (according to contemporary experts) hurt the reputation of the entire medical establishment of his day. Fortunately, back then, they had the recourse to put him in an insane asylum.
I was talking about speech in the context of exchanging ideas, but you bring up a very good point. In an ideal world, lying would only damage the reputation of the lier.
One indicator of the quality (or lack thereof) of a society is how easy is to damage one's reputation without evidence. That's why the whole "Believe women" movement is complete and utter bullshit.
This problem has always existed, and the social standing of person A and the social standing of person B typically determined the outcome. Platforms such as Twitter where an unfounded claim can be spread so rapidly and to such a vast number of people are also a modern thing. There's no easy answer, but having the state as arbiter of truth is never the solution.
And in other contexts, you can imagine supporting the right of Communists to speak and organize even if you find Communism abhorrent and misguided.
Note too the benefits of allowing/supporting the right of [insert disliked political group] to speak:
1) You find out who is in that group when they speak (as opposed to them remaining anonymous/hidden online) and potentially address them directly
2) You might be able to question them to find out what led them to that position to prevent more people from going in that direction
3) You can be aware of the message that they are trying to send and counter it with more speech
In contrast, doing something like banning support for the Communist party is likely to lead to 1) more sympathy for Communism as an oppressed outgroup; 2) a lack of understanding of how extensive support for Communism is and what might be causing it; 3) the use of "Communism" as something that people can use to denounce each other as part of petty/unrelated feuds.
This is the second time I've seen this specific example in this context. Where are people getting this from? And why is it being used to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis?"
I don't understand in real life how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths without the recommended treatment being resolvable in a single conversation (research so inconclusive on either as to make both treatments suspect imo). Why would either professional be presenting a treatment as "recommended" without the strong caveat of "but others of my caliber think this recommended treatment will kill you." If said caveat isn't included, surely we don't want doctors going around giving such blatantly misinformative advice?
And again why is the "free speech " blanket always cast so wide as to include this? We aren't allowed to not have Nazis around without risking restricting medical debate? Smacks of slippery slope.
I wasn't using that example to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis". I was using it to counter the sentence I quoted: "If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech." There's an important distinction to be made between speech I think causes harm, and speech I think should be censored. That's all I wanted to say with my thought experiment.
I actually do not believe all speech should be always be protected. I agree with the MIT statement that harassment shouldn't be protected. And it seems to me that e.g. expressing support for Hitler could credibly be regarded as harassment. (Same for e.g. labeling someone as a "Nazi" because they say the US should have stronger border security.) More details on my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34135283
> how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths
It's happening right now (has been for 2 years) with COVID vaccines. Also permanent gender surgery performed on minors -- doctors performing them say they are saving lives, opponents say they are mutilating children below the age of consent.
I don't believe that your example is what the first amendment exists to protect, in fact if your hypothetical researcher is causing physical harm to people with their treatment, that's probably a criminal offense that has nothing to do with political speech.
Scientists and doctors regularly disagree with each other about which treatments are best for patient, how much heavily to regulate pharmaceuticals, etc. And who is right in those debates have far reaching consequences for human life. Thousands of people live or die every year based on those disagreements.
Ignaz Semmelweiss's life is the perfect example of this phenomenon in action, with extreme consequences:
He realized doctors were killing their patients by not washing their hands and cleaning their instruments. He devised simple solutions to this problem. The doctors of his day laughed him out of the room and had him committed to an insane asylum where he was effectively tortured to death.
The consensus of medical practitioners at the time was that he was a crank. But he was right. Should he have been imprisoned? Certainly the doctors of his day would have had him banned from social media for "misinformation" if they could have, and they did far worse.
We abide by the principle of free expression not because it causes the least harm in every instance, but because it causes the least harm in expectation. The value of minority viewpoints that are right about important things that the majority is wrong about will always outweigh the harm of harmful speech, in aggregate. And one thing is clear from all of human history: We are not responsible enough to tell the difference ex ante.
Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you support absolute free speech without any limitation. We all have a lot of rights, and exercising those rights can impinge on the rights of others. Why would freedom of speech be somehow special and trump every single other right?
I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.
I assume it would be obvious, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications (I'm not sure how well this constitutionally works for private companies). This obviously doesn't count credible threats, telling people to riot or be violent, etc.
Basically you have a right to offend people short of targeted harassment.
*This is obviously an oversimplification but I'm giving the HN the benefit of the doubt here, however misguided that may be.
> Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications
I hear this a lot, and it's not actually true. That's what the first amendment means. The first amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not define the concept of free speech as a whole, it just protects a form of it.
It annoys me when people assert that being silenced by a private entity doesn't actually limit freedom of speech, because they argue that the freedom isn't being restricted unless a government is doing it. I'm not necessarily for unrestricted free speech (because it often ends up being loud and obnoxious, and often silences other speech when it becomes a shouting contest, especially on the internet), but this very specific interpretation that the US Constitution's first amendment actually defines free speech has always bugged me as something logically unsound.
It seems to me that far too few "have the courage to use [their] own understanding," and that many would willingly abdicate intellectually to external authorities, provided the opportunity to do so without incurring social costs. A culture of open, potentially adversarial, discourse is incompatible with systems of thought which devalue the individual's capacity to reason, and so that culture itself is routinely undermined.
Almost no notion of free speech considers an absolute freedom to say whatever. Almost all conceptions of free speech deny the freedom to promote manifestly false and/or terroristic ideas (promoting killing a specific person, for example, almost no one considers protected speech). Always the problem is not whether there is a line, but where to draw it.
The war of ideas is a game where the goal is to get the most amount of people to adopt that idea. No part of this is removing someone's ability to speak, but they may not be listened to by the masses that don't like their ideas.
Ironically the US explicitly noted this problem when the German constitution (in the part occupied by the allies) was drawn up. So they basically introduced free*
*no nazis or similar.
Seems entirely reasonable and this whole "it isn't free if there isn't anarchy" sounds very naive.
Me and my friends are not interested in finding a new bar just because of some stranger’s abstract belief that we’re the ones who should leave when a loudmouth Nazi shows up.
Responses to this argue that when obnoxious nazis show up, we should just act like the nazi, using violent speech if necessary (tell him to "fuck off").
I don't know about you all, but personally I'm interested in participating in civil society most of the time. I don't want to have to get into a violent debate with swearing with fucking nazis, the same I don't want to breath toxic fumes or drive a car to work. I vote for bus stops, I vote for carbon taxes, and I similarly want to leverage our societal mechanisms to not have to act as an individual agent in the ideological war against fascism every single day.
I've learned that obnoxious nazis have an advantage by violating the peace treaty terms of civil society and tolerance, because by definition they don't hold themselves by such rules. Meanwhile those of us that are just trying to live our lives still have these rules and values and are hesitant to abandon them to deal with the nazi for many reasons, not the least of which being we don't want to sink to their level. Not to mention, it's exhausting. For whatever reason the nazis get their rocks off to it, and thus it's less exhausting and more exhilarating. Fine. But the whole point of society is to rubber-band away things like that to create a community of people who at some basic level maintain a level of civility.
When nazis show up, they violate the civility, they violate the peace treaty, and the solution shouldn't be "let them keep walking in and doing it and re-doing the fuck-off debate every time," but rather, close and lock the doors to them, because they've already told us who they are and what they're about.
An oversimplified example: your carpet shop has a rule: no shoes on in the shop. You come in with shoes, you get thrown out. A guy shows up with a shirt on that says "My value is to track as much mud on as many carpets as I can in my life." Do you let him in the door?
>>An oversimplified example: your carpet shop has a rule: no shoes on in the shop. You come in with shoes, you get thrown out. A guy shows up with a shirt on that says "My value is to track as much mud on as many carpets as I can in my life." Do you let him in the door?
The problem isn't that there's a line at which it becomes ok to remove yourself from, or them, forcibly.
The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things, which is why so many people disagree with you.
People say "paradox of tolerance" when I bring this up but I don't understand the purpose. Yes, And?
> The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things,
It's being applied to the intolerant, as intended. There are intolerable philosophies being openly discussed on mass media (tucker Carlson restating great replacement theory, matt walsh calling for police to kick down the doors of drag performers). Openly white nationalist and fascist people are showing up in towns to harass and intimidate people. In this environment, when the system is failing to not tolerate these intolerant beliefs, or in the case of white nationalism especially, actively enforcing the intolerant "right" to promote their viewpoint, the peace treaty of tolerance has been broken, and those of us you'd describe of "tolerant" stop applying the rules of civil society to the people breaking them in front of all of our faces.
And at WORST the outcomes for these intolerants is they have to change venues for a university talk, or, get a Twitter ban, for which capitalist society handsomely rewards them with talk show appearances and podcast shows.
> People say "paradox of tolerance" when I bring this up but I don't understand the purpose. Yes, And?
It has a name and using that name allows for more succinct communication. It's also a way for those who are unfamiliar with the paradox of tolerance to realize it's a thing so they can look further into it if they so choose.
---
For the rest, it's just a lot of rationalization for why you think you should be able to prevent people from saying things. And you try to hang it on the paradox of tolerance as a justification.
But it's not really, the lesson from the paradox of tolerance isn't that the tolerant must become absolutely intolerant to protect themselves, it's that they cannot be absolutely tolerant.
The line where intolerance needs to kick in for protection shouldn't be "someone said a thing", but should instead be "someone did a thing". Those like yourself who try to use the paradox of tolerance to rationalize your views are treating tolerance/intolerance as a binary rather than a spectrum.
And finally,
I'm a minority myself and have been called racial epithets. I remember the KKK coming into a nearby town and holding a rally back in the 90's. People were pissed off, but even then I defended their right to have the rally. My recommendation to everyone was just don't go. Imagine if they held a KKK rally and no one showed up, how hilarious would that be?
I would be no more ok with minorities attacking KKK members than I would be with KKK members attacking minorities. There's an equilibrium and fairness there that doesn't exist with words. If it's not ok for KKK members to tell a black person they're inferior, is it not ok for a black person to tell a KKK member they're inferior?
This obviously won't convince you as you're not thinking rationally, but that doesn't make the above any less true.
There’s a difference between being able to speak and being offered common platforms even when they’re available, versus someone loudly disturbing everyone around them repeatedly who did not choose to attend an event, and which is not in a public or semi-public space.
The proprietor of the bar isn't required to let them use it as a platform for their ideas, and given that Nazi is not a protected class, they're not required to even let them inside. They can turf this hypothetical Nazi out on the street and let them rant out there.
What? Of course there is, in the United States and many other countries. Protected classes are explicitly defined by the Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and others. The bar owner can't refuse entry to a person because they are of a certain ethnicity, for example. But they absolutely can refuse entry to them for being a Nazi, or for any other attribute not protected in law.
But Free Speech does end with speech - vandalism and terrorism are already illegal, do we really need to prohibit everything that could potentially be a step on the path to illegal acts?
That’s getting darned close to precognitive law enforcement…
Free speech can be used as the crowbar to motivate enough people to commit acts of vandalism and terrorism. Yes, those are illegal. Do you need something that can prohibit that? If you don't want to have a '6th of January' groundhog day every couple of years then that might make some sense. Let's see what the final outcome of that is. My prediction: if it isn't dealt with forcefully the only thing that will happen is that it will continue until they get it done.
Also, a person with crazy ideas with no one to talk to but other similar people due to restrictions on speech and debate is not likely to become MORE sane or LESS resentful.
It rarely ends with anything else. Most people are all talk and will back down if confronted in a nonphysical way. If they are going to resort to fisticuffs they are going to wind up in jail for it.
Not when they are in groups. And that's the first thing these people do: get organized so they're not longer just by themselves when aiming for confrontation.
That’s where the whole metaphor breaks down. Those are actions that law enforcement is supposed to deal with. Any aforementioned bar patron who just let “the Nazis” at the bar exist is in no way culpable for not having stopped them somehow.
Preventing literal fascists from seizing power is a collective responsibility that cannot be offloaded - both morally and practically - to any single institution. Especially law enforcement.
> 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf ... Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which eventually propelled two dozen American astronauts to the Moon.
The statement says "MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment." So if the nazi at the bar starts threatening or harassing people, they're out.
If I were writing the statement, I probably would've added "intimidation" in that sentence. Then I'd kick the nazi out if they're using slurs, or if they self-identify as a nazi (e.g. wearing a swastika).
It gets tricky though, because if you add "intimidation" then someone can say "people who disagree with me are intimidating me". (I suppose they can also say "people who disagree with me are harassing me" with the current policy.)
My basic approach for dealing with this problem would be to utilize the fact/value distinction. Free expression of fact statements is much more important than free expression of value statements, because knowing the truth is important.
The threshold for censoring a value statement, like "The lives of <X people> don't matter" or "<X people> should be enslaved", should generally be lower. If someone claims that such a statement intimidates or harasses them, their claim will often be credible.
But for a fact statement, if someone's notion of "harassment" is so broad as to make it impossible to express a particular factual claim without engaging in "harassment", I'd say they're not complaining in good faith.
It's OK to argue that a particular delivery of a factual claim constitutes harassment (e.g. if the delivery is peppered with slurs). But the complainer should always be able to re-express the factual claim in a way that makes it no longer "harassment" to them.
But the definition of Nazi is fleeting, since there is no more National Socialist party in Germany and american problems are different.
In France we do limit free speech legally, especially around anti semitism and walk a fine line. For instance a man said "Islam is the stupidest religion on Earth" and was found innocent in court: he can insult a religion or a God, as long as he didnt call for people to be hung. But another said "Heil Israel" in a comedy piece to mock, in his view, how Israel was behaving like its former oppressor. He was censored and it started a long list of sentences in court as he persevered on that line of thought. He's considered by his supporters as a victim of political correctness.
It's hard to decide what to do: on one hand, it's interesting to express views that challenge common acceptance, on the other, it's not a big cost to shut up and move on when society decides the cost of letting you speak is too great a threat considering our history.
To avoid that Nazi at the bar "problem", first decide what the problem is: that people speak or that people listen. If you cant accept they speak, you must define limits to speech (that s the French model and we are clear some things simply cant be said, period, so shut up and move on). If you can, then you must educate your population so that merely listening to hate speech doesnt trigger hate. That's been the american model, and we never believed it can actually work: after all, you elected a man who was against elections, for instance.
Free speech at a university is important. Sure it opens the door to regressive ideas, but it also opens the door to progressive ideas, which may be equally counter-establishment. A university is a place where these all ideas can, and should, be discussed and debated.
Free speech in a bar, or any other business environment, though is out of place. Because the primary goal of a business is to make money, and creating disharmony and antagonism seldome leads to better business.
In other words free speech is useful, but there's a time and a place.
Bars for example like to attack a hermogenous crowd. Happy people drink more, break less. If 10% of the patrons start spouting off racism, or mysogeny, or whatever, then the rest won't fight it, they'll just leave. If it happens a couple more times they'll stop coming back.
So bars are typically quick to remove people, or ban people, with a history of strife. You don't have to go as far as Nazis, all you need is a few guys being obnoxious about, say, eating meat.
Free speech is not "saying whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want." there's a time and a place. A university campus is a great place, and also (for typical college age people) a good time.
Devil's advocate; MIT and many other universities are technically businesses. And they have become more and more like businesses with each passing year.
So in this case, would complete free speech be out of place by your metrics?
In the case of MIT, which is a 501(c)(3), but also sits on a multi-billion 'endowment'.
Clearly universities have "personality" (as do all business's) and that factors a lot in which university I choose to attend. I expect a different world-view in say Alabama compared to say California.
I might steer clear of Berkley as being too hippy, and choose Alabama or Mississippi instead.
But I also expect that a business in the business of sharing ideas is open to new ideas. If I want to discuss a gun-free society at Alabama State, then i might be in the minority. As a professor my students won't appreciate it in my physics lecture, but I might form a student group against guns etc.
So yes a university is a business, but the business of ideas, and censoring some ideas seems like that makes it a bad business.
There are very few universities that hit this mark. That being said, MIT might actually be one of them.
My understanding of the situation is that most universities accept federal funds, which have a bunch of strings attached. One of these strings is allowing freedom of speech. This is why communists couldn't be banned from campuses back in the 50s and 60s, or the speech codes of the 80s and 90s failed.
This doesn't apply to universities like Harvard or Brigham Young that take zero federal funds, but the vast majority of them aren't going to pass up the money.
Generally, you let them get drunk and then throw them out.
This “Nazis are everywhere” thing is a manifestation of busybody administrators and isn’t a real problem. Even if it were, it doesn’t require Byzantine declarations about approved speech.
People need to grow up and not get offended so easily.
At my university there was a "Free Speech Club" that put on a panel of eugenicists and alt-right people who advocate for fascist actions. While the amount of noise Nazis make is disproportionate to their population, it doesn't take that many people to create a social change, for better or worse.
> it doesn't take that many people to create a social change, for better or worse.
It doesn't, but this brings up an interesting question. Is it legitimate to limit speech to prevent social change? I'm sure there were a lot of pro-segregationists that would have loved to prevent the social changes of the 60s and 70s. Would you legitimize their attempts, in exchange for having more tools to fight nazis?
Generally you'll want to head them off at Normandy before they make it down to the pub.
To put it another way, the problem of Nazis is not a problem of free speech. It's a problem of people who are actively violating other people's boundaries.
Nazis love it when you make it about speech because then everyone starts arguing tautologies instead of investigating and prosecuting criminal behavior.
I think there are two fundamental approaches to the highly objectionable views questions. Either: ensure the space is free of nazis by removing the Nazis from the space, or: ensure the space is free of Nazis by convincing people not to be Nazis. The first requires no engagement, the second requires engagement. The first has guaranteed results, the second is uncertain.
> The first requires no engagement, the second requires engagement
(1) people are innocent until proven guilty
(2) if one group is judge, jury, and executioner that's a problem
(3) authoritarians seek to quell dissent by censoring
(4) removal/ejection/ostracism from group is censorship
(5) contrary to your assertion removal/ejection/ostracism is a form of engagement
(6) in fact within the realm of free speech r/e/o is the most extreme form of engagement
(7) this is because it is the quashing of that ejected person's ability to freely express themselves
> The first has guaranteed results, the second is uncertain.
(8) hard disagree, the first is guaranteed to generate all sorts of backlash (perhaps not the results wished for)
(9) the second is guaranteed to generate debate, exactly what authoritarians and the censorious dislike
(10) ps: (quibble) the “Nazis” were terminated with extreme prejudice in 1945, any variants thereof nowadays are neo-Nazis
===
All the above is transparently obvious to me. It concerns me that in a so-called liberal society many clearly are either unwilling or are unable to see that everything I have outline is true in all cases. The fruits of this ignorance are all around us.
show me the point in my chain of reasoning where i defended "free speech at all costs"
to my mind i made a very reasonable defense of "free speech even for speech i find objectionable and disagree with but ultimately must tolerate in the interests of the inviolable principle of freedom of expression for all not just for my bubble" – that's the position i'm arguing for and nothing more.
"at all costs" != "free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]"
"at all costs" goes far further and is not something i am arguing for
> is unlikely to work.
i'll go one stronger – “free speech at all costs” cannot work. but that's fine because that's not what i'm arguing for. what i'm arguing for ("free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]") must work because that's the foundation a free society is built on. otherwise, all bets are off and the spoils go to those most willing to use covert and/or draconian measures to achieve their ends
If there are enough of them the Nazis may end up removing you. The idea is to reduce the spread of Nazism not only by convincing those that have already been corrupted but also to limit their ability to do the same to others. Without that second component it's a losing battle, new converts will be made faster than you can convince existing ones to drop their mental garbage.
There's no law that says Nazism will spread until it is stopped any more than there is a law that says Anti-nazism will spread until it is stopped. There is probably a maximum mass that can sustain such a dumb ideology.
> There is probably a maximum mass that can sustain such a dumb ideology.
I've read my grandmothers' diary, she had quite a bit to say about the previous time people underestimated the size of that maximum mass. There are very large numbers of people that will be happy to sustain such a dumb ideology if it is presented to them in such a way that it presses the right buttons. Fear is a very powerful motivator, as are frustration and jealousy and clever people will be more than happy to take advantage of these facts to push their revolting ideologies.
There’s no evidence anything can stop Nazism. Trying to stop it through enforced speech could very well accelerate it.
More effective than fear of government punishment is shame. Few care about pissing off the government in this country so that seems like a non-starter.
It certainly didn't work in Europe, where most countries have anti-extremist speech laws, and many specifically persecute open manifestations of Nazi ideology and symbolism.
But, well, there's still a neo-Nazi march in Berlin pretty much every year. And it's larger than Charlottesville one was.
Oh, we have plenty of evidence that some things can stop Nazism. The question is if you want to dedicate another couple of 10's of thousands of acres to war graves.
Yes, probably a continental landmass the size of Russia, or the USA represents its physical limit. Philip Dick presented a couple of dystopia visions of it, not all of which have been filmed yet. Yevgeny Zamyatin another. Although more correctly a totalitarian police state, than Lindbergh's or Henry Ford's vision of judenrein.
I wonder, why is the focus always on Nazis and not on say, Communists who also have a history of creating violence, death, and destruction? Why do we not equally focus on shutting down voices calling for enforcing absolute economic equality, or dividing people up into classes? Why is free speech less important in only one of these cases?
Because there are no modern Nazis, so they're a perfect straw man / boogeyman.
But most Western countries still have actual, real communist parties so you can't paint completely crazy pictures of them, because their members will simply raise their hand and say "no we're not like that at all".
Usually because the participants in these debates are not from countries where communism is right now a major issue. Though if that were the case I'm pretty sure they'd be worried about that too. And the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive either.
There seem to be more people calling themselves communists and supporting communist ideas in the USA, than there are who promote violence toward minorities. And I do mean actual or very-near communists, not people who want a social safety net and health care.
Although of course, attempts are made to associate broader and broader statements with extremism, such that even having an immigration policy at all is interpreted as racism, so the number of supposed racists is dramatically inflated.
If the right similarly broadened it’s interpretation of statements, 80-90% of the country could be claimed to be communists, for supporting the most minimal state assistance of the poor, which almost everyone does support at some level.
If you're all for free speech, the "nazi at the bar" problem isn't a problem because free speech would allow you to battle it out in a propaganda (the neutral definition) war.
I don't think a whole lot of people are actually pro free speech, but I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that.