[touwer]

It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad

[dmitrygr]

> It's smart to ban hate speech

Everyone has their own idea what hate is. For me: it is anyone saying any word with “a” in it. Better stay quiet, or it is hate speech.

[Epa095]

In general the justice system don't care much what your idea of the law is.

If its not clear through the actuall law or the accompanying comments what constitutes hate speech, it will be cleared up by the court itself.

[dmitrygr]

Do you really not understand the sort of slippery slope that presents?

[Epa095]

My point is that this is the norm, not the exception in legal systems. It's good for laws to be clear cut and unambiguous, but in practice the world is not, and laws gets interpreted as courts use them.

[dmitrygr]

Yes — a very clear and unambiguous “speech is allowed” is the correct solution. If your feelings got hurt, you can cry to your mommy. The world does not owe anybody comfort.

[stinkbeetle]

Is calling people nazis hate speech?

[calmworm]

A rose by any other name…

[stinkbeetle]

That didn't answer my question.

[calmworm]

But it did. Calling something what it is doesn’t matter one way or another. It is still what it is.

[stinkbeetle]

No it didn't.

[calmworm]

Okay.

[generic92034]

It depends. One prominent figure of the right-wing populist party AfD in Germany has been called a Nazi. When he sued the originator the court decided that, considering the circumstances, was not an insult in the sense of the law.

[stinkbeetle]

That was argued to be a satirical skit rather than sincere statement I think. Which is quite an outlier but would be still probably quite interesting to compare with other cases.

But in general if you were walking down the street or talking about something on the internet and somebody else called out or posted and said you are a nazi. Hate speech?

[generic92034]

As mentioned before - it depends on the circumstances. If you call someone wearing a full Nazi outfit a Nazi, it probably will not be seen as hate speech/insult. If you call someone showing nothing in that regard a Nazi out of the blue, it could. But that would be handled as personal insult, then. For hate speech it needs to affect more than one person, I believe.

[stinkbeetle]

I see. So are there any situations where it could be considered verboten-speech?

[roenxi]

> It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that.

Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.

Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.

[bitcurious]

>We know, we had the Nazis.

Yes, I keep thinking about the bastion of free speech that gave birth to the Nazi movement. If only the Weimar Republic had anti-hate speech laws, perhaps the Shoah could have been avoided? Oops, turns out it did have those laws, and those very laws were subverted to suppress dissent.

[joelwilliamson]

I think tourer was arguing that the Nazis were a template for how to use speech restrictions to maintain power.

[fungi]

Banning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affected anyone but Nazis and Jihadists. It's just plain good policy.

I guess that's why arguments against it always fall back on straw men and hypothetical slippery slopes.

There are plenty of actual things that do negatively affect societies free speech but this isn't even close to one of them.

[theandrewbailey]

"There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys."

- RFK Jr.

[LAC-Tech]

This argument has always struck me as ridiculous. You think if only the Weimar Republic had had Hate Speech laws everything would have been fine?

[perching_aix]

Right, I guess the people there just magically all woke up one day hating the jews and voting in Hitler. Crazy how that happens. Why do political factions even spend money on campaigning? Those silly geese.

[LAC-Tech]

Wait, your operating theory on why the NSDAP became popular is because they... tricked everyone into hating jews?

You are not only entirely misunderstanding why the NSDAP appealed to people, you're also completely misunderstanding what post WWI Germany was - a republic hastily brought about with little care so that Woodrow Wilson would offer Germany peace based on his 14 points (he didn't). It was doomed to fail from the very beginning. If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.

The idea that freedom of speech was what led to its downfall does not stand up to even the smallest scrutiny. Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.

[perching_aix]

> If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.

Oh okay, all good then...

> Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.

Can you think in even more absolute, even more reality-divorced terms? I was trying to mock this with my previous comment, but clearly that angle did not reach you.

"Oy vey, the insane ideas I craft, that people aren't actually saying, are insane." Yes, they do be. Congratulations.

[bdangubic]

people are sheep mate... in 2026 with the social media at politicians disposal you can convince most people of just about anything you want. current politics in the US is basically cultism. if trump says that Russians are now great guys, 99% of people who grew up during the cold war that are "maga" now are going "oh, what a turnaround, love them Russians now."

same goes the other way, Germany can return to 1930s in the time one political campaign starts and ends given the state of society at the moment.

I am not advocating for limits on free speech, I am a free speech absolutist. and with that come the consequences we see not just in the united states but around the world. but to think that allowing anyone to say anything cannot lead to absolute catastrophies/hatred/... in the year of our lord 2026 is very misguided...

[Hikikomori]

Well they kinda did,long before the Nazis and der Sturmer put a torch on it.