11-15-2024, 09:26 AM
(11-15-2024, 07:36 AM)Anna Wrote: This is funny because "it didn't start with the gas chambers" meme is mostly used by the opponents of the so-called hate speech. The political correctness and the censorship in the name of tolerance are justified with the appeals to the examples of genocides and holocausts in history and the discriminatory hateful rhetoric which gave rise to them.
Let's not forget that the Nazis were initially the opposition exploiting the weak democracy. Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf in prison. Did he have a right to free speech too? There are numerous examples in history where verbal aggression preceded or accompanied discrimination, physical violence against or actual extermination of various ethnic groups or whole nations.
The society's oversensitivity and the rise of special snowflakes might as well stem from the collective PTSD.
/start opinion
In truth, many opponents of hate speech are not against hate speech, they are against free speech.
They have allowed their own emotional triggering to become fertile grounds to presumptions that any people hearing or reading "hate speech" will be swayed by its' content. As if every bit of information they encounter must be purified and rendered inert to their own biases. Or the presumption that any others hearing it, will lack the means to identify it as such, and respond accordingly. Rather than attacking the content... they smear the speaker, call them names, or liken them to popular villains.
The response often takes the form of a fear response. Fear is both sloppy and abrupt...
"Speech" is a responsibility of all members of a society or community... most who engage in it are naturally inclined to amend their emotional acceptance of their own speech without reservation (perhaps to account for their personal relevance.)
Our recent focus on "fee fees" and virtue posturing has become a thorn in the side of free speech. Personal judgments of 'hatefulness' should be used to address the speech, not suppress it. To invalidate hate speech, you must address the speech, not the speaker.
However, there is such a thing as speech for "hates' sake" and such speech deserves intense scrutiny... most often to the dismay of the speaker.
Our community, for example, will not tolerate the practice of proselytization, which very often a central element to "hate speech." Also, speech attesting to "validating hate" is most generally a form of verbal violence, meant only to attack and impugn the subject... But a list or a description of a person or events may be negative, without being hateful.
The ultimate resolution of that speech is at the individual level. If the individual is triggered, the speech will be called 'hateful'... if not, it's just speech.
/end opinion
