quote: one could look at environmental regulations that are often supported by large multi-nationals knowing the true losers are small firms that can't afford to meet certain goals
um, could you provide at least a little evidence for claims like this...
quote: Smith and Locke were more in line with patriots like Teddy Roosevelt, not Teddy Kennedy
who said anything about kennedy?
quote: France does not have freedom of speech
actually, in the sense that you're referring to american's don't have freedom of speech either, the difference is in how specific the injurious effects of one's speech is.
quote: But Sweden has more restrictions (for the good of the collective, of course)
first, if you really enjoy arguing so much, you should at least attempt to act like you respect the opinions of those you're arguing against. snipey little comments about 'the collective' do little to further your argument. second, you keep making statements with no factual backing, despite being contradicted by people with firsthand knowledge of what you're talking about.
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote: actually, in the sense that you're referring to american's don't have freedom of speech either, the difference is in how specific the injurious effects of one's speech is.
um, could you provide at least a little evidence for claims like this...
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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"Swedish lawmakers have given initial approval to a law that could have a chilling effect on preaching against active homosexuality. Voting in May, Sweden's parliament, the Riksdag, passed on first reading a bill criminalizing "hate speech" against homosexuals. A final reading will occur this fall.
While targeting Nazi and racist hate campaigns, the bill also addresses "church sermons," causing conservative Christians in Europe to sound the alarm.
"The bill clearly violates the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights," said Johan Candelin, president of the Religious Liberties Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance and a Finnish Lutheran pastor. "If the bill passes, it will place Sweden on level with China, with the state defining which theology is permissible."
Göran Lambertz, the Swedish chancellor of justice, declared in a formal note to the Riksdag that a church sermon describing homosexual practice as sinful "might" constitute a criminal offense under the law. Anyone convicted would face up to two years in prison. The chancellor of justice monitors basic civil rights in Sweden."
quote:Words which, ordinarily and in many places, would be within the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment may become subject to prohibition when of such a nature and used in such circumstances as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils which Congress has a right to prevent. The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.
posted
so does that mean that sweden too is prosecuting hate speech, or that a bill is in the process of being debated? i can't tell.
here's something that none of the governments in europe have the power to do, but which we are burdened with as americans - kill us. We are the only developed nation (assuming you don't call china developed) that still allows it. that feels like a pretty big infringement on my rights, unless of course you trust the government enough to never wrongly convict someone of murder...
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posted
also, regarding europe and hate speech... europeans have a much more vivid memory of WWII than we americans (IMHO); they incurred more damage and are living among the reminders of the conflict. it was precisely the hate-mongering that is being outlawed which allowed the NAZI's to take power, and i can't blame those countries for attempting to keep something like that from happening again. do you really see a concrete difference between castigating jews for being jewish and castigating gays for being homosexual?
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posted
I am not planning on murdering anyone so I do not fear getting executed. I might be politically incorrect at times so that is actually something I would think would be a dangerous law -- a law making it a crime to say something. Sweden has this law, we can wait to see how far they take it. I would think it interesting to see what would happen if they arrested a mullah at any one of the local mosques for saying something against homosexuality.
Oh, and Japan also has the death penalty. I am not sure how I would categorize China, but I did feel totally safe from Crime walking in Beijing -- even late at night.
quote:I might be politically incorrect at times so that is actually something I would think would be a dangerous law
so your position is that the only "rights" which should be written into law are the ones that apply immediatly to you? as long as the holocaust is on my mind, isn't there a story about how after turning a blind eye to everyone else's opression the protagonist had nobody to turn to when they came for him?
quote:I did feel totally safe from Crime walking in Beijing
somehow i don't think that we should start looking towards totalitarian, communist regimes for pointers on how to make a safer(certainly not more free) society.
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"so your position is that the only "rights" which should be written into law are the ones that apply immediatly to you? as long as the holocaust is on my mind, isn't there a story about how after turning a blind eye to everyone else's opression the protagonist had nobody to turn to when they came for him?"
Murderers deserve no rights at all. I'll discuss the death penalty in a later thread. However, government has no business telling people they have to be polite or risk jailtime. I may not like anti-Mormons, but they have the right to say what they wish.
Posts: 232 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:I am not planning on murdering anyone so I do not fear getting executed.
Hold onto that thought. It was probably a comforting thought to the 18 people on death row here in Illinois before they ended up wrongly convicted of murder.
But most were poor and nonwhite. If you're white and not poor, maybe it's realistic not to fear. Something easy to live with as long as you don't care about what happens to people who don't happen to be like you.
quote:kerinin said: here's something that none of the governments in europe have the power to do, but which we are burdened with as americans - kill us.
Nope. They can’t kill people as punishment for a crime, but you can bet the government still has the right to kill its citizens in certain situations.
quote: do you really see a concrete difference between castigating jews for being jewish and castigating gays for being homosexual?
But saying a particular action is sinful should never be something a government should be able to imprison you for. I’ve attempted to have this discussion before, but there’s a huge difference between saying “Group X is bad” and saying “Action X is sinful.”
quote:there’s a huge difference between saying “Group X is bad” and saying “Action X is sinful.”
i get the feeling this has been argued to death recently so i won't get into it except to point out that while the enlightened individuals on this forum might be more than capable of making this distinction, i have found that maintaining the seperation between the fact that what someone is doing is wrong and repugnant and that who someone is is morally wrong and repugnant is often rather difficult. homosexuals aren't beaten to death by people who make this distinction, and i would argue that the majority of people who would be incriminated under the law we were discussion likewise would not be all too interested in the distinction between the two.
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quote:homosexuals aren't beaten to death by people who make this distinction
Of course not.
quote:i would argue that the majority of people who would be incriminated under the law we were discussion likewise would not be all too interested in the distinction between the two.
And most of the people who would be incriminated by the law would argue that they are interested in the discussion. Do we really want to be in a position where the government has say over what people profess to be moral and immoral?
posted
If anyone is going to bitch about government, business alliances i have three words:
Military Industrial Complex.
And while everyone in the government is guilty of these sorts of things. the Bush DoD, is conspicuously intertwined in this mechanism (hello Kellog Brown and Root?).
At least the swedes aren't handing their tax payer funds to companies which are economically raping the populace.
Posts: 4482 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
dag - i'm not saying that we should likewise adopt these laws. i guess what i was trying to get at is that in the case of "rights" such as the freedom of speech, a society must choose how much tolerance is going to be given to those whose speech has the possibility of inciting unlawfulness or injury. Europe, having witnessed firsthand the disastrous effects of this type of hate-mongering is understandably of the opinion that the dangers are significant enough to warrant giving up a certain degree of liberty.
We americans are pretty convinced (and with good reason it would seem) that our system of government and social order can withstand an almost infinite degree of expression, if we had just recently recovered from what germany underwent, we might not be as confident...
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posted
One might argue that it is the continued acceptance of the idea that supressing unacceptable speech contributes to the vulnerability of a society to hate speech's influence. This is an intuition - I can give reasons why this might be so, but it would be conjecture.
posted
Chomsky had some interesting opinions regarding mechanisms of control. his position was that "free" societies are no less controlling of their populations than totalitarian societies; in a free society political discourse is allowed and encouraged, however the "power structure" establishes conceptual limits outside of which the political discourse will not wander because the society would see such discussions as immoral or impractical. Totalitarian regimes he argue allow freedom of thought, and regulate only public expression.
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posted
I never bought that, although I've only seen others' summaries of Chomsky's theories on it. The man instantly bugs me.
But the problemt is I'm skeptical of the idea of imposed conceptual limits. The problem is, I think to impose them requires that you not have those conceptual limits - otherwise you wouldn't have the slightly broader view necessary to set the limits. Someone in the "power structure" with less constrictive conceptual limits would likely tend to make use of his broader limits, since they would help his rise in the power structure. So the elite would tear down their imposed conceptual limits almost by default.
Now, everybody has some conceptual limits, and they tend to self-reinforce in society. But the only way I've heard of to expand them is to talk about them, so free speech is anathema to the idea of imposed conceptual limits.
Dagonee P.S., One of the reasons I hate talking about Chomsky is that any short refutation of him has to use his terminology, which is wonderfully loaded towards his own ends. He is a linguist, after all.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Chomski has a few good insights but overall he pins himself so far left that his message is not influential or meaningful to the greater population. The best article he ever wrote in my opinion was his attack on behaviorism and his pointing out the dangers involved in Skinnerian views of human nature. I'd recommend that anyday.
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while i find his conclusions a bit overdone, i do see what he's getting at. the fact that refuting him is difficult because his terminology is loaded towards his own ends is in effect a support of his ideas in this instance: by determining (through control of the educational system for instance) the specific explanations and terminology which a culture uses, it makes certain ways of life seem more normal and acceptable.
my favorite part about chomsky is his ideas about the limits of human conception, or the idea that because we understand in a pre-determined fashion there are certain "ideas" which we cannot understand, or which are alien to our conceptual process. I really liked how he described science as a convenient coincidence; that we were able to easily understand the world in such a way that we could manipulate it as we have. an unusual perspective...
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