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| quote: | Originally posted by MarkT
There is no comparison between arbitrarily rounding up people based upon ethicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, physical health, and political ideology vs. censoring speech that incites hatred and/or violence. |
Didn't notice this on the first pass but I think it deserves a response as well...
The trouble with the notion of "incitement" is that one never knows whether or not it "incites" violence until that violence has already happened - and even then, it's hard to definitively link cause and effect.
How does one create legislation against this without resorting to arbitrary speech codes? I think we may even be walking into Orwellian territory there. It's one of the burning philosophical questions raised by 1984 and even certain Hollywood movies like Minority Report - thought (and speech) may lead to action, but if a criminal action were to be prevented somehow (in this case by censorship), then of what significance is the mere thought? How do we know for sure that the criminal action was going to occur in the first place?
Holocaust deniers and other revisionist historians make me sick to my stomach. I think they should be ridiculed, laughed at, and generally be swept into the gutter by society at large. But society can handle that without censorship - we don't need someone in office telling us that yes, it's okay to ridicule these people because what they say is classified under "hate speech". I *KNOW* that they are full of shit, and I won't hesitate for a second to let everyone else know that they're full of shit.
So I don't agree that censorship is ever the answer, no matter how good or how necessary it may look in hindsight. We just don't know how society will be affected by words, and there is simply no objective means to classify what is "hate" speech or what might "incite" people. In my mind, AdScam should have incited a great deal of hate in Canadians, but surely no one believes that the results of the Gomery inquiry should have been censored...
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