Whoa there (Off-Topic)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Friday, December 20, 2019, 10:07 (1800 days ago) @ cheapLEY

That’s crap. Free speech is already not absolute. Kermit already mentioned hate speech being a crime. You all want to pretend it’s all or nothing when it’s already not that.

Geez, man. Everything is crap with you, or the stupidest thing you've ever heard. There are smart people who know a lot more than you or me who disagree with you. Do you ever have a moment a reflection where you think, "It's possible there's some angle I haven't thought about." I do.

You're implying I said hate speech should be a crime and I don't think I said that. I mentioned hate crimes, and underscored the problem with that concept being yoked with speech--especially when people start conflating speech with acts of violence. Honestly, I think "hate" attached to a legal concept is problematic. Hate is a motivation in many crimes, and in my mind does not change the crime committed. Intention matters, and by that I mean the intended purpose of the action. Demonstrated hate might help prove intention, but intention ultimately is what matters. If someone kills me because they hate short, crippled dudes, or because they hate me personally, or because they wrote a manifesto saying they were going to kill someone today and I was the first person they saw, they are equally guilty of intending to murder and then doing so.

Many of the "hate crimes" that get the most visibility turn out to be fake, and were faked to feed a narrative. That's another problem with this special class of crime. Those that serve a narrative get wall-to-wall coverage, and those that don't, don't. A hundred are murdered in Chicago in a month. Crickets. Most hate crimes recorded in this country by a large margin are directed at Jews. Are we having a national conversation about antisemitism? No. But when a hate crime serves a preferred narrative, it suddenly becomes representative of a huge problem in this country, and we can't talk about anything else. And unfortunately, it validates the nutjobs. A tiny group, like those who play-act at Nazism, who have been for decades seen by everyone as crackpots worth no one's attention are now getting national press, which serves as a kind of recruiting effort for more disaffected idiots. So now, the least racist country on earth supposedly has become a country where Nazism is ascendant. Don't flatter those assholes.