- Banned
- #451
When people fail to acknowledge that not all ideas should be treated equally, you end up with black slavery, segregation and Nazism. To suggest that someone's right to equal treatment and to feel safe in society is equal to someone's right to discriminate and abuse is beyond stupid.And freedom of speech does indeed allow you to spout "hateful crap". Who decides what is "hateful"? You?
It is the difference between the Anglo-Saxon concept of freedom of speech as per John Stuart Mill (i.e. you can test opposing ideas, and mock, expose and refute them, but not use the law to asphyxiate debate, because in the silence that follows a dreadful conformism would set in - aka PC speech), and the American legal philosopher Joel Feinburg's "offense principle" - which espouses that the law [i.e. Big Brother government] should stop freedom of speech which causes/is likely to cause offense.
The latter is a hallmark of totalitarianism. And breeds glass-jawed snowflakes who have been indoctrinated and have never been taught how to debate issues objectively.
Then again, some countries believe that civil war era militia laws which allow civilians access to military grade weapons of war, are more important than human lives.