Freedom of speech vs Respecting other people's feelings

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Well I think we should be allowed to express our opinions on political correctness without people whining that they're offended. We're not aiming to offend people, we just want more freedom of speech. I've been expressing my feelings on political correctness in this thread but I haven't actually put anything rude or offensive. But someone will probably come along and say that I have.

I've seen some quotes on Facebook about political correctness, which got like a million likes.

Being called an -ist or a -obe used to mean that someone believed or practised prejudice against those groups.
Now it just means you hurt someone's feelings.

Being politically incorrect these days is just having the balls to say what the majority of people are thinking.

Both are equally important.

For example with the Trump as president scenario, I get why a lot of people dislike Trump, but at the same time were being needlessly toxic and vile about Trump, in many ways they were much worse than Trump while at the same time criticizing him for being toxic. In that case they were not standing above the man the criticized, but below.

So in an ideal civilization you could criticize political policies, but in a civilized manner without degrading society to the point where it becomes just apes with rabies flinging turds at each other.

Last edited by Lecia_Wynter on 14 Feb 2023, 8:00 am, edited 2 times in total.

Joe90, you made a good point.

I agree that we don't aim to offend people. All we can do is take chances.

However, to answer the OP's question, I'm guessing he is referring to countries where hate speech is criminalized, and maybe he is wondering how broadly or narrowly defined those laws would be.

Would they have to include explicit threats of violence, or would mere criticism of this or that group be prosecutable?

Yes, posting anything political here is almost like a dare. But it shouldn't be, unless you're expressing hateful threats and violence against a group of innocent people.

I see it this way. Employing a person just because of their skin colour is political correctness. Turning down a person just because of their skin colour is racist and disrespectful. Employing a person because you feel as an employer, they're the right person for the job due to their attitude, résumé, etc, regardless of skin colour, is respect.

It's complex: Affirmative Action and Quotas.

Logically, neither should happen....and to believe either shouldn't happen is not necessarily tantamount to racism. However, both were necessary at a time when there was a vast disparity in opportunity between whites and "minorities."

Nowadays, there is, in general, less disparity....I'm on the fence whether they should get rid of Affirmative Action (quotas seem uncommon these days).

I am not a believer in either, logically......but there seems to be occasions where they are still necessary. The objective is to get rid of the conditions (like racism) which allow for this necessity.

There is an African-American who is an idol of the right, probably the most important living intellectual of the right, called Thomas Sowell. He asserts that the affirmative action was responsible for the poverty, high rate of crime, drug use and exponential increase of single motherhood in the African-American communities. His arguments are pretty compelling.

I know of him, and have read him. I agree with him most of the time, but certainly not all the time.

I don't like people merely because they are black, or because they are conservative. Or because they are black AND conservative.

I believe we should, in time, get rid of all racially-based policies. And I don't believe problems which happen in "minority" communities are solely the fault of "society." The people who live in these communities should bear at least some responsibility.

Freedom of speech is more important. We live in an age where many are overdue some hurt feelings.

Hard to define what freedom of speech is these days though. While it's traditionally the state not being able to prosecute someone, online mob justice goes too far in the modern world. I think new laws should be created to reflect the internet age, specifically prosecuting people for trying to get others fired or harassed for exercising freedom of speech.

Universal rule of thumb for example, if the state can't fire you from your job or harass you for comments made on a sensitive topic, then neither can the general public.

So your solution to people getting fired for the things they say is... sending people to prison for the things they say?

That's a pretty dreadful solution, isn't it?

Encouraging harassment, yeah, that's criminal, but "trying to get someone fired" is so broad. Like, most people who get fired in these sorts of situations aren't being fired because someone called their employer and asked. They're being fired because the employer became aware of the comments and decided this person was a liability who they didn't want working for them.

There's no way to stop that beyond some sort of Orwellian "this person said something offensive so now their job is safe even if your business suffers" state overreach.

In regards to preventing people from being fired: nobody really thinks about the next step of this.

For simplicity's sake, let's use an extreme example: a neo-Nazi. If someone with this kind of belief system could not be fired, that means you may have to work with them. Would you be comfortable doing this? Knowing that your coworker wishes to murder people for being the wrong ethnicity? A lot of folks would quit. The business could either hire more neo-Nazis (or people comfortable with them), which would deservedly tarnish its reputation to the point it'd have to shut down, or simply shut down.

It is also a liability. If you run a business providing services to people, it's a real problem if you have someone in your company who vocally hates entire demographics. You can't rely on them to do their job. And in my experience, people who hold these opinions are really bad about keeping them hidden.

If you don't allow people like this to be fired, you create a situation where the government is actively protecting a neo-Nazi from social censure, causing the business to lose employees and customers.

Now, in the past, similar arguments were used to prevent the hiring of people of color. However, there is a key difference: you cannot choose your race. This is why race is a protected category. You can, however, choose your political opinions. Generally, political speech doesn't get the same social protections as race or religion, and I'm not sure we really want to go down the route of providing them. It's enough that the government won't throw you in jail.

Fundamentally, if you make people mad, you can't expect them not to be mad. What I see in a lot of free speech advocates is the expectation that nothing they say will get a hostile reaction. That folks will be content to say: "Well, I disagree." But that's not reasonable. If you say something that's sufficiently abhorrent to a lot of people, they won't want anything to do with you.

I'm against state intervention no matter what. But I believe in the right to make a living even for neo-nazis or neo-communists, who I dislike equally. Everybody is a human being and should have the right to provide for themselves and their families. Also, most of people being cancelled or protested against were not in the extremist category. Was Dave Chapelle truly a transphobe for deserving all that pressure that sought to destroy his career?

we need truth ! Persons feelings might not be as important.!

They can still make a living by going into business for themselves. But you can't force someone to hire a person who advocates for the death of others. And I don't see how this right can be enforced without state intervention.

Let's recognise at least that it is a problem.

They're often fired for the backlash from the online mob and not because their views are illegal. I think there should be stricter punishments for bowing to the mob or being an organiser within a mob. For example, people with large followings on social media trying to stir very sizable numbers of people up against some hapless soul who just happened to brush them up the wrong way with their *legal* opinion.

Laws already exist against harassment and wrongly firing people which also covers the "mob" but I think they need to stretch further. Broadening them to take into account discontent stirred up on the internet by certain people.

The old laws just haven't caught up with modern tech. An example of such a law might be fines and prison sentences for someone using the internet to organise a boycott against a company who employs someone who might have said something controversial but perfectly legal about immigration, trans issues, animal welfare and slavery or whatnot.

This is what I would consider the state not being allowed to punish someone for speech, but the internet mob "repealing" the state and punishing that person themselves. Not allowed really.

Reminds me of the story of James Damore who's leaked memo went viral and was fired by Google. The memo suggested that there are biological reasons why women are not equally as successful as their male counterparts in the tech industry. Is that right? His arguments were fairly reasonable. Even if he was wrong, does he deserve to get fired for that?