Freedom of speech vs Respecting other people's feelings

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Dengashinobi
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16 Feb 2023, 1:19 pm

Jakki wrote:

Dengashinobi wrote:

funeralxempire wrote:

I don't believe the two are inherently in conflict. Freedom of speech is largely a matter of how the state and I interaction, respecting others feelings (and the consequences of not doing so) is entirely personal.

Freedom of speech doesn't trump freedom of association, both fall under the broader freedom of expression. If people dislike me because I'm outspoken and often disagreeable I have no choice but to accept that. If people discuss that and choose to shun me en masse, I also have to accept that instead of whining about being cancelled.

Being shun and getting fired are two different things.

Freedom of association, you mean the right of those business owners to decline services for gay marriages. Yes I agree with that.

But organising defamation campaigns against an individual or a business in order o damage them financially, that's harassment. And could be arguably illegal.

^^^^am definitely not in concurrance with the above Post ^^^^^. . . . :roll:

,
certainly hopes this is not a widely held belief on this planet , but respect right to expression.
Perhaps there is some further explanation of this idea ,am not aware of ?

This goes as a reply to @funeralxempire as well.

My concern is that good people are being fired because they express their ideas that some people might not like. I repeat that if there is an organised campaign by some individuals that target another individual there should be some form of protection for the individual that is being harassed. I do not have the answer about how that protection should be implemented. The ideal would be for society to sort it out without the necessity of the law intervening.

funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2023, 1:27 pm

Dengashinobi wrote:

My concern is that good people are being fired because they express their ideas that some people might not like. I repeat that if there is an organised campaign by some individuals that target another individual there should be some form of protection for the individual that is being harassed. I do not have the answer about how that protection should be implemented. The ideal would be for society to sort it out without the necessity of the law intervening.

There really isn't a way for the state to intervene in these sorts of matters without someone's rights being denied.

So-called cancel culture isn't a new phenomenon, 'cancel culture' is just what folks on the right call it when they don't agree with the cause. None of those people seemed to care when they were the ones doing the cancelling, but they sure don't like to imagine being on the receiving end of that treatment.

At the end of the day consumers are entitled to participate in boycotts or campaigns to pressure businesses regardless of their motivations, regardless of their political alignment. They're entitled to plan and discuss these actions, they're entitled to engage in them so long as their actions don't reach the threshold to count as harassment, uttering threats, etc.

Anything else results in regular people's rights to expression being denied.

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Nades
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16 Feb 2023, 2:15 pm

funeralxempire wrote:

Dengashinobi wrote:

But organising defamation campaigns against an individual or a business in order o damage them financially, that's harassment. And could be arguably illegal.

Can more than one person decide to shun a business?
Does it only become a problem if they coordinate their shunning?
Are people no longer entitled to discuss if they find a business problematic, and how to deal with those concerns?

This sounds like you seek to limit some people's freedom of speech because it conflicts with a business interest.

Its the spill over he's concerned about it. Someone else (business owner) being effected for an employers legal freedom of speech.

Targeting others or slander isn't really allowed and I imagine even with no added laws, people can get themselves into trouble for organising boycotts against someone unrelated to the target.

This is what I would consider as harassment and crossing a boundary and all to common today. The internet shields people by dissolving culpability among the members of mobs. Sort of like getting (mostly) away with beating someone to death if blame is shared between many people.

Motivations need to be legal too. They can't be done because someone working for it was behaving legally.

funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2023, 2:50 pm

Nades wrote:

funeralxempire wrote:

Dengashinobi wrote:

But organising defamation campaigns against an individual or a business in order o damage them financially, that's harassment. And could be arguably illegal.

The problem is that a good portion of these cases don't involve defamation, they simply involve showing the person's actual words or actions. It isn't defamation if it's true.

Internet harassment of the sort that sometimes happens in conjunction with these sorts of situations should be taken seriously, but then again, it's not just a problem when it happens in this context. It really can't be allowed to become normalized regardless of the motives.

Even if a person is demonstrated to be a genuinely terrible person, they're entitled to the same protections against being harassed, threatened, etc as anyone else.

Being shunned or boycotted isn't harassment though. Neither is expressing contempt for some entity behind their back. Not being interacted with isn't the same as being interacted with. It would have a grave chilling effect on free speech to suddenly not allow people to discuss if they find a person or other entity problematic in some manner or to limit discussions over how to minimize interactions with such entities.

Dengashinobi
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16 Feb 2023, 3:12 pm

funeralxempire wrote:

Nades wrote:

funeralxempire wrote:

Dengashinobi wrote:

But organising defamation campaigns against an individual or a business in order o damage them financially, that's harassment. And could be arguably illegal.

Freedom of speech and freedom of association are inalienable rights. Apparently the Civil Rights Act of 1968 kind of alianated such rights and I thing Nades is talking on that basis.

I for myself prefer that everyone should be free to speak their mind and associate with whoever they want. There is a problem though when individuals fall prey to hateful mobs, be it a black person back in the day, be it a Google employee who's memo gets leaked, be it a comedian who does transgender jokes.

funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2023, 3:27 pm

Dengashinobi wrote:

I'm not sure it's reasonable to compare a comedian who maybe gets fewer gigs as a result of transphobic jokes and the acts hateful mobs were once associated with. Getting less work or even losing your job entirely is not really comparable to being tortured to death in public as was typical of hateful mobs back in the day.

If a business is open to the public, they're open to the public. They can still ban people from the premise, they just can't ban entire groups of people. The end result of not interfering with the ability to discriminate in that way would be that communities could deny people the right to live within that community simply by refusing to engage in any commerce with those people.

Someone being shunned due to their actions is not the same as someone being shunned for inalienable characteristics. I hope you're not trying to pass the two off as equal.

Nades
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16 Feb 2023, 3:32 pm

Dengashinobi wrote:

funeralxempire wrote:

Nades wrote:

funeralxempire wrote:

Dengashinobi wrote:

But organising defamation campaigns against an individual or a business in order o damage them financially, that's harassment. And could be arguably illegal.

If it falls within the protections of freedom of speech, the most someone should face is ridicule and criticism for an opinion that's crass (as they should). Targeting others unrelated or attempting to make life difficult for that person in other ways should be illegal and even with laws as they currently are, often is illegal. I just feel the laws should cover vigilantism via the internet a lot better than they do as most laws are fairly old now and written pre-internet.

If the state can't fire you, neither should the mob. If the state can't slander you, neither should the mob.

The law is very clear that if the state can't punish you nobody can. It defeats the whole purpose of having laws in the first place if vigilantism was commonplace.

This is where people wrongly assume that freedom of speech only stops the state from punishing you....the state is absolute in their authority, so it applies to lesser "common" folks too, mainly every single citizen in that county and beyond if the laws are mostly aligned which western law is.

funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2023, 3:43 pm

Nades wrote:

The law is very clear that if the state can't punish you nobody can. It defeats the whole purpose of having laws in the first place if vigilantism was commonplace.

Really? There's lots of ways people can be punished for acts that aren't illegal. It isn't illegal to be rude, but if someone is constantly rude they will eventually find few people interact with them except when obliged, obligatory interactions are terse and most of the voluntary interactions involve hostility. They likely will find few people are willing to do them favours and that people might even choose to be as petty as possible towards them whenever an opportunity presents itself.

That's all punishment but the state can't stop it.

Parents punish their kids for acts that aren't illegal.

HOAs punish people for acts that aren't illegal, typically the people even agreed to it.

Actions have consequences, the social consequences of one's actions might be punishing in effect.

Nades
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16 Feb 2023, 3:48 pm

funeralxempire wrote:

Nades wrote:

The law is very clear that if the state can't punish you nobody can. It defeats the whole purpose of having laws in the first place if vigilantism was commonplace.

I'm on about harassment though. Illegal stuff like badgering an employer to fire someone or calling repeatedly someone a Nazi online which is common now.

Being called an a***hole for an obnoxious point of view is still fair.

funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2023, 4:02 pm

Nades wrote:

funeralxempire wrote:

Nades wrote:

The law is very clear that if the state can't punish you nobody can. It defeats the whole purpose of having laws in the first place if vigilantism was commonplace.

Why is a Nazi off-limits but an a**hole is fine? Especially if the person is legitimately aligned with or at least adjacent to actual fascists? Even outside of that context, as much as it's juvenile, communist, Nazi and fascist are often just bywords for authoritarian, autocratic or even just the people I don't like, at least for some folks.

I'd argue that harassment of the employer should be off-limits but that doesn't extend so far as to preclude boycotting and advising them of why. The scale for this being reasonable/unreasonable probably depends on how big the company is. Some schmuck who's running a business with a handful of employees probably doesn't need 1000 calls over it, even if they're all single calls from individuals. A large business can handle it.

Multiple contacts from a single individual might rise to the definition of harassment regardless of the overall context it's occurring it, but there's already laws to address harassment of that nature. Threats are a separate issue and again, laws already exist to address them.

Most of the activity I anticipate you'll cite as going too far is probably already covered by laws because society has already agreed. New laws probably won't change anything unless criminal cases are started and then dropped due to the belief that charges won't stick.

Nades
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16 Feb 2023, 4:30 pm

funeralxempire wrote:

Nades wrote:

funeralxempire wrote:

Nades wrote:

The law is very clear that if the state can't punish you nobody can. It defeats the whole purpose of having laws in the first place if vigilantism was commonplace.

Why is a Nazi off-limits but an as*hole is fine? Especially if the person is legitimately aligned with or at least adjacent to actual fascists? Even outside of that context, as much as it's juvenile, communist, Nazi and fascist are often just bywords for authoritarian, autocratic or even just the people I don't like, at least for some folks.

I'd argue that harassment of the employer should be off-limits but that doesn't extend so far as to preclude boycotting and advising them of why. The scale for this being reasonable/unreasonable probably depends on how big the company is. Some schmuck who's running a business with a handful of employees probably doesn't need 1000 calls over it, even if they're all single calls from individuals. A large business can handle it.

Multiple contacts from a single individual might rise to the definition of harassment regardless of the overall context it's occurring it, but there's already laws to address harassment of that nature. Threats are a separate issue and again, laws already exist to address them.

Most of the activity I anticipate you'll cite as going too far is probably already covered by laws because society has already agreed. New laws probably won't change anything unless criminal cases are started and then dropped due to the belief that charges won't stick.

I don't think "Nazi" is a byword. A Nazi is clearly defined as a Hitler era Nazi. There isn't such a thing as a Nazi that doesn't agree with original Nazis.

Agreeing with or condoning anything the Nazis stood for is actually very difficult due to how extreme they were. Someone would literally need to want to kill entire races or seriously misconstrue the identity and culture of a race. They also need to be avid dictators and support no democracy in the slightest. Honestly, almost all people "accused" online of being a Nazi today never falls into this extreme category or even remotely close.

Nazi is just used as a trigger word specifically to incide hatred against an accused. It's almost never used with genuine accuracy now.

funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2023, 4:38 pm

Nades wrote:

So we can't even call someone who agrees with most of the NSDAP agenda a Nazi unless they specifically endorse genocide?

I agree that the term has been watered down in common usage (which is what I was describing earlier), but I don't expect the average layperson to understand the differences between the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet, for example. The average person barely seems to know the difference between fascism and communism, let alone between the flavours of each.

Someone like Richard Spencer would be hard-pressed to win a defamation case over being called a Nazi even if his agenda isn't in lockstep agreement with the actual NSDAP.

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16 Feb 2023, 5:13 pm

Does me being offended by the "Neurotypical Disorder" parody mean that I'm a snowflake? Just a question.

I don't think it offends me as such, I just think it's irritatingly based on all the false information and stereotypes, even though it is supposed to be a joke. Plus I'm insecure/ashamed about being ASD, so that might play a part too.

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16 Feb 2023, 5:22 pm

Freedom of Speech, because it's a constitutional right and the basis of democracy.
That being said, reasonable people must remember all rights come with responsibilities.
Common sense, empathy, and ethical judgment must be exercised.

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Pepe
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16 Feb 2023, 5:23 pm

WARNING: I am high on caffeine.

Quote:

Freedom of speech vs Respecting other people's feelings

In most situations, Freedom of speech is my priority.
I am a TRADITIONAL aspie, after all.
Things get more complicated when you have a close friendship/relationship.

But overwhelmingly, I will become defiant if someone attempts to restrict my freedom of speech and particularly, my freedom of thought.

The caffeinated skunk has spoken.

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16 Feb 2023, 5:36 pm

Josh68 wrote:

I couldn't vote because both are equally important to me. I wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings unnecessarily, but I would never want to restrict a person's right to express their thoughts regardless of how insensitive or unpalatable they may be.

I am the same.
I can't pick one or the other.
It is dependent on the situation.

I too value the "right to express their thoughts".
What some ppl seem not to realise is the importance of INTENTION.

This is not rocket surgery, but some still disregard its importance, especially with those on the spectrum in mind.

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