Sunday, August 20, 2017

Hate Mail

For people who can discern the difference that Trump refused to make, the complete and qualitative difference, distinguishing between people, Nazis demonstrating for hatred and racism and violence and those other people who were protesting against them, and rightly slamming Trump for that, it's amazing to me that you now claim to not be able to make a similar qualitative judgement about the ideas of the two groups.

If the people who are Nazis are qualitatively different from anti-Nazis, as I hold they are, they are different ON THE BASIS OF THE IDEAS THEY HOLD AND ARTICULATE.   To hold that the ideas, somehow, have to be pretended to be equivalent in terms of their acceptability and their protection ignores that it is the ideas of the Nazis which make them dangerous.  That such ideas are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people within still living memory makes pretending that they are deserving of equal status under the law is insane.   

Your position gives hate speech an equal status to speech for equal justice for people under the law.  

In reality, due to the difference in intent,  it privileges the hate speech of Nazis who are trying to gain power to make their hate into a reality over the lives of their targets, so it empowers and values that speech above the lives of their current and intended victims.  

That is the real position of the lawyers and judges and justices who hold that position.  It enables and empowers the very real, and historically proven possibility of such hate speech gaining power and doing that.  It did in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and under the Jim Crow era in the United States which the current Attorney General and members sitting on the Supreme Court clearly want to go back to. 

Anyone in a group targeted by Nazis is entirely justified in feeling that those professionals are ready to sacrifice them on their altar of Holmesian First Amendment Purity in ways they never would themselves. 

Update:  The difference in intent of speech is a basic and crucial difference in whether or not that speech can lead to results that damage the rights and lives of other people.  If I said that someone should give you a hundred dollars and there was a chance someone hearing that might do that it would be entirely different than if I said someone should kill you and there was a chance someone hearing that might do it, the first would, in no way, endanger your rights, the second one would.  

Pretending that all speech is somehow neutral and that, therefore all speech deserves equal status under the law is an absurdity that is asserted only when the results are likely to hurt someone else, to deprive them of their rights and lives.  It is only when that's the case that judges and justices play stupid and pretend that can't reliably be done.  If it were commercial speech, or even commercial "speech" under copyright or something, they'll tease out the most obscure and technical of points to make that judgement. 

5 comments:

  1. you really do love to hear yourself write, don't you? Now if only you could put together coherent material you would be onto something. let me help you out here:

    "Nazis and Anti-Nazis are polar opposites. GET IT!"

    try writing like that Sparky. You might not have so many people dozing off at your drivel. Say hi to your boyfriend for me.

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  2. by the way, it's GENERAL Zod, you half a fag.

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    1. Now I know you're Simps sockpuppet. "General" yeah, like Capt. Peachfuzz.

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  3. I'd say hate speech does not run afoul of Brandenburg. Part and parcel of the Nazis' approach is to incite violence and imminent unlawful action, even if they don't always succeed in that regard...

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    1. Nazism is intrinsically an incitement to violence as is the KKK, it is contained in their defining ideology. To pretend that isn't their intent, which has a long history of succeeding in producing violence, is willful blindness. I do think it is remarkable how judges and justices who will sedulously strain at the most technical issues outside of their previous experience when it is a matter of disposing of money or property suddenly claim they can't do it when the words inciting violence are right there to be read and heard. That sometimes the Nazis might not do it immediately, at the same place and time the words were spoken or handed out makes it absurd to pretend that wasn't part of saying it.

      Considering the cases Holmes was involved in which ended in lynching, including that one case where the Supreme Court held a sheriff and someone else (I'll have to refresh my memory) over for the one criminal trial the Supremes ever conducted, it's amazing he could pretend that speech wasn't the motivation of all lynchings, even the ones done without ropes and so not counted as such. The Brandenburg decision, especially the concurrences, make a lot of the dissent in the Abrams case. I think it was one of the most irresponsible things in my life time that the court did, apart from Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United and the Heller case.

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