Monday, January 07, 2013




France's censorship demands to Twitter are more dangerous than 'hate speech'

I rarely agree with Glenn Greenwald.  His attacks on Israel are particularly hateful.  I guess he hates being a Jew.  But he absolutely hits the bullseye below

Writing in the Guardian today, Jason Farago praises France's women's rights minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, for demanding that Twitter help the French government criminalize ideas it dislikes. Decreeing that "hateful tweets are illegal", Farago excitingly explains how the French minister is going beyond mere prosecution for those who post such tweets and now "wants Twitter to take steps to help prosecute hate speech" by "reform[ing] the whole system by which Twitter operates", including her demand that the company "put in place alerts and security measures" to prevent tweets which French officials deem hateful. This, Farago argues, is fantastic, because - using the same argument employed by censors and tyrants of every age and every culture - new technology makes free speech far too dangerous to permit:
"If only this were still the 18th century! We can't delude ourselves any longer that free speech is the privilege of pure citizens in some perfect Enlightenment salon, where all sides of an argument are heard and the most noble view will naturally rise to the top. Speech now takes place in a digital mixing chamber, in which the most outrageous messages are instantly amplified, with sometimes violent effects . . .

"We keep thinking that the solution to bad speech is more speech. But even in the widest and most robust network, common sense and liberal-democratic moderation are not going to win the day, and it's foolhardy to imagine that, say, homophobic tweets are best mitigated with gay-friendly ones.

"Digital speech is new territory, and it calls for fresh thinking, not the mindless reapplication of centuries-out-of-date principles that equate a smartphone to a Gutenberg press. As Vallaud-Belkacem notes, homophobic violence – 'verbal and otherwise' – is the No 1 cause of suicide among French teenagers. In the face of an epidemic like that, free speech absolutism rings a little hollow, and keeping a hateful hashtag from popping up is not exactly the same as book-burning."

Before getting to the merits of all this, I must say: I simply do not understand how someone who decides to become a journalist then devotes his energy to urging that the government be empowered to ban and criminalize certain ideas and imprison those who express them. Of all people who would want the state empowered to criminalize ideas, wouldn't you think people who enter journalism would be the last ones advocating that?

I've written many, many times about the odiousness and dangers of empowering the state to criminalize ideas - including the progressive version of that quest, especially in Europe and Canada but also (less so) in the US - and won't rehash all those arguments here. But there is a glaring omission in Farago's column that I do want to highlight because it underscores one key point: as always, it is overwhelming hubris and self-love that drives this desire for state suppression of ideas.

Nowhere in Farago's pro-censorship argument does he address, or even fleetingly consider, the possibility that the ideas that the state will forcibly suppress will be ideas that he likes, rather than ideas that he dislikes. People who want the state to punish the expression of certain ideas are so convinced of their core goodness, the unchallengeable rightness of their views, that they cannot even conceive that the ideas they like will, at some point, end up on the Prohibited List.

That's what always astounds and bothers me most about censorship advocates: their unbelievable hubris. There are all sorts of views I hold that I am absolutely convinced I am right about, and even many that I believe cannot be reasonably challenged.

But there are no views that I hold which I think are so sacred, so objectively superior, that I would want the state to bar any challenge to them and put in prison those who express dissent. How do people get so convinced of their own infallibility that they want to arrogate to themselves the power not merely to decree which views are wrong, but to use the force of the state to suppress those views and punish people for expressing them?

The history of human knowledge is nothing more than the realization that yesterday's pieties are actually shameful errors. It is constantly the case that human beings of the prior generation enshrined a belief as objectively, unchallengably true which the current generation came to see as wildly irrational or worse. All of the most cherished human dogmas - deemed so true and undeniable that dissent should be barred by the force of law - have been subsequently debunked, or at least discredited.

How do you get yourself to believe that you're exempt from this evolutionary process, that you reside so far above it that your ideas are entitled to be shielded from contradiction upon pain of imprisonment? The amount of self-regard required for that is staggering to me.

Source


10 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do Liberals get their minds so twisted ?

Gummy Bear King said...

Q. How many conservatives does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. None. They live in the dark.

I Prefer Twizzlers said...

Q. How many tea baggers does it take to change a lightbulb?

Q. None. Lightbulbs do not exist. They are not mentioned in the US Constitution or the BIBLE.

Mr Skittles said...

Q. How many BIRDS does it it take to change a lightbulb?

A. None. They are too busy making stupid-ass comments to right wing blogs.

Anonymous said...

Hillary Update

Bill Clinton was asked about Hillary Clinton's head, to which he replied:

"Well, she's no Monica Lewinsky"

Bird of Paradise said...

The twitter bird needs to tell the french chicken to GET A LIFE

Anonymous said...

France has a "women's rights minister"?

Personally, i can't wait for the radical Muslims to take full, (rather than the partial control they have now) control of the EU. Only then will their addiction to extreme forms of political correctness come to an end. That end being the end of a sharp sword.

Anonymous said...

Common how it is leftists and other assorted fascist socialists attempt to use the power of the State to control the thoughts of the people. If such laws were in place in the States 80% of the leftists would be in prison for what they say about the Palins and other conservative female statesmen.

Anonymous said...

@ 4:24
You seem to forget such laws only apply to conservatives. A progressive can do or say no wrong.

Go Away Bird said...

The SOVIET UNION didnt die after all look at how those french have gone for BIG GOVERMENT forgeting how the FRENCH UNDERGROUND fought against a SOVIET style goverment under the NAZIS i guess the french have forgoten about their sacrifices in WW II