Anything that restricts free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of opinion is wrong. When people are REQUIRED to avoid saying certain things, it can lead to disaster. When it becomes a habit, it often leads to tragedy and horrible misunderstandings. That’s why I refer to it as being like living in a communist dictatorship. It’s a big part of the reason for the fall of the Soviet Union; people could not speak their minds, they could not say the truth, so the situation got worse and worse without any of the leadership at the top able to know just how bad things had become. Eventually the split between what was real and what was said became so great that nobody could believe anything. It was all lies, word avoidance, dodging the real issues, pretending real problems weren’t there, because of political correctness.
The leaders of the Politiburo had no knowledge of how bad the economy was, about food shortages, about the problems of the people… because NOBODY was allowed to speak freely. So, the Soviet policies continued to lead to further disasters, the whole time with the leadership out of touch and nobody allowed to say “Hey, things are really bad, we need to fix such and such” because nobody could say what the real problems were.
Nothing can be fixed, resolved, nor divisions reduced when you’re not allowed to talk about them. It results in more problems and more divisiveness. If you can’t make clear who exactly you are talking about except with special words of an authorised meaning and nuance that’s restricted according to a political ideology that changes on convenience, then NOBODY can fix anything or resolve real social problems.
The temptation for others to keep weighing down the definitions of “hate speech” with more and more shit which they made up, just to make things even more difficult for others is unavoidable because it’s not an agreed-upon-term like common language requires. It’s a fictional term of no fixed value, real objective meaning, with a definition that can be changed on a whim by authoritarian ideologues out of sheer spite if they want to.
Calling something “hate speech” is also unfairly used to censor particular ethnic groups, and when people of those groups complain of this, the complaint itself is defined as “hate speech”.
Hate speech and the concept of hate crimes were pushed hardest from the late 1960s with the push for “multi-culturalism”.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (iccpr) is a legally binding human rights convention, currently ratified by 167 states. The ICCPR was adopted in 1966 and includes a right to freedom of expression in Article 19, but also an obligation to prohibit hate speech in Article 20 (2): “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.” The two rules contradict each other, and Article 20 (2) directly contradicts the USA’s Constitutional 1st Amendment.
Instead of worrying about the violent intent of individuals, “hate speech” advocates always wanted to ban utterances, gestures, conduct, or writing that they didn’t like. A George Orwell 1984 concept. As far as I know, the term has never been narrowly defined only against encouraging genocide or violence since there were already laws for that sort of thing, and threatening others is already a clearly understood term. There was no need for such a new term as “hate speech”. It was promoted on college campuses, leading to a rash of new speech codes and other imaginative methods to control what people say and think, with no relation at all to the “genocide” or “threats”, because those terms were already existing. It’s just a way to introduce speech codes and control people, the entire goal from the start. The advocates of “hate speech” have used the term and concept as a way of silencing other people, and have always used the term to get around the 1st Amendment protection for Free Speech in the USA. It’s been used in a similar manner in other Western nations. It’s been used in a similar manner in other Western nations in order to erode the common Western concept of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, that had become a strong pillar of Western democracy and culture for centuries. This pillar is under attack.
Unfortunately, those “words” have real world consequences when someone is accused, so they can’t be simply ignored and have been used in attempts to smash people’s lives;
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-28/bolt-found-guilty-of-breaching-discrimination-act/3025918
These same nasty toxic people are championing tyrannical rules against the common people, rules which are RACIST, SEXIST, and attack traditional beliefs and traditional families. They keep pushing rules that are more and more poisonous.
School Fires Teacher After Saying Merry Christmas To Atheist Student
https://www.rt.com/uk/402196-uniform-transgender-neutral-skirt/
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55879
https://www.thecollegefix.com/content-restrictions-placed-universitys-free-speech-wall/
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2016/09/25/blond-cheerful-families-dangerous-right/
http://irishsavant.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-war-against-whites.html
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55546
https://www.foxnews.com/us/elite-nyc-school-teaching-kindergartners-about-white-privilege
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrXc05jpB9s
In many Western nations, the concept of defining what people say as “hate speech” is used to attack traditional cultures , attack Christian beliefs, oddly avoiding apply the same rules to Muslims and Jews, or anyone else. Anglo-Celtic culture is attacked in Australia by the “Racial Vilification” laws and similar. In the state of New South Wales, many slang terms are now illegal. Traditional Anglo-Celtic Australian culture is attacked, censored, and the views of the majority of the population on numerous issues aren’t permitted.
In the United Kingdom, people have been fined heavily and their lives ruined because the police have punished them for actions which do not legally constitute a crime such as tweeting a rude word online or posting the lyrics of a song in a blog. The police have tried to “check your thinking” as they say. They have got away with this many times to intimidate the common public despite no laws being broken by the individuals the police are harassing. Telling the truth in the Western nations is becoming rapidly defined as “hate speech” for more and more subjects.
The Nazis pushed speech codes and political correctness of their version too. Do you think the Nazis could have ruled Germany so tightly if they had freedom of speech? North Korea does it. Do you think North Korea can ever solve it’s problems when nobody is allowed to say “Hey we got problems here in our food supply!” Cuba does it. When the excuse of “It offends people” is used repeatedly, it becomes toxic. It kills free communication of ideas.
When you do that, it’s dangerous, confusing, and leads to more trouble. Instead of solving real problems, the politically correct lie about them and pretend the problems aren’t there. The Social Justice crowd then spend huge amounts of spite on creating fictional victimhoods and other fantasy “problems” with which to attack people about. They use these to bully people, censor, shutdown opposition, and push policies that are increasingly divergent from the real world issues that truly need to be dealt with. They create more problems then try to blame everyone else for these, while refusing to accept any personal responsibility for their part in actions that led to the creation of looming disasters.
You can see this in personal experience. Perhaps like me, you have been on car trips with people who haven’t a clue who decided where the hell everyone is going, everyone assuming that it was a group decision while in truth it was a total misunderstanding. I’ve sat in company meetings with executives trying to work out what the problem is, while NOBODY has a clue because NOBODY told them the true issues, just beat around the bush, so the entire meeting is everyone trying to GUESS. This is why I hate speech codes and political correctness so damn much. Nobody can communicate properly. A lot of the time those who get “easily offended” are just acting that way as cry-bullies to shut other people up.
I see the term “ableism” as nothing more than an insult used to shut people up, it’s used as freely and as dishonestly as “anti-Semitism” is used when people aren’t anti-Semitic, and “Nazi” is used when people aren’t Nazis, and “White Supremacist” is used when people aren’t white supremacists.
They use their claims of “hate speech” like a sledgehammer to shut people down, to scream at them to not say anything which disagrees with political correctness.
It’s wrong. Period.
You can’t go half this, and half that, on Free Speech
It’s all – or nothing
If you have only degrees of it, it isn’t free speech
Time to tell the cry-bullies to shut the Hell up. Like the majority of people, I’m tired of the nonsense used by the politically correct, the lies from the social justice crowd, the screaming of “I’m a victim” from people who are fantasizing new issues to have a temper tantrum about.
Do you think the corona virus pandemic would have got this bad if doctors in Wuhan were allowed to say “We have a very dangerous new virus!” back in early December?
Only in free open discussion do problems get solved and social issues get fixed. If you shut down one side of a debate, you aren’t having a debate, you are enforcing a tyranny.