Update (10/16/23): The Illinois man who fatally stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy had reportedly been worried about the “day of jihad” and had “been listening to conservative talk radio about the Israel-Hamas war and became increasingly concerned about his Muslim tenants.”
Right-wing media spent days fearmongering about potential mass violence happening on Friday after a former Hamas political leader was reportedly mistranslated as advocating for a “day of jihad.” Despite a lack of evidence of a related threat to the United States, some called for increased surveillance and others gave advice on how to best avoid an attack.
The US really should think about implementing a law about hate speech, inciting violence against others, based on race, gender, religion, etc …
Just copy paste from the law in Belgium, the UK or Germany. That way you can round up these people and maybe in a decade have a decent society again.
We have a history of shitty censorship going back to the colonial era. We have good reason to not put the power to criminalize viewpoints in the hands of government.
You don’t criminalize the speech, you add accountability for the outcomes.
Then you’ve gotta be patient and wait for there to be some outcomes, instead of clamoring for the speech to be shut down in advance.
We call that distinction “prior restraint”. In US law, government doesn’t get to silence speech, but can still prosecute harms that happen after the speech.
The outcomes keep happening and nobody is penalized.
So we shouldn’t do anything because something bad might happen? That’s like claiming the 8th amendment could lead to lawlessness because we will treat criminals too nice
Yeah, you shouldn’t hand the current administration the power to silence speech, because the next administration might use that power against you. That seems like a pretty damn good precaution in a multicultural society.
The administration doesn’t decide what is or is not abhorrent speech.
That’s who runs the enforcement, though.
I don’t think you grasp the difference between “the law” and “law enforcement.”
Every democracy that I can think of has laws against hate speech, including all of the ones that score higher on the freedom index than the US. Outlawing hate speech increases freedom. All of the questions about who gets to define what constitutes hate speech and where to draw the line have already been answered. Different countries have arrived at different answers, but the US clinging to the right to continuously blast hate and weaponize far-right ideologies into terrorist attacks in the name of “liberty” is idiotic. A Nazi group marching down Main Street chanting about how they want to kill the Jews doesn’t make society more free. It terrorizes society. It makes it less free.
And in any case the US regulates the crap out of speech. Theres no lack of regulation as to what constitutes legal and illegal speech. There’s laws against libel and slander. Many on the far right - including Donald Trump have both taken very liberal advantage of those laws and have called for them to be made stronger. They are the ones calling the press the enemy of the people. We also have laws against making false statements, against deceptive advertising, against counterfeiting, against passing bad checks. We have laws against verbal assault. We have laws against making terroristic threats. We pass those laws because speech can and does produce harm. If you falsely and maliciously accuse someone of rape, if you write a bad check and defraud someone out of their car, if you call in a bomb threat, you are causing harm with speech.
250-odd years ago, they were still figuring that shit out. We’ve had a couple of centuries since then to better understand democracy and political dynamics.
Somehow, it’s only hate speech that people want to hold up as the linchpin of liberty. Hate speech decreases freedom because it increases fear and because it empowers the enemies of freedom. It is the paradox of tolerance. No country is perfect and everyone is dealing with a bizarrely well funded and strangely internationalist far right, but at least hate speech laws offer the opportunity for at least some level of control.
We put the power in the hands of the government to criminalize, well, basically everything we consider criminal, including speech.
Well, now you’re building a history of dumb fucks being manipulated in to violence by lying fucks and it’s seeping across the border in to my country.
So smarten the fuck up and do something about it.
Incitement to violence isn’t a viewpoint.
Awww but sedition! And espionage!
As with a lot of other stuff, this sounds nice in theory, but the implementation is that instead of putting the regulation of speech, healthcare, taxes, whatever else on shittily elected officials, the US instead puts it in the hands of completely unelected corporations.
Democratic oversight is very flawed and not perfect by far, but it’s way better than corporate oversight which is authoritarian by its very nature.
but muh free speech
Out of curiosity, can you sum up the key points of those?
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Found the person who doesn’t understand free speech.
It’s so odd how there is always some sort of caravan of immigrants approaching our borders or "day of jihad” that suddenly disappear the Wednesday after an election.
Dude, the real issue is shariah law in America as I hear these ladies talking at the deli counter in my local BJs because they don’t know the difference from Shariah Law made by Christians fanatics or followers of the Quran
Shakira law says your hips should only tell truth
It’s an orthotic device!
The irony here of course is that the fundamentalist christians have 0 issue with carrying out a “jihad” of their own against people of other religions, lgbtq, and athiests. I mean if you are so afraid of a 6 year old American citizen of another ethnicity hurting you but have no fear or problem taking his parents’ money you are a special kind of fucking coward and degenerate. But then again those conservative news agencies know everything that their viewers dont have the mental horsepower to understand, or do but will never investigate on their own or think for themselves makes them afraid of their own shadows.
It did come….on Jan 6th 2021
why are they so worried when theres so many good guys with guns
I doubt they believe in “good guys with guns” any more than the “day of jihad”. They’re just catch phrases that make them money.
Oh no don’t get that misconstrued many really do believe in the good guy with a gun fantasy and that one day they will have to use it to defend themselves or their family from certain doom.
Sure, random gun owners probably believe it, the same way many of them also believe “climate change isn’t real”.
But do the politicians? I’m not sure if they’ve even bothered to consider if it’s true or not.
It’s profitable to a lobby group that in turn “donates” $16 million a year and it creates a single-issue voting bloc that will tolerate literally anything – including things they claim their guns are to prevent – as long as you don’t take away their hero fantasies.
Even if there was a “day of jihad” did he really think it would to be the first graders doing it?
“Despite a lack of evidence” makes it sound like an oversight. It’s pretty clearly a case of malicious assholes just making shit up to serve their political ends.
the call is coming from inside the house
Hold up. You’ve already lost. They don’t need evidence of anything. Their job is to manipulate pre-existing fear. If people merely perceive danger and that their safety is compromised, some of them will help totalitarianism take root.
Can we shut down the Republican Party now? Please? For the safety of America?
is it 2001 again?
Fear, hate, and grift. It’s all they know.
So concerned about terrorists that he became one.
Yeah I’m more worried about the altrightaliban thanks
Y’all Kaida
Jihad means many things, including inner struggle. It’s actually pretty likely that the day of Jihad (if there were any earnest calls for Jihad in the first place) was probably a day of mourning that already happened.
