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Arnold Kling on Michael Huemer on Thought Crime
It kind of goes without saying, but inherent in the notion of "thought crime" are both crime and punishment. If it doesn't deserve punishment, then it's not a crime.
Amen, brother. But is this just preaching to the choir? Consider: A whole lot of NPCs and talking heads sure ate up The Narrative. Propaganda is effective, to an extent, but beyond that extent it is deeply corrosive, particularly to any intellectual class, who become disillusioned and cynical. Thought crime is next.
Religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are all about thought crime. You have to take the salvation of Jesus into your heart or something, and if you don't, have fun with eternal damnation. I can accept Aquinas, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis. These are men who appealed to reason, writing to convince and persuade.
I imagine only atheists see the appeal of comparing woke (progressive, successor) ideology to a religion of sorts, likely filling some kind of primitive need for tribal loyalty, purity tests, and expensive signals (rabid adherence to nonsense). I'd love to hear Antonin Scalia's take though. Or L. Ron Hubbard's. Perhaps what we are seeing with successor ideology is not an individual need for such, but instead just the character of mass movements, the nature of power, its patterns of growth and movement and perpetuation. Are propaganda and thought crime inevitable?
Let's take it back to 1984. Orwell demonstrates the existential horror of a regime that can successfully deploy thought crime. Didn't he make it blindingly obvious for everyone? I'm pretty sure we were all nodding our heads in 8th grade English class about the evils of totalitarianism, only a few years after the USSR fell. I suspect this issue is particularly salient for me, as a libertarian.
Anyways, I'm not mad, just disappointed.
This is very confusingly written, since no-one actually refers to anything as a "thought-crime" expect in reference to claiming a martyrdom/dissidence status for some view they themselves hold. Ie. "The fact that I can't tell the truth about vaccine deaths without being cancelled makes my vaccine skepticism a thought-crime", not "You are a thought-criminal for doubting the efficacy of the vaccine, even though the vaccine undeniably works". Or, if there are actual prominent examples of the latter as a mode of discourse, I certainly haven't encountered them.
Let's taboo "thought crime". It's just meant to be a convenient label / handle, but with extra salience from Orwell's 1984.
I'm talking about society's seemingly reflexive need to punish wrongthink. This is corrosive because it's very difficult for society or its agents to determine exactly what an individual thinks. Furthermore, only acts (and not thoughts) have relevant consequences. We generally think it's ok to wish harm on one's neighbor for a brief moment.
Simple examples of thought crime include hate crimes, hate speech, accusations of being a racist rather than doing a racism.
In the US, at any rate, hate speech is not illegal. And "hate crimes" are crimes in which the victim is chosen because of his group membership (real or perceived). No hatred or other ideas need be shown. In that sense, a hate crime enhancement is not very different from a gang crime enhancement. Neither is really a "thought crimes." The problem is really the last one on your list, better known as cancel culture.
I thought the context of this punishment was extrajudicial canceling, etc. Not that the criminal justice system prosecutes wrongthink.
That is what I thought, until he explicitly mentioned hate crimes.
As I've attempted to demonstrate in another reply, I mean hate crimes in the colloquial sense, not necessarily the statutes in the US (but possibly so). When people described the Jussie Smollett hoax initially as a hate crime, I don't think it was a claim that the crime would meet the statutory burden for a hate crime, and I think they are largely describing a thought crime on top of a purported actual crime of assault or whatever.
I think you need to be more clear about what renders some crimes motivated by the victim's group membership a "thought crime" and others not.
Sure. I don't think most people who call JS a "hate crime" are making a claim about how the victim was selected. I don't think they understand the statutory burden to declare an act a "hate crime". When people call JS a "hate crime", they are saying "they attacked JS because he was black, because they hate the blacks". This is a different sort of claim, and it revolves around thought crime.
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