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Below, there is a discussion of the civil war due to Robert E Lee statute being torn down. The other main event of the day is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I would say as a general matter the biggest supporters of Palestine in the US are progressives. Progressives also hate the confederacy.
Question is can you separate them? The south was arguing for their right of self determination? Of course, imbedded within that is they wanted to savagely deny that right to blacks held in chattel slavery. Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis (from the river to the sea has a meaning).
So in both cases there is a legitimate claim to right of self determination. But that claim is bloodied by what those people would do with such right and at least in the confederacy context that “bad thing” was enough to invalidate their right to self determination.
My question then is whether the right to self determination is properly thought of as as a right? If so, it seems at best it is a contingent right. If it is a contingent right, what contingencies are unimportant enough to “trump” the right?
Most (but certainly not all) progressives I've seen are careful to distinguish that when they express support for the Palestinian cause, they are not defending Hamas. There's no question that Hamas's goals include complete extermination of the Jewish people, they don't even pretend otherwise, but one can in principle support the Palestinian cause and Palestine "from the river to the sea" without also calling for a final solution.
Perhaps this is just a motte-and-bailey argument no different from the revisionist claim that the Confederacy was fighting for "states' rights". I honestly don't know and can't offer an opinion on what proportion of Palestinians sincerely support the extermination of the Jewish people, or see that as a necessary evil in the establishment of a Palestinian state. But in principle I see no reason why pursuit of a Palestinian state must require the extermination of Jews (or even just Israelis).
This is a flagrant example of sane washing/running cover.
It's the same Motte and Bailey bullshit where more milquetoast progressives chanted Defund the Police and All Cops Are Bastards, and when pressed, retreated to claiming they just wanted accountability in policing.
Burn it before it takes root.
I came to a conclusion a while ago that I am no free speech absolutists under a couple of conditions. The Free Palestine from the river to the sea is one area where I think we may have passed what I think we can allow. There has been some talk of foreign ownership of tick tock and how we had limits on foreign ownership of media. My Overton window for restricting speech comes down to these factors:
Is it something really bad that if implemented would ruin civilized society. This saying comes far too close to explicit promotion of genocide. Sure you can sane wash it but it really does feel like a belief one step away from advocating a policy of the holocaust.
Is the threatening speech outside of a nutty 1-2% of the population and capable of becoming official policy. I don’t care what some cult talks about which includes things within some gender studies program. Looking at views in the younger generation it feels like the majority of young people hold these beliefs in some form.
Society needs the free exchange of ideas obviously and free speech should be the dominant belief in most instances but this seems to be approaching if not past my line.
Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea.
The moment you decide that some particular phrasing or statement deserves to be suppressed with government force you immediately engender a hostile reaction, as people usually implicitly realise that authorities banning certain types of speech are not doing so for the benefit of the people they rule over. While obviously some "speech" doesn't get this kind of reaction, like child pornography, political statements like this absolutely don't fall into that category.
Personally, the fact that you've established a "line" of permissible opinions immediately makes me want to repeatedly violate it, because I see that as an attack on my own freedoms. And of course my counter-argument, which has just as much validity as your desire to put a clamp over my mouth, is that calls for censorship like your own lie outside the bounds of permissible political discussion.
Yes I have a line. Kill all Jews seems to be it.
I absolutely believe that people should be able to say that. I don't agree with that message, but I think it should be possible for people to disagree with me. But I didn't actually say that anyway - the fact that you interpret that statement as "kill all jews" is entirely on you. The fact that a statement you disagree with prompts you to hallucinate genocidal intentions is an excellent argument against your self-admitted desire to be placed in charge of what constitutes permissible speech.
Aren’t you a Holocaust denier or am I confusing. People say things before they do things. We aren’t talking a fictional writing class.
You're accusing me of being a holocaust denier because I disagree with your desire to shut my mouth for me? This is comically uncharitable and looks to me like nothing more than an attempt to attack me by falsely putting inflammatory words in my mouth while feigning innocence by way of ignorance. For the record, I'm not a holocaust denier, and have never claimed to be. I have in fact made posts which reference the holocaust as having happened, and it boggles my mind that I have to actually state this.
But to answer your point, the claim that people who say this are actually making is that there'd be a single state, democratic solution. If you believe that being members of a multicultural democracy instead of an ethnostate would be the death of the jews then you're making the same arguments as the white nationalists on the alt-right, and you don't get to criticise anyone for being racist anymore - which is something I believe you do care about, given that you tried to attack me by calling me a holocaust denier.
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Gonna have to disagree with you there, I'm a free speech absolutist who thinks the Holocaust happened, disagrees with the Nazis on everything and am not antisemetic in the least - and yet I'll defend to the death their right to say Jews are evil and the Holocaust never happened.
And you hold that position if your choice becomes something like
There are things I value more than free speech. I don’t have a problem with a lot of things America did in third world countries to limit communism. Sure you can argue I’m giving you a false choice but I’m not positive it’s a false choice.
So far, I have seen no evidence that suppressing speech (in the sense of sharing ideas, ideals, theories etc.) is actually reliable at reducing violence on-net. In fact, it's one of the favorite tools of authoritarian governments to oppress people physically, and also suppress their speech to keep them from complaining about it. The only thing suppressing speech seems to be consistently good at is helping the elite enforce their will on the population (hell, even that not always; there's plenty of examples of inept crackdowns that seem to actively help the spread of whatever they wanted to suppress. Which seems good for exactly as long as you agree with the elite.
That said, I think there are some common-sense limits to speech. Explicit calls to violence, coordinating crimes etc. really have very little redeeming qualities, have a very direct connection to actual violence/crimes and are imo quite easy to distinguish, so I'm not overly worried about outlawing them. On the other hand, while I'm hardly a holocaust denier, I'm pretty strongly against the holocaust laws in my country, germany, because it's imo essentially identical to define Pi by law to be a specific value so that nobody is even allowed to question it - even if we're pretty confident about it, this is imo not inside the scope of what laws should (and contrast to defining Pi by law for the purpose of legal disputes, while still allowing discussions about it).
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The obvious point would seem to be to speak out on how the choice is a false dilemma being proposed by the people predisposed to censor tick-tock, who are merely utilizing unrelated historical events to try and emotionally cludgeon people into accepting censorship as the lesser of two evils rather than an unrelated, and unnecessary, evil in and of itself.
A bit if deeper thought is they every nation has their memes or same mythology. Letting the Chinese picks the algorithms and memes for our next generation seems dangerous. This Israel situation might. E a prime example of that.
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Thing is, even now and even if you are the USGov, you can't really shut down the speech. You can drive the unsavoury characters underground, and leave the folks who might actually be able to work out a solution unsure what they can say (and by extension do) -- but samizdat was a thing even for much more repressive governments in a much less technologically advanced environment. You can't stop it, why no meet it head-on?
Look at here, we have resident Holocaust narrative non-enjoyers, very enthusiastic ones -- how much traction do they get? Honestly modern narrative enforcement just makes me more doubtful of all the stuff I learned in History class, not less -- I'm not quite buying SS's line at the moment, but really how would I know any better? That's where your values put me -- thankfully I think they weren't quite shared by the powers that be for this lovely period of a few hundred years so far; let's not fuck it up.
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30% seems wildly exaggerated. I think suppressing the river to the sea sloganning on TikTok would only make it louder on other platforms, so I'll put the effect at "decreases by X%".
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The problem with that is at some point you wake up with Ministry of Truth. You can check UK and EU and hate speech which is moving to become more and more encompassing.
On the other hand I have recently came to the conclusion that freedom of speech and freedom of stupid/obnoxious/hipocricy are two different freedoms. And they should be mutually exclusive in a single person.
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