As students return to college campuses across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza.
As students return to college campuses across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza.
The right to a free exchange of ideas includes the right to disagree with protestors without being harmed.
You say this but if I saw someone punch a Nazi, I would cheer and forget who it was if asked by the police.
I believe that you would, but it would make you an enemy of free speech. Either a society allows the expression of ideas widely perceived as harmful, or it only permits people to express those ideas which the powers that be approve of. Throughout history, the powers that be always claimed that they were suppressing just the harmful ideas, and they were almost always lying. I don’t trust them with that authority.
That’s a false dilemma. There’s a middle ground between allowing only approved speech and allowing any speech whatsoever. And we already make that distinction. Fascists don’t believe in free speech and threaten the rights of others through threats of violence, which isn’t protected speech. Likewise fraud, libel, slander, blackmail, false advertising, and CSAM aren’t protected and are considered harmful.
There’s a difference between expressing an idea and making a speech act. Harmful speech acts, including “true threats” in the legal sense (e.g. credible threats of imminent harm, as opposed to expressions of support for policies that would be harmful) and all the other things that you mention* may be regulated without impinging on the free exchange of ideas (although one must watch out for attempts to suppress ideas by claiming that they’re speech acts).
I’m not talking about a mob of fascists threatening to attack someone there and then (illegal) or actually attacking (illegal, and cause for justified violence in self-defense). I’m talking about a peaceful march of fascists carrying signs expressing support for national socialism. They get to march.
*I do find it odd that simply possessing images of children being raped is illegal whereas possessing images of, for example, children being murdered is not (even if those images of murder also used for the purpose of sexual gratification).
😬
Promoting the systematic genocide of minorities immediately disqualifies you from meaningful conversation. You deserve a punch in the face for being a Nazi and defending Nazis.
Fuck off, Nazi
I don’t see how that has any relevance to the argument. Harming people is already illegal and isn’t being addressed here.
I am responding to this comment:
I consider disruption to be a form of harm. It’s not as serious as, for example, physical injury, but it’s still harm. The main form of disruption that the recent protests have engaged in involved trespassing and so it was illegal, but many colleges preferred to address the problem internally rather than calling the police. These new rules are part of the process of addressing the problem internally, and we’re discussing whether or not they do so without infringing on the students’ free speech rights. My point is that preventing the protesters from being disruptive is not an infringement.
(“Illegal” wouldn’t be the end of the discussion even where the police were called to remove trespassers, because a university’s policy of having the police remove some trespassers but not others could also infringe on free speech rights.)
Disruption is not a form of harm.
Disruption is impossible without causing harm. If you’re not harming me then I can just ignore you and so you have failed to be disruptive.
Edit: The word “disruption” can be used in other contexts to describe acts that aren’t harmful. For example, a new discovery might be said to disrupt the existing paradigm. My claim is about “disruption” used to describe protest-associated actions like blocking roads, making a lot of noise, or preventing students from going to class.
Being unable to ignore something is not a form of harm.
Gotta love a “free speech absolutist” who thinks that it doesn’t count as free speech if it stops you from walking to the other side of the quad without taking the long way around.
Come now, I don’t believe for an instant that anyone is as fragile as that. Even my nephew who is a young cancer survivor and weathered people who refused to wear masks during the pandemic by wearing his own.
Except these restrictions prevent speech, not harm.
How so? I think they’re content-neutral and designed to prevent disruption (such as blocking off parts of the campus that should be publicly accessible or making a lot of noise at night) without preventing people from peacefully gathering and expressing their ideas.