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Los Angeles Times Provides Comical Yet Disturbing Pretexts for Censoring Speech

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The concept of “hate speech” is not so much the thin edge of a wedge as a full-frontal assault on our fundamental right of free speech. If we do not have the right to say things that people who want to silence us choose to call “offensive,” we have no free speech at all. Anyone can silence anyone else, provided they enjoy the favor of the authorities, who get to decide what is truly offensive. Yet the Los Angeles Times, which relies on free speech for its business, published an editorial yesterday supporting the censorship of so-called hate speech. The arguments are comical:

Racist hate speech has been linked to cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and requires complex coping strategies. Exposure to racial slurs also diminishes academic performance. Women subjected to sexualized speech may develop a phenomenon of “self-objectification,” which is associated with eating disorders.

They have to silence speech they don’t like or people will smoke and have eating disorders.

This part is less funny:

These negative physical and mental health outcomes — which embody the historical roots of race and gender oppression — mean that hate speech is not “just speech.” Hate speech is doing something. It results in tangible harms that are serious in and of themselves and that collectively amount to the harm of subordination. The harm of perpetuating discrimination. The harm of creating inequality.

That may sound like harmlessly flaky duckspeak of the type students are fed in their social justice classes. But the danger of people in authority taking it seriously is quite real.

Campus snowflakes brandish their fists and growl that people expressing views they disagree with are literally committing violence. This implies that expressing an unapproved view is the same thing as assault and battery, and should result in a comparable prison sentence.

Instead of characterizing racist and sexist hate speech as “just speech,” courts and legislatures need to account for this [hogwash.]

As for those of us who are still American enough to treasure the right to speak our minds,

[T]hese free-speech absolutists must at least acknowledge two facts. First, the right to speak already is far from absolute. Second, they are asking disadvantaged members of our society to shoulder a heavy burden with serious consequences. Because we are “free” to be hateful, members of traditionally marginalized groups suffer.

From the progressive point of view, the “marginalized” are sacred. Free speech is not. Playing one off against the other is a useful pretext for destroying free speech at the most fundamental level, which liberals will hurry to do once they have the political leverage to enforce this evil nonsense with the force of law.

Here’s a profound truth from a comedian, to counter the wacky comedy the La-La Land Times puts on its editorial page:

On tips from Torcer and Bodhisattva.


Source: http://moonbattery.com/?p=85422


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    • Boo

      Walk away, turn the channel, put down the paper or politely change the subject. They all work, they all mean your not necessarily in agreement and they are how a civilized society takes responsibility for one’s own thoughts. The idea you can control another’s thoughts is just more smoke and mirrors that’s just gonna trip you up and leave you bruised and bleeding.

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