Where the Line is

I literally have a half-dozen half-written posts from the last month and a half but here I am starting a new one. It's because I've had an epiphany on why free speech for white supremacists is such a problematic issue.

We all agree that killing people is a net negative. We agree on that to such an extent that my tepid description of it a "net negative" makes it sound monstrous because it doesn't convey the extent to which I should condemn killing people. We also recognize that there are various reasons why people kill other people:

• The killer is angry that the victim was cheating on them
• The killer is disturbed that the victim is unresponsive to their demands to stop eating the face of another person who appears to be unconscious, maybe dead

So killing people is a bad thing but we are able to draw a line and say: on this side of the line where you are just struggling to deal with your anger the killing is unacceptable; on this side of the line where a possibly-still-alive person is being mutilated by someone who has been driven to psychosis by bath salts, killing is acceptable.

Let's make a five point scale. At five we have situations that are so over-the-top that we all agree that shooting someone is pretty much the best possible option. From

one to three

we have varying degrees of sympathy for the shooter, but we still find it very clear cut that shooting someone was unacceptable. At four we run into the problem cases where we understand why the shooting was justified in the mind of the shooter but think they ought to have made more of an effort to escape the situation, or we think that a reasonable person ought to have known better, or some other set of facts makes us question whether it was justified.

Let's imagine a similar scale for suppressing political speech, for trying to deny people a platform which to spread their views. Just like killing, it's weighted towards allowing people to say what they want. A one might be "I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for." and a two or three might be, "Ice in November? What happened to Global Warming?"

A five would include things that are obviously already illegal. If you specifically ask people to kill your someone of an opposing political view or threaten to kill them yourself, for example.

A lot of people who argue that white supremacists should have the same speech platform as the Green party seem to think that advocating genocide of a group of people based on their ethnicity, religion or skin colour is a four and we are haggling over how far we ought to go. Actually, a lot of them seem to think it's a three.

It's a five.

I've made the joking-not-joking analogy that if we want to protect my freedom to cut vegetables we have to protect someone's freedom to stab people. Free use of knives. That analogy may seem unfair, but that is the degree to which people who say that white supremacist recruitment events are just another kind of free speech sound insane to me.

They think that banning the Communist Party's speech is the equivalent of shooting someone because they killed your father, while banning nazi speech is the equivalent of shooting someone because you felt afraid when your level of fear was totally irrational and you weren't really in danger. I agree with them on the Communist Party bit, but to me banning nazi speech is shooting that drug-addled face-eater. It's shooting the blood-axe-wielding berserker running for the maternity ward. The line is way over there and there is no question that we are across it.

So while they think they are arguing principles of free speech, a tacit part of their argument is that promoting genocide just isn't that harmful. It's not harmful the way saying,

"smash every window in this place"

would be, or the way that

drawing an unauthorized picture of Mickey Mouse

would be.