What on earth is a progressive?
Someone who wants society to improve and move forward, not regress to authoritarianism.
That's the dream, but the reality can very easily turn into a nightmare.
Progressives are left-leaning (beyond the moderate left) - they profess to wishing that the advancing of the human condition can be achieved by simply using social reform and expecting everyone to be nice to everyone else... Adherents hold that all we have to do is sing a few choruses of
"Kum Bay Yah" and the world will automatically become a better place.
Unfortunately, while its a nice idea, the reality is that it is simply naive ideasim in its silliest forum. When things don't work out they way progressives expect, they will start trying to tell everone what is best for them... whether they like it or not. You know the type
- "the general populace are a simple people, they don't know what is good for them - but we know best!". Just as absolute free speech can be a path to authoriarianism, so too can the free speech suppression of progressivism.
Nadine Strossen, former head of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008, explains why hate speech laws backfire.
www.thefire.org
No matter how many synonyms are invoked to try to circumscribe the inherently vague, broad, and manipulable concept of “hate,” these laws unavoidably vest broad discretion in enforcing authorities. Even when such authorities act in utmost good faith, they cannot enforce such unduly vague laws except in accordance with their own subjective values, or those of other people. As one would expect in a government where officials are (appropriately) accountable to their constituents, officials are likely to enforce these open-textured laws in accordance with the values of significant community interest groups.
One person’s cherished repudiation of intolerance is someone else’s hate speech.
Edited by jimbob:
snipped for rule 4
Essentially what she is saying, is that restrictive hate speech laws are weapons that, when used in an attempt silence targets, can, and often do, end up backfiring on the users. It is essentially a form of Streisand Effect - white supremacists, for example, are emboldened by attempts to suppress their speech, they make a lot of noise about it, and that brings more attention to what they say. Strossen cites a great example of this in the Charlesville
"Unite the Right" rally... The participants' chants (
"Blood and Soil" and
"The Jews will not replace us") likely caused a few people to harden their racist attitudes. But a greater effect was that it caused others to repudiate racism and to engage in anti-racist and anti fascist activism. Antifa numbers rose quite dramatically in the wake of Charlottesville.
