@PalacinkyPDX Point taken. It's not a practical real-world overreach problem. However, the technical definition given by @KevinTwining seems ponderous and obtuse, and "be nice to others" seems a lot more approachable AND actionable AND motivating. That was my only actual point. I don't begrudge these laws if they actually protect folks, and I recognize that I've led a sufficiently privileged life that I haven't had to feel the need to BE protected.

HAVE these laws made you safer? In the face of Trumpian un-kindness, I'm not sure how much help they actually are. I'm not convinced they're a harm to anyone, but not totally sure they're that much of a help either. If people are determined to be asshats, and some uber-asshat gives them a bit of permission ... don't they just think they're above the law, and beyond a certain point, structurally, does the system actually work?

I mean, 60 years on, and Emmet Till's family still hasn't gotten justice. I think the laws against murder are necessary, because sometimes people are even punished for it, and maybe now and then that even serves as a deterrent; but I think the milk of human kindness is what's really needed.

@PalacinkyPDX Emmet Till's family never got legal justice, that's for sure. A kangaroo jury that found the murders innocent. However, Till's mother decision to leave his casket open for view in Chicago, where tens of thousand viewed his remains, lite up the Black world in America. His family never received legal justice for the horrific crime but the outrage at the brutality done to him helped change the course of the nascent civil rights movement in the US. The justice that Till's family received was will beyond that afforded by the US legal system, it was the Civil Rights Laws enacted in the 1960s.

The problem with hate speech laws are that by censoring what people say you are only going to stop them from saying it in public, they will say it in private, and there it can fester into dangerous conversations, of the kind that led to all kinds violence. No I agree with Christoper Hitchens:

"My own opinion is a very simple one. The right of others to free expression is part of my own. If someone’s voice is silenced, then I am deprived of the right to hear. Moreover, I have never met nor heard of anybody I would trust with the job of deciding in advance what it might be permissible for me or anyone else to say or read. That freedom of expression consists of being able to tell people what they may not wish to hear, and that it must extend, above all, to those who think differently is, to me, self-evident."

I will not indulge in your ad hominems.

@PalacinkyPDX I don't advocate passively asking others to be kind and nice if they wouldn't mind too much; I do advocate encouraging one another to be so, by example.

But yeah it's a struggle and it makes no sense to wait around for others to give you equal rights, too. I am at least intellectually aware that I haven't had to fight for my rights as a WASP heterosexual cisgendered male, they were just handed to me on a silver platter (and pretty much an overflowing one). So I tend to defer to folks who have had to fight tooth and nail for things they should have been afforded to begin with, on these topics. Understand that all I'm trying to do is sort out my own understanding of their tactical decisions.

I am conflicted about some forms of activism because I am not sure it accomplishes what people think it does in the long term but I suppose that even if it's true that "you can't legislate morality", maybe the symbolism of doing so makes enough of a difference to justify the potential downsides or unintended consequences of such legislating.

It is not, for me at least, a question of being inconvenienced. I don't engage in hate speech in the first place so if a law gets passed forbidding it, it has zero impact on me. I'm already in compliance.

Personally I have never equated law with morality or [dis]obedience to law with [im]morality -- there's a correlation but not a causal relationship. But I have noticed a lot of people do conflate those things, and if you make their attitudes illegal, maybe that motivates them to behave in ways it wouldn't motivate me ...

Hate speech laws are the overt intrusion of government think into the way we think as individuals.
Christopher Hitchens was a great defender of the freedom of speech

"The only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification is the right of free expression, because if that goes, then so do all other claims of right as well.
Assassins of the mind" - Feb 2009

@cava Hate speech laws exist to protect the right of all to go about their lives without fear, a primary role of any state. Nothing Christopher Hitchens wrote falls into that category. These laws aren’t about free expression of a viewpoint. They are concerned with an active attempt to use free speech to actively incite others toward hatred and violence against those with whom the speaker disagrees, or those that the speaker dislikes.

Free speech: “Religion is stupid”. “People who believe in a god are idiots”, etc.

Hate speech: “People should start attacking ‘xxxxxxxx group of people’, and rounding them up”. “Strike them down whenever and wherever you find them; they’re vermin”. “Burn their houses and (places of worship), preferably while they’re inside them”.

Get it?

@KevinTwining Did you read the news article?

I don't trust the governments interpretation, it is far too easy too silence anyone using these terrible laws.

@KevinTwining You are educating me. I had always thought that hate speech was illegal in at least some US states, but now I learn otherwise.

I would like to point out however that speech such as you have written would probably be illegal in most jurisdictions as “incitement”

[en.m.wikipedia.org]

IMO a crime is a crime and it’s best to disregard the race, gender or ethnicity of the parties involved.

@KevinTwining Fortunately (as far as I and other Americans are concerned) that type of speech "People should start attacking 'xxx... group..." isn't a crime.
Cruel words from another person don't necessarily constitute a verbal threat under the law. The difference between a criminal act and a lack of courtesy are the specific violent nature of the threat and the creation of fear in the threatened person. The proper word for such a crime is "assault," which can be defined as an intended but unsuccessful battery or an act that creates the immediate apprehension of harm. The latter of these two includes a verbal threat. There's a big difference between "those people need their asses kicked" and "I'm now going to kick your ass".

Trump wants to crack down on comedy shows such as SNL. Billionaires apparently don't like being made pubilic targets for the amusement of ordinary people. Same as it ever was, going back to ancient Greece