this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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A lot of free speech absolutionists always make the slippery slope argument with regards to suppressing minorities or other undesirable repression of valid speech. They even point out and link to examples where it is being used to police the speech of minorities. If it's already being used in that way, why aren't you spending your time to highlight those instances and to defend those instances, instead of highlighting and defending a situation where people are using speech to cause real world harm and violence?
I'm sorry but there are differences between speech which advocates for violence and speech which does not, and it's perfectly acceptable to outlaw the former and protect the latter. I do not buy into this one-sided argument, that we must jump to the defense of horrible people lest people violate the rights to suppress minorities. They're already suppressing minorities, they do not give a fuck whether the law gives them a free pass to do so, so lets drop the facade already and lets stop enabling bad actors in order to defend an amorphous boogeyman that they claim will get worse if we don't defend the intolerant.
My initial concern is that internet access is mostly considered a utility which at least the UN considers a human right. "If you can take away a right, it's not a right, it's a privilege." That being said, "rights" are a social construct anyway which we regularly violate for "good" reasons, eg prison violates one's right to freedom of movement, and as an institution they weirdly reinforce The State's monopoly on violence and arbitration of who qualifies as "human" - in a twisted sort of way, prisoners are rendered "less human" by the state by their rights being taken away. Maybe it would be better to consider taking away internet access via ISPs sort of the moral equivalent of turning off someone's water if they're using it to poison the town well? If you abuse your right, you don't get to use it anymore as a defensive mechanism for everyone else's rights, ala sex offenders being put on a list which violates their privacy for better protection of more vulnerable groups.
I'd rather prisons focused on rehabilitation, and kept everyone in there until they were sufficiently rehabilitated. Instead of having second class citizens who can't participate in society because of what they're branded with, and prisons that do everything they can to break people and make them incapable of seeing themselves as part of society.