i just kicked a drunk woman out of my hotel for calling my gay coworker a fag

"do you think people should be allowed to deny the holocaust in Germany, Austria and other countries where that's illegal?"

oh for the love of god- i'm irish, non practicing catholic. i have absolutely nothing against the hebrew people as a whole.

i am not a nazi, neo-nazi, sugar-free nazi or sunday nazi.

but are you really asking me if an historian (however controversial) should have been jailed for holding conferences (even ones in biker bars) and writing his beliefs that the holocaust was exaggerated?

that is a crazy, and dangerous law. people should be allowed to deny the holocaust if they like. would you like GWB to introduce a law making it illegal to deny God?

the terms "fag" and "faggot" are manifest of ego gone awry. they are symbolic of the American propensity for competition, and like some of the intense reactions to this thread, they are shorthanded attempts at superiority. that "fag" and "faggot" are still abused today, and that standing up against homophobia can spur such ridicule as demonstrated here, points to the Western sacrifice of sensitivity to an individuality troubled with small-mindedness, ignorance and spite.

xpost

spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue creates an atmosphere of worry / threat / harrassment that's slightly more serious

i see and kind of agree with your point, but i would still be uneasy of making grafitti more or less of a crime because of the who the targets are. i'd find it extremely difficult to draw the line.

every crime has to have a victim, i just think that an action should be judged consistently, not on the identity or sensitivities of the victim/target. and I know that's not a perfect point, before i get nailed.

darraghmac you've being needlessly defensive here (altho understandable on a thread where hoos is accused of boastfulness/smugness/whatever)! you don't have to qualify your views with 'i don't condone this btw' and 'oh for the love of god'.

the trouble is, darraghmac, not everyone is as 'enlightened' as you. to you, people who deny the holocaust or use hate speech are loonies, no one takes them seriously surely? but these laws are all predicated on the fact that if unchecked, historical lies and derogatory words aimed at dehumanising minorities will proliferate

xps

every crime has to have a victim, i just think that an action should be judged consistently, not on the identity or sensitivities of the victim/target

it's not about the sensitivities of the target (or only partly), it's about the wider social consequences of hate speech/historical lies

Hey, wow, I get to say "LEX OTM!" Hi-five! Cause once again, like basically NOBODY EVER in the U.S. has seriously advocated criminalizing Holocaust denial, and yes, nations that have those laws tend to have them as remnants of de-Nazification programs and political reconstruction and whatnot.

Seriously, freaking out about the alleged potential for abstract political speech to be criminalized in the US is every bit as frantically ridiculous as thinking there's a "war on Christmas" or that all black people are plotting to rape and kill you.

xpost

i would still be uneasy of making grafitti more or less of a crime because of the who the targets are

It's not the TARGET that makes the difference in that example, it's the CONTENT. And you already live in a nation where the content makes the difference: if I spray-painted "I am going to kill you" on your front door, that would be a rather more serious offense than spray-painting my name.

xpost

standing up against homophobia can spur such ridicule as demonstrated here

i'm really not trying to take a stand here on abuse of homosexuals, but i think any ridicule was aimed at the self-congratulory and (possible) complete dramatisation of the event as breathlessly relayed here.

i am fully aware that this may make the guilty parties look a bit arseholish, myself included, but can we not be so po-faced all the time?

i'm sitting on the fence but i am at least facing darraghmac's direction.

what...opposite him?

numerous xposts

hey, i did say that i wasn't making perfect points- and regarding being over-defensive, i think you'll agree that even on ILX it's hard to even play devils advocate on racism/homophobia kind of issues without getting completely and unneccessarily ripped to shreds.

i think nabisco's point about content is otm, but that content isn't made any different by the fact that i may be homosexual/jewish/a woman/a clown or whatever.

what things is it okay to be self-congrtulatory about on ILE now?

being drunk
maybe finding some sort of unbelievable bargain in the sales

anything else?

liking shit 80's music i think

Spelling "self-congratulatory" right? (Kidding, kidding.)

P.S. Darraghmac has just fallen into the great lie/fear that's at the center of people fearing this stuff -- this bizarre leap to assume that things are being dealt with based on the identity of the victim, as if someone's being offered "special protection," or it's suddenly "more of a crime" to harm a minority than it is to harm a white person. And this very, very obviously isn't the logic: it's that some crimes carry an element of terrorism and threat. If you beat up every Latino who comes into your neighborhood, you're not just committing assault -- you're engaging in systematic intimidation against all Latinos. (Cf a black man in -- I think -- being prosecuted recently under hate crimes provisions for throwing something through a woman's windshield while complaining that too many white people were coming to the local mall.)

"enlightened"

yeah, it's pretty outlandish to argue for hate of any kind, even if it's a word - not as small as it may seem.

xxxpost self-congratulatory = pride, and there's nothing wrong with being proud of being open-minded. it's not as common a characteristic as it may seem. and whether it be pride or homosexuality, the crux of the issue involves ridicule, a small but biting form of hate, both unnecessary and unjustified.

You can't have a thread about free speech without the fire thing, you know.

i just think that an action should be judged consistently, not on the identity or sensitivities of the victim/target.

It's not so much about the target as it is the context, which sometimes includes the target. <trope>You can't yell fire in a crowded theatre, after all</trope>.

Sub-questions for D: Do you think that death threats should be criminal, or warrant criminal investigation? Do you favor throwing out intent in considering levels of murder/manslaughter? Do you think systematic intimidation and harrassment should be legalized?

If someone goes around burning crosses on black people's lawns, do you think the extent of his crimes is trespassing, having a bonfire without a permit, and reckless endangerment?

(If he digs a moat and sandbags around each cross, should we knock off reckless endangerment?)

see, now, surmounter- that was exactly what i was talking about. well done. end of this thread for me.

anyway, stet and nabisco were winning anyways.

see you on another thread, i'm really not going to get into personals, i find established ILXors always seem to come out on top for some reason.

Threats are a weird area. I don't think I've ever taken them seriously, although I know a lot of people do. It's just that, in my experience, people who make threats to harm or even kill other people very rarely actually carry them out. But some do, of course, so... And if threats carry a racial or sexual aspect, they seem more insidious. Criminal, though?

(I'm on the fence wrt hate laws. We have them here in Canada, but I'm unsure what I think about them.)

Dude, nobody's getting personal, and you strike me as a pretty established ILXor yourself! I'm just trying to see if you acknowledge that there's a line where speech becomes harrassment, intimidation, or threat. We accept that they do when we say stuff like "I'm going to murder you"; are there no criminal acts you see working the same way?

L+F: w/r/t hate crimes, consider that if someone's actually assaulted someone for reasons of bigotry, he's kinda already proved himself willing to follow through. I dunno, I can understand arguing that these laws aren't necessary, but I don't quite see how people assault the logic or philosophy behind them. If we were looking at an actual successful 60s-style campaign to, say, intimidate some group of people and keep them out of a neighborhood, I think we'd all see how an individual assault wasn't just an assault -- how it was part of a conspiracy toward racial injustice and a mild, localized form of terrorism, you know?

I need to think this stuff through more.

nasbisco, I worked with street kids for a long time and I've heard every threat under the sun and just learned not to take them seriously, so even "I'm going to murder you" means little to me. But if you tack on "you little fag" or "you fucking n****r" to the end it does get a lot darker (okay, that's a big "duh" isn't it), but if the person making the threat calls out to bystanders, say, looking for support or solidarity it gets worse still. I suppose I'm wondering where the real world line gets drawn.

Or, my first sentence in this post!

There is no hard and fast line, that's why it's left up to judges/prosecutors/juries in indidiual cases to decide whether or not it's been crossed.

And I haven't really answered you, have I?

Instead of laws, however, couldn't bigotry (during the commision of another crime) be an aggravating factor for individual courts to decide on a case-by-case basis, though? Hate crime is too close to thought crime, maybe. But I can't really argue with you scenario of someone already with a history of assault against a minority. Just trying to get this straight in my head.

Ha, xpost with Eppy.

(With a reminder that it's not that way in Canada, though. We have hate laws here.)

Instead of laws, however, couldn't bigotry (during the commision of another crime) be an aggravating factor for individual courts to decide on a case-by-case basis, though?

That's what "hate crime" MEANS in the U.S.!

I mean, geez, I'm just going to paraphrase a bunch of crap from Wikipedia so we at least all know what we're talking about here, at least in US FEDERAL terms:

-- a 1969 law that makes it a federal case if anyone "by force of threat of force willfully injures, intimidates or interferes with ... any person because of his race, color, religion or national origin," specifically with regard to federally protected activities including voting and going to school -- the Civil Rights context of that one should be absolutely obvious

-- a 1994 SENTENCING act that increases penalties for crimes committed on the basis of race, religion, etc.

-- various state laws, both criminal and civil

All approved by the Supreme Court in 1993 on mostly the same basis I'm outlining above -- Rehnquist's opinion sez: "This conduct is thought to inflict greater individual and societal harm.... bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest."

so what we really need is federal precedent classifying the word 'faggot' and 'retard' as hatespeech?

(P.S.: The fact that lots and lots of Americans ALREADY imagine these laws are one step away from throwing people in prison for being racist or insulting one another is one very good reason we will never actually have laws that involve throwing people in prison for being racist or insulting one another.)

but are you really asking me if an historian (however controversial) should have been jailed for holding conferences (even ones in biker bars) and writing his beliefs that the holocaust was exaggerated?

that is a crazy, and dangerous law. people should be allowed to deny the holocaust if they like. would you like GWB to introduce a law making it illegal to deny God?

-- darraghmac, Monday, May 28, 2007 7:04 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

yes i fucking am because he was a fucking nazi who addressed nazi rallies. he did not say the holocaust had been 'exaggerated', he denied it ever happened.

speaking as somebody who falls into no less than 3 constitutionally protected minority groups (4, if you consider a college stint as endangered waterfowl) it's difficult to reconcile the forbiddenness of "intimidating or interfering with...' [because of race, religion, class] with the experience of having been intimidated and interfered with because of non-race, non-religious, non-class issues for many, many, years.

as i see it, in any incident where the motive or aggravating factor in a crime is raw bigotry – acted prejudice with malevolent intent - it should not matter what the particular bias is for/against. it shouldn't matter if one agrees or disagrees with the premise: torching a pedophile ex-con holocaust denier's car is (and should be) as criminal as torching a charitable convent's nun-wagon-comissary truck.

our moral and ethical sympathies notwithstanding, any behavior that seeks to harm based on intolerant judgement of a group or bloc's politics, beliefs, or lifestyle is dead wrong. case-by-case action against individual members, if necessary, is exponentially more preferable, just, and in line with the underlying principles of the constitution & bill of rights.

AT WORK, I like to say, "That's not [name of business] language." And then if they continue it, "That's not [name of business] language. Leave now."

It sounds so kindergarten techer but somehow most people take it seriously.

its the battle of this thread and big hoos for which is more self-indulgent

-- and what, Monday, May 28, 2007 9:13 AM

http://www.imagehosting.com/show.php/696226_catbag.jpg.html

fuck you internet

its the battle of this thread and big hoos for which is more self-indulgent

-- and what, Monday, May 28, 2007 9:13 AM

http://www.filenanny.com/files/44f7b9c9f14e0/cat-bag.jpg

it's all so crazy

u know u have a ways to go as a gay man when dude gets ripped apart for posting an anti-homophobia agenda, and the woman yelling faggot in the hotel is defended.

i think the self-indulgent thing is being mistaken as such when it seems to be a matter of plain surprise. if i ran into a woman like that, i would honestly be rather fucking shocked, and i'd sure as hell vent/post a thread about it.

hmm, weird, my internet browser has taken away all of the posts defending the drunk woman.

big hoos didn't post an 'anti-homophobia agenda'. he chucked someone out of his hotel for getting drunk and calling someone 'faggot' and then posted about it.

xpost

ur really "surprised"?

Some people need to brush up on "speech act theory" around here. It seems that the idea that "speech is not an act" is getting people tied into all kinds of weird conceptual knots. Surely heterosexuals, of all people, ought to be familiar with performatives, since the absolutely classic example of a performative speech act (a use of speech which also creates consequences in the real world and thus constitutes an act upon and within that world) in the texts of Austin and Searle is the chaplain saying "I now pronounce you man and wife". Speech is action. "Hatespeech" is a use of language which doesn't just "exemplify" or "reinforce" external contexts of harm: it is itself an act that harms, given certain "conditions of satisfaction" (i.e. external circumstances in which it can function effectively). When straight people call each other faggot as a joke do they harm each other? No, because the conditions of satisfaction haven't been met. They know that they aren't faggots and so the wrongness of fit between word and world ensures that no harm is done to each other. But when it becomes de rigeur to call people faggots in the public sphere, queers don't just "feel" threatened, they *are* threatened. If such statements are treated as acceptable, this maintains straight privilege. Note that I am not discussing the legality or illegality of these acts: within certain bounds, it's perfectly legal to say things that inflict harm on other people. Couples and families do this all the time. Apparently message boards do too.

HOOS, would you have been so professional and courteous if you weren't being paid to be as such?

really surprised, though i know what u mean in that i shouldn't be.

i thought we were just talking about how it might not be wrong to blast the word faggot in public? pretty sure there was an argument about something like that just now? to me the fact that that argument happened defends that woman.

and not tolerating the use of the word faggot constitutes an anti-homophobia agenda, duh

thnks drew for saying what i was trying, and failing, to articulate above thread

i just think this thread is kindof ridiculous? some guy gets upset about some stupid fucking bitch, posts a threads about it, and what's the reaction? he gets a bunch of shit and the stupid woman spurs Vassar-worthy ideological debates regarding the validity of her behavior. i guess i like debates like that but it seems slanted, hard.

what's wrong with a, damn hoos, that woman's an idiot and it sounds like u played it cool, rock on

If I hadn't been on the clock at my workplace it's quite possible it's quite possible I wouldn't have said anything at all. I asked her to leave because I knew (as an employee and acting manager) that I reserved the right to do so. I'm generally not a confrontational guy.

xxpost

xpost to alisa, that was.

totally woulda bitched her out even if i didn't work there, r u kidding. that's just not acceptable