@Graylight My answer is that it's just too grey. Pretty much any crime can be blamed on something that a public figured said. I agree with laws against very specific acts of speech, such as direct threats of violence, defamation of character, and false bomb threats. But hate speech laws are too broad and have generally been bad in every country that tried them.

@BohemianBoo But do they have to be? I agree that just because Trump said "go get 'em," he isn't necessarily responsible tor the action others took. However, if it can be proven that the speech was made, was deemed hateful by existing definitions, was heard by specific people or groups and was enacted or played out as a result of those ideas and speech, then a person may be guilty of using hate speech in order to incite violence.

But we have definitions of hate speech. According the the UN (and the Oxford dictionary), in common language, “hate speech” refers to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on [i]inherent [/i]characteristics (such as race, religion or gender) and that may [i]threaten [/i]social peace.

Bhikhu Parekh (2012) lists the following instances as examples different countries have either punished or sought to punish as hate speech:

Shouting “[N-words] go home,” making monkey noises, and chanting racist slogans at soccer matches.
“Islam out of Britain. Protect the British people.”
“Arabs out of France.”
“Serve your country, burn down a mosque.”
“Blacks are inherently inferior, lecherous, predisposed to criminal activities, and should not be allowed to move into respectable areas.”
“Jews are conspiratorial, devious, treacherous, sadistic, child killers, and subversive; want to take over the country; and should be carefully watched.”
Distribution by a political party of leaflets addressed to “white fellow citizens” saying that, if it came to power, it would remove all Surinamese, Turks, and other “undesired aliens” from the Netherlands.
A poster of a woman in a burka with text that reads: “Who knows what they have under their sinister and ugly looking clothes: stolen goods, guns, bombs even?”
Speech that either denies or trivializes the holocaust or other crimes against humanity.

Robert Post’s four bases for defining hate speech might help us organize the features of Parekh’s list:
In law, we have to define hate speech carefully to designate the forms of the speech that will receive distinctive legal treatment. This is no easy task. Roughly speaking, we can define hate speech in terms of the harms it will cause—physical contingent harms like violence or discrimination; or we can define hate speech in terms of its intrinsic properties—the kinds of words it uses; or we can define hate speech in terms of its connection to principles of dignity; or we can define hate speech in terms of the ideas it conveys. Each of these definitions has advantages and disadvantages. Each intersects with the first amendment theory in a different way. In the end, any definition that we adopt must be justified on the ground that it will achieve the results we wish to achieve. (Herz and Molnar 2012, 31)

The four definitional bases are in terms of: (1) harm, (2) content, (3) intrinsic properties, i.e., the type of words used, and (4) dignity.
[i]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hate-speech/#WhatHateSpee[/i]

@Graylight See, this is what I mean by too grey. I think it's okay to say something like "Islam has no place here" but not okay to say "Muslims have no place here." But because the line there is so subjective, I think it's wrong to make either statement illegal.
I'm against third world immigration for economic reasons. But anything I say on the issue could easily be twisted into "hate speech."

Now if someone was to say that we need to attack anyone who promotes religion or third world immigration, that I agree should be illegal, because there's a direct threat of violence. But we should be able to have conversations about controversial topics like immigration, religion, and racism.

@Peaceandnamaste I will burn every US flag I come across just to prove that racism and bullshit exists on all sides of a war argument.

@DiegoWolfe You are right. But that doesn't change how prominent of a symbol it is. What most people today call “the Confederate flag” was born as the battle flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Original wartime battle flags, are associated with the Confederate soldiers who carried them. It became even more so when in May 1863 (after realizing the first design of flag in 1861was confusing), the Confederate Congress approved a new national flag (called the stainless banner, which they later changed to get rid of the white) featuring that battle flag. It became a political flag, associated with the independence of a nation dedicated (clearly stated by the terms of its Constitution) to the defense and perpetuation of slavery.

In the decades after the death of the Confederacy, its flags – especially its most prominent battle flag has quite clearly lived on in infamy

@LeopoldBloom Either banned from everywhere or put away in a museum away from the public.

@DiegoWolfe Sir Walter Raleigh, explorer
Sir Philip Sidney, poet
William Tyndale, translator of the Bible
William Penn, founder of the US state of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Swift, author and satirist
Edmund Halley, astronomer
J R R Tolkien, author and academic
Michael Palin, actor and writer
Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace
Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp, chairman and CEO of 21st Century Fox
Chief Justice Mrs Sujata Vasant Manohar, former Judge of the Supreme Court of India
Imran Khan, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and international cricketer
Aldous Huxley, author
Edwin Hubble, astronomer
Professor Stephen Hawking, physicist
Harald V, King of Norway
Bob Hawke, former Prime Minister of Australia
Sir Roger Bannister, neurologist and athlete

Some graduates of Oxford University. No, it's not a book. It uses books. Lots of them. To create well-rounded, productive members of society who have helped progress the human condition fo a thousand years. They may not all know how to install a new breaker panel, but let's look at this:[b] In 2021, the Oxford University acceptance rate was 13.5% (according to data from UCAS). It received 24,645 applications and accepted 3,330 students overall.[/b]

Why are you so angry and resistant to education? Because you don't have it and others do? Education is free, it's abundant, its literally everywhere. Whether you're sitting at Oxford or Valencia community college, further education leads to knowledge, progression, enlightenment, personal confidence, critical thinking abilities and solutions-based thinking. It's available to everyone at any time and those who already have it can't wait to pass it along, as the effect of education increases with every new member. All you have to do is want it.

@Graylight Im not against education you blithering neanderthal, eery person you have noted used physical real world education not just the formal education youre screaming from your goddamned soapbox about, i am calling for more than books to be used to teach a student to go into the real world not just the fucking pages of a damned book this is why i fucking hate humans you stand on fucking stupid hills to die at serve NO value! I am saying kids are fucking morons who cant take what is in book at value, did the founder pf pennsylvania sit in his fucking office only looking at books of the land he wanted to make a state NO he was out and learning book only education is a fucking waste of time money and life

@DiegoWolfe You have no idea what education is and you buy into the five year-old’s myth that one must either be good at books or actual life. They are elements of the same journey. You can’t know that because you’ve availed yourself to “ book learning,” evidently. I know a lot of guys who are savvier on the streets more than you could know and “real life” in a way that you can’t even define. But they live in tents in ditches.

@Peaceandnamaste Cuck!

@BohemianBoo The flag makes me cry.

@Peaceandnamaste

@BohemianBoo why?

@Peaceandnamaste Freedom of speech.

@Cowboybob What about the racism on the other side of the argument? Its very 'head in sand' to think it only occurs and/or occured on one side.

.

@zonavar68 I would argue the flag stands for exactly what it was intended to stand for - the official sanction of slavery. Burqas, while condemned by some women, are embraced by others. They are not a universal symbol of oppression, slavery, bigotry and greed.

The burqa is a clothing choice for most Muslim women. Most contemporary Islamic jurists have agreed that Islam does not require women to cover their faces. Less than 1% of European Muslims even wear a burqa, while in America there are about 1 million Muslim women in America, 43% of them wear headscarves all the time, according to the Pew Research Center. Afghanistan is currently the only nation with laws for mandated wear. However, 14 countries have banned their use altogether. That's called overreaction.

[i]https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2021/04/wearing-the-burqa-is-not-oppressive-the-ban-is/
https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/what-is-a-burqa
https://people.howstuffworks.com/veil3.htm
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/news/a44416/muslim-women-explain-how-feel-wearing-burqa-hijab/
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/02/04/france.burqa.ban/index.html
al-Qaraḍāwī, Yūsuf. "Is Wearing the Niqāb Obligatory for Women?". SuhaibWebb.com. 9 July 2014.[/i]

@Serendipitymaybe Racism exists in human society on all sides of the social argument irrespective of where you are on earth. A person just chooses to look the other way and ignore it when it's being perpetrated by one's own chosen side. Same with slavery (both historical and modern) - it will never go away while ever the master/servant methodology exists and is embraced as the fundamental building block of societies, religions, industries, governments, relationships, etc.