Reply #7: in a nutshell, yes

[iverglas]

Acknowledging that does not amount to calling for such speech to be outlawed, and no one has any basis for suggesting that it does.

Acknowledging it is the first step in examining ways of addressing the problem. Making something a crime is not the only way to do that.

Hate speech doesn't just wither and go away, and it does have effects on people.

The targets are made to feel insecure in a variety of ways -- physically insecure, insecure in their position as full members of the society who can expect equal treatment in all regards, and so on. And too often they become actual targets of people who hold the ideas that hate speech expresses.

The intended audience can be influenced in its thinking and influenced to passer à l'action as the French put it, to go from thinking to acting.

When a society tolerates hate speech, it exacerbates the insecurity felt by the targets and emboldens some who might tend or want to engage in action.

Not tolerating is not equal to outlawing and punishing. That is just one small subset of not tolerating.

Calling hate speech what it is -- in the media, in social settings, in institutions -- is one first step toward expressing intolerance for it. Identify it when it happens, identify the people engaging in it, talk about their motives, talk about what people who talked like them have done in the past, talk about how people who are targeted by speech are commonly also targeted by acts, talk about all the effects that hate speech has on individuals and societies.

There is no more an invisible hand in the marketplace of ideas than there is in the marketplace of goods and services. The good does not just oust the bad by some kind of natural selection process.

Cheap and dangerous crap will be produced and sold and bought in the retail economy if we don't do something to stop it, because there are people who can't afford better or aren't exposed to better choices, or are persuaded to make bad choices by the people whose interest it is in for them to do that.

The same thing applies to dangerous ideas. If they are not confronted and combated, they aren't just going to go away.