eating sugar and telling liesVerified account

Defending the right of everyone to speak unimpeded by the state is a noble cause. It's also a cause where some topics >>

>> get more attention than others. Right now, that's the right of white extremists, white nationalists, white supremacists to speak hate.

Let's not forget that at any given time, there are numerous other groups being stifled in their speech. But who gets attention?... >>

That's right, you guessed it: The fucking Nazis. And why? Because of belief in the "slippery slope" argument. >>

The "slippery slope" argument is a logical one, that implies that restrictions placed on one group's speech will trickle down to others... >

But, problematically, in the US, this typically requires the belief that rights trickle down from privileged groups to less privileged ones.

We protect the most hateful groups, assuming that by doing so, others' speech will be protected. Frankly, I don't buy it. >>

And with limited attention, funding, etc that means that we often spend our time protecting hate *at the expense of* protecting other speech

I'm not trying to dictate what anyone should do. Everyone deserves legal defense, imho. But we should be interrogating this fallacy.

...because while you're out there fighting for Nazis' rights, the rights of others are still getting trampled. It's about attention span.

This is why I work on liminal issues of expression: Nudity, atheism, minority religions, anonymity. I do that because I will not spend >>

a second of my life fighting for Nazis' rights. Someone else can, but I won't. Also, look at how few free speech orgs fight for nudity.

Finally, a story: An American lawyer, a woman, raised her hand after a talk I gave about the censorship of nudity online and said >>

that what I was doing wasn't important. That I should be working on hate speech, or terrorism, the important issues of our time. Um... >>

imho, the bodily autonomy of women *is* a key issue of our time. Political speech isn't the only speech worth defending. /fin