I think I linked the Wiki article on Wehrhafte Demokratie down there somewhere - maybe it'll make my opinions easier to understand. It's a core concept of the German political system, but apparently something that is rather foreign to Americans. Maybe it illustrates the differences between our views on society and the state.
And the problem is that Americans are too finicky about their sacred constitution to make it comply with the UDHR? I know that it is a problem, but I cannot understand why it should be a problem. 
You realize that pretty much nobody complies with the UDHR, right? Because nobody does. It was a document drafted in the post-war idealism glow of crushing the Nazis (and the drafting committee was headed by Elenore Roosevelt, for the record). And also, the primary purpose of the UDHR was to create a document that showed what "human rights" were. Before that point it was fairly vague and rarely used as a rhetorical device.
Pretty much what I was going for - the UDHR is not practical as a real law and should rather be seen as a guideline.
No discrimination based on political opinion for example could mean Germany would have to stop throwing Holocaust deniers in jail, which we hopefully all agree is an understandable course of action given our history.
Disagree. Strongly. Germany's complex about Nazis may be understandable, but that doesn't make it right.
Hm, maybe I should explain: Denying the Holocaust is, at least in Germany, something much much more serious than spouting some other bits of random nonsense. It's not just another wacky political opinion. By denying the Holocaust you place yourself outside society, outside of the fundamental agreements that rule civilized interaction. You openly declare yourself an enemy of everything that civilization and society stand for, and I believe that acting against such enemies in a manner apt to prevent them from doing harm - actively marginalizing them by laws such as this one, for example - is at the core of defending our society.
Wehrhafte Demokratie is an accepted concept in Germany, even if it may be very foreign to someone socialized in America.
More generally, any corrosive and intolerable political opinion would have to go unsilenced, even those calling for direct action against state and society or against segments of the population.
Ah yes, "corrosive and intolerable". Sure, it's racists today, and since racists aren't people it hardly matters if they're silenced, but I wonder whom it will be tomorrow whom the state puts on the chopping block. It has no right to wield that power, not for any purpose. Violence is another matter, but speaking is quite another.
You're reminding me strongly of the Christian right in America here, they also have a tendency to say that certain messages have no right to exist because they're contrary to the national purpose.
See above, mostly. A couple of things though: Why do you think that speech and violence are competely separate spheres? That seems rather arbitrary. Also that slippery slope argument is fairly silly in that form, since it can be used without big changes to argue against anything other than radical anarchism. And I'd like to remark that I never talked about national purpose, to the contrary: It's easily possible to formulate all these thoughts in a moral relativist framework.
That way you'll only achieve a muffling of those voices, to stretch the metaphor a bit. But some people shouldn't even be given the opportunity to become active politically.
Because only the hard power of jailing all those whom stray into extremism does the job. You're already clearly not able to do that, what with the number of neo-Nazis in Germany and the existence of the NPD. Frankly, you're making them stronger. The whole rhetoric of fascism is based on retribution of enemies of the people keeping them from their true potential. I wonder who's filling that enemy role these days, for the European right to be steamrolling so well...
It's not immigrants, not really. They just say that to get people riled up. It's the oh-so well meaning state apparatuses deciding they really can tell people what to think because they're social/liberal democracies and not fascist dictatorships. It's for their own good, after all.
MSH, I'm not American, I'm European, and not even that right-wing a European. Giving the state the power to jail people such as those discussed does not imply advocating throwing them all in jail to rot. The German neo-nazis are doing a fine job making themselves look silly, and our civil society is very effective at marginalizing them - that does not mean one should carelessly throw away another powerful instrument to keep them down. (And no, fascist rhetoric does not work like that. If you want I'll go dig up examples, but I don't want to end up on more watchlists than necessary.)
Your last paragraph has me confused though: Do you seriously believe the ideological successors of the National
Socialist German Worker's Party are against big government? Again, you're talking about Europeans - we think differently, even our loonies do. There's a bit of rhetorics against the Greens and their nanny state aspirations, but that's all - their real issues are elsewhere, and immigration is definitely one of them. Google 'NSU' if you want a bit of a shock.
I suppose that I'll be a black sheep and say that I've got no problem with a Indiana's law. A private business owner should have the right to refuse service to someone for whatever damn reason he chooses, be it gender, intoxication level, or choice of payment. No one is going to starve because of intolerant business owners, especially with public concern and the free market both pointing the other direction.
Freedom to run business trumps the concern of equal access to non-public services.
Two counters to this. Firstly, the public concern/free market argument is already clearly untrue, since it was Southern business owners who most strongly fought for segregation even though they had the most money to lose from it as they lived in the locale with the greatest number of black people. Ideology comes before profit (and occasionally the two synergize, hence the businesses with "Segregation Forever" posters outside to rile up white customers).
Secondly, we live in a capitalist society. These non-public services make up almost the whole of our society. So yes, being denied service in that way is harmful. You don't need to starve, you just need to get the message that you're unwanted and constantly have your life disrupted because of the hatreds of other people. In a society like ours, when you open a business, you are making yourself a provider of our society. You get profit, sure, but the role comes with responsibilities. Just as you can't rightfully serve rotten meat because you're a private restaurant, you can't not serve people based on your personal biases which are divorced from business logic.
If we are going to be capitalists, we should at least actually be capitalists and not capitalists-unless-inconvenient.
An addendum here: By allowing discrimination by private initiative, you breed resentment, and ten or twenty years down the line divides in society, great civil unrest, violence, and so on and so on. Allowing it is blind ideology; even Macchiavelli would advise against it.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1245193 times)