48 percent of college undergrads agree death penalty should be applied to "hate speech"

[Occam's Banana]

In the venn diagram of people who "really meant it" and people who "did something about it", the overlap between those two groups may indeed be relatively few.

It's impossible to prove the size of the first group,
but the group that "did something about it" was a provably extremely large group.

I don't disagree.

Many of the people in the "did something about it" circle of that Venn diagram were just johnny-come-lately bandwagon riders and "go along to get along" order-followers or the like. For practical purposes, whether they "really meant it" or not is irrelevant. But they'd have had no bandwagon to ride, nothing to go along with, and no orders to follow, had it not been for that group of relatively few people in the overlap.

And when you're getting loaded into a train by men with guns, is there really a difference at that point, if they "really meant it" ?

At the point you are being herded into ghettos, loaded onto trains, or queued up for gas chambers - no, there is no difference.

It's much too late by then. That's why something should be done regarding the relative few in the overlap group, before it gets to that point - even if that "something" is just getting the hell out of Dodge. (That's what I meant when I said "unfortunately, they failed to deal with the relative few who 'really meant it' and did do something about it".)

 

[tod evans]

What about "death penalty" (or any other "such harsh punishment", as the proposition is stated in the OP). Do the respondents understand this to refer only to capital punishment as the end result of a structured and formalized trial process? Or do any of them understand it to include the more immediate (and rather less formal) consequences of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place? (If it is the latter, then our very own @tod evans might well agree with the proposition as it is presented in the OP - and he is certainly no left-indoctrinated college-boy snowflake.)

Maybe I'm too stupid to draw the correlation but punching someone in the mouth for being insulting is a far cry from having government agents load them on a bus or outright kill them.

There's no quicker, or in my opinion, better way to teach manners and decorum than immediately and painfully without government interference. Then again I believe "He needed killin' " is a viable defense available to everybody except government employees.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Maybe I'm too stupid to draw the correlation but punching someone in the mouth for being insulting is a far cry from having government agents load them on a bus or outright kill them.

There's no quicker, or in my opinion, better way to teach manners and decorum than immediately and painfully without government interference. Then again I believe "He needed killin' " is a viable defense available to everybody except government employees.

That difference is exactly what I was getting at. "He needed killin'" and "having government agents [...] kill them" are two quite different things - but either or both could be counted as the kind of "harsh punishment" the survey statement is concerned with, for purposes of deciding whether one agrees with it.

 

[acptulsa]

Maybe I'm too stupid to draw the correlation but punching someone in the mouth for being insulting is a far cry from having government agents load them on a bus or outright kill them.

And yet there is the mindset that punching them is wrong under any circumstances, but government killing them is totally just if government says so. And it isn't uncommon.

 

[TheTexan]

unfortunately, they failed to deal with the relative few who 'really meant it' and did do something about it".)

Likely because there is no practical way to identify those relative few who "really mean it", nor is there any practical way to identify who is [going to] "do something about it".

Which is why I don't see any practical benefit to attempting to put people into buckets on how "really" they mean it - its not actionable, nor is it measurable.

If 48% of people say they want us dead for our speech, barring other irregularities in the polling, the practical approach is to simply take them at their word. If only a small portion of that 48% are true believers, but the remaining portion are more than willing to follow their orders, there is no practical difference.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Likely because there is no practical way to identify those relative few who "really mean it" [...]

Which is why I don't see any practical benefit to attempting to put people into buckets on how "really" they mean it - its not actionable, nor is it measurable.

If 48% of people say they want us dead for our speech, barring other irregularities in the polling, the practical approach is to simply take them at their word. If only a small portion of that 48% are true believers, but the remaining portion are more than willing to follow their orders, there is no practical difference.

I agree. I don't see any practical benefit to trying to divine which people "really mean it" and which ones don't, either - which is why I don't recommend that anyone waste their time trying. In fact, my point is that there is no need to do so. Among those who might "really mean it", the only ones who really matter are the ones who actually did (or are doing) something about it. That is the bud that must be nipped, or the root that must be struck. The "48 percent of college undergrads" from the OP are ancillary.

[...] nor is there any practical way to identify who is [going to] "do something about it".

This is true - but I haven't been talking about trying to identify who is going to do something. I have been talking about those who actually did do [or are oing] something. Those are the people who matter, and they can be identified (by virtue of the fact that they did or are doing something) [1]. They are the ones who compose "that group of relatively few people in the overlap" that I referred to in my previous post. Absent that group, there won't be any order-followers (whether "true believers" or just opportunistic go-along-ers), because there won't be any order-givers.

If they ever even do anything at all, most of the people who agree with statements like the one in the OP (because they approve the use of deadly force in the name of thought-policing and speech-controlling) won't do anything about it unless and until some relatively much smaller group of people actually act to implements such a regime.[2] It is the latter group that should be the locus of attention and reaction/counter-action, not the former (who are mostly just "useful idiots" and assorted hangers-on). Once they've established and entrenched their regime, it's too late. The upshot of all this in the context of the OP is that it isn't the student respondents who are the real danger (any more than were typical German citizens - including the ones who enthusiastically "sieg heil"-ed when Der Führer's motorcade drove by) - it's the (relatively fewer) politicians, bureaucrats, administrators, and their enforcers who actually enact what those (relatively greater) student respondents merely (have been indoctrinated to) endorse.


[1] The crime and tragedy of the Holocaust was exacerbated by the fact that so many did not take sufficiently seriously what the Nazis were actually doing until it was too late, and so could not react/counter-act in a timely manner with sufficient numbers. If there ever comes a time when a state-enforced "death penalty" (or other severe punishment) for "offensive speech" is implemented here, it will probably occur under the same dynamic.

[2] And even then, many of them still won't do much of anything significant beyond merely agreeing with or endorsing the regime.

 

[TheTexan]

I agree. I don't see any practical benefit to trying to divine which people "really mean it" and which ones don't, either - which is why I don't recommend that anyone waste their time trying. In fact, my point is that there is no need to do so. Among those who might "really mean it", the only ones who really matter are the ones who actually did (or are doing) something about it. That is the bud that must be nipped, or the root that must be struck. The "48 percent of college undergrads" from the OP are ancillary.



This is true - but I haven't been talking about trying to identify who is going to do something. I have been talking about those who actually did do [or are oing] something. Those are the people who matter, and they can be identified (by virtue of the fact that they did or are doing something) [1]. They are the ones who compose "that group of relatively few people in the overlap" that I referred to in my previous post. Absent that group, there won't be any order-followers (whether "true believers" or just opportunistic go-along-ers), because there won't be any order-givers.

If they ever even do anything at all, most of the people who agree with statements like the one in the OP (because they approve the use of deadly force in the name of thought-policing and speech-controlling) won't do anything about it unless and until some relatively much smaller group of people actually act to implements such a regime.[2] It is the latter group that should be the locus of attention and reaction/counter-action, not the former (who are mostly just "useful idiots" and assorted hangers-on). Once they've established and entrenched their regime, it's too late. The upshot of all this in the context of the OP is that it isn't the student respondents who are the real danger (any more than were typical German citizens - including the ones who enthusiastically "sieg heil"-ed when Der Führer's motorcade drove by) - it's the (relatively fewer) politicians, bureaucrats, administrators, and their enforcers who actually enact what those (relatively greater) student respondents merely (have been indoctrinated to) endorse.


[1] The crime and tragedy of the Holocaust was exacerbated by the fact that so many did not take sufficiently seriously what the Nazis were actually doing until it was too late, and so could not react/counter-act in a timely manner with sufficient numbers. If there ever comes a time when a state-enforced "death penalty" (or other severe punishment) for "offensive speech" is implemented here, it will probably occur under the same dynamic.

[2] And even then, many of them still won't do much of anything significant beyond merely agreeing with or endorsing the regime.

I view the 48% as potential energy. Imagine a bowling ball on a shelf.

The "relative few" are the ones who get the ball rolling.

You can try to take out the "relative few", but that bowling ball is still on the shelf, waiting to get pushed off.

 

[Occam's Banana]

I view the 48% as potential energy. Imagine a bowling ball on a shelf.

The "relative few" are the ones who get the ball rolling.

You can try to take out the "relative few", but that bowling ball is still on the shelf, waiting to get pushed off.

That is an apt analogy. I would only add that "taking out" the relative few is a much more tractable problem than "taking out" the 48 percent.

And to mix metaphors, the "48 percent" can also be thought of as a kind of stock pond from which future members of the "relative few" will be drawn.

 

[acptulsa]

And to mix metaphors, the "48 percent" can also be thought of as a kind of stock pond from which future members of the "relative few" will be drawn.

Yes. But it's some comfort to know that only a very few of the bowling balls are sharp enough tools for the job.