Orthogonal to the main point, but I think the banning of holocaust denial seems a really stupid policy. Not for freedom of speech reasons, but because the policy is “aimed badly”, failing to cover some of the people we would presumably like to restrict, and restricting (at least if the law is taken literally) some viewpoints that seem harmless.
If there is a person with Neo-Nazi politics running around in uniform intimidating people then I have a serious problem with that person and can see the point in a law designed to limit their neo-Nazi-ing. But, that person might not actually deny the holocaust (they may, for example think happened but not think it was a bad thing).
Now, imagine we meet Wilfred. He is more discerning (in his estimation) than the typical human and he has realised the truth that human history actually started on January first 1960. On this day the aliens put the first humans on Earth, gave them false memories and set up all the initial conditions for their bizarre experiment. Wilfred is in violation of the laws against holocaust denial, not because he has mentioned the holocaust in any of his confusing youtube videos, but because the general claim “everything before 1960 was false memories” obviously includes “the holocaust didn’t happen” as a special case.
We can think of other people who are not neo-Nazis, who are harmlessly denying the holocaust. If you talk about the simulation hypothesis (we are all in the matrix) are you denying the holocaust? What if you propose that you are a boltzman brain?
Orthogonal to the main point, but I think the banning of holocaust denial seems a really stupid policy. Not for freedom of speech reasons, but because the policy is “aimed badly”, failing to cover some of the people we would presumably like to restrict, and restricting (at least if the law is taken literally) some viewpoints that seem harmless.
If there is a person with Neo-Nazi politics running around in uniform intimidating people then I have a serious problem with that person and can see the point in a law designed to limit their neo-Nazi-ing. But, that person might not actually deny the holocaust (they may, for example think happened but not think it was a bad thing).
Now, imagine we meet Wilfred. He is more discerning (in his estimation) than the typical human and he has realised the truth that human history actually started on January first 1960. On this day the aliens put the first humans on Earth, gave them false memories and set up all the initial conditions for their bizarre experiment. Wilfred is in violation of the laws against holocaust denial, not because he has mentioned the holocaust in any of his confusing youtube videos, but because the general claim “everything before 1960 was false memories” obviously includes “the holocaust didn’t happen” as a special case.
We can think of other people who are not neo-Nazis, who are harmlessly denying the holocaust. If you talk about the simulation hypothesis (we are all in the matrix) are you denying the holocaust? What if you propose that you are a boltzman brain?