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DanArmak comments on What truths are actually taboo? - Less Wrong Discussion
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At some point the law must decide what is a correct revision and what is an "incorrect" revision attempt that would amount to denying the (legally enshrined) conception of the Holocaust. Regardless of the net value of the law against Holocaust denial, it is a law restricting speech.
Right, I disagree with the law, in case you were wondering. I don't think it contributes any significant value. I support marginalizing bigotry, not criminalizing it.
Law can criminalize things, but it can't marginalize them. It may be that the politicians who make the laws agree with you that a society whose people voluntarily marginalize Holocaust denial would be better than one where the government suppresses Holocaust denial by law. But to them, it's not a directly available option, so they prefer to play it safe.
This is an aside, but yes it can.
I'll explain my view. Here are two entirely consistent statements:
On this view, the United States does mostly well. Klansmen have a hard time getting newspaper columns, TV shows, and contracts with major publishers. Association with the Klan is a serious cost in polite society. But we provide police to protect their marches.
How?
So, if you pass a law that doesn't make it illegal to X, but does mandate that I can no longer do X in public buildings, and mandates that I have to pay substantial annual license fees in order to do X, and that the licenses must be applied for in person at City Hall during business hours... how is marginalizing X different from what that law does to X?
The law regulates X. Whether it succeeds in marginalizing X is an empirical question.
Many things are legally regulated and yet not marginalized, in the original sense of being not just rare but frowned upon by mainstream society. A few examples off the top of my head: drivers' licenses (state-issued and can only drive approved cars). Gun carrying and shooting (state permits for carrying, for purchase, can't shoot in the air anywhere you please). Selling food (food quality inspections, registration/permit to open a business, can't open a shop in the wrong city zone, special taxes). Etc, etc.
I agree with all of this. My point was simply that it's possible for the law to succeed in marginalizing X... as you say, it's an empirical question.
It had originally sounded like you were claiming it was an impossibility... that the law can't marginalize things... but I gather that's not what you meant.
Originally I simply meant that the law can't order things to be marginalized. Parliament can pass a law, or the government can issue an order, saying something is forbidden; but they can't directly say something is marginalized.
So they have to work through side effects. Of course that's possible and sometimes it does succeed. But it's highly uncertain ahead of time whether a law will succeed in marginalizing something, much more so than whether a proposed law will succeed in reducing or eliminating a behavior it explicitly outlaws.
I think you two are having a semantic argument that can only occur because English doesn't distinguish between imperfective and perfective verbs (roughly speaking verbs of process and verbs of completion/result).
(nods) Makes sense. I'd just misunderstood you initially.
I'm now amused by the notion of passing a law that explicitly mandates that, say, gum-chewing is marginalized. That is, we're all obligated by law to frown on it in public, shun its practitioners, and so forth. (I don't mean to suggest that this would reliably marginalize gum-chewing, merely that it amuses me.)
Do a before and after of the American labor movement with the central event being the Red Scare. Do a before and after of Christianity in Russia with the central event being the Bolshevik Revolution. Legal crackdowns can ultimately affect thought.
I'm not really familiar with US history, so let's talk about Christianity in Communist Russia. It wasn't merely marginalized, it was almost entirely outlawed after the Revolution.
The church organization was dismantled, its property and funds were confiscated, including most actual churches, and new ones were not allowed to be built. People could legally practice religion in private, but anyone who publicly declared their religion was forbidden from being a Party member, from holding any senior post, and generally was persecuted and oppressed. Many people (and in particular many priests) were persecuted much more harshly, being murdered, tortured, deported, etc. by the regime.
And after the Communist regime fell, in only a few years Russia has become about as publicly religious as the US. Which goes to show the Communist attempts at atheist education failed, in part because people were attracted to anything the Communists were against.
I don't see, in this example, either how the legal crackdown was marginalizing but not outlawing religion, or how it succeeded in affecting thought.
Yes, and that outlawing worked. Orthodoxy fell from holding near-universal adherence and being a pillar of state power to a fragmented, hated patchwork, which was re-allowed to exist during World War II as a submissive state organ.
While the state lasted, Russians really did become atheists and Marxists, though as Bertrand Russell footnotes his History of Western Philosophy, this practically meant replacing Tsar-worship with Stalin-worship. Criminalization led to marginalization. Similar things happened to "infantile leftist" communists and "factionalists," and with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, militant anti-fascism.
These are just particularly dramatic examples. Unfortunately, not all censorship and oppression has the Streisand Effect. I think regimes would act at least a little differently if it did.
I thought you were going to bring up examples of how the law can marginalize something without making it illegal. Instead this is an example of the law marginalizing something by making it illegal. It seems we misunderstood one another.
I originally said that the law couldn't (merely) marginalize something, it could only outlaw it entirely (and then it might be marginalized or disappear entirely). So, if the German politicians want to marginalize Holocaust denial, the only legal tool they have is to outlaw it entirely.
Ah, we were talking about different things, then. But yes, I think it can do that too. I think that Supreme Court rulings helped to make racism taboo. Returning to the labor movement, passing laws that prohibit forming closed-shop contracts are a great indirect means of marginalizing labor, or simply the non-enforcement of laws against firing labor organizers.
... which is significantly lower than before it was outlawed.
Had it never been officially discouraged in the first place, I would still expect it to be less popular in 2013 than 1913. Wouldn't you?
The "secularization hypothesis" is seductive and common, but if you google, you'll see that it's debated whether societies do in fact become less religious as they get richer.
Honestly, I'm so uninformed any opinion I have on the subject is almost totally uncertain. I've typed out multiple replies to this comment, and deleted them all because I simply didn't have a high enough confidence rating. Sorry!
OTOH, religions can either get more or less popular, so all things being equal (which I doubt they are in real life) lowered popularity is evidence for the laws working.
But is still higher than other Western countries today, and is a very sharp rise over the past twenty years, which may be still continuing.
Would this be true if communism hadn't fallen?
Still, you're right, it doesn't seem to have stuck.