Hate crime bill: Hate talk in homes ‘must be prosecuted’

The huge ideological change that has occurred in the west in the last 10 years will be a mark in history.

When it seemed that we were constantly advancing towards more freedom, something in people's mind snapped, we stopped and then we started walking back in the opposite direction, towards more state control.

How much of this change can be attributed to social media?

That is pretty draconian. How would that even be enforced without sweeping violations of privacy? At some point you are no longer asking what topics are offensive, but rather what topics are safe.

Isn't this exactly the plot of some Orwell story or something? The children are encouraged to report their parents' thoughtcrimes to the party. I'm actually serious.

Europe's speech laws are pretty terrible. It's one big advantage of living in the US: speech has serious legal protection.

Hate is somewhat subjective in some area's - it is only when it clearly leads to actions that impact others unfairly, does it become more clear cut. Otherwise it can open a Pandora box of interpretations.

For example: Is the Scottish word Sassenach offensive, as an English person I can laugh and appreciate it, others may not and take offence. Equally in today's society it is easy to take offence and that right there is how they class a hate-crime in some circles - if you offend somebody and by that, they take offence even if no offence was meant nor intended.

This is so fucked up I don't even know what to say. Maybe that's good, god forbid it'd be hateful.

This is ridiculous. I highly doubt it would withstand review by any Judge who also knows the law. It won't last long. This is the same thing that leads to tyrannical governments like in China, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

It is interesting how little people understand history and how this has been the norm over the millenia. These things happened in Babylon and in Persia thereafter. It happened in Rome and Greece. It happened in 7th century Arabia and continues to today. It happened in the 15th Spain until the 19th century. It happened in Europe in the early 20th century. It happened in Russia from the early to late 20th century. It happened in the USA in the mid 20th century. It has happened in China since the early 20th century. It is happening now in all sorts of countries throughout the world today. These are just a small selection of this problem happening at various times and in various places throughout history.

The warnings about this have been know for a long, long time and it requires vigilance on the part of the citizens of every nation to play their part in protecting the freedoms one has.

Unfortunately, there are far too many who get all too easily offended and are all too easily lead into fear by whatever leadership exists in their respective countries.

We have no resilience in our populations today.

Article is login-walled, so I’ve only read the first few paragraphs. For clarity, what actually happened here? I’m unsure whether a new bill is being discussed that says this explicitly, or a _suggested_ interpretation of a bill by a lawmaker, or a _legal_ interpretation of a bill by a judge/magistrate. Those would all have different implications.

The Public Order Act 1986 has an exception:

> It is a defence if you are inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe the the words or behaviour used would cause or would be heard or seen a person outside.

I believe the argument being made in the reading of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill is essentially that you can still commit a hate crime in private. Which seems fairly obvious —assuming you subscribe to the notion of hate crimes— but never expect the Times to see things with that sort of resolution.

Wow. This is incredible. How on earth do people believe they have the right to tell people how to think and what to say in their domicile?

It used to be a funny parody or satire we used to assign to despotic fascist or communist regimes... but has this come back to bite us.

I'm not espousing hate speech. I wish people were civil and pleasant but that's not reality and we also disagree on what is hate (depending on perspective) --but this crime bill is beyond the pale. It's draconian. I'm not even sure China goes to this extent unless it's anti-government speech.

People don't know what they are doing to themselves.

This is right up there with communist states having husbands, wives and children rat on each other plainly to weaken citizens and strengthen the government.

The fact that this is even in serious consideration and not completely laughable shows how far the overton window has shifted on policing speech.

My fear is that we can't go the other direction, back to sanity, when it's gone this far.

Weird how almost no-one has read the article, nor the bill, but this thread is full of comments about how terrible this new law is. (It's not a law yet, it hasn't been passed).

Lol. This was flagged within 1 hr. Talk about irony man...

Is there a non-paywalled version?

From the little that's visible, Jimminy Cricket that's insane. Would that make anyone who refuses to wire up state-controlled microphones a criminal?

The law violates itself.