Man found guilty of ‘grossly offensive’ tweet
news.stv.tv
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> The 72-year-old, whose family served in the armed forces...
That's just surreal. Bringing in little old ladies to testify that your tweet hurt their feelings. I really wanted this to be fake, but other outlets are running the same story. Madness.
It's a very, very anti-armed forces comment. I may disagree with it, but it's a completely valid point of view to hold. The idea that the armed forces, whose job it is to kill, is above this sort of criticism (wishing death, hellfire), is pretty mental and actually quite worrying.
Imagine Major General Snodgrass says "we must go to war with Russia now and hang it if it's nuclear!" Someone responds that Snodgrass is an idiot, a fool, a bounder and trying to compensate for the fact that he is slightly less sexually attractive to humans than a badger that was hit by a lorry last tuesday fortnight.
Snodgrass will have medals and be described by establishment types as a "National Hero." It goes with rising through the ranks. Also likely upper class for students of the British class system. Prosecuting people for being critical of a national hero who supports the class system is a thing some dream of seeing happen. This is a step forward for them.
Again I don't think it's right that all UK soldiers are evil and am generally opposed to killing in any circumstances where there's a viable alternative. The idea that expressing the other side of such an opinion should cause you to be prosecuted is insane on every level.
I've heard that the most celebrated holiday throughout the world (albeit on different days) is "Independence from England." Death is what soldiers deal in as even the armed forces most strident supporters will agree. It's the whole point, otherwise they'd be aid-workers.
That's undeniably true but it's oversimplifying and cherry-picking the facts. The literature covering this subject is so vast that many libraries would not have the space to contain it all. What's contained within that information is a myriad reasons that explain why that statement isn't as straightforward as you would have us believe. It explains why nuances and fine minutiae are so important in any such discussion—and so on.
You should also not forget that war and soldiering have been inseparable from the human condition from the very beginning of recorded time, furthermore, archeology supports that view much, much further back—even back to the time of the Neanderthals.
As much of many of you who've never been in the position where you have to make a decision come a war may dislike the notion, war isn't going to be declared obsolete anytime soon. Only an ostrich would believe that.
One wonders what you would say when an enemy was at your country's door and unless some of you actually stopped it, then not only would your life be in danger but also it's likely everything you own will be pillaged and that everything you stand for will be rubbed out in utter disillusionment not to mention that your women would most likely be raped and then killed.
I say that as someone who had his rights to say no taken away by my government and was forcibly inducted into the military system against my wishes.
Even in England they celebrate the day someone tried to blow up the Parliament!
Would that have justified the tweet because now the hurt is somehow more equal? How do we measure relative hurt?
There is no actual harm in offence alone.
Of course, Graham Chapman would not have made such a bland comment.
Camera pans back as Palin turns towards it to close out the news report and in the background a swarm of naked people jog blithely into the distance.
I found this more surreal. Sir Walks-A-Lot. (yes I know, but I had to read it twice.)
I see Brits are pining for the empire so hard that they went straight back to Victorian sensibilities.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_5_of_the_Public_Order_...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU
While I still do not claim to fully comprehend British culture, there is always an odd undercurrent of authoritarianism whose chill I can feel now and then – it is worth noting that it bridges the political divide. I have talked about this with my British colleagues and heard numerous explanations, but none that I feel satisfactory. At times when I feel particularly dark I joke about this with said colleagues and say: “You say that you went to war with the Germans on behalf of the free world. But at times I wonder: Was it not that they in a way were outdoing you and you were feeling a bit envious?” Now, clearly this is intended to be offensive and not something that I genuinely believe, but like many jokes, it somewhat works because there is some kernel of truth at its core.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-535...
The SNP are trying to be far more authoritarian than the Tory's at this point.
Who said that? They definitely ruled over a lot of the non-free world at the time. India? East Africa?
A large part of the world supported the Axis simply because at the time, the British Empire was the relevant empire oppressing them, and by default, anyone who hated the British supported the Germans and/or Japanese.
A possibly apocryphal story is that a Brit was trying to explain to an African why it was necessary to fight the Nazis. He said "each country must rule over its own people, the Germans over Germany, the Poles over Poland, the French over France..." and the African said "..."
Gandhi was firmly against fighting the Germans and Japanese, and many Indians equated fighting for the Axis with fighting for independence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army
"After the war ended, the story of the INA and the Indian Legion was seen as so inflammatory that, fearing mass revolts and uprisings across its empire, the British Government forbade the BBC from broadcasting their story."
>But at times I wonder: Was it not that they in a way were outdoing you and you were feeling a bit envious?”
Were they? At the outbreak of WWII, the British controlled "25% of the world's population, and of 30% of its land mass".
The phrase "odd undercurrent of authoritarian" itself is particularly odd, because what's odd about a country that ruled over one of the largest, if not the largest, empires of all time having an authoritarian streak?
But “grossly offensive”, man that’s absurd.
But that someone tweeting “the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn” is guilty of anything besides being lame, is beyond what I can understand. It seems like this is about something more than just being "grossly offensive", did this somehow make someone in the military upset or something? Surely it can't be illegal to be offensive now can it?
> The 72-year-old [Janet Hunter Jess], whose family served in the armed forces, said: “To see someone wishing British soldiers dead, it still hurts me. It still hurts me that anybody would disrespect someone that had given their live for the country.”
> Ms Jeffrey, 51, stated: “First of all, the gentleman in question had done so much to raise awareness and funds for the NHS in England and became a bit of a national hero at the time, but then the fact it referred to British soldiers as well.
It seems indeed this is more about that people in the military, or related to those with people in the military, was offended by the tweet.
I wonder if the irony around that this fellow fought in the second world war for freedom of speech for everyone is hitting any of these people offended at the tweet.
I'm not aware of WW2 being about freedom of speech.
I'm pretty sure if Britain had ended up being occupied, they'd have had less freedom of speech than they enjoy today.
Second world war was obviously about multiple causes, not just one. But liberty and freedom was a pretty big part of that, and freedom of speech is obviously a big part of those two. If the other side of the war won, freedom of speech would have looked very different (or not exists at all), that much is clear.
Given that soldiers typically kill people, it seems inevitable that someone will hate them, whether justified or not.
If you look at countries that demand unconditional patriotism, they are usually flirting with dictatorship or outright fashism. It's not something a free society should emulate.
This is a man who had become known as a national hero, who stood for the resilience of the people of a country struggling with a pandemic and the services trying to protect them.On a side note, Ari Shaffir better clean up his act. He said some bad shit about Kobe after he died.
The standard for “offending” will continue to encompass more and more speech, too.
Just dumb.
The original video: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Ro2aKSUIezY
I still think it's ridiculous he got in trouble for it though.
No, it wasn't a very good joke, but some of those live by the reaction of the audience...
What has been brought onto him because of that video is a travesty.
It was a(n amateurish) skit. The Monty Python did worse, did he need an authorization for that or something? This is getting ridiculous and the trial was a farce itself, with real life consequences.
Neither should have a record of any kind of doing what they did.
Praise the first Amendment, the kind of liberalism European governments strangely aren't in a hurry to copy...
I think the legal standard is that he had to have finished an Oxbridge degree, or at least spent a semester in the Footlights.
Of course even if they were an actual nazi that should still be protected.
How is what is "offensive" even defined, legally? Is it entirely up to the jury's interpretation, or are there characteristics that the jury is required to say that the speech has? They hint at this when they describe protected classes, but I don't know much about UK law.
I suspect the majority of people involved in this case would agree, however none of them wanted to admit the emperor is wearing no clothes.
Was he found guilty of excessive “u” usage as well? We should probably be conserving vowels during a pandemic.
Not charged with a crime, but almost weirder in a way.
Edit: story is here: https://badnews.substack.com/p/capitol-police-sent-cops-to-a...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sen-johnny-isakson-called-fbi-o...
That CEO is now in jail because the tweets were 100% accurate but the Senator was never punished.
Uh, there's a matter of degree.
In the US, that'd be protected political speech. The most one could expect is scorn.
The UK may have a lesser speech protection than the US, but still a much broader set of political speech is allowed than in Russia or NK.
The degree gap is usually quick to be bridged, via this common anti-fallacy called "slippery slope". Give it a few more years.
That's kinda a silly argument, given that free speech rights have generally increased in the UK in the last few decades.
Slippery slopes are good to be aware of, and hope to avoid. They aren't inevitable. Things don't progress constantly towards the worst possible state.
https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/deid (also deed) https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/auld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
Just the accent would be covered by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_English
1. Assuming that under a just war theory, a just war can AT MOST be just for one of the warring sides
2. big armies aren't any more likely to fight just wars than small armies
We can conclude that if you're a soldier in a war, there's a better than even chance that it is unjust, and deserters are on average more honorable than soldiers."
Admittedly less catchy.
If we're all in prison, none of us are in prison, is that how it works?
I heard some comedians say that they don't perform in Canada because of the same type of anti-free-speech laws. Maybe some Canadians can chime in but there are cases of comedians getting charged with hate speech laws.
I think as Americans we forget most don't have 1st amendment rights.
I know Canada though is going to pass some crazy online hate speech laws this year and take all this to another level.
The article states that he was convicted under the Communications Act whose Wikipedia page[1] lists some other "notable prosecutions" - worth checking to know the other times where the UK government has overstepped themselves.
The Scottish Crown Prosecution Service has some guidelines[2] for prosecuting the "offensive content". In my eyes this tweet does not fulfil the criteria (although this may be covered under "national tragedy"so I hope he can appeal.
From the COPFS document:
Prosecutors should only consider action in this category of cases where they are satisfied there is sufficient evidence that the communication goes beyond being:
• Offensive, shocking or disturbing; or
• Satirical, iconoclastic or rude; or
• The expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion even if
distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it; or
• An exchange of communication that forms part of a democratic
debate
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003
[2] https://www.copfs.gov.uk/images/Documents/Prosecution_Policy...
If you're asking why those provider orgs don't have the money they need the answer is simple: we've had ten years of governments that thing the NHS should do more for less.
it's kinda like Americans donate money to schools, despite the fact that they are supposed to be properly funded by the government. The NHS is basically on the brink of collapse at the best of times both due to chronic underfunding and chronic inefficiency.
Also i realize it's not at all uncommon for Americans to donate to hospitals either.
https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog/public-health-week-tiktok...
This is extremely common today.
A tragi-commic episode is the Tony The Tiger porno guy. A guy viewed a porno he received by email, I think, featuring a man in a tiger outfit (furries?). He was charged with some indecency crime. ( Sorry, Gwern, but your deepfake pedo porn idea would not work here, since it is a crime to even depict virtual acts which are banned under the decency law. You can't cosplay pedophilia or bestiality.)
Then there was the Scottish fella who was prosecuted for hate crime, after teaching his girlfriends pug to do a sieg hiel. The video, “M8 Yer Dugs A Nazi” went viral, and the boyfriend was charged and fined. I won't link it, in case it becomes a crime to share this stuff. “My girlfriend is always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is, and so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi.”
I only mentioned some of the most famous cases off the top of my head. There are hundreds more.
The problem is, for all the hate crimes like this that become famous, thousands more go unreported, and unpunished. Fortunately, the law society hopes to correct this, and is lobbying to remove the 'private dwelling' exception from hate speech laws. Making it a crime to mock goths and punks at the breakfast table. https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/04/stirring-up-divisions-in-priv...
1) .tv is Tuvalu.
2) STV is a voting system.
/s
This was v. condition of his sentence:
"The final term of his probation order will be that when he is exercising his right of free speech and speaking against AHS Health Orders and AHS health recommendations, in a public gathering or public forum (including electronic social media); he must indicate in his communications the following:
I am also aware that the views I am expressing to you on this occasion may not be views held by the majority of medical experts in Alberta. While I may disagree with them, I am obliged to inform you that the majority of medical experts favour social distancing, mask wearing, and avoiding large crowds to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Most medical experts also support participation in a vaccination program unless for a valid religious or medical reason you cannot be vaccinated. Vaccinations have been shown statistically to save lives and to reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms."
In a sort of artistic, foreshadowing in a book kind of way; I find the parallel of having to wear a mask and your speech being muffled by it, and being muted to a degree, a symbol of the current situation. Others are noticing this parallel too.
Maybe in some dark, comedic future our phones will sound out disclaimers when they hear us contravene the official narrative in some way.
In this specific case, what about the tweet in question is worth defending? Is it worth defending only because it happens to be speech, or is there some actual merit to said speech?
[edit: sure, downvote me instead of engaging the argument. Prove your first amendment worthless]
For the record, I did not downvote you.
For instance, the merit of this tweet has now become more significant due to the awareness it has ended up spreading about offensive speech laws in Scotland. Similarly, individual tweets about a leader or country may be seen as offensive and meritless in our time, but perhaps in another 50 years historians look at them as a sign of changing opinions on some matter, giving them merit.
Even if we drop that kind of grand view of things and just focus on smaller matters, companies pay a lot of attention to offensive speech because tracing down the cause will help them improve their product. Thus, clearly offensive speech has merit.
If we determined that offensive speech was meritless, people saying offensive things wouldn't start saying things politely, they'd just say the offensive things privately, depriving society of a valuable feedback method.
There is also the freedom of association, so you do not have to associate with people whose opinion you don't like.
Many countries have laws that disallow you to disturb the public order. These are old laws that aren't based on any principle aside authority, vanity and perhaps a little practicability in some situations. They should be improved.
Blasphemy is illegal in my country. This law was not applied for decades and is therefore more or less invalid. It just hasn't been deprecated because laws do so very slowly without much incentives for public officials. So basically blasphemy is legal now. I would argue with the inception of the net and internet comments, offensive speech is legal too.
-----
> Riley initially posted a screenshot of a January 2019 tweet by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones about an attack on the former British National party leader Nick Griffin, which said: “I think sound life advice is, if you don’t want eggs thrown at you, don’t be a Nazi.” She added “good advice”, with emojis of a red rose and an egg.
> Later, Murray tweeted: “Today Jeremy Corbyn went to his local mosque for Visit My Mosque Day, and was attacked by a Brexiteer. Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi. This woman is as dangerous as she is stupid. Nobody should engage with her. Ever.”
> Riley said she was being sarcastic in her tweet, did not call Corbyn a Nazi, and told the judge that Murray’s tweet caused serious harm to her reputation.
-----
Riley was awarded £10,000.
The saddest part about this is that Riley decided she should take someone responding to her tweet to court.
Riley wasn't slandering Corbyn by cheekily calling him a Nazi - although part of her defense was explaining how Corbyn is actually an antisemite (which would be irrelevant or even counterproductive in a case accusing Murray of maliciously lying.) It's her honest belief.
Murray honestly believes that Riley is stupid, and that Riley was showing her agreement with a physical attack on Corbyn. This can be a questionable interpretation if you realize that Riley probably hates Owen Jones, too, but it's certainly reasonable. Besides that, everyone had access to the Riley tweet, and could decide for themselves.
It's an unbelievably low standard for liability.
-----
> There are three major defenses against a defamation suit. The first is “privilege,” which typically protects journalists when they quote otherwise defamatory statements made by officials in parliament or the courts to allow for full reporting of issues of public interest. The second is “truth,” which protects the person being sued if they can show that what they said was true. And the third is “honest opinion,” which applies if an opinion was expressed and that opinion was held reasonably and expressed honestly rather than out of malice or to harm someone’s reputation.
> Murray’s lawyers believed they could defend their client using not just one but two of the defenses: truth and honest opinion. Was Murray not justified in inferring that Riley was equating Corbyn to a Nazi when she implied that the two cases were similar, especially in the context of Riley’s earlier statements? Was Riley’s comment not agreeing with Jones’s approval of a previous attack and suggesting it was deserved this time too? And was Murray’s view not expressed honestly and with the intention chiefly to defend Corbyn’s reputation rather than harm Riley’s? (Calling someone “stupid” in a heated exchange on Twitter is not usually considered defamatory, otherwise we’d have many tens of thousands of people facing enormous fines.)
https://www.mintpressnews.com/rachel-riley-libel-defamation-...
The concept of Free Speech is very quickly being eroded around the world. Ira Glasser, head of the ACLU throughout the 80s until the early 2000s, was on Bill Maher last Friday. He said that when citizens don't defend Freedom of Speech, then you basically rely on the government to tell you what you're allowed to say, and that's extremely dangerous. Then you get things like this, where people are convicted of tweeting and censorship.
That said, I don't know if the UK has protections for free speech the way the US does. As a Canadian I know that the freedom of speech is not held in high regard as the US, so maybe that comes from its UK heritage.
Interestingly there isn't really such a thing as UK Law; there is the Law of England and Wales, the Law of Northern Ireland, and Scots Law, the final one being applicable here. These three systems are markedly different, and for criminal cases there is not even a shared supreme court for the three jurisdictions.
In Scots Law the term "Sheriff" has a different meaning to how the term is used in US law enforcement. It refers to the Sheriff Court [0], a Sheriff being a judge.
> That said, I don't know if the UK has protections for free speech the way the US does.
It doesn't.
So "grossly offensive" seems about right when you put context like that into play of thought.
Low amount of solved crimes? Make it illegal to be offensive on Twitter and suddenly lots of crimes gets solved.
If you use the wrong metric then people will game it. Now watch governments do the same.
They've already been doing that for ages: crime rate, gdp, employment, inflation. Here is a clip from my favourite show that highlights this:
Decision making which relies on trust and reputation works well if an organization is small (50-100) and there is no big stuff turnover. Metrics are scalable - you can increase organization size from 1000 to 100000 and they'll continue to work (as bad as before but not much worse).
So true.
In a world with information overload, the real trick is not having lots of information, it's knowing which variables really matter. Bad bureaucracies and journalists often fixate on the wrong stats, which is usually what's easiest to measure or benefits them personally the most.
In the case of Quora, they seemed to prioritize signups and decided to become a gatekeeper to loads of actually useful information for humanity. Twitter appears to be sliding down this same path. The managers responsible for these decisions probably have loads of metrics "proving" that they're geniuses for these decisions, but I'd say that they're not measuring the right variables which are a lot harder to figure out.
This may be a controversial statement to some, but in the case of Covid, the governments of the world have been fixating on what benefits them most ("permanent" emergency powers, the beginnings of a digital social credit score system through the backdoor of vaccine passports, shoveling trillions of dollars around that will inevitably lead to gross corruption, a permanent in-built excuses for every failure they preside over, an opportunity to reset the economic system (you will own nothing and like it), etc) and what's easy to measure (the omnipresent "cases") while harming a load of other important variables that also really matter to peoples lives and health: the survival of the small businesses their family built, social cohesion and mental health, early cancer screening, physical fitness and low BMI, the right to absolute bodily integrity, and numerous other important things that are harmed by the fixation on only one aspect of health.
> won't even send a cop out for less than a homicide any longer
You might have cause-and-effect backwards here.
Talk to an actual cop and you'll quickly learn how wrong your theory is.
what you describe is basically a blackmail by the cops. Blackmailing the public that way kind of suggests that it isn't just few bad apples - it is the whole police system which is morally corrupt.
I'm not saying they weren't, but especially for quality of life type calls where a cop used to come out, no way is that worth responding too. And if you paid attention to what BLM etc have been demanding, it's to reduce disparate impact on certain groups of police calls (FAR more calls for black males for example then middle aged asian females)
There are just too many cases where a quality of life type call like this (you haven't yet been actually beaten) or a white person feeling "threatened" turns into a major issue -> police respond, end up needing to use force, the thing escalates.
Perhaps you could try to be a police officer and help out.
The USA lost in Vietnam, went on to have a very mixed record in the 1980s, got their confidence back in the early 90s, lost some of it in the mid to late 90s...and...well, the 00s taught the USA military again to be humble. Not a good template for municipal police departments.
When every major BLM-esque protest in the last several years was triggered by the death of a black person at the hands of the police, that characterization is "grossly offensive"
Not saying you should be put on trial for it (like in the article's case). Just stating a fact.
We could debate their tactics or the value of property damage to a social cause in terms of convincing moderates. But your presentation is pretty gross.
No need: they are just quitting and getting other/better jobs. Civil servants (teachers and police, among others) aren't slaves after all, they have plenty of options.
An example is that the guy who solved this "mean tweet" problem is the same guy who could go and solve the burglaries problem. Assume you have a team that analyzes cyber crime that is underemployed but the team is required for rare cases. In their free time they enforce "mean tweets" (I'm not arguing that is okay, I'm arguing about resources). The assumption that they could use their free time better to solve burglaries is probably not true. Unless they Aram Mojtabai from the Blacklist. All of his resources are 1:1 as he can do anything.
You are the one making assumptions that firing people doesn't exist as a concept.
You missed the point which was not normative - that resources are not always interchangeable at a 1:1 ratio. You can clearly fire and hire wherever you want. It's the efficiency of that transaction to be discussed. Does the value gained by adding an enforcer outweighs the value lost by removing a "mean-tweet-enforcer"?
If the force's problems are caused by a shortage of enforcers and adding one more enforcer provides a huge value... while at the same time this "mean-tweet-enforcer" provides little value, then absolutely, make the trade.
But if this "mean-tweet-enforcer" does a lot of other valuable things, and this one article that made the news is just a one-off, while at the same time the police are not at a shortage of people but have process issues leading to the reported evidence failures, and adding another enforcer does not help much - the trade may not value society.
I just see a lot of arguments that we should reallocate resources without analyzing the tradeoff where one side may gain little from a lot of expenses. The OPs article states that the burglary issues, from what I can see before the paywall, were caused by evidence failures. If the argument were able to show that the resources lost by looking into this tweet could be reallocated to solve the evidence failures in the article by securing more CCTV feeds or something, then that's a strong argument. Either way, the comparison is theoretical. There are no mean tweet enforcers. The discussion is not normative, but positive. Simply not all resources are a 1:1 trade.
You seem focused on the economics of the situation and I’m hard pressed to come up with a number for police who are a joke vs. police whom the public have faith in. But a cheap way to get that benefit is stop having law enforcement act like asses.
Sorry you couldn't feed your kids last Christmas, we just _had_ to spend all your taxes on judges and solicitors to put people in prison if they do something grossly offensive - like fart in public.
While I wish for no one's death, being hurt that someone hates professional killers is ridiculous. The hero worship of soldiers needs to end.
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
A trillion dollars wasted in a World War lined the pockets of a few thousand people, that at the end, urged the government to intervene because 'the allies' were about to lose the war and wouldn't be able to repay their loans.
You could grow a mustache just from saying that out loud.
He mentions that the interviewer knows his army history and he observes that no one asks about the families of people he's killed while a soldier. He was instead awarded medals for such behaviour.
The only chance any of this stuff could be reformed is off the back of a party with a huge majority ramming it through without much discussion or input from the public. Which is to say it could happen, but it won't be any kind of vote winner or manifesto promise. And it wouldn't be very democratic.
The Courts could do something about it. The European Convention on Human Rights (and the Human Rights Act 1998 which incorporates the Convention into UK law) protects freedom of speech. Its free speech guarantee has a lengthy list of exceptions, but it is up to the Courts to interpret the scope of the exceptions. Thus far, they've tended to read them broadly, limiting the value of the Convention's free speech guarantees; but, maybe one day the Courts will start interpreting them in a more narrow way. I wouldn't get one's hopes up, but it wouldn't be an impossible development.
The UK Conservative government plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a "British Bill of Rights" [0]. It is hard to predict what the outcome will be. On the one hand, the overall intention is to "water down" the European Convention on Human Rights, making it harder to pursue claims under it in the UK Courts. On the other hand, the UK government wants it to put special emphasis on "free speech" rights. In particular, it wants to prioritise freedom of the press over the right to privacy, contrary to recent case law which the UK government perceives as putting the priority the other way around. We can't yet know whether this project of replacing the Human Rights Act will succeed, nor can we yet know what exactly any replacement legislation will say, nor can we yet know what the Courts will make of it. But it is possible that it might improve the situation on free speech, even at the price of regression in other areas of human rights protection.
[0] https://consult.justice.gov.uk/human-rights/human-rights-act...
There was a great outcry (led by Murdoch's media properties) that British citizens were tweeting pro-ISIS, anti-British sentiments but couldn't be charged under any law.
So the Tories changed that, and it was a popular change.
Of course, people always support laws that control "Them", but laws apply to all of us.
This kinda stuff is classic "Leopards ate my face, says lady who voted for the Face-eating Leopards Party".
1: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127 2: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/12/section/43 3: court documents aren't published yet, info from media reports
> The only difference is the severity of the consequence, for now.
So the only difference is most all of it.
Not just that. They will also sentence him. Sorry it is not silly, it is a crime in my eyes to deprive human from freedom for the things like that.
Sure it is not NK. And it will probable never be. But turning into some China like version of social credit system is definitely a possibility with the way things are going. So what would be our arguments then - we do not burn people alive?
And this man. Like the rest of his generation he was out with a machine gun in the fields. He’s beyond criticism? Because he’s old? Because he walked in his garden for charity? Because he was on the English side and all English soldiers get a pass, wink wink? He probably blew 30 young soldiers brains out on tour.
Harry Miller: Legal victory after alleged transphobic tweets https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-59727118
Disabled Woman Arrested, Interrogated Over Domestic Violence Stickers https://www.reduxx.org/post/disabled-woman-arrested-interrog...
I find the desperation in this what-uppity to be appalling and contemptuous because ego boosting medals, media recognition is worse than a decent wage.
“There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting" words those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplinsky_v._New_Hampshire
Freedom of speech is (nearly) black and white. We cannot feel free to express our speech even if others find it offensive. If we do restrict it, that is not freedom.
"produce a clear and present danger of a serious intolerable evil" and “imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
In subsequent cases even literally burning a cross on your lawn wasn't deemed "fighting words"
The doctrine is very nearly hallow. So hallow that should I yell in your face I'm going to get you alignItems! I shall have to add right now with the candlestick so it should qualify!
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/959/fighting-wo...
2) British judges can and do cite rulings of the US Supreme Court.
For example: If you say "Joe is a liar" and then you are heard saying "I said that to ruin his reputation" it should be criminal. You did not express your belief or view, you merely used speech to cause harm. I am looking you "freedom from religion".
Outside of the legal realm, there needs to be a conversation about intent. A lot of socio-political issues can be toned down a lot if you consider the intent and perspective of the other side. For example, a pro-choice person sincerely believes a fetus is not a human yet and a pro-life person sincerely believes it is a human, with thay in mind they are not baby killers or misogynyst oppressors respectively. They both hold sincerely held contradictory views about conception. Regardless what side you are on, consider some or many on the other side do not have malicious intent and are not your enemies but fellow citizens on the same side.
To the most part, intent is illegal not actions. Provable intent with the assumption that you are innocent until reasonably proven otherwise.
That's what slander is. It's already illegal (not sure if it's a felony, though, or just a misdemeanor).
Apart from slander, though... strong disagree. You should be able to be offensive. Being offensive is in poor taste, and often is also poor tactics, but it shouldn't be illegal. Best reason why: "When it's illegal to offend, being offended is a weapon." (I stole that from someone here on HN, but I don't have the source handy at the moment.) I do not want to give that power to every busybody and power-tripper with an internet connection.
You should be able to cause offense so long as your intent is not only to cause offense. If your words match your belief it should be protected speech. What I am saying is for when people say offensive things for the sake of causing harm to others.
In US the constitution protects citizen speech...from the governemnt. UK doesn't have a constitution.
Your opinion is objectively against the US constitution.
The UK has a constitution, but it isn't a single written document, or even entirely written:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_K...
That's what Twitter is for? Seriously?
How are we going to deter assholish behavior from people who are out of their parents' and probably have no friends? I don't think jail time is the right answer, but at that point the government is the only real entity with the ability/right to correct their behavior.
I think politics and government are intertwined as a matter of history, not as a matter of inevitable fact. Political rivals can disagree and use systems to disenfranchise one another, but they can also agree on some norms of decency (in an ideal world these would align with their constituents, but as a matter of history they tend to be the norms of some established elite).
If you want to call my position myopic, look at Jan 6th and what the lack of censorship had done then. There is plenty of harm caused by deliberately not censoring some things, as it gives a chance for malicious groups to grow.
What I think is myopic is the overall attitude "censorship bad, free speech good." It's incredibly individualistic and could only exist in the experiment that is the U.S.
Also: the line between nonviolent and violent behavior is, as all other lines, fairly blurry. Do we censor attempts to incite riots under free speech? If so, why do we not also censor statements that promote a culture of hating society?