Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK
theverge.com
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Churchill summed it up best, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, which means people will be made examples of as and when needed.
Looking at the cases it seems like "the needs of few" at the top outweigh the needs of many. So cut the BS Mr. Churchill
Seems correct on the money-adjusted metric
I’m disillusioned, discovering that it wasn’t Spock (Nemoy) uttering this as his dying words.
Did someone eventually tell Churchill that sometimes “the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many?” Or do I have to wait many years in the future to hear that sentiment?
No, it's an ideal that some countries claim to aspire to, and some seem to be moving away from. (Those lists of countries are not as disjoint as they might seem).
It’s always people. Biden is a person. Putin is a person.
Hiding behind language like country or state is part of the propaganda and mind virus such people rely on, insuring agency defers to concept. They’re self serving people, not concepts.
Sadly this isn't the case in the West anymore. Most people come from a rather meaningless and mind-numbing job, turn on the TV and expect to be entertained. And seeing your neighbor from a different political camp punched in the face is the oldest form of entertainment the humanity came up with. Look at many social justice programs now: "group X has been suffering historically, so let's now make group Y suffer in some other way to make it fair" as opposed to "let people from X and Y build shit together for the sake of prosperity".
This way will inevitably bring poverty, people will eventually wake up and start asking the right questions about the dropping quality of life and affordability of assets, but it can take decades more of arguing on who's shitpost was more offensive.
Citation needed.
"African-Americans have had worse access to educational resources, so let's shut down gifted programs for everyone." https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/08/us/new-york-gifted-and-ta...
"The population of certain high-status schools is not demographically identical to the population at large, so let's stop using objective criteria in university admissions." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-test-optional-sat-act-s...
"Girls do worse in math class than boys, so let's change the curriculum to be less about math and more about social justice." https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13658
The last article doesn’t mention word “girls” or “female” at least once on the page.
Likewise, there is an ongoing court case about Yale (which is also spilling over into discussions about other schools) discriminating against students by race. See https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/13/yale-illegally-discriminates.... They have been trying to transition to more subjective methods of student filtering for a while now to hide this better. Rather than include an entire bibliography of the context behind the change, I just linked to that change being enacted, since that's what I considered the important thing being asked for (the proof of systems being made more unfair/objectively worse).
I can't give you bulletproof explanations of why these changes are being made - no one can. No one has come out to explicitly say, "We're changing the math curriculum because [group] is doing worse and we need to tilt the field in their favor." It's always couched in "better world" language - it's more just, more equitable, allows students to learn better, etc. But the claim was that social justice reforms are more focused on destroying something providing value to a privileged group than trying to come up with ways for everyone to achieve better outcomes together. That's what these changes, in general, show.
Instead of having the opportunity to go to a specialized gifted program, even if it's harder for people of some races to get in, no one gets one.
Instead of auditable, comparable, and clearly defined criteria for college acceptance, it's entirely subjective and based on the Admissions Office's biases.
Instead of a math class that teaches actual math, even if some students find that boring or difficult, we have whatever California is doing.
Assuming zero-sum scenarios (such as hiring or school admissions) this is the basic premise behind affirmative action, and is why Ivy league schools (such as Harvard) and state schools (such as California) attempt to suppress Asian and white admittance in favor of black and brown:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/us/university-of-californ...
In other cases, it is directing tax payer money away from general funds towards specific groups:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-29/palm-spr...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/25/reparations...
Finally, there are times where subordinates are treated differently for the purposes of promoting the new in-groups:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10663977/Clover-Par... (sorry, I couldn't quickly find a better article than the daily mail, though the video speaks for itself).
The most particularly pernicious idea to become a meme is "decentering whiteness". The net result is that contributions from white people are devalued and deprioritized, effectively dehumanizing white people as though they were nothing more than the sum of their skin color. Examples from various organizations preaching it:
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/decentering-whiteness-buildin...
https://www.uua.org/worship/words/decentering-whiteness-wors...
https://blogs.shipleyschool.org/decentering-whiteness-at-hom...
https://www.gettingsmart.com/2021/11/11/decentering-whitenes...
https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysE...
There are no shortage of examples like these in classrooms, workplaces, churches and government services and training, expanding into every facet of society at an increasing rate. The core idea- that many of these things don't need to be structured around a particular culture- is fine. The implementation details, however, rarely are.
If you think about it, retribution is pretty petty. It doesn’t accomplish anything and a civilized society should do away with it.
The only reasonable basis for punishment then is the “educate millions” rationale above. To the extent that it is effective in establishing rails for a stable society, I think it’s morally acceptable to do so.
You accurately summarized the crux of the argument: it’s all about your views on the dignity of the individual.
Not that I disagree that setting an example is a part of liberal democracies, but at least in the US, we've been "setting examples" since forever. It's just that as a society we deem most of the people who the courts have historically used to "set an example" expendable.
Anyway, the notion of deterrence, in the United States, if you consider this a modern liberal democracy, is codified in the federal sentencing guidelines: https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2021-guidelines-manual/annot...
irrelevant technicality: I suppose setting an example could also be construed as general deterrence based on a instance of specific deterrence.
You might not like it yourself, but surely you can see the appeal?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTN9We8unmU
I still think it applies.
On top of that, that video (and your view of Twitter) is based on what Twitter was like 12 years ago. These days it’s used by world leaders to make important declarations. It’s used by war correspondents. There are two-way discussions and twitter threads by experts in every field. Twitter has substance and importance now.
> "The deterrence is really to show people that despite the steps you took to try and recall matters, as soon as you press the blue button that’s it. It’s important for other people to realise how quickly things can get out of control. You are a good example of that, not having many followers."
Jesus, 18 months supervision and 150 hours unpaid labor, for a tweet by an unknown Twitter user, who named no names, and who deleted his drunken tweet after 20 minutes.
Did the judge have minimum sentencing requirements? If not, this was absolutely discretionary and absolutely out of proportion to the "crime," and is only "justified" by the judge using him as an example.
Right, that's precisely the statement from the judge that I was paraphrasing as "I'm sentencing you in accordance with the law so that people will see that if they break the law they will be sentenced in accordance with the law." The judge is not saying "you didn't do this" or "you don't deserve this." The judge is saying "you deserve this sentence according to the law, and this will show people that if they break the law they will also receive the sentence they deserve according to the law."
Argue as much as you want about the law itself, or even about the judge's specific decisions within whatever sentencing leeway he legally had, but it's just plain ludicrous to say the judge isn't sentencing based on the merits of the case or is serving a personal agenda. There's nothing even remotely hinting that this is the case.
I think precisely the opposite, and I think we're using different definitions of the word "sentencing."
He committed a crime by the text of the law. Yes, we agree on that. No one is questioning that. But all you've argued so far is that the judge came to the correct verdict.
The sentencing, in the other hand, is completely out of proportion to the crime, and is not mandated by law. The judge himself said that he is sentencing him harshly as an example. That means her was motivated to set an example, and is not simply giving him this ludicrous sentence on the merits of the case alone.
The comment at top you were responding to was arguing about the injustice of this exact thing.
It seems currently and historically, such social norms and expectations have been primarily enforced through social shaming and avoidance, rarely government intervention. That's the baffling part to me.
Maybe government intervention on such “trifling” matters is now possible thanks to IT systems, and we will come to see this as the norm, rather than the exception, as more and more people forcefully or willingly give up some of their liberties in order to have (or merely feel?) more security.
No, it isn't.
How is that outside of evolution?
Your definition of "organic" seems suspect.
"Naturally on their own", you say?
It sounds like you consider humans outside of forces of nature, outside of evolution.
Are you a theist perhaps?
I'm trying to understand your position, because to me humans and human relationships and human societies and human actions seem (obviously) a part of nature. They're complex systems, yes, but there's nothing inorganic or unnatural or magical about them. The same rules of biology and physics apply as everywhere else.
And yes, coercing others to capture more resources for self seems a prototypical example of a (co-)evolutionary arms race.
Let's agree to disagree.
You come back with ad-hominems.
And then add new wrong assumptions into the mix – why should I abhore religion? You can do better.
As opposed to 'organically' would you still have an issue understanding?
Assume here that normal is a linguistic approximation to the mathematical idea of arithmetic mean. It could also be replaced with the word typically.
In this context, your notion of a top down demand that blue means red or vice versa, is not 'organic' evolution, it's guided. Closer to the dog than the wolf.
I claim it is textbook evolution. An almost trivial observation.
Note that mine is not a moral judgement. I said nothing about whether I like such coercion or not, whether I think it benefits humanity in the long run or not, etc. Just that it's completely in line with natural evolution – not outside of it.
Typical, normal, organic… whatever you want to call it. Not necessarily desirable because such vocabulary is alien to evolutionary processes.
The only way you could call organisms taking advantage of other organisms to gain preferential access to resources "atypical", is if you consider humans outside of the natural world. Then statements like "top down" and "unnatural" would have substance.
I called that view theist (mystical may have been better), which decremental took strong umbrage to, for some reason. But again, a rather trivial observation IMO.
It's actually kind of amazing how free the internet is compared to TV and radio. Nobody seems to be worried that you can't broadcast such offensive things on those traditional media. Why should the internet be a special free-speech zone when it can have the same reach as them? Not saying I agree with it, but that could be the common feeling among British voters.
So I bring China not as to put UK in a worse light, but to put an example of countries implementing these sort of systems of surveillance and enforcement.
The USA is protected by its Supreme Court and the fact that the Constitution is impossible to amend at this point, but if the younger cohort could vote for criminalization of unpopular speech, I suspect the proposition would actually win. Definitely so on many university campuses.
It's bad taste and trashy but that's kind of it.
The problem is exactly that it's not an unusual attitude to hear. The difference is who it was aimed at. So for me the real issue is that we're cherry picking when we apply a very vague and loosely applied law based on who said it to whom, and in my eyes it should be a valid case for the defense, and element of a judges decision for sentencing, of just how situational it is.
Making 'an example' of someone is not a basis for a societally-positive criminal justice system.
Unfortunately we in Glasgow are still dealing with this nonsense in 2022.
You would be better served by pointing out that governments tend to become more authoritarian over time & the harder citizens resist authoritarian creep, the longer they have before a bloody revolution is usually required.
It used to be the case that peers (ie lords) had a somewhat different treatment in the law: they would be tried for crimes in the House of Lords instead of a regular court. The idea of that seems more reasonable the further back in time you go as the nobility had more power. However that is not the case anymore either.
It continues to be the case that the justice system is more accessible to some people than others and having better access likely correlates with the probability that one is knighted.
If the target were a random member of the public, it seems that the offence would still be made out (he would still be found guilty) but perhaps the sentencing would be less severe.
It does seem that judicial discretion was thrown to the wind here. I don't agree that the sentencing reflects the gravity of the offence, given the mitigating circumstances raised by his defence counsel.
I hope this case is appealled, and the law thoroughly weighed against human rights.
One of the nice things about being able to ask for a trial by jury is that jury nullification can help ensure that laws aren't abused even when judges are perfectly willing to "make examples" of people
If you think any single example of a law being applied in a manner that is technically defensible but (arguably) morally wrong should rule out an entire category of laws - you'd have no laws left.
My guess is that most laws are occasionally abused. The trick is to distinguish between those laws that invite it and those that don't.
This one of The Crown's protectors who is being disrespected. Now do you understand?
I’m always surprised that people in the UK put up with so many of these authoritarian nanny state and “think of the children” laws.
Fake name on Twitter is immediate red flag
(Not taking away from the fact that the tweet is of course moronic and disgusting)
(1) A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if—
(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
(b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.
(2) An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the written material is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and are not heard or seen except by other persons in that or another dwelling.
--------
However, it looks as though you might get away with saying some very nasty racist things in public if you were careful with your vocabulary, tone of voice and so on.
Is there any protection for people with Tourette's or mentally ill people, I wonder?
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/teen-prosecute...
So if that is anything to go by, it is "No".
> The court heard Armstrong, who acts as a carer for a man he considers his father, had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and suffered from anxiety and depression.
Also, Asperger's is not really an excuse to say hurtful things. I have ADHD, which is related to both Asperger's and autism, and I would never say something like that. It's not so cut and dry to say "oh, they have <x>, so they're excused".
We with ADHD absolutely do not have the same issues of interpersonal understanding, so of course you wouldn't because you wouldn't have that impulse in the first place.
From what I know I'd say autism (light or not) can definitely be an excuse for saying hurtful things, due to limitations in getting why something "merely factual" could be hurtful.
In that case the slippery slope argument was a fallacy.
I don't think those policies necessarily were a net benefit, either, particularly in the case of mask mandates for children, which weren't shown as effective enough to warrant damaging the mental health of children.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.
> Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.
That is wrong.
What you mentioned is the very definition of a slippery slope, where the conditional relationships of the hypothetical syllogism do not hold.
Furthermore we've not proven that the laws have been given up; the impacts of the anti-liberty legislation in the wake of 9/11 took almost a decade to sink in and enter the public discourse. The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table. Probably help protect children and/or fight Russians or something. Worked in China, great impacts on crime, etcetera, etcetera.
They expired on 25th March 2022 barring a small number of administrative issues which have been extended.
The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago. True, with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on. And yes, the restrictions worked against that type of emergency - an airborne virus of pandemic proportions.
It's a fallacy to claim that now that we know all that and the laws have expired, next time there's an emergency of any kind governments will just impose lockdowns and do contact tracing. There's simply no basis for such an outrageous claim.
> The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table.
Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.
This but unironically. Do you not see the surveillance implications of having your p̵a̵p̵e̵r̵s̵ vaccine passports scanned everywhere you go?
Past performance isn't an indicator of future performance. International travel is more common and faster these days. Plus whether or not you buy the idea that COVID in particular came from a lab, the fact that it reasonably could have is enough to predict that viruses will in the near future. That wasn't as big a risk over the last century.
We literally need 1 lab, anywhere in the world, to combine lax standards with dangerous research. That isn't going to be a once-per-century event, it'll be relatively common. The world is a big place.
> and the laws have expired
So I'll readily admit that I haven't paid any attention to laws in the UK which is what we're discussing today. But "oh they've all expired" is an optomistic take. A lot of laws and policies can go through a parliament in a 2 year emergency where mass lockdowns are an option on the table.
So I'm not pointing to a specific example but I'm not backing away from the claim yet either. It is likely that many of the changes made haven't been rolled back, and that a lot of new powers still exist ready to be used in the next emergency. Sure they aren't locking down right now, great. But they've opened a lot of Pandora's boxes about how much power a government is expected to wield as a routine matter. What just happened in the west was some sort of bizzaro story from the tales out of the USSR or China. It isn't a the prologue to a series of great government policies, it is a dark cloud of what might be coming. We can't afford for these ideas to take root; freedom pretty much alawys outperforms in the medium term and I'd rather live free with some risk than watch people be imprisoned for their own good.
Shouldn't the null hypothesis be that a lack of animal habitats means fewer animals and less chance of zoonotic diseases emerging? I know it's tempting to blame all the world's problems on climate change, but we need to be careful not to exaggerate things and give climate change denialists weak arguments to attack.
> Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.
You may not feel that these systems have been, or would ever be, used against you, but unfortunately people in other countries might not be so lucky[0][1], and bad uses of technology have a way of spreading internationally.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/cybergulag-rus...
[1] https://theconversation.com/chinas-surveillance-creep-how-bi...
Yet we continue as if nothing is off.
This is society, where politeness is codified in law.
“this is gonna be a totally different country than it is right now. Laws that you think are in stone -- they're gonna evaporate, man. You'll be able to marry a goat -- you mark my words!” - Bill O'Reilly
The government using an anti-CSAM filter to further restrict, say, copyright infringements has precedent, so could be a valid slippery slope.
The idea people pushed that marriage equality would lead to people being able to legally marry their animals was fallacious because nobody could articulate a logical jump from same sec couples to interspecies.
You refer to "marriage equality", not "same-sex marriage". So you presumably think that the justification for allowing same-sex marriage is not some consideration of whether recognizing same-sex marriages in particular is beneficial, but rather that the justification is that they must be allowed for "equality". That justification easily generalizes to any other case where someone wants to enter into a "marriage" that is not currently recognized.
[ Note: Personally, I think the state should have nothing whatever to do with marriage, obviating the entire issue. ]
Perhaps the reason why marrying toasters is unlikely to be anywhere on the slope is that, from the government's perspective, a marriage is a legal contract entered into by the parties. It's not clear what a one-sided legal contract with a toaster would look like, beyond the mere recognition of property ownership.
One possible extension, though, could be marrying a corporation, since they have legal personhood. Perhaps that right will be moot once polygamy becomes legal, or alternatively someone will try to make polygamy legal by attempting to marry a corporation owned by their two intended spouses.
A slippery slope exists when there is a functional reason why one would cause the other. It's a fallacy when they're simply related by irrelevant association (in this case, their prohibition). Legalizing one thing for a good reason does not cause people to lose their minds and legalize dumb things.
Well, except that a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other. If the law still said that a man can only marry a woman, and a woman can only marry a man, then polygamy would be impossible without defining the number of people in a marriage.
(I suppose that technically marriage could be defined to be non-transitive, such that a man's two wives weren't married to each other, for example, but that would seem like an arbitrary and discriminatory restriction. Also, the government could give legal recognition to more than 2 sexes, but that seems like a point on a different slippery slope.)
Anyway, I think that for a lot of people, the insistence that marriage should be between one man and one woman was some combination of "it's always been that way", "that's how you create a child", and "that's the only type of marriage my religion allows", but SCOTUS set the precedent that none of those are legally sufficient to prevent a redefinition of marriage.
So it's not that one type of monogamous marriage is "closer" to polygamy than another type of monogamous marriage. The court doesn't have to take into account the wishes or definitions of already-married couples, and instead looks at what grounds the government has for refusing to grant legal recognition for plaintiffs who believe they are married to each other. I haven't looked at the specific rulings and legal arguments, but my impression is that states would now have fewer grounds for opposing a further, more expansive, redefinition.
I never heard of that idea before, but I didn't really know anything about how it is in fact defined where it is legal and customary.
I found something that describes the "Law of Marriage Act of 1971" of Tanzania:
"Under Section 10(1) of the Act, a marriage is defined as “the voluntary union of a man and a woman, intended to last for their joint lives,” and may either be monogamous or polygamous (or potentially polygamous). Further, under Section 57, no wife in a polygamous marriage holds a superior position in matrimonial homes than any other wife."
I read that as saying that polygamy consists of a set of bilateral relationships having one person in common, and not a complete graph of all possible relationships between the individuals.
The paper I found that in seems to be about issues arising in divorce in Tanzania.
The problem is stated as:
"Because non-divorcing co-wives cannot be a party to divorce proceedings, and only parties can claim a stake in marital assets, the LMA currently offers no means for non-divorcing co-wives to claim a stake in marital property"
This sounds to me like wives are not considered to have a relationship to each other, and that has social implications which are important.
One can't overgeneralize based on this one source and one country, but it tends to make me more confident in my guess that "non-transitive" is the norm.
In an alternate reality where the US constitution happened to define marriage as between "a man and a woman", I could imagine activists pushing for states to allow polygamy so that two men or two women could "indirectly" marry, and pressuring the government to avoid the issues experienced in Tanzania by writing laws and policies which effectively treat the connection between the leaf nodes as equal to their connection to the root node when considering questions of divorce, taxation, inheritance, parenthood, etc.
But the argument that must be rejected is "this is a step in the direction of X, therefore it is equivalent to supporting X", which is a common argument and a bad one. Arguments in that form should be rejected.
In other words, slippery slope areguments (like correlation arguments) are fallacies if they are claimed as definitive proofs for a claim being made, but are not fallacies if used as supporting evidence for a claim or if arguing that the claim should be considered a possibility that may need to be considered or investigated.
In bayesian reasoning, both can be used as evidence for some claim, that creates a new set of (posterior) probabilities for a set of mutually exclusive claims based on a set of prior probabilities.
For instance, lets say you are concerned that some president may end up as a dictator. In a democracy, the prior probability may be relatively small. Then, lets assume the country abolishes term grants more power to the president in some time of emergency. In that case, one could argue using a sliding slope argument that the risk that the posterior probability of the president ending up as a dictator had increased after being granted more powers.
Often "logical fallacy" is taking to mean "bad argument", but that not necessarily the case. A slippery slope argument can be a reasonable and valid argument, it is only a fallacy when presented as if A by logical necessity leads to B. But most debate arguments does not claim to be logical proofs in the first case. "Anytime A have been done in the past it has inevitably lead to B, therefore it will happen again". This might be a very good argument, but it is just not a logical proof that A will always and inevitably lead to B.
For example correlation causation is one that needs to be treated with care, but correlation is often investigated further by scientists to find causation. It does not prove it exists, but it does indicate an area fruitful to research further.
But the texas sharp shooter fallacy and cherry picking data does not make for a good argument nor serve as a useful indicator of where one might dig for further information.
One great way of thinking about it in modern terms is thus: Rhetoric is Bayesian. You're operating on probabilities. There's a ton of things that are likely to happen but not guaranteed. There's a ton of questions to which there is a large field of possibilities, and one action can cause opposite effects in different cases.
One of the best examples in modern times is "Appeal to authority:" This Doctor say X is true, therefore X must be true. Even large groups of doctors have gotten important things wrong[1]. Thus, a logical fallacy - X says Y is enough to create a predicate as the beginning of a chain of logic, but it is not "Proof" within a logical chain. "X says Y. X is a Doctor. Therefore Y" is fallacious logic. Nonetheless, you should listen to doctors, because rhetorically they probably know what they're talking about on medical issues.
“Nazi glorification” is fairly specific. “Grossly offensive” is not.
If nobody is aware that it’s prosecutable that you are happy someone is dead (a perfectly valid opinion), then you shouldn’t prosecute people for it.
And yes, speed limit laws, do change over time.
And no, you can't be punished for having broken a speed limit in the past, that is not in effect today.
Parent's comparison seems rather apt.
If society A says the speed limit is X and society B it's Y and society C it's infinite. What's the point that speed is objectively measurable?
Society A and society B won’t disagree on whether something is moving at 150km/hr.
It is more like this, person A is in a hurry and is allowed to drive over the speed limit because person A is good person, but person B, who also is in a hurry, is a scumbag and therefore person B is not allowed to drive over the speed limit. It is very similar to how woke culture works.
Please detail how we can objectively measure “offense”.
There are huge numbers of interesting questions around how we treat freedom of speech in a civilised society. What restrictions can we collectively accept? How do we ensure that individual rights to speech are protected? How do we protect people from harassment or abuse, and how does this balance against the fundamental right to be offensive? Discussion about these is way more interesting than hot takes about how we're all going to prison for being mean on Twitter. And worst of all it detracts from the serious conversation to be had about how grossly inappropriate the reaction in this specific case is.
I'd like to add that most posters here on HN are arguing conditional on living in a Western democracy. And most Western democracies have set different restrictions - but all do have some restrictions. E.g. it's illegal to deny the holocaust in Germany.
I'm also in favour of limits on speech, but I draw the line at threats and sustained harassment. I don't think the tweet in the article rises to that level, and I don't think I'm a hypocrite for allowing that tweet but not allowing threats.
I do understand there are benefits to the all-or-nothing approach to free speech though.
Making that into a legal doctrine would be quite tricky.
e.g. The head of the NAACP used the word in 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/john-mcwhorter-n-...
Privilege is concept that certain attributes a person has confer relative advantages in the ways they interact with the world and the outcomes thereof. Acknowledging that is not and cannot be bigotry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_privilege
Unless you're saying that white privilege is a consequence of racism, which would be correct, but not really relevant to the discussion here.
Related the concept is so terribly named it seems meant to raise conflict. Privledge implies that it should be optional. It invites the previously mentioned abuse.
noun
a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.
It's named perfectly fine, it's just people willfully misinterpret it.
As far as being a "racist rhetorical cudgel", I'm sorry if you've felt that way, but the majority of times I've seen it used, it's to point out that a person's privilege does work to invalidate their opinion on a matter.
Most often, this is when someone is claiming that some form of discrimination doesn't exist, or isn't that bad, or that it happens the same to everyone and the people complaining should just get over it.
Privilege affects one's lived experience in ways that it's difficult to notice, because you have only your own lived experience to rely on. As a man, I was privileged not to experience harassment, and like many men I thought my female friends were exaggerating how bad it was. Then I took a series of subway rides with a friend who was harassed every time, and later got personally harassed by a creepy coworker. My privilege blinded me to the reality of the situation.
The same thing applies to race. I see a lot of white people who never personally witness racism making these broad statements about how, for example, you should just do what the police say and you'll be fine, when they've never had a cop drag them out of a car for no reason because they look like someone who might deal drugs. Because of their differences in societal privilege, their lived experience of dealing with cops has been wildly different, and the people with privilege shouldn't be talking over the people pointing out issues.
[1] https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and in-
sulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protec-
tion builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering
the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility.
White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress be-
comes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include
the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such
as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behav-
iors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.Also, while I haven't read DiAngelo's greater oeuvre, that's a pretty poor quote to pull. The symptoms (anger and fear particularly) and strategies he gives of a white person experiencing "white fragility" could just as easily be applied to a black person experiencing racism! Which honestly is in accord with my wider experience with the anti-racist movement. Its most ardent supporters tend to say things that, as a non-American (and non-European before you make that assumption), are almost indistinguishable to me from white supremacy. I find myself agreeing greatly with John McWhorter (https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...) over Ibram X. Kendi.
The scary thing that should terrify everyone is we are going to come to a point where being called racist no longer matters or nobody cares, and then your gonna see REAL racism come back with a fury and force you wont like.
So, milk could become a symbol of this if used within that context. People are paranoid enough today that if a picture of someone enjoying a glass of a milk was published, they could assume it was a signal of this. And it could be, to be sure.
The circle of life on this sort of thing, I think, goes something like:
Come up with a contrived reason milk could be considered racist, film a video or whatever about chugging milk while making a racist screed, get criticized for being a weirdo, and then some reactionary clickbait site can have the headline "Internet user called 'racist' for drinking milk."
It is dumb, don't worry about it.
They spread the rumor that the OK symbol is racist.
Some people go to racist rallies and make the gesture.
Is it now a racist gesture? A gesture can't really be racist I don't think, it is the intent behind it. In the case of OK, it doesn't provide much extra information, right? If somebody is making it at a racist rally I guess it is a bit redundant. If somebody makes it while scuba diving I guess they are really indicating "OK."
The OK gesture was an effective pick because, it has mostly been supplanted by thumbs up to indicate all's good anyway. So it doesn't have much counter-pressure. I don't think milk consumption is going anywhere.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
https://theconversation.com/milk-a-symbol-of-neo-nazi-hate-8...
These kinds of statements are the result of a wretched game of Telephone. "White supremacists are using the OK sign as an identifying signal" became "Crazy leftists say the OK sign is racist". It's an effective recruiting tool on the uninformed.
I have, however, heard the term 'racist' accurately used to describe people making an inverted OK sign when said people happen to be standing at a Proud Boys rally, or by people who otherwise spend their time hanging out with, or trolling as, white supremacists. [^1]
Same deal with milk. It's only racist when it's being used as a symbol by people who are intentionally being racist:
> "One slide Dr. Novembre has folded into his recent talks depicts a group of white nationalists chugging milk at a 2017 gathering to draw attention to a genetic trait known to be more common in white people than others — the ability to digest lactose as adults." [^2]
That doesn't mean "milk is racist", or that drinking milk is racist; it means unabashed racists seem to enjoy co-opting common symbols as code for their secret clubs.
[^1]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
[^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-sci...
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
Who says that's not already the case outside of the coastal cities?
Why not,and who gets to make the determination?
I'm an atheist, and having so many blasphemy and religion protection laws in liberal democracies misused (or rather, used exactly as they are truly intended) so horribly has really taught me what poorly defined restrictions on speech mean in the real world.
As for racist speech, I really truly believe that censoring does not ever serve its intended purpose. You are only breeding further resentment, driving the expression under ground,and giving people new reason to hate and feel oppressed.
Censoring it might keep the racists to their ugly selves, but that's OK with me.
We clearly disagree on the second so can you elaborate? I believe formal legal censorship of an expression GIVES it oxygen and will subsequently increase it.
Brute force (and deplatforming is brute force) isn't an automatic recipe for victory in a war of ideas.
I used to think of "Racism" and "Racist" as binary . You either ARE or are NOT a racist (and "I am definitely not!":). Life, and people smarter than myself, have thoroughly convinced me that it is a spectrum instead. The most open-minded, liberal, self-aware, "un-racist" people I've met realize there are impulses, tendencies, biases in all of us. Kind of like some of the smartest and most knowledgeable people are humble and aware of their gaps of knowledge. Thinking racism is binary and "I'm not it", blinds you to many aspects of it.
I remember a poor but enlightening joke a long time ago: "Those driving slower than myself are idiots; those driving faster are maniacs". I feel we may have similar personal line on racism spectrum: Those more close-minded than myself are "Racists!!!" those more open minded are "Woke!!!".
Which is to say - I don't think there's an easy, small, easily identifiable group that we should just lock up. We can start at the bottom of spectrum and quickly agree that "well these people are definitely racist", but pretty soon we'll get to the delta between our two lines, and then who gets to decide who is locked up / what should be censored? Whoever we eliminate, whoever we lock up, there's going to now be the next person/group/opinion that is now at the new bottom and needs locking up.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If you actually care about fighting racism, you have to be able to see it. You have to be able to understand it. You have to be able to track it. Driving racist rhetoric underground, making it hard to follow what groups are being targeted or what lies are being told, making it more difficult to identify who is involved in racist groups, what their numbers are, and who is listening to them doesn't help fight racism. Racism exists, and we need to face it. We can't just hide it away so that we can feel better or pretend the problem is solved.
You can't fight an enemy you aren't allowed to see.
What is censoring for you?
I don't see a single Western democracy that is not "censoring" or restricting the rights of individuals to some extent. It's just to a different extent. E.g. the US has speed limits on highways, but Germany hasn't. You must not deny the holocaust in Germany, but you can do so in the US.
The argument that there is no grey area seems flawed to me. Instead, can we, as a society, discuss productively where we draw the line?
I agree with grayness, I just happen to draw my line fairly, for lack of better word, liberally - and specifically so that we Can, to your point, discuss ideas productively as a society - something that censorship explicitly and by definition prevents! I am a proponent of marketplace of ideas and open discussion.
To your example, I do not see German laws making denial of holocaust as even remotely effective. I believe they are in fact counter productive - I've met people who use them to confirm the notion of "Jewish conspiracy". I do not agree with these people! But I'd rather have them spew their nonsense in the open, and be able to freely tell them they're wrong, unhindered by naive and ineffective at best attempts at censorship.
(speed driving laws are not censorship in any way that I've seen the word defined. Not every law is censorship, not every action is speech/communication).
Which is my point - in a democracy restrictions to the rights of individuals are there to protect the rights of others. This rationale is shared by many restrictions to individual rights, hence the speed limit example.
A speed limit is a censure not a censor by any means whatsoever.
> "censoring" or restricting the rights of individuals to some extent.
Censorship is not any restriction but restrictions on books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc.
> A speed limit is a censure not a censor by any means whatsoever.
My point is there is a reason every single Western democracy has restrictions to free speech. And these restriction come from the same rationale as a speed limit, say, that is to balance the rights of individuals with the rights of all other members of society.
no there isn’t
The number of people and public figures I've seen labeled as so called fascists or racists when their own clearly stated postures are emphatically not racist by any rational notion is large. Once some authority gains the right to prohibit racist speech, it's very, very easy for their definition of racism to shift as well.
Out of many criticisms of the U.S. that the country deserves, its mostly rigid protection of free speech rights in a formal sense is one good thing, and it hasn't led to a hell of bigotry, or at least no more so than have weaker protections for free speech in other countries.
Depends on how you measure it. The US has some pretty notable racial issues, even compared to other Anglosphere countries. I wouldn't put that down to freedom of speech laws, but it's also not a very good defense of those laws to say that it's affected the level of bigotry in the US.
I know what you're implying there, but your logic also says the US is racist against whites since they're poorer than Asians. Is it? Or is your logic wrong?
How many major countries are overtly ethnically homogeneous in the world, willfully closed or hostile to anything even resembling the mass immigration from all corners that the U.S has welcomed for many decades with only moderate tension?
How many people in European states will openly speak of certain groups, like gypsies, muslims and so forth with extremely derogatory words, but barely be called out on it by anybody? I've seen it many times, and go back to my point above, that in the U.S. the same things would and do simply get more intense media attention.
The U.S absolutely does have a number of very serious racial conflicts simmering at all times, but all things considered, I'd say the country does a remarkably good job of usually keeping them from getting worse, regardless of its high tolerance for free speech of even the most offensive kind.
Anecdotally, I remember having discussions with Danish family in the 90s, about racially-related issues in America, and in the shape that they took, I recognized how woefully unprepared they were to really look at their own racist attitudes (e.g. vis a vis Turks and immigration). When I returned in 2019, and had a chat with a gentleman supervising a number of different immigrants on some sort of work-integration program... well, I wasn't much impressed with his expressed attitude towards the workers.
It might be hard to find statistics, but I think we shouldn't just give up and rely on anecdotes. For example, a 2017-2019 Pew Research Center survey[0] found that people in the U.S. were somewhat more willing to accept Muslims as neighbors and family members than the Western European median.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/08/in-the-u-s-...
It's easier to be morally upstanding about you presume you and your fellow citizens would handle a potentially racist situation when it's hypothetical and not just a fact of life.
None of this is meant to excuse any of the awful stuff in the US, but to point out that there's a lot of confounding factors. It was a lot easier for Europe to take the high ground on abolishing slavery early on when they were century old empires who could still fill their coffers by exploiting people in Asia and Africa directly instead of importing them.
lol. I find it hard to not laugh at that. Having done business in US, UK, and varrious places in Europe, my first exposure to business culture outside of the US left me utterly shocked about the high levels of blatant and unabashed racism that was ubiquitous outside of the US.
It often involved racial groups that weren't legible to me as an American but was was particularly striking in how unprofessional it was. In the US someone might quietly dislike some race or another, but in a professional context someone explaining a project delay with "You know those <race> can't be trusted to get anything right." would be shocking, but I encountered statements like that outside of the US a dozen times across multiple countries.
Same goes for roma people, you won't ever really get any discussion on the racial dynamics or the socioeconomic circumstances that lead to the higher crime rates etc. It does not matter, the only discussion is around how much discrimination is maybe too much. The discrimination itself isnt even an issue.
As an illustrative point both Russia and China have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. They just added enough caveats that it's worthless.
I would point out that governments in authoritarian societies have a habit of labelling certain groups of people as enemies (either because those groups challenge them politically, or because it's convenient to have a scapegoat to blame the government's own failures on), so in practice you end up with just as much, if not more, vitriol spewed in authoritarian societies.
Yet you can't say "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in public schools because the judiciary lost their minds at the idea of marijuana use and its illegality. There certainly is/was bigotry when it comes to marijuana, its users, and speech around it.
These racist maniacs would absolutely have me censored and punished for my views, and their putrid racist ideology is infecting academia, entertainment, "news", politics, and even the law. So no you certainly can't rely on "reasonableness" or the social standard of the day to bound the limits of speech.
- If you limit what people are allowed to write or say, you are effectively limiting what others are allowed to read or hear.
- Censorship means delegating a censor.
- That censor would then be able to determine what I am allowed to read or hear. There is nobody I trust besides myself to do that. I definitely don't trust any government body to do that.
Also if you're going to enforce laws against racist speech dispassionately, you will ban every major religious text. The Torah, Bible, and Qur'an have parts that advocate for all kinds of racist, sexist, homophobic, and generally terrible behavior. The UK government doesn't try to censor these books, so it's obvious that their censorship laws are simply a way for law enforcement to persecute people they dislike.
I've never once met a true free speech absolutist. We accept restrictions on speech all the time. We restrict companies from outright lying about their products. We (sometimes) hold people accountable for lying under oath. We even compel certain speech by forcing companies to disclose ingredients and allergens. Even for government some material is justifiably classified and shouldn't be publicly shared. I should not be allowed to make direct calls for violence against others, phone in fake bomb threats, or yell "fire" in a theater.
There are good reasons to limit/place restrictions on speech. It's the same with every right we have. There will be instances that call for restriction. It falls on us to make sure that we preserve freedom as much as we can while still enacting sane restrictions.
Laws against racist speech do more harm than good. They hinder our efforts to understand and confront racism and they are so broadly defined that they are easily abused. That doesn't mean other restrictions on speech are't a good idea though.
These sorts of lies are usually covered under existing fraud laws. When such laws don't exist, companies use accreditation firms. Long before OSHA, Underwriters Laboratories tested the safety of various building materials and electrical devices. Customers and insurers preferred UL-approved products because it meant a lower risk of harm. If a manufacturer changed their product to be less safe, they'd lose their UL certification and a lot of revenue.
> We (sometimes) hold people accountable for lying under oath.
Yes and we hold people accountable for trying to pass counterfeit money or writing bad checks. These sorts of situations are special because all parties agree on the rules at the start of the transaction. By the same token I'm against unprovoked violence but fine with sports like boxing.
> We even compel certain speech by forcing companies to disclose ingredients and allergens.
I'd be fine abolishing such laws. Companies that didn't list their ingredients would probably lose significant business (since many people have allergies). Companies that lied about their ingredients could be charged with fraud (either in civil or criminal court). And again, in places where such laws don't exist, accreditation firms do the job. That said, we don't require ingredient labeling at bake sales and those seem to do fine.
> I should not be allowed to make direct calls for violence against others, phone in fake bomb threats, or yell "fire" in a theater.
The "fire in a crowded theater" hypothetical is from a supreme court case where socialists were imprisoned for distributing leaflets that protested conscription in the first world war.[1] It has since been overturned, and it is an excellent example of why any restriction on speech ends up being abused by those in power.
In those cases the laws dealing with fraud are still imposing a restriction on what people are allowed to say. Same with trademark and copyright laws. It's a good thing that companies aren't allowed to simply lie about having a UL certification for example.
> These sorts of situations are special because all parties agree on the rules at the start of the transaction
True, but only depending on the situation and what you consider to be a transaction. If a law is passed that makes it illegal to offend someone on twitter, anyone who uses twitter "agreed to the rules" too right? You don't always have a choice. If you give false information to police for example you haven't agreed to anything explicitly but they'll still come after you if they find out.
> I'd be fine abolishing such laws
I don't think you find broad support for that.
> Companies that didn't list their ingredients would probably lose significant business
You might think that, but history shows you'd be wrong. Gerber and Beech-Nut sold baby food that contained dangerous levels of arsenic mercury and lead. DuPont knowingly poisoned people while trying to hide that fact from authorities. Johnson & Johnson also lied and hid their knowledge that their product would harm their customers. Lenovo has repeatedly shipped malware infested systems to consumers which opened them up to everything from privacy leaks to remote code execution. None of those companies went out of business. You couldn't count the number of companies who are currently, and/or have previously and often repeatedly caused harm to their customers yet continue to operate successfully. Even when the consequences were deaths, including the deaths of children. "Voting with our wallets" is a proven failure as a means to regulate the dangerous and harmful actions of corporations.
The "fire in a crowded theater" example still holds. It wasn't overturned as much as it was refined to limit its use to what it was originally intended for because it was being abused. The risk of abuse is always present. We need to be careful to keep an eye on every case where freedom of speech is restricted to make sure it was appropriate, but just because someone can misuse something to violate our rights doesn't mean that thing shouldn't exist. Nearly every law or power police and government have are at risk of being abused. The answer isn't anarchy but oversight.
This seems right on the surface, but the problem is that it's really hard to determine what a racist message is. For instance, if black people want to discuss their frustration with white people in honest language, it might sound pretty racist. But I'm not sure any of us would want to curtail that. FB had this exact problem not too long ago..
https://revealnews.org/article/how-activists-of-color-lose-b...
Because it is.
we live in a world where saying “all lives matter” makes you adolf hitler 2.0. crime statistics are banned on twitter. if you say “its ok to be white” you will be called a nazi, and fired from your job. THAT’S racism.
It's the same argument that people make when they say, because any word can be claimed to mean anything, any so-called hate speech crime can be used to make any arbitrary speech illegal, simply by labeling any form of speech "hate speech."
It's the 'perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless void' model of society that assumes societies are not made up of humans with brains already aware that people can lie and attempt to game the system, and that no one will ever be willing or able to correct flaws in the system. Even in the case of OP, I doubt the UK could take any arbitrary tweet and sentence someone under the same law.
That said, I think the laws in the UK in this regard are going too far - but a slippery slope implies an irreversible process. These laws exist because the people of the UK want them to. If they wanted otherwise, they could change the laws to reflect that. That isn't a slippery slope.
All restrictive speech laws do now is push dissidents underground into radicalizing echochambers like 4chan, while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?
The entire point is to slow the ability of dissidents to spread their message, because despite what believers in free speech maximalism claim, truth doesn't always out. "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on" was a meme well before the internet gave lies the speed of light.
>while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?
I've already commented that I reject the slippery slope argument. If the people of the UK find their free speech laws go too far, they can change those laws.
Outside of limited cases where speech can be linked to physical harm, it should be legal and unrestricted.
And companies should embrace the spirit of freedom of speech in choosing not to restrict it on their platforms. (Or they could be forced as common carriers)
I just got kicked off the main lemmy.ml server because I had the audacity to challenge the current Ukraine invasion and say that the Russians were fuck ups who broke what they touch (which I honestly believe, and I feel history backs me up on this). Was accused of being "a nasty racist" and instantly banned site wide. Was this right? I think not. Was I racist for this statement? Also, I think not. The Russians aren't even a race, so I just don't see it. Nevertheless, this is an example of the sort of free speech that is silenced by this attitude and I don't think the pro-Kremlin echo chamber in there is better off for it. Please be careful what you support, there are plenty of people out there who will use it for their own ends, regardless of how you meant it.
Just imagine if the deceased guy was your grandpa or someone you care about a lot, would you not feel hurt by that tweet?
I don't think this is about "ideological conformity". No one is stopping you thinking, or saying, whatever you want at any time. The problem is when you use a platform to broadcast that message to a wider audience, especially one like Twitter that will show your posts to people who don't follow you.
Well it seems this law actually does that.
And of course, the rules don't apply to them. Just look at the president of France, if you want to see a particularly bad fuckup. He, and his wife, have confessed, publicly, on TV, repeatedly to having a paedophilic relationship, where she abused her job to fuck children (she was even cheating on her husband doing it). He was 15, she was 40 years old at the time. Not only have they not been sued (in France, both would be punished)
Needless to say, a whole bunch of people were sued for stating this during the campaign, as well as for a bunch of other negative things they said about him.
"in France, both would be punished"
It seems absurd to me that both the victim and the abuser would be punished. Do you have any source for this?
The burden of proof for libel action is very different to the burden of proof for criminal liability. It's the difference between civil and criminal law - they're worlds apart. You can't really compare the two, despite them both being based around the act of writing something on the internet. Posting something potentially libellous on Twitter won't get you convicted of a crime, but it absolutely could get you sued.
Likewise, public confessions satisfy the standard of proof for criminal liability. If you say "I'm glad I killed this guy" next to what looks like a corpse with 100 people watching, you can be convicted of murder without the police so much as checking it's indeed a corpse, based on testimony (does not even need to be direct testimony, done in court, it can be a police officer saying one of the hundred confirmed this to them) of one person. If you say it on TV, well the laws on this predate TVs, I'm sure it will work the same.
And, technically, since he was a minor, French law says the public prosecutor HAS to sue the adult (ie. her), no choice. Don't you love "someone think of the children" laws? Needless to say, this didn't happen.
That's not quite as clear cut as you put it. Sexual majority is 15 years old in France.
Now, since she was his teacher, it could be argued that it was not a consensual relationship (if there even was an actual act, I don't pretend to know), but that would be something for courts to decide.
In short, this is a terrible example of your point.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorit%C3%A9_sexuelle_en_Fran...
People doing that kind crap have no limit to how low they're willing to drop their common decency to promote their shitty political agenda: They spread their lies over social networks, alienate the debate with inane affairs and waste valuable resources from the judicial system.
I'm glad those idiots are getting sued.
They literally arrested and prosecuted someone for an off color joke. This is as straightforward a case of “them” stopping you from saying what ever you want at any time as it gets.
The only people who are scared of the police in the UK are middle class, normally law abiding citizens. One minor slip-up and they will be on you like a ton of bricks.
I’d wager most police officers couldn’t give a rats arse what someone posts online given the barrage of verbal abuse they likely get each day. They would much rather see the streets safer.
If I vandalised your car or even stole it then being drunk wouldn't be a reasonable defence in those cases either.
> Where the defendant is on trial for a crime of specific intent, his state of intoxication will be relevant to whether he formed the required intent.[8] This may prevent the defendant from having the required mens rea. If the defendant's intoxication is so significant as to prevent any sort of intent, this can lead to acquittal.
Some legal commentary about its previous use: http://barristerblogger.com/2018/03/24/its-time-to-change-th...
While there is certainly a slippery slope argument about the validity of restrictions on speech, that is not how I see this - this is legislative debt, and an argument in favour of deleting deprecated laws
Not walking around with an ice cream cone in your back pocket is more what I think about when I think of legislative debt.
Governments and companies continue to get more and more empowered to do this stuff because people always show that it has never really been about freedom but rather pushing their own views.
Unironically canceling the cancelers to pushback against cancel culture? Maybe the horseshoe theory has some merit after all.
Do you also have a problem with robbers being punished by the justice system and having their ill-begotten spoils returned to their rightful owners? It’s really no different.
A better example might be punishing a murderer with the death penalty. But most people who oppose retributive “justice”, myself included, do indeed have a problem with that system so it’s still not a particularly persuasive point.
If a person believes $action is wrong but are able to rationalize why it’s only wrong when others do it but it’s justified and permissible when they do it then it seems to me that the hullabaloo over $action is just a pretext and real issue they’re mad about is who is doing it rather than the $action itself.
The problem is that one side currently doesn't think it is wrong to do these attacks in the first place.
But maybe they will start to understand the harm, if they are subject to the same thing.
Yes, it is better for these cancel attacks to happen to nobody. But it simply isn't going to stop until people on all sides understand the harm that it causes, and likely the only way to do that is for them to suffer at least a bit of those same attacks.
> people always show that it has never really been about freedom (emphasis mine)
Which people? They always act this way? It was never about freedom, for anyone? Who could possibly say this authoritatively?
I think the last ~5 years has put a bright light onto freedom of speech. It is a complicated topic with some surprisingly nuanced positions. Does it include the ability to say what you want wherever you want? Or without consequence? There are multiple vectors to it.
I consider myself a free speech advocate. But i have no military fetishism that you claim is one of the root causes for free speech support (a weird combo). I support free speech because... i think people speaking their mind freely is a net positive. That appears to be increasingly controversial these days. That's fine, more room for discussion.
One of the safer to discuss at work examples is how loud can speech be while still being speech. Is a concert playing loud music free speech? Is it still free speech when the music is at such a level it causes hearing damage for those attending? Even if some attendees are children? What if it is only temporary hearing damage? What level of loudness creates enough harm to another person for it to stop being considered speech? Where is the distinction between me causing you bodily harm with airwaves or with punches?
Another example is bright lights. Having a sign up is free speech. But what if the sign is well lit up at night? How many photons can I send toward you before it stops being speech and starts being violence? Clearly aiming a powerful enough laser to cause eye damage would violate it. But what if it was a weaker red laser that I was shining through your window. If it is the aspect of targeting you that matters, then when if I set up a bill board and put a bunch of red lasers pointers that moved around randomly to draw attention, so it is no longer targeting just at you.
Then there is all sorts of problems one can get into with photos and the numbers that represent them.
thanks for asking the tough questions
Personally, I'm of two minds about it: this isn't a "cancel culture" situation, because evidently he did break a law. He's not being shunned by society, he's just getting arrested for a crime — however ridiculous the crime may be.
The main argument against this sentence is that other people do the same thing all the time and don't get punished for it. That's not a strong defense. The other argument is that the law itself is inappropriately applied, which it probably is. But this guy wasn't engaged in civil disobedience, he was a drunken idiot who thought he could shoot his mouth off with impunity, and to his surprise he got caught in the system. He should appeal, and the law should be clarified, changed, or struck down, because it's being selectively applied and that's a bit scary. But, this isn't shocking, and the guy isn't a sympathetic hero.
The problem with your view is 1) It is unsubstantiated - where do you see "crickets from the usual crowd"? 2) It is exaggerated and playing into partisan tribalism of people. 3) Creates more division than helps, does not address anything really except teach toxicity.
You're flaming the fumes.
This is always going to be a controversial topic with too sides. That isn't apparent in the US because there are such strong protections on freedom. But that doesn't change the fact that there are some people who believe they should be removed: those people exist in every society, they are a majority in the place where this occurred, and they are a majority in many other countries.
Saying that someone is fanning the flames when they say they support freedom misunderstands the topic totally. There are people who believe free speech is weak and decadent, the First Minister of Scotland is a lawyer...these people are not crazies, they are people in govt today. And there aren't two sides to freedom, you are either for or against, there is no middle ground (I live in Scotland, the primary argument of people who want to supress freedom was your argument, word for word...my freedom is gone now).
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-scottish-governmen...
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sending-a-mean-tweet-abo...
A good opportunity for the Americans among us to feel gratitude at our constitutional right to insult the dunderheads in both chambers of our congress!
It's times likes these that I like to reflect on how fortunate it was that the Sedition Act of 1798 was allowed to expire long before I was born.
Death threats, after all, are worse than being glad someone is dead.
This is nothing compared to what people tweeted the day after Margaret Thatcher died. You absolutely should not be prosecuted for that.
However, we are told that what was said was, "The spokesman said the tweet, which included Rashford's username, saw Price swear, use a racist slur and claim that his 'dead nan could have scored that.'"
And this is before the rules got even more strict.
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Communications_Act_200...
And they said PRC lacks global influence and soft-power.
I mean this is satire now but with the way things are going its not entirely ludicrous
Compare that to for example HN and Reddit - the places where free speech has much less administrative suppression and where the speech is mostly moderated by the community. There is much less Russian propaganda in those environments because any time it appears it gets strong rebuttals which stay together with the propaganda. As a result anybody exposed to that propaganda here gets also exposed to the rebuttals, and that is naturally net loss to the propaganda, ie. the propaganda can't thrive in the environments where free speech isn't suppressed.
https://www.businessinsider.com/in-britain-police-arrest-twi...
Sure the tweet is terrible. But ruining someone’s career prospects for it levels bad?
The US has a long and sordid tradition of nakedly political censorship. Ask Eugene Debs how much good the 1st amendment did him.
I really hope to see our justice system progress toward a system with a goal of reforming people rather than punishing people. Ostensibly that's what the purpose is already, but if you look at the output, it clearly isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vovan_and_Lexus#YouTube_ban
Who knows what sort of punishment those guys would have gotten if they were UK "citizens".
Once he has completed his punishment and appropriately paid for his crimes against society and the late Captain Moore, why will Mr Kelly still be newsworthy?
Won't he earn the right to have his crimes forgotten?
Most of them are just losers saying stupid offensive shit; clearly not worth giving the time of day let alone prosecuting. And one was someone who was understandably angry about the actions of foreign troops in Afghanistan; he has a right to express his anger.
Isn’t stuff like this why the ‘report’ function exists? Or couldn’t the gov just request a takedown / account suspension? Or the social pressure of responses to the tweet would create enough backlash…?
This just seems like an archaic way to patrol social media, which is basically a nebulous void.
On the other hand, I guess if you really need a lot more free public involvement in community service and picking up litter, then this law is the answer…
I'm genuinely confused by what "get out of control" means. Violence? SWATing? Other people on the Internet may get mad?