The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trum...
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-...
I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.
I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
I didn’t agree with banning Gerry Adam’s voice and had sympathy with the nationalist cause, but let’s not make out like these were mainstream figures. Adam’s and McGuinness were apologists for people waging war against the British state. I strongly suspect a communist group with similar aims would get short shrift in the US.
Free speech is never absolute. Europe and the US have different mechanisms to protect free expression, but net they don’t end up in very different places.
Other examples include "appeal to prurient interest" even when the "interesting" activity is not illegal.
[] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.36...
>The case you cite doesn't appear to make your point.
It does if you go on and read the judgement, which cites that that it is reasonable to initiate a stop for obscenity, which was part of the reasoning used to grant QI.
I think this is beside their point. Police are practically given qualified immunity by default; the case isn't strictly "lost" at this stage, it's lost if that decision is appealed and upheld until the victim is out of appeal options.
To your point, the summary judgement is still a clear injustice and it does practically give police the ability to stop speech whenever they want. But there's an element of random punishment if the person they stop has the resources to appeal the first decision. I'd be surprised if that appeal would be lost in this case given the main problem was the content of the expression; that's a pretty cut-and-dry 1a violation.
(It's a separate issue but there's another problem with the cases in which the officer loses qualified immunity in that the city they work in (tax payers) will pay the damages to shield them from consequences. I forget the legal mechanism but it pretty much always happens.)
Constitutional amendments are also an extremely high bar (2/3rds in congress + 2/3rds of state legislators), so much so that they never even try them anymore. So adding a hate speech amendment or "sending offensive messages" law, like the UK did via parliament, would basically be DOA in the US.
But of course all rights can hypothetically be taken away in any human system, if there's enough public support or obedience.
The 'pen' says they are not allowed to keep grazing their cattle there in Clark county, yet they still are to this day.
It's genuinely hard to see a way out of complete degradation to a failed democracy at this point. None of this is hypothetical either. Sometimes I wonder if people on this site read the news at all, or are just willfully ignoring the reality of the situation.
Do you think Black Americans, or native Americans feel shame when visiting these museums?
Or are they not "our people" to you?
This broke down instantly as soon as the same party got all three branches of government.
The actual place to look for serious US speech restrictions is "obscenity", like the Comstock laws, and modern things like Mississippi Internet age verification.
Also, nearly every enemy of the US is on Twitter under their official names.
I'm not sure how fair argument that is. When you're literally the owner of the platform, of course you'd use your real name and the names of the companies you own, on the platform you just bought. Doing anything else would be weird :)
You can find clips of their spokespeople all over the news. There are no restrictions on accessing or viewing it here.
It’s weird to read people from other countries whose views of free speech have shifted so much that they can’t imagine a country where news outlets are allowed to broadcast things like this if they want.
clips can be easily and readily found on most social media sites like youtube.
the really scary ones generally are only in arabic with arabic names and titles, so the english-only gringo demographic aren't going to see them
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.
The actions and words of the United Kingdom are vastly different.