There's something I find loathesome about this "Send a message" sentencing. What the judge has done is send a clear message, that he won't sentence you on the merits of the case but will sentence you to serve his own agenda. The only message this sends is that justice has failed. It's always completely transparent who exactly gets made an example of, and who gets off with a slap on the wrist. We'll spend months hunting down every rioter in the London riots throwing the book at them and putting up massive billboards in city centres trying to identify them, but when a prominent tory steal millions from the tax payer in dodgy PPE contracts? Well let's just write that off shall we. Because as we know, stealing some shoes from JD sports is much worse than stealing millions in the middle of a pandemic.
I wouldn't attribute it to fascism, because the concept works in any social group and was used throughout history. Even Mao said something like "Punish one, educate millions."
I think the true conflict is about the dignity of the individual. Is it permissible to do a disproportionate amount of harm to one person to bring about consequences that further the goal? I'd say no.
And that also includes bringing less than appropriate punishment.
I think the whole purpose of punishment is to discourage others from committing the same crime - not to punish an individual for the sake of retribution.
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.
If it actually worked, then maybe this would make sense, (though I believe the negative social effects of that approach FAR outweigh the dubious positive). But in a case like this, where it was precisely a LACK of thought that marked it as a crime, it honestly seems absurd to me. It's like prosecuting someone for tripping over their shoelaces in a supermarket.
Such things are indicative of the general zeitgeist in the society. If most people were hard workers, knowing how to count money and expected accountability, you would see more sentencing for embezzlement and nobody would care about some random dude's shitposting.
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.
> 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".
In what sense do they not correspond? The gifted program was being shut down because schools like Stuyvesant admitted very few black students. See, for example, Forbes' take on the subject; https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2019/08/28/to-add...
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.
Why? It's trivial to find examples. This is a hot button topic in the US- in particular, the now-in-vogue phrase "equity" replacing "equality".
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:
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:
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.
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.
I'd argue that "setting an example," or specific deterrence, has lessened in severity with the rise of liberal democracies. The notion is about as old as law itself. There was some pretty brutal stuff way back. Still have some big contemporary outliers like electrocution in some states in the US, but that's going away steadily.
> Is that liberal democracy thing some time in the past
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.
IANAL but it seems like "setting an example" is synonymous with "setting a precedent", which is a concept that seems fundamental to any legal system, even for civil cases. Companies press charges against every slight infringement on their trademarks because if they don't, they're implicitly setting a precedent that the behavior is ok. If you aren't actively setting precedents, then legally it's the same as saying, "we're ok with anyone and everyone doing this all the time." Doesn't matter what governmental structure you have, as a society, we set boundaries in order to define the world we want to live in.
Precedent in common law systems applies more or less only to determining what the law is and is not really related to sentencing more strictly or leiniently (ie making an example of someone), so I don’t think they are synonymous.
The problem I have with send a message style justice is that it means the person is being treated as an individual they are being used for some sort of societal manipulation. The aim of written law is to attempt to treat everyone the same before the law I think this undermines that concept.
It doesn't set a precedent though, it is just arbitrary beating of a scapegoat. So called "tough on crime" laws are a bad kneejerk idea but at least they are relatively consistent compared to "fuck this person in particular because I feel like it" of arbitrary example setting. The whole point of precedent being seen as a positive in law is because it makes legal outcomes more predictable.
I don't really understand your argument. It's one thing to disagree with the law itself, but in what way was this case not judged on its own merits, and what agenda was the judge serving? I hardly think "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" counts as some person agenda. I see no indication that the judge said or believed that the person did not violate the law or did not deserve the sentence according to the law, but was being sentenced merely to serve as an example to other people.
Except that the judge said specifically that he was sentencing him as a deterrence to show other people.
> "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.
> Except that the judge said specifically that he was sentencing him as a deterrence to show other people.
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.
> but it's just plain ludicrous to say the judge isn't sentencing based on the merits of 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.
"Remember, that not he who gives ill language or a blow insults, but the principle which represents these things as insulting.
When, therefore, anyone provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you."
~ Epictetus, Enchiridion
There’s something I find holistically loathesome that a) other people read twitter at all, leading to b) it actually matters and has to fall under legal jurisdiction. If people moved on and quit reading twitter, this just wouldn’t matter.
Twitter is quite different from most of other social networks out there. It’s much more immediate, which has a lot of benefits but also a lot of drawbacks.
You might not like it yourself, but surely you can see the appeal?
Oh come on, that video doesn’t capture it at all. First of all the people who follow you actually choose to follow you, AND they choose when to read twitter, which already changes the dynamic completely from the video.
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.
> Churchill summed it up best, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
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?
It’s a restatement of Bentham’s dictum from 1776: the law should do the greatest good for the greatest many. Churchill obviously knew of Bentham, but I think Churchill often put things more elegantly than some of the famous philosophers.
I feel like I must have been corrupted by the internet or something if the tweet in question is considered "grossly offensive". It certainly isn't nice, but 18 months supervision and 150 hours of community service? I don't even know how to put my bafflement into words here.
It's just standard 'edgy' anti-english diatribe from a Scot. It's really nothing I don't hear regularly either out in public or from friend-adjacent people here.
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.
The problem is exactly that the law shouldn't exist in the first place. Such laws violate the fundamental human right of free expression. Repeal the law and then you won't have to worry about uneven application.
There is no such thing as a fundamental human right to free expression.
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.
I believe the use of the word fundamental here refers to the fact that free-speech underlies all other rights. If you don't have free speech then you don't really have any rights at all.
I'm from the US, so please forgive my ignorance of UK law in this regard, but is this case special at all because the target of the insult was knighted (or whatever the correct term is)? Would it have been the same result if the target was a "random" non-knighted individual?
That sort of thing generally shouldn’t make a difference in the U.K. But in this case I think the law gives special protection to public figures and I guess people who are knighted tend to be public figures.
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.
The target being a "public figure" might well have factored into the Crown Office's decision to prosecute, as part of the public interest test under the Prosecution Code.
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.
This is exactly why "hate speech" laws are so dangerous. It gives carte blanche to the government to go after anyone who says anything any one person (or the government itself) might find offensive.
And we have a judiciary who can —still, for the moment— make and break statue based on their rulings via appeals and the Supreme Court. The government does not have carte blanche any more than a government already does. The last 2 years has shown us they're pretty much a law unto themselves.
I hope this case is appealled, and the law thoroughly weighed against human rights.
> And we have a judiciary who can —still, for the moment— make and break statue based on their rulings via appeals and the Supreme Court.
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
Add the idea that has been floated over the years into making law enforcement officers a protected class as well and it's not a large leap to see how such seemingly well-intentioned things can be abused by the state.
> This is exactly why "hate speech" laws are so dangerous.
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.
"Freedom to offend" is a core tenet of American freedom of speech. It is not at all present in the United Kingdom or for the most part continental Europe. You can be arrested for Tweeting something mean, for calling a police officer a rude name, for insulting a religious figure. Whether or not whatever it is the Europeans gained in exchange for giving up that right was worth it is up to you.
They have always been a subservient people who look up to authority figures -- their betters -- to take care of them and to tell them how they should go about their lives. And it's not "think of the children", it's "think of me".
Yeah, one would be surprised to realise how popular the Queen and the family is in the UK for exactly the same reason: somebody to look up to. British make fun of American celebrity culture, but then there’s that appreciation of nobility and the royal family.
At first glance it may seem baffling, but if you see it from the “different culture different values” framework, you realize it’s just how people there want their society to conduct itself. It’s no different, from this perspective, to how baffling may seem cultures where burping loudly in the dinner table is not frowned upon, where people really value their personal space or not, and on and on.
It's not baffling to me that people don't like people who act this way. I don't like such comments either. What's baffling to me is the punishment given for it. Using the given parallel, I'm not familiar with a case where such punishment was given to someone who burped loudly at their dinner table (or some other social faux pas).
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.
What about China’s supposedly social credit system?
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.
I'm aware of the existence of China's social credit system, but that's not exactly a system I'm keen on holding up as a something to strive for. This being in the UK, I feel we should look at UK historical norms, not China's.
I get it’s UK and may be the most influential western country in the last 200-300 years. But time goes on, countries evolve and often they do so in unexpected ways. My argument is that, at some point we must detach a country from its past (whatever that means) and accept the direction its constituents are now wanting to take. Even if we personally don’t approve of said direction.
I don't think "we" must do anything of the sort. It's important to continue to disagree with things, and articulate the reasons why, even if a majority of some other group supports them.
Except it's not an evolution. There's nothing organic taking place. It's a concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce populations into going along with things that are expressly against their own freedoms and interests by people who are by any standard their enemies.
It's not top-down. People vote for this stuff, so I agree it's organic. Politicians reflect the culture of the people they represent. That's their job and they will be fired if they don't respect it.
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.
If tomorrow the government commanded that the color blue is now to be called red, that would not be an evolution of language. It would not be language evolving organically as language does over time. It would be change by force outside of the way things change naturally on their own.
> outside of the way things change naturally on their own.
"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.
I feel like I'm debating someone who is intentionally acting obtuse. I think you know what I'm saying and understand perfectly well what my position is here. Trying to shoehorn religion (something I'm sure you abhore) into this says a lot about the disingenuous nature of your motivation in this discussion. This would be more fruitful if you would just be candid with your own opinions instead affecting a passive aggressive attitude.
If the original comment said 'it would not be language evolving [normally]...'
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.
No, the original comment talks about people taking advantage of other people through "concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce", calling that "outside of evolution".
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.
If you compare UK with China then what is next, North Korea? What is the point of mentioning China, is relevant to the discussion? Is China a model of great society and personal freedoms that other countries should follow?
I don’t know. Personally, I like my freedoms and I wouldn’t like to live under a system implementing social credits as in China (have they done this? I’m not sure). However, I don’t know what will work in the long-run. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about China, but it has done a lot of things right. I also know they have fairly different values to the west, allegedly, a lot more weight put in the wellbeing of the collective, even at the expense of the individual.
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.
Similarly, some cultures today enjoy the practice of tossing homosexuals from rooves. Before you rush to condemn the practice, recall that they are from a different culture, with different values.
In the US, I may get kicked out of a dinner for aggressive burping, and Twitter may ban me (and has banned me lol) for whatever reason they want. But nobody's facing legal penalties for it.
I am from such a "different culture", and I hate criminalization of speech. Unfortunately, it is a minor topic in our politics and thus the status quo is likely to stay that way, not to mention that the EU where we are members wouldn't probably let us decriminalize hate speech; the winds in Brussels blow in the other direction.
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.
I agree that they would. It's so disheartening to see how quickly people have been convinced to abandon a freedom people had to fight so hard in order to assert just decades earlier. The folks involved in the Free Speech Movement who have died already are certainly spinning in their graves, but those still alive have to just look at the kids today and wonder where we went wrong.
It really depends on if you believe the majority can impose anything they want on a minority. Even if a majority of people in the UK want these rules, we can still argue whether a government has the right to enact that will of the people.
I get the different values part, but even if I set aside the "as an American" free speech issues, 150 hours of community service seems WAY over what's necessary. That's nearly a month of full time work!
I’m generally in favour of some limits on speech. I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example. It’s obviously very complicated and something people are going to argue a lot about. BUT this case has made me change my opinion. Things much worse than this are tweeted every day and this is the one that gets prosecuted. It’s blatantly politically motivated (‘national hero’, British soldier etc) and in terms of awful things people tweet…it’s not actually that bad. Suddenly I find myself agreeing with the people arguing these restrictions are a slippery slope.
Aside from me absolutely being in favor of even offensive and racist speech out of general principles, you'd be surprised (or not) by how easily "racism" can be redefined to include all kinds of things that are very, very dubiously racist by any normal definition. There are extremely woke people who consider even questioning any of their arguments about race or class as a racist act. There are cases where a person making clear cut criticisms of islam as a religion is labeled racist because of its general association with the arabic world, and so forth. The list goes on.
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.
This is exactly why we need free speech. It's a pragmatic position. Of course I would like to live in a world where people don't spew vitriol. But for the reasons you outline that cannot happen except in an authoritarian society.
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.
> 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.
Many countries, including many in Europe have some very serious, heavy racial issues that are both more ingrained than those of the U.S and in quite a few cases more violent or openly discriminatory. The U.S. however is generally at or close to the center of global media familiarity and attention, so naturally, the theme of its own racial issues is disproportionately magnified.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
France? The discourse around islam is insane there, and you have an almost neo-nazi party like the FN getting 30%+ of the votes regularly there. There is no shame in talking about forced expulsion of legitimate immigrants there too( "Remigration" ).
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.
Yeah, honestly it just shows how little americans know about the outside world. That there is even a discourse around racism in the US shows that people care enough about the issue. Outside the anglosphere, it is so normalized and institutionalized that it's not even a controversial issue. And when it is, it would be for issues that are way outside of the normal anglo overton window on racism. For example, it's generally accepted in france that you can't go to university if you wear a headscarf. It's not even a debate anymore really.
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.
I think the important comparison there, and something I often keep in mind, is that the US is a lot more diverse racially, even with its segregation, than a lot of other countries in the world. It's a lot easier for a country that's 90% the same race to not have open and prevalent racial issues, since there will be entire cities/areas where you won't even meet someone of a different race.
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.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by racism. Interpersonal racism seems to fly under dogwhistles moreso than outright statements now that it's socially unacceptable (in most places), where e.g. casual racism against Romania people is still pretty common in Europe. Judging from economic outcomes, though, I'd say the US is still pretty racist, even if being individually racist is mostly condemned (though I think it's fair to say from the Trump presidency that there was still quite a lot just bubbling under the surface).
> Judging from economic outcomes, though, I'd say the US is still pretty racist
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?
There's no such thing as racism against Romanians, since it's not a race, but it could be xenophobia. Or maybe you're making a confusion with Romani (Roma, gypsies) people.
That's fair, though I understand economic outcomes are very sticky across generations (IIRC descendants of Irish immigrants, for example, remain significantly poorer than other white people). Even if we could wave a magic wand today and eliminate racism altogether, I'd expect this inertia to result in black families having significantly less wealth on average than white families for many years to come.
It's true that economic status is sticky (or in other words, social mobility is limited), but with black people in the US it goes beyond that into underfunding, predatory policing, gentrification etc that serve to compound existing inequities. While I think that we should aim to uplift poor people more generally through economic reform, in the specific case of black people in the US there are still definite institutional thumbs on the scale.
> 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.
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.
I have been called a racist for voicing my opposition to efforts to repeal constitutional prohibitions against racism. These lunatics somehow make up definitions that absolve themselves of their racism and condemn the anti-racists.
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.
>>"I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example. "
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.
> As for racist speech, I really truly believe that censoring does not ever serve its intended purpose.
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?
> E.g. the US has speed limits on highways, but Germany hasn't.
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.
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).
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning - why would some negative effects of an intervention automatically invalidate the positive effects? If you don't think there are plenty of positive effects, feel free to speak to somebody from the German Jewish community and see how they think about it.
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.
There is merit to the idea of the 'paradox of intolerance.' If we tolerate someone explicitly being intolerant, what have we achieved except changed who is allowed to be intolerant?
>>"Censoring it might keep the racists to their ugly selves, but that's OK with me. "
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.
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.
My understanding is that studies show deplatforming actually works if the goal is to remove the broader cultural influence of a group. That is to say, if there is a group on platform A who are then group-banned from platform A, when they move to platform B the group is actually smaller in size and has less influence. If this happens from platform B to platform C the group continues to become smaller and have less influence. The same papers I read also pointed out that the people who follow the group across platforms become more and more entrenched though, which is also interesting.
Or you know, occasionally you accidentally create a new front in the culture war which is far more expansive and destructive than the side effects of the original problem.
If this were true, "heretical" movements (Christians in the Roman Empire, Protestants in the 16th century, Liberals in the 19th century, Nationalists in multi-national empires of the early 20th century) would have never prevailed, because they were "deplatformed" by the powers-that-be with vigor. In fact, they were often even decapitated, not just deplatformed. But they were often successful in the end anyway.
Brute force (and deplatforming is brute force) isn't an automatic recipe for victory in a war of ideas.
> and giving oxygen to it helps propagate and give validity to it.
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.
"Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
Who gets to define what is racism and what isn't? And how broadly do we apply this logic? Racism is wrong and dangerous so we can censor. What about sexism? Ageism? Heightism? Extend this out and anything that can be potentially offensive to anyone shouldn't be allowed.
I disagree with restrictions on speech for the following reason:
- 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 disagree with restrictions on speech for the following reason:
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.
> We restrict companies from outright lying about their products.
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.
> These sorts of lies are usually covered under existing fraud laws.
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.
Logical fallacies are only fallacies when they are presented as if the conclusion follows by logical necessity from the argument, as in a mathematical proof.
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.
This is a point I wish more people would understand. There are logical fallacies that always make for a bad argument and logical fallacies that are reasonable but not logical proofs.
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.
Slippery slope isn’t automatically a fallacy. It’s a fallacy if you don’t articulate why A would lead to B.
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.
Your last sentence seems to itself refute the point it is trying to make.
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. ]
Marriage equality is generally implied (if not expressly stated) that it is about humans. Functionally speaking, there's no evidence to show that people who like people of the same sex might move on to toasters. The movement was always about people. The lack of specificity was because the context was obvious, not because it was nebulous.
The next point along the slippery slope would more likely be forcing states to accept polygamous marriages of more than 2 people. Another point on the slope might be allowing siblings to marry (especially if they are the same sex so there is no danger of inbreeding).
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.
It's not down the slope though, because nothing about being LGBT is "closer" to polygamy than existing marriage. They're not related in practice, function, or advocacy.
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.
> nothing about being LGBT is "closer" to polygamy than existing marriage.
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.
>a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other
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.
Thanks for researching that. I agree that, in practice, societies which allow polygamy probably have non-transitive marriages, and they could theoretically allow women to have two husbands so as not to give men more rights than women.
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.
Slippery slope is a logical fallacy, and not a rhetorical one. Logic and rhetoric follow different rules. Logic is purely binary - If I say "Burgers are unhealthy", and you can find one example that fits the definition of a hamburger that is made of plants and not full of fats, you have disproven my logic. Rhetorically, though, the point will stand as most burgers are "sometimes food".
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.
A "slippery slope" argument that something is dangerous is, imho, similar to use a corellation to argue that there is a direct causal link between two observations. Neither are sufficient to prove such claims. But, both _may_, depending on other information, be evidence supporting the claims, even if they do not prove the claim outright.
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.
It is a bit of a tricky one; there are a lot of valid and reasonable arguments in the same mental area as slippery slopes.
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.
When the UK brought in laws around lockdowns and handling covid people here were complaining that it was a slippery slope and the government would never give up those restrictions yet they did exactly that and those laws are no longer in play.
In that case the slippery slope argument was a fallacy.
We've established - quite clearly - that in an emergency the government can lock everything down for 2 years and that lip service to liberty or human rights means nothing. Emergencies happen every 2-3 years. Why won't we see similar anti-liberty measures again in the next 20 years? 'We' 'know' it 'works'. It isn't even clear that we'll be spared another pandemic through that timeframe, the world is quite small these days and it doesn't look like we're winding back on the interconnected globe.
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.
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.
> with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on
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.
It isn't so much the destruction of habitats in itself as human encroachment of rising density increasing the odds of both contact and exposure as well as transmission to larger human society. Ebola is a horrifying and contagious disease but it is limited in its spread to rural areas where it quickly burns itself out by being too lethal.
> The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago.
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.
There was indeed a slippery slope from "2 weeks to flatten the curve" to extended lockdowns.
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.
My go-to example is all the talk from conservatives about how allowing same-sex marriage would lead to people marrying animals.
“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 problem with banning things like "racism" is that words change meaning over time. Maybe some time in the future, any reference to "White Privlege" may be considered racist, for instance.
The OK hand sign is racist now. There's rumbles of milk being racist.
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.
The OK sign is only racist if it's being used by racists to signal to other racists that they are racist. This remains true if you replace "The OK sign" with any other innocuous act or item.
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.
While I am not condoning banning speech, your examples above compile into a pretty disingenuous take. While I'm sure an example could be found if you looked hard enough, I have never once heard of anyone crying 'racist' about normal people making the normal OK hand sign innocently.
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.
> While I'm sure an example could be found if you looked hard enough, I have never once heard of anyone crying 'racist' about normal people making the normal OK hand sign innocently.
These are just pranks made by 4chan and their ilk.
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 essentially the same prank, I believe the milk one is the even more absurd followup.
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.
While intent should be what matters, that isn't the case for many people. There was a man who was cracking his knuckles and somebody took a picture of him. Apparently his hand was close to the OK sign and he was fired. It is getting to the point where intention does not matter.
People of European decent tend to be much better at digesting milk (lactose) as adults and there's a meme that if you can't chug a bottle of milk you have to get out. Or something silly like that. Turns out groups of people with ancestry in east Africa have the gene for lactose as well.
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.
That could definitely happen. That would be kind of similar to how being called "communist" lost most of its power from overuse. In a generation or two, maybe even "nazi" will no longer be seen as an insult in parts of society.
This is the reason justice system has the concept of prescription. You cannot be prosecuted for something that wasn´t deem unlawful in the past and even if there was already a law about it we can't condemn you if we failed to do so within a not distant past. It pretty much cover you in case meaning change over time.
Only if you're defining both terms to mean something different than in the contexts in which they normally are used.
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.
It is used as a racist rhetorical cudgel however, a "shut up your opinion doesn't matter because of your race" to mark someone as wrong without addressing their point at all.
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.
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.
It depends. Judging people's lived experienced based on their skin color may be racism under the MLK definition, but the far left has created a new definition of racism that allows one to discriminate against others based on the color of their skin, for paler colors of skin.
This is just blatantly untrue. Some piss-poor unemployed KKK member yelling racial slurs at the TV during the 2012 election is still a racist, despite having infinitesmal power - especially institutional power! - compared to the person he is being racist towards. I doubt there's a single person who would doubt that. Would you?
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.
And that sounds like something a racist would say. Seriously, "a white"? Does my race matter to you because you judge the validity of arguments by the skin color of the people making them?
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.
White working class boys in the UK are amongst the least likely to go to university in the UK, they don't have a privilege for being white.
I think terms like white privilege drive resentment and are divisive.
"In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race..." Barack Obama.
As a white (and formerly working class) boy from the UK, I can confidently say that nobody has at any point in my life discriminated against me on the basis of my ethnic background. That is the extent of what this expression means – it does not mean that any individual to whom it applied is in a superior position relative to others, but only that they do not suffer from disadvantage due to one specific thing.
There is a stubborn desire to ignore this distinction, and the reason that these terms become divisive is because people are too often manipulated into misrepresenting them.
> it does not mean that any individual to whom it applied is in a superior position relative to others, but only that they do not suffer from disadvantage due to one specific thing.
That's not the way it's taught to children. They're encouraged to think of their "privilege" entirely in terms of race, which determines whether they win or lose.
The lack of having been discriminated against is by definition not a "privilege". What's wrong isn't the lack of discrimination, but the idea that lack of discrimination should be called a "privledge" rather than a "norm". It attacks people for not having hardship, namely turning something that's good int o something that's bad. The use of the term "white privledge" fundamentally applies that to make things "equal" we must discriminate against white people as much as we discriminate (as a society) against non-white people. Namely, bring people doing well down to the level of someone doing badly, rather than elevating the people doing poorly up to the level of "normal".
> the idea that lack of discrimination should be called a "privledge" rather than a "norm".
But the lack of discrimination isn't the norm. It would definitely be nice if it was, but that's not the case. White people experiencing better general overall treatment by society compared to those in the same situation who are black is just a fact. Complaining that it causes reverse discrimination doesn't make that untrue.
My point is it SHOULD be a norm, and trying to push the other direction, as the phrase does, is doing things backwards. We should be "norming" the idea that discrimination is bad. Rather than saying that discrimination is normal and thus everyone should be equally (which isn't really possible) discriminated against.
Each sentence, though individually false, comes together to produce an overall point that is also false.
A lack of a disadvantage others have is a privilege. The point of calling it a privilege is to emphasize that white people benefit from racism against other groups even when they don't do anything racist themselves. Benefitting knowingly from discrimination against others while doing nothing to end it is complicity. The term "privilege" is not an attack on white people, it is an attack on racism. It absolutely does not imply that we should bring down white people or be racist to them. Privilege will end when discrimination against non-white people ends.
At least set up a monthly donation to an anti-racism organization, or something like that.
The 'privilege' is just a trick to divide you and make you fight each other. If it was't black vs white, it would be a 'privilege' based on subtle shades of skin, hair, eyes or even height. Anything works to distract masses from the fact that the only real privilege is hereditary wealth. Having the right family name is The Privilege. It's unbelievable that the relatively smart people fail to see this elephant in the room and instead fall for that shallow and self contradictory "anti-racism" doctrine.
The fact is that everyone has a certain amount of "privilege" due to their membership to a group and the complex dynamics that exist between groups. There is no person who doesn't have a list of advantages and disadvantages compared to others. Understanding that, and that your experience will not always be what everyone's experience has been is all you need.
Men get harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, but we don't really hear much about "female privilege". If you want to point out discrimination, you don't need any concept for "privilege". The problem was never that one group has something. The problem is that one group does not have something. It's the inequality that needs to be addressed, not the "privilege".
Making blanket assumptions about people on the basis of their skin color is something we should be avoiding, not encouraging. Keep the focus on what needs to be solved and suddenly you avoid all the problems focusing on "white privilege" causes like resentment, defensiveness, blame, and guilt.
> The fact is that everyone has a certain amount of "privilege" due to their membership to a group and the complex dynamics that exist between groups. There is no person who doesn't have a list of advantages and disadvantages compared to others. Understanding that, and that your experience will not always be what everyone's experience has been is all you need.
It's really hard to get people to realize that, and to see the different types of things they benefit from silently. Do you have better suggestions to get people to notice?
> Men get harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, but we don't really hear much about "female privilege". If you want to point out discrimination, you don't need any concept for "privilege". The problem was never that one group has something. The problem is that one group does not have something. It's the inequality that needs to be addressed, not the "privilege".
People do talk about both sides, but you're right that they don't use "privilege" there.
I think the word privilege is useful to point out when one group has a huge advantage over another, even when there are some advantages or 'advantages' going in either direction.
> Making blanket assumptions about people on the basis of their skin color is something we should be avoiding, not encouraging. Keep the focus on what needs to be solved and suddenly you avoid all the problems focusing on "white privilege" causes like resentment, defensiveness, blame, and guilt.
It's not really an assumption that if you're white you face a tiny fraction of the racism that a black person gets, for example. As far as defensiveness and guilt, etc... I feel like any language used to talk about this will get politicized and twisted that way.
>It's really hard to get people to realize that, and to see the different types of things they benefit from silently. Do you have better suggestions to get people to notice?
Much of the time it'll have to be hearing from other people and their experiences. Then you can kind of compare that with how things go for you. It's nice in a "count you blessings" kind of way to have a list of advantages you have, but it's not important. What matters is that people understand that differences exist so that when they hear about one person's problems they understand that their own experience isn't representative for everyone. Without that someone might hear someone with complaints against police (as an example) and think back over their own long history of pleasant/helpful interactions with officers and dismiss the other person's complaints as overblown or even made up. We see the same problem with A/B testing. Some user complaints about something in a tweet or forum and other people dismiss them because their experience is different and they don't realize what they see isn't universal.
> I think the word privilege is useful to point out when one group has a huge advantage over another, even when there are some advantages or 'advantages' going in either direction.
Why is it useful? Won't it be more useful and productive to point out when a group has a huge disadvantage compared to another? That's something you can fix. If you are told, that simply because of where you were born and the color of your skin X Y and Z are going to be easier for you that isn't useful. You didn't cause that situation, you can't change where you were born or your skin color, and you probably don't want to make anything worse for yourself even if you could. If you tell someone instead that other people with a different skin color are unfairly treated in X Y and Z that's something people can and will want to change.
> It's not really an assumption that if you're white you face a tiny fraction of the racism that a black person gets
The problem is that it 100% is. An old white man accused of being "privileged" might be a holocaust survivor or come from a country or community where they've faced racism their whole lives. Maybe it wasn't even racism explicitly. The point is that you can't know what struggles a person has had to deal with and when people have suffered the last thing they want is someone telling them how great and easy their lives have been.
If you're going to make an assumption it should be that every person has had struggles and advantages at various points in their lives. What matters is that we identify areas of inequality and correct them to reduce all people's struggles. When you do that you aren't asking anyone to feel bad about how good they've had things, you're just asking them to help bring everyone up to the same place. Guilt. blame, defensiveness... those things aren't inevitable. It's all about framing the discussion constructively around the problem to be solved and not the people who, entirely by chance, don't have that particular struggle.
It sucks being poor regardless of race (I grew up poor in Australia, so pretty wealthy by some perspectives), but having to contend with race is an additional burden to those who are not white in predominately white countries because there's another difference for them to overcome.
WRT the white working class boys, They are not being held back by terms like white privilege. They are being held back by the very white house of lords denying them opportunities.
In an American context, how often do you hear about social policies to round up Canadians who overstay work visas in order to deport them?
Do you think white people who lived during the time of segregation or redlining had white privilege? Because there's plenty of those people still living today. The kids shouting slurs at Ruby Bridges are still alive.
Now yes, obviously white privilege is not the only axis of oppression and both in the UK and US class privilege is overlooked to a massive degree but pretending white privilege is a racist term is stupid.
>Do you think white people who lived during the time of segregation or redlining had white privilege
Whites were 80-90% of the population during that time, assigning a vague notion of "privilege" to an entire race of people as a basis for reverse racism is not only useless, but misleading, because these "privileged" people were still in competition with other whites (and non-redlined minorities). The implication is that they collectively derived benefit from unfair rules against blacks, but frankly this is a dishonest assertion.
>but pretending white privilege is a racist term is stupid.
>Racist: discriminatory especially on the basis of race or religion
You're playing wordgames to resolve the cognitive dissonance that comes with claiming to be anti-racist while using intrinsically racist terminology. Especially when the implication of "white privilege" is that there is an unfair advantage based on race which needs to be corrected based on race. Reverse racism is still racism, even if merriam-webster tries to redefine the term.
> Whites were 80-90% of the population during that time, assigning a vague notion of "privilege" to an entire race of people as a basis for reverse racism is not only useless, but misleading, because these "privileged" people were still in competition with other whites (and non-redlined minorities). The implication is that they collectively derived benefit from unfair rules against blacks, but frankly this is a dishonest assertion.
They absolutlely did derive a collective benefit, i'm astounded anyone can deny this. Are you just ignorant of just how badly treated black people were compared to white people in that period?
How much "benefit" do you think the average white person received from segregation and redlining less than 10% of the population? How would you even quantify it? Marginally lower property prices/rents in a small subset of neighborhoods? Slightly smaller class sizes in pre-modern schools? Slightly less competition for unskilled labor?
This is rhetorical sleight of hand, sophistry which conflates mistreatment with collective benefit to justify racial wealth transfer and power mongering, all on behalf of the so called anti-racists.
Your definition of racism is one of many. Today there is a strong push to define racism only as discrimination against historically oppressed racial minorities.
The so-called "white privilege" is the abstract invisible but ever present enemy that's present in every cult. People in North Korea believe that spies and greedy capitalists are trying to invade their great country, and only the wise and pure leader Kim is going to save them. Orthodox muslims believe that the christian non-believers are the absolute evil, and the orthodox christians think the same about muslims. Different christian cults believe they are surrounded by fake christian cults and only they have the true understanding of what's right and what's wrong. The so-called woke believe in the ever-present whiteness evil and only their anti-racist doctrine will save them. My point is that if someone insists that you're surrounded by enemies, and the only way to save your soul is to blindly accept the Teaching, you're in a cult. The enemies part is what makes cult a cult, because the cult organisers want they followers to have a shallow us-vs-them mentality.
> "You shouldn't be able to tweet racist messages"
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..
“I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example.”
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.
Speech laws also requires the court to make a judgement on the intent of the perpetrator, the exact same expression can either be legal or illegal depending on intent.
Shooting someone can be illegal or legal based on the intent of the perpetrator, establishing the state of mind of someone accused of a crime isn't exactly a legal novelty
True, but the intent here is very subjective, the court basically has to fantasize about the perpetrators intent. And what it usually comes down to is if the perpetrator is "good" person or not. Speech laws invites courts to be subjective in their rulings.
Slippery slopes aren't really a type of fallacy. Much in the same way that conspiracies are often real.
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)
It looks like they might be. This seems to be the relevant part of the Act:
(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?
The article doesn't say Armstrong requires a carer.
> 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".
Apart from both being NPF, having some symptoms that can be misinterpreted as similar, and high levels of comorbidities, ADHD is not related to autism.
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.
The slope is slippery because, given enough time, lawyers are always be able to form a causal effect chain from human action A to undesirable outcome B.
This implies all such causal chains, regardless of their nature, will always be accepted as valid. If that were true, no lawyer would ever lose a case.
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.
Okay, buddy, we have this thing called the Internet now. It's a magical place where you can be anonymous and say whatever the fuck you want. The cat has left the bag.
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?
It's odd that you seem to find restricting speech and pushing dissidents underground into radicalizing echo chambers to be a problem, while not being at all concerned about those dissidents' capacity to radicalize orders of magnitude more people and form even bigger echo chambers when given free rein on the biggest platforms the internet has to offer.
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.
Almost literally every person is "in favour of limits on speech" to some extent, so this kind of reductionism contributes nothing (and I'd argue generally makes the signal-to-noise ratio even worse).
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 100% agree with you. There is strong indication we are heading towards a more volatile world, and we need to collectively discuss these questions.
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.
By that logic if you are in favour of actionable threats being illegal you should have no problem with this. It's just speech after all.
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.
...over the speed limit, yes. The point of parent's post is that the offensive nature of a statement or speech in general is subjective and can change with whims and the time. A speed limit is objective and quantifiable; if you go over the speed limit stated you get fined, there's no room for interpretation
Your comparison would be true if the speed limit differentiated on the intent on the speeder, e.g. person A can drive over the speed limit but not person B because person B has the wrong intent.
They can do that because of regulation, not intent.
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.
> I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages
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.
Interesting case: drunken tweet to a small follower count, deleted after 20 minutes, leading to prosecution and conviction. The Online Safety Bill which is due to be passed, with further empower institutions to police 'harmful messages'. I guess ideological conformity is a good thing for stable society?
It’s also disturbing that the police complains it is not given the means to combat knife crime but thinks it is a good use of their resource to police politeness on twitter.
What is typical for organization like police is that they prioritize things that gets the best statistics in a spreadsheet, not the best result for society.
Which only shows their activities are graded with wrong criteria. But as we all know from office life, picking valid criteria for performance ratings is an adventure by itself...
Are the police really motivated by this? Or are specific senior figures who are in they public eye and thus don’t want their “reputation” shamed on social media the real individuals pushing for these kinds of legislation?
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.
The police like to chase easy targets and social media offers up lots of opportunities to prove how well they are doing their job.
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.
Yeah, they really like their soft targets, don't they? On the other hand, a gathering of young men who believably signal that they're totally down for a bit of street violence, now that's not such an attractive target to confront.
The fact he was drunk doesn't really have much to do with it. It wouldn't be an excuse for running somebody down in his car or stabbing someone and shouldn't be here.
Drunk in charge of a communications device is hardly on the same scale as driving a vehicle. One is likely to cause actual bodily harm. The other is most likely to result in minor embarrassment, except in a few wild outlier cases.
It actually might be an excuse to some degree. Diminished capacity is considered in many jurisdictions, and defendants who can demonstrate diminished capacity at the time of the offense can often get lesser sentences.
> 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.
I guess ideological conformity is a good thing for stable society?
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.
Only if you think there's no difference between saying something and publishing it on the internet. When I said "saying" I mean that in a literal sense - speaking to people face to face. That is not the same as publishing something.
FYI, and this is in the article, the law used to prosecute the man was written to prevent you from saying offensive things over the telephone. This distinction between a voice and a megaphone doesn't apply to this particular situation because the law itself makes no such distinction.
The problem is that that is never, ever, where it stops. There's always people that society suddenly decides are "really important", usually the most dumb-witted, cruel abusers you can come up with.
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.
> He was 15, she was 40 years old at the time. Not only have they not been sued (in France, both would be punished)
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.
People digging up old stories on Macron's and his wife are anything but concerned about helping justice. They're only interested in proving Macron was abused by his wife so she can get convicted and then he (the victim!) gets hit as a side effect.
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.
a whole bunch of people were sued for stating this during the campaign
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.
They both said on TV they fucked when he was 15/16, and while she was in a power relationship over him (as his French teacher). Pointing out there might be a problem with that doesn't violate libel laws for a whole host of reasons.
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.
I wish people would stop misusing the word pedophilia. Most normal adults can be sexually attracted to 15 year olds. Pedophilia is something completely different.
> No one is stopping you thinking, or saying, whatever you want at any time.
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 history of this law dates back to 1935, when it was designed to protect post office staff who ran telephone switchboards from being harassed by the public, and it that context, it makes sense. Of course in 21st century the law doesn't make sense as it isn't humans transmitting our messages any more
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
Crickets from the usual crowd who would be crying "cancel culture!" on all TV and radio for weeks and calling for heads to roll had the tweet been about something other than a cause they support (military worship).
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.
> 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.
The largest media outlets that beat the freedom of speech drum (fox, other right wing sites) never do so in response to people whose speech they don't like being silenced.
One major factor is a disagreement in what counts as speech. I see this from people individually discussing topics and from official stances of platforms, even supposedly free speech platforms.
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.
“ > 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?”
The National Review is very much on the respectable ideologically consistent side of the Usual Crowd (TM). (I mean, don't get me wrong, it's awful, but it largely has the courage of its convictions). Rest assured that, like, the Sun and Daily Mail and Spectator aren't going to be decrying this.
I'm on the right, the far right even by HN standards. This response is either comically out of touch or disingenuous. Nobody in my circles is celebrating this, it has always been about freedom, and I have never encountered your straw man in real life or even on the dangerous alt-right forums where I was radicalized.
What on earth would make you say this? There are plenty of people upset over this including myself and others that believe in free speech. This is unfortunately in the UK which doesn’t have the same protections as the US. This person would not have been found guilty in the US but the UK doesn’t have the same level of freedoms.
I read the grand-parent comment as about the misrepresentation of free-speech in the media. Of course there are sincere and consistent free-speech supporters, but their cause is disproportionately used in the British media to favour opponents of other liberal/libertarian causes.
I normally cry cancel culture and I find this awful despite not sympathizing with the man's views. Likewise I'm concerned about the impact of 'nuisance' laws in the UK on legitimate dissent despite finding most protestors to be annoying.
I think this comment leaves a bad taste. It is dissing at partisanry where there isn't any. I personally know many republicans and democrats who have a staunch sense of free of speech. They all would be crying in unison.
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.
This is a partisan topic. The reason why this has happened is an old law that has been repurposed by the police to pursue these claims. In Scotland, which has a different govt to the UK on this issue, the hate speech laws are even more stringent (and the police even more aggressive in pursuing crimes on Twitter).
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).
I don't know about "crickets". This thread is full of people who think this is a bad move.
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.
I think you may be looking for an issue where there is none on this one. While "the usual crowd" absolutely rightly believes in canceling the cancelers as pushback for anti-freedom policies like the cancel culture embraced by the left and progressives, I just Googled the guy's name and there's barely any news articles on it at all aside from a few tabloid-tech style sites like this one, starting a day or two ago. I'd chalk this one up to "most people have no idea this even happened".
> While "the usual crowd" absolutely rightly believes in canceling the cancelers as pushback for anti-freedom policies like the cancel culture embraced by the left and progressives
Unironically canceling the cancelers to pushback against cancel culture? Maybe the horseshoe theory has some merit after all.
Certainly, it is the cancelers who are most upset when their behavior comes back around and bites them in the behind.
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.
It is different. Fundamentally different. One is retributive (A did it to B so B is “justified” in doing it to A, too) and the other is restorative (A took from B so “justice” is served by A returning it to B). Everyone is worse off in the first scenario (an eye for an eye and all...) while everyone is back to where they started in the second scenario.
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.
You are missing the point of the retaliation, in this eye for an eye way.
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.
>> Hundreds of UK citizens have been found guilty under Section 127, often for insulting, abusing, and harassing public figures like athletes, journalists, and MPs.
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.
I feel like we've got this totally backwards. If we're going to have laws around speech at all then it should protect the general public more than public figures. In fact some public figures, such as politicians, should be entirely exempt from protection. But we don't see it protecting the general public because those cases are never as high profile.
I like how to justify the "including verified accounts" it's defining "Harassment" to include a regular critique of her ideas but with a naughty swear word.
I don't know about this one, but there was a teenager that quoted a snoop song on her instagram (not directed at anyone but rather in memory of her friend that died in a car crash) and got threatened with an ankle bracelet and a $1000 fine.
And this is before the rules got even more strict.
That's the thing. People often don't know the contents of these tweets, so we don't even know whether the accused actually said anything, let alone something that violated a law.
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.'"
Is my downvoted & dead sister so because she is false or because she spoke an unspeakable truth? Surely this cannot be one of those places where mentioning an offensive word (as distinct from using it) is considered offensive? @dang
That seems like an incredibly low-bar for what's considered "grossly offensive". Then again, the worst stuff is made by anonymous accounts and the police probably aren't going to trace those.
I'm a bit confused who found this message that offensive? I have a brother who served in the British Army and I struggled to take offense at all. Just one guy with an opinion.
Breaking: man in UK jailed for thinking bad thoughts, "experts say the body language of the man clearly indicated he was thinking thoughts that go against public interest, the man has been apprehended and we hope to set an example for this kind of behavior"
I mean this is satire now but with the way things are going its not entirely ludicrous
I believe after Margaret Thatcher died, "Ding-Dong, the Witch Is Dead" hit Number 1 on iTunes UK. Should everyone who purchased the song have been sentenced to community service, too?
To illustrate the effects of administrative suppression of free speech one can observe that Russian propaganda freely blossoms on the platforms where free speech is significantly administratively suppressed, ie. for example FB, Twitter, LinkedIn - the places where speech violating various "safe space" rules is handled by getting administratively deleted. Russian propaganda is a product of a free speech suppressed environment and easily thrives in such conditions. The rebuttals to Russian propaganda on those platforms gets reported by Russians as harassment and bullying and thus frequently gets deleted, and as a result the Russian propaganda stays there unchallenged or weakly challenged at best. One of the main point of Russian propaganda is rationalization and normalization of the actions of their fascist regime, and such rationalization/normalization naturally fits the "safe space" rules of those platforms, while denying "safe space" to that propaganda is one of the most important thing in fighting it, yet those platforms in many cases de-facto help Russian propaganda by allowing it to highjack the free speech suppression machinery on those platforms.
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.
Another British case from this week: a man got 3 months in jail for being drunk on a plane. The judge acknowledged he wasn't violent or aggressive or even rude to anyone, but he did vomit: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/drunk-p...
I remember 8 years ago when the UK police started conducting night raids on houses like they were going after the Taliban, because the people tweeted something anti-muslim after a terrorist attack:
Funny how some people take 'freedom of speech' for granted or universal..nope...that is uniquely an American feature, still, even after centuries. Democracy does not mean free speech.
Presumably a reference to how the Brandenburg decision only threw out Whitney/Schneck/Abrams/etc in 1969. Legal rights are just words on paper without a corresponding culture of respect for their importance.
The US has a long and sordid tradition of nakedly political censorship. Ask Eugene Debs how much good the 1st amendment did him.
The thing I’m most interested in isn’t in this article nor the source it cites: how was the tweet itself reported or discovered by the authorities in the first place?
In many ways, we haven't moved much beyond the middle ages where "make an example" was the standard operating principle. Sure we don't publicly hang or draw & quarter people in the square anymore (which I am glad for of course), but the basic underlying principle of "increase obedience by scaring people when they see what you did to person X" is still very much in use.
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.
YouTube also removed a channel last week on direct orders from the UK Ministry of Defense, after it published a video prank involving the current Defense Secretary.
Stop using Twitter. Build open decentralized alternatives that won't cooperate with speech police. Defund the useless bureaucrats who exist only to police speech. Fire them. Let them compete for their bread and wine like all of us who work for a living.
I'm a little surprised that the UK press is allowed to name Mr Kelly.
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.
The tweet is certainly bad taste and something that would be appalling if said out loud, however, this seems like a bit over-the-top judicial response to tweets.
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…
Given the date, it feels appropriate to point out that the same law also makes it illegal to send a message that you know to be false for the purpose of causing annoyance.
> 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.
I'm genuinely confused by what "get out of control" means. Violence? SWATing? Other people on the Internet may get mad?
I'm an American so I don't know that my opinion has much importance here, but as someone who has never really believed in "cancel culture" and who regularly rolls their eyes at the self victimization of politicians and celebrities who advocate for hate against marginalized groups then act like they are being bullied when those same groups call them on it, this is definitely eye opening.
If I would have my way, I would allow all offensive speech, however if a society wants to be policed, I'd rather it be done by a court of the state and not by private companies because there is a higher chance of things being fair if it's done by the state and it's easier to hold courts to account than private companies.
I've been noticing how much I'm "self-censoring" nowadays. The whole "free world" concept is a lie. Even the "guardians of freedom" USA wants you to disclose all social media handles if I apply for a visa. That means whatever I say online is already getting profiled.
Reading that headline, I was thinking it might be like a specific graphic death threat against someone, or just some vile racial epithets but no its just the kinda edgy stuff you see all over social media. Upsetting that this is even a thing and sets a very bad precedent.
"I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free" - for all our problems, these are still not hollow words. I wouldn't choose to live anywhere else.
It’s the nature of the average voter that they might whinge about their freedom of speech being infringed and, on another occasion, call for a guy like this to be punished, without appreciating the inconsistency.
Funny, cause both political sides thinks the other base is toxic and so I guess when you are forced to take a train to a camp and do some outside work you won't mind so much.
No, he wasn't. It's offensive, but the figure of speech "the only good ... is a dead ..." does not call for murder. And offending soldiers is not a hate-crime, AFAIK. The tweeter should have been made to pay a fine to the charity Captain Tom was endorsing.
I see, probably the person I got this info from encountered an overzealous seller. Which is not unusual, Lidl in Poland requires ID to but non-alcoholic beer. Literally nobody else does that.
Those are the ones with wikipedia articles about them that I found in ~5 minutes of searching. Many things can be greatly minimized if we pretend the only instances that exist are those so widely publicized to earn themselves a wikipedia article.
Grooming ‘epidemic’ as almost 19,000 children identified as sexual exploitation victims in England [1] implies it is widespread, but it's not clear from the article how that number is split between grooming gangs and other perpetrators, so it remains a mere implication, not fact.
I assume the above comment was flagged for its flippant tone, but I'm vouching for it, because it raises a very valid complaint about anecdotal evidence.
The UK is a large country, so even if some event is rare, it's easy to find 10-20 incidents, and claim it is widespread. And if it's emotionally charged, people are afraid to call out such misleading use of anecdote, because they'll be accused of downplaying or defending the events, despite having valid concerns.
This gives whoever decides which anecdotes enter the public consciousness the power to pain any picture they like, no matter how divorced from reality. I'm sure you can think of a few such cases in the recent past.
Have UK courts heard of the Streisand effect? I have a strong urge to search the said tweet to find what the hell did he say and I'm pretty sure it will be like the first or second result in google images if i had enough motivation for it.
