Tyranny coming to you
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Ok I am not American so feel free to discount my views. But America is awesome. Its contribution to modern society is probably unequalled in history. The technology, science and extraordinary jurisprudence are stunning.
Sure it is flawed. It has way more guns than it needs. The country is riddled with crackpot christians and a strange unjustified paranoia about government as an institution. A large portion of the population are under-educated by comparative international standards and the police appear on the whole unable to stop shooting unarmed people.
Yet if there is one thing the rest of the world can envy it is their obsession with their rights and in particular their love of free speech.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by
David Boots.
You won’t get any argument from me that the hate-laws in the UK and to a lesser extent in France are applied too broadly in some extraordinary cases. The Count Dankula one for example is a pretty difficult case to explain either way. However, hate-speech, extreme harassment, intimidation and threats exploded during the Brexit debate and the narratives that came out from it and after the vote. Immigrants who never experienced racism or intimidation found it came hard and fast out of nowhere…both to children and adults. Busses in the UK became a notorious place of vile nastiness against not just immigrants but LGTB too, and even people with disabilities. Many of the hate-crime convictions come from mobile-video recordings on busses….often filmed by non-immigrants, angry and concerned but to afraid to intervene. One of the reasons convictions of hate-crime have gone up into the thousands is because examples of hate crime exploded recently after the Brexit vote, the laws were updated to reflect that and the government and police are finally taken seriously. This is a phenomena that might be completely invisible to many British people who have less flagrant acts of racism happen in their community or who don’t take public transportation in mixed areas. It’s hard to image there would be thousands of convictions or that things are as bad as they say it is.
Does this apply to Countdankula? I don’t know. His example seems pretty tame compared to those who had “go back to ISISstan smeared in excrement on their front door” or black people called monkeys threatened with physical beatings if they were seen again on the bus. Just watch an episode of South Park and you’ll see Jewish jokes way harder than what Countdankula did. But then, the authors are Jewish themselves…and it was done in the United States. And the UK had the hollocaust virtually waiting at their doorstep. I have no pity for the idiot who made the video but a jail conviction would be a pretty terrible use of the justice system.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by
Davis.
David Boots wrote:
My view is that this conviction should serve as a warning that your liberty to voice an opinion is threatened and has been for some time. Either people wake up soon to this or we will all have to submit to religious oppression and in our lifetime.
As I’ve said before. The United States has a very unique and quite extreme attitude towards free speech. One has virtually the right to say anything that doesn’t involve a crime (or instigate crime). Europe, Canada, Aust/NZ, Japan etc have never ever had remotely similar concept of freedom of speech. And there is no notable movement in these countries to remove these limits on freedom of speech. In a survey very few Europeans felt sympathy for those convicted of hate speech or “gross offence” or “gross indecency”.Remember the analoy of the Westboro baptist church. Americans and European take a very different attitude towards it and show little interest in changing it.Ask yourself…what if the guy had thrown his dog a black doll and said “kill that n******r” and trained the dog to rip it apart. Would you be so quick to defend the rights of the person who made that video”? I highly doubt Rick Gervais would have defended it so passionately. Jewish jokes are a lot more tollerated than jokes about people of color, partially because many Jewish people make their own jokes against themselves, and also we are under the misconception that Jews are now completely equal and accepted and don’t face the problems they once did. This is not true. There is still clear anti-semitism alive and in play. And many Jewish people who see South Park and Family Guy jew bashing become very distressed as what that could mean for them in the future and in memory of family members who were butchered in their lifetimes. I don’t mind South Park and family guy because absolutely noone and nothing is spared the wrath of their cartoon satyre which includes a whole lot of hard core jokes about LGTB, men and women, races around the world, aborted foetuses and just about everything else. It is parody and almost always there is a clear point to their identity-jokes, almot always in an attempt to show why it is wrong or how absurd it is when taken to its extreme conclusion. I don’t think this is why the guy made that video, he wanted to show how clever he was, pointlessly provoke and offend people while building up youtube views and condition an animal to participate in hatespeech. It doesn’t mean I agree with his conviction, but Ricky Gervais and the South Park creators identity bashing is very very different to what this stupid asshole did on youtube, and I don’t think most British people sympathise with the video maker or care remotely enough about the idiot to protest his conviction. That doesn’t make the conviction reasonable, but its a lot more complex then you are leading on and again, other countries take a quite different approach to free speech than America does.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by
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