So, we have Free Speech preserved in Canada, and people won't be able to have you imprisoned for disagreeing with them on Twitter.
But, we also won't get any Doctor Who in 2016.
Sorry guys.
RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Solitario Egg + Gawith's Navy Flake
Hate speech laws are an enlightened alternative to having to do what must be done, when someone mortally insults you.
ReplyDeleteYou don’t police your thoughts, when talking to your boss or to a girl you are trying to pick up?
DeleteI absolutely support free thought and free expression, but not when it is used for the purposes of oppression. Speech is an action. You would not insult a Hells Angel or a member of a drug cartel. The first will hurt you and then send their lawyers after you to sue you for damages, and the others will simply dismember you to terrorize the public and will make you a subject of a narco banner. Who or what is policing your thoughts when you are dealing with powerful sociopaths?
The fact is, Law recognizes that speech is also an action, and polices it to maintain social order. There are Incitement to Violence statutes in California and some other States. Under that law, if you say fighting words to another person, you are provoking them to a fight. If you insult someone with fighting words, and they don’t start a fight, and you repeat these fighting words (or combat taunts, as I prefer), and they still don’t hit you, at that point you can be arrested for saying the fighting words to a person, and then repeating them, AS IF you started a fight!
Whether you like it or not, you also have a social obligation to act. If you witness a rape or some other crime and don’t intervene (by calling cops and possibly acting as a witness), you will be charged and you can get jail time for being an accessory to a crime. This is nothing new. In the days of yore, the King can compel you to go and fight in a war, and possibly die and be crippled. Few people know, that under the Posse Comitatus Law of the Old Americas, so much vaunted by the lunatic fringe nowadays, you were compelled by your local Sheriff to join the Posse to deal with criminals, and possibly participate in a lynching. If you didn’t, your refusal to answer the call can be used to confiscate your property, typically your land. How does THAT grab you?
Speech can also be used to control people emotionally and socially at the interpersonal level (men and women in abusive relationships), and also for social control and repression. In a bad and undemocratic place, you can be denounced as a witch, a spy, or a traitor and be turned over to a mob or a kangaroo court. You can use speech to intimidate people and take away their women, and destroy them, as if you were using fists. Free speech exists everywhere, it just takes more character to back it up in a totalitarian states. Saddam Hussein of Iraq exercised his free speech to denounce corrupt and incompetent officials in his regime, everyone else under him would have been shot. In any repressive society, in any lunchroom scene dominated by popular cliques, those in power will use their free speech to put down and socially dominate those who are at the bottom of the social pecking order, who generally gave to face a lot more negative consequences for exercising THEIR free speech. Sexual violence and verbal threat of it has been used for millennia to dominate and control women. Not just women, it is also used in the militaries the world over (including the US) to control men and maintain informal privilege and social order. That is why today we have a concepts of the Hostile Work Place/Environment, the Sexual Harassment and the resultant litigations. It all has to do with maintaining a level playing field and giving everyone a fair chance. That is indeed social enlightenment. And of course, where there is great light, there is also shadow, but on the balance, I like this system, especially given the alternative.
Bottom line is, it takes courage and genuine respect to speak Truth to Power and live to tell the tale, and if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, you will take the same care when speaking with those who don’t get respect, power or privilege, especially from the anonymity of the internet. If you watch what you say with some, but then insist on your freedom of speech to trash others, then you are a two-faced, spineless bully, typically a product of social repression, aka Authoritarian Personality, the ready follower of dictators and demagogues.
DeleteHate speech is allowed in the US. See all the Neo-Nazis, Westboro Baptist Church, and clan demonstrations? Hate speech directed at a specific private person crosses the line into threats and intimidation, and it raises the issues of the hostile environment threats of litigation and need to mitigate it.
DeleteNobody is talking about imprisoning right or left wing extremists. Their speech is protected. 95% of all political oppression is peer pressure and emotional abuse. Emotional harm, also called emotional abuse, also Toxic Leadership in the military, constitutes harassment, mental cruelty, makes for a hostile workplace. You engage in that and that will cost you in child custody decisions made against you in divorce proceeding, your military career as an officer will be shot with mandated counseling, and if you become emotionally abusive in the work-place, you will have successful harassment complaints lodged against you.
DeleteEmotional harm is a very big deal, and I don't think that there is a country in the West, that doesn't recognize this fact.
Um, actually, what I referred to above was in fact people wanting to LITERALLY imprison a guy who wasn't even an extremist, but just criticized some feminists on Twitter. They wanted him imprisoned for 6months-10years.
DeleteIf I have to wait until 2017 for more Doctor Who in return for a well-needed legal precedent in Canada for free speech and defining Social Media as a public square (effectively), that's a good trade.
ReplyDelete