It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
If the only thing I knew about a given law is that those three complained about it I would immediately and wholeheartedly support and endorse that law. It’s probably awesome and badly needed.
However, in this particular, case the law is wildly criticized and these 3 are just part of the crowd. And even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day.
In fact, do you know who should make you mad? Politico.eu. This “news story”/“opinion piece” uses those names just to generate views and bring money. The subject is not being handled in any meaningful way. Your time is just wasted and you’re being used as a product to be sold to their advertisers. And you should be mad at yourself for continually falling in this trap of forming opinions on baseless information.
Casual reminder that Politico is owned by Axel Springer SE, the german Fox News
That’s how Trump people work.
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Removed, civility.
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The problem with your attitude is that, by definition, free speech is only a useful right when it protects unpopular speech. The law at hand here isn’t a surprise (the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right), but it is certainly a particularly glaring red flag that there is absolutely nothing stopping them from e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.
The vast majority of important free speech cases throughout history have involved the most deplorable people making the most deplorable kinds of speech, but e.g. American free speech would be nonexistent if the KKK hadn’t won their landmark case.
No. That’s your problem with my attitude.
“Free speech” absolutists don’t convince me with their hypotheticals.
Believe it or not: absolute free speech is not the end goal and not as valuable as you all believe.
Forbidding some kind of speech can be okay.
Because not forbidding it creates an awful lot of very real and very current pain. Somehow the theoretical pain that a similar law could create is more important for your argument, than the real and avoidable pain thatthis law is attempting to prevent.
And I say that the specific American flavor of free speech is not very valuable at all.
My dude. The person you’re replying to said nothing about whether or not they should be able to say what they want. They simply stated their opinion about what they said.
Log off for a bit and work on your reading comprehension.
Huh? The parent commenter said that without knowing anything else, they would support a law that (if you know something about it) would impact whether or not they should be able to say what they want. Now, that commenter may or may not support such a law knowing more about it, but the response addressed the danger of blind support for it.
How did you get to your interpretation of the parent comment?
It’s not blind support. It’s an educated guess based on the fact that those 3 people tend to froth at the mouth in rage against laws that are good for society and support laws that are TERRIBLE for society. So far their track record has been good enough that if they’re mad about a law, it’s probably a good law.
I don’t know why this needs to be explained to you. I’m going to log this as a donation to aid the mentally impaired on my taxes.
In practice, does the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions
It seems to me there are a lot of exceptions to free speech in the land of free speech. I wouldn’t see any harm in adding hate speech to the list given how large it already is.
That seems more of a problem with flawed democracy or autocracies, than to do with free speech. Any awful thing could become law under a flawed democracy/autocracy. The UK has plenty of undemocratic elements and they’re abused to pass horrible laws right now, and we need to fix those elements - the laws are just the end result.
Yeah but what about, just… you know the whole vibe of the thing. I mean these people are really loaded and successful and they just do what they want and I’m drawn to their gravitas because my own life seems so hopeless and just don’t seem to be able to control my own television let alone an entire government so whatever they think and say is just an amazing breathtaking righteous truth bomb.
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That would be bad enough if they didn’t then also advocate incarcerating people for disagreeing with them.
I think Denolition Man should be required viewing for any conversation about good vs bad laws. It’s worrying how few people seem to be aware of the ideas in that movie.