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Wow, UK has lost freedom of speech

Hercules56 said:
Wow, ◊◊◊◊ in UK really has gone wacky.

Waving a swastika flag counts as an actual "assault"????

Jeez.
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Do you understand the difference between 'a form of assault' and 'an actual assault', or are you genuinely as dense as you are pretending to be?

Not that I said a word about the UK in that post, but they are cracking down on a wide variety of online harassment. Occasionally, they will overstep, as is normal in any policy affecting millions. North was a neo-fascist speaker, who (from a Searchlight link upthread); "In 2019 North was ordered to pay the philosophy professor A.C. Grayling £20,000 plus costs, after an obscene libel on what was then called Twitter." He is not the sweet little innocent autistic man that some are painting him as. He's one of the Baddies.
 
Thermal said:
Read harder. I didn't say 'immediate' for a reason. Intentionally and substantially rewording an argument for rhetorical benefit is considered profoundly dishonest.

Nazis are active threats, and the swastika has taken on more specific meanings than the symbol of a wider political party or nation. And you know this.
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As much as I hate the sight of the swastika and nazis, and as much as I agree with you on an emotional and intellectual level, im not sure that the display of the swastika on a public sidewalk or street can always be seen as a threat of violence. Sometimes it just means "I hate jews".
 
Hercules56 said:
As much as I hate the sight of the swastika and nazis, and as much as I agree with you on an emotional and intellectual level, im not sure that the display of the swastika on a public sidewalk or street can always be seen as a threat of violence. Sometimes it just means "I hate jews".
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Yet again, I didn't say 'always'. You really have to knock off the strawmanning.

And btw, I don't think it always amounts to a police matter. The Jake and Elwood school of thought works fine for me, as does the 'pop a Spencer' approach.

eta: and a swastika doesn't mean 'I hate Jews'. It means 'I want to exterminate Jews'. There's a difference.
 
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Thermal said:
Yet again, I didn't say 'always'. You really have to knock off the strawmanning.

And btw, I don't think it always amounts to a police matter. The Jake and Elwood school of thought works fine for me, as does the 'pop a Spencer' approach.

eta: and a swastika doesn't mean 'I hate Jews'. It means 'I want to exterminate Jews'. There's a difference.
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That's your interpretation. A judge might agree that the meaning of a swastika flag depends on who waves it. Calling every single display of a swastika to be a threat of violence is a slippery slope.

Can we make the same declaration for the display of a Palestinian or Soviet flag?
 
Hercules56 said:
That's your interpretation. A judge might agree that the meaning of a swastika flag depends on who waves it. Calling every single display of a swastika to be a threat of violence is a slippery slope.
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Not 'every single'. We just went over that.
Hercules56 said:
Can we make the same declaration for the display of a Palestinian or Soviet flag?
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No. We again just went over that.
 
Thermal said:
Yet again, I didn't say 'always'. You really have to knock off the strawmanning.

And btw, I don't think it always amounts to a police matter. The Jake and Elwood school of thought works fine for me, as does the 'pop a Spencer' approach.

eta: and a swastika doesn't mean 'I hate Jews'. It means
'I want to exterminate Jews'. There's a difference.
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This.

We do not need to allow people promoting their belief that they want to kill their fellow citizens who are Jewish, homosexual, have mental health conditions etc., we know that is what they would do if they gained power as that is part of their ideology. (I think we can assume that in the UK today they would also want to kill all Muslim folk as well.)
 
Thermal said:
Not 'every single'. We just went over that.

No. We again just went over that.
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Why not? Many people feel that the Palestinian flag and the Soviet flag displayed in their face is a threat of violence, based on the terrible history of these two societies.

Why do you give them a pass?
 
Darat said:
This.

We do not need to allow people promoting their belief that they want to kill their fellow citizens who are Jewish, homosexual, have mental health conditions etc., we know that is what they would do if they gained power as that is part of their ideology. (I think we can assume that in the UK today they would also want to kill all Muslim folk as well.)
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And many people feel that waving a Palestinian flag in front of a synagogue, or a Jewish owned store or company, is a threat of violence.

Do we ban this activity as well?
 
Hercules56 said:
Why not? Many people feel that the Palestinian flag and the Soviet flag displayed in their face is a threat of violence, based on the terrible history of these two societies.

Why do you give them a pass?
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For the same reasons that we just went over. Which part do you need explained?
 
Hercules56 said:
Then YOU would go to jail and the Nazi would be seen as the victim of assault.

Great job.
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Oh, bull ◊◊◊◊. There is no ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ nationwide mandatory jail time for assault. You can be found 100% guilty, and have your sentence suspended for mitigating factors like provocation.
 
Hercules56 said:
Because many people feel that waving a Palestinian flag in front of a synagogue, or a Jewish owned store or company, is a threat of violence.
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One is a flag of a sort-of-nation, one is the flag of Nazism; we have no reason to consider that the person (outside of say filming a TV programme) flying that flag is not a Nazi, and Nazi ideology requires the murdering of a few millions of their fellow citizens. Quite different things. That is why promoting Nazism should be a criminal offence in of itself.
 
Darat said:
One is a flag of a sort-of-nation, one is the flag of Nazism; we have no reason to consider that the person (outside of say filming a TV programme) flying that flag is not a Nazi, and Nazi ideology requires the murdering of a few millions of their fellow citizens. Quite different things. That is why promoting Nazism should be a criminal offence in of itself.
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The last time that flag was openly flying, we launched a World War against them. Shouldn't really be controversial to say 'yeah we don't accept this'. What are we supposed to do, protect them till they get their way, then kill them again? They are predefined as criminals, and repugnant to public discourse.
 
Nessie said:
What has happened is that many people have now weaponised hate speech laws, by making spurious complaints to the police about what others they disagree with have posted online. The police investigate the complaints and some reports, which are evidenced to be hate speech breaking UK laws, that go to the UK prosecution services, make it to trial and those people are convicted.

Those convictions are then often misreported, without proper context, by other bad actors, to get to make a living as so-called journalists and social media commentators. They have found that misreporting and making people angry, gets more attention, and so they make more money, than responsible, evidenced, explanatory reporting.

Those groups of people, who are acting very irresponsibly, have created a chaos of misinformation.
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And, as I have pointed out previously, the source cited for the version of events being discussed is the Jerusalem Post. Not a neutral source.
 
Carrot Flower King said:
The supposed shouting "We love bacon" was discussed in another thread, but we got sent to the Naughty Step, as it was off topic.

Long story short: there was no actual evidence available to support the story; it was in the context of long-running protests outside the building site of a mosque in Dalton in Furness (not Dalton, east London as many claimed), which had big presences of outside agitators and a lot of arrest for public order offences of folk on both sides of the argument. I did a lot of rummaging in various corners of the net on that one.

This is what happens repeatedly with a bunch of these supposed suppressions of free speech: over-claiming by certain parties; mis-reporting; removal of pertinent facts and so on.
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I remember that one, a few seconds of effort and the claims were exposed as nonsense and lies. Of course that did stop the usual suspects...
Carrot Flower King said:
There is a difference between free speech and deliberate provocation: Nazis insisting on marching through a Jewish area is the latter, not the former.
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A critical difference that many USAians simply don't accept. Mostly, it appears to me, it's simple arrogance; anything the USA does is Correct, therefore anyone who does things differently is Wrong. Then the defensiveness starts.
Carrot Flower King said:
I deliberately avoided mention of the Six Counties and marching season or the equivalent in Glasgow.
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Most Yanks simply don't understand. But then they don't understand Ireland or Scotland at all really.
Carrot Flower King said:
As pointed out earlier, some of those stories are not as presented: some are just plain inaccurate, some are skewed, and it is not clear that some happened at all.
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This.
 
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