For slighly different perspective we can look to Europe.
At 6 a.m. on September 8, the German Twitter user @pauli_zoo was awoken by six police officers demanding access to his home. They were there to gather evidence for a criminal investigation. What potential crime prompted this? Calling the interior and sports minister for the city of Hamburg “a dick” on Twitter.
This is hardly the first time that Germany’s strict laws against speech crimes, including bans on defamation and incitement to hatred, hit the headlines. In June 2020, the German police union filed a criminal complaint against the newspaper Tageszeitung, claiming that it had incited hatred by publishing a column comparing the police to “trash” that should be “thrown in the landfill.” In 2017, Germany adopted the German Network Enforcement Act, a law obliging online platforms to remove “manifestly illegal” content within 24 hours or risk hefty fines.
Nor is Germany the only European democracy to crack down on offensive speech. In September, for example, a French court fined an activist €10,000 for depicting President Emmanuel Macron as Hitler on billboards protesting France’s COVID-19 policies. And last November, Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, coordinated a clampdown on online hate speech in Germany, Italy, France, Greece, Norway, Britain, and the Czech Republic. In Germany alone, police searched more than 80 dwellings, seizing smartphones and laptops, while 96 suspects were questioned about hateful posts that included “insulting a female politician.”
Yet another example of how English and French Canada are just too culturally different to ever truly understand each other. Why do we even bother with Canada anymore?
The author thinks rights are very brittle things, once 'lost' in a single decision, shattered forever. As the survivors of our Japanese camps can tell you, sacred rights can be grossly abrogated in a panic, then restored when calm is.
As to speech rights, I have only seen them expand for a half-century. Cyberspace was just phone calls, in the sixties, and you could charge somebody with "making an obscene phone call" if they said 'hell' or 'damn', since those words were obscene. Now, in cyberspace, you can bully a woman to abandoning her apartment with threats of gang-rape torture deaths, and generally get away with it. (Only a half-dozen examples there, but if you just want examples of women being bullied out of a cyberspace conversation with "free speech", then there are thousands of "obscene phone calls" per day, these days.)
I would say that last week, during COP26, in Postmedia comment columns, especially the N.Post, about 8% of comments made fun of Greta Thunberg, generally of her intelligence in some way. The notion that "equality bureaucracy comes calling" deserves to be rejected from The Line on the "we reject bullshit" credo. The sentence starts with "Don't be surprised" as if it happened to at least 50% of those who insult Thunberg's intelligence. Is it even 0.1% of the NP commentators? (Because, trust me, over 1000 such insults can be dug up.)
Deciding which speech is "active speech" is a complex nest of precedents that I'm no expert in. But Charlie Manson never killed anybody: all he did was emit a stream of words at people. He was still convicted of murder.
Such decisions go back decades. The notion that our not-young Supreme Court, who had all digested millions of words of case law before Twitter was invented, and continue to consume ten thousand words a day of legal thinking for a living, are addled by 50-words-or-less philosophy bites, beggars belief. I'm pretty sure it was mostly on precedent, and how different jurists view them in today's culture.
Here's the thing: the word "woke" appears twelve times in the essay, and the word "law" only eleven. I haven't the author's legal background, but I think we can see this essay isn't about law, but changing culture. Culture informs how the law is read, and used, and our culture is changing to reflect ever-more sympathy for the weak and marginalised. The bending-over-backwards to not-hurt them puts pressure on rights that have been assumed for some time.
BUT: the comedian's rights are very new. Ask Lenny Bruce. Those same swear words that made your phone call obscene would get you de-platformed off every stage bigger than your Mom's living room when I was little, much less the rest of a modern comedy act.
The rights to make money from giving offense, using any words you want, that have appeared during my own lifetime, are enormous. If this decision had gone the other way, it would have chopped back about 0.5% of what I've seen become possible since the Smothers Brothers were "silenced", and it wouldn't have been any kind of slippery slope, or shattered window.
For slighly different perspective we can look to Europe.
At 6 a.m. on September 8, the German Twitter user @pauli_zoo was awoken by six police officers demanding access to his home. They were there to gather evidence for a criminal investigation. What potential crime prompted this? Calling the interior and sports minister for the city of Hamburg “a dick” on Twitter.
This is hardly the first time that Germany’s strict laws against speech crimes, including bans on defamation and incitement to hatred, hit the headlines. In June 2020, the German police union filed a criminal complaint against the newspaper Tageszeitung, claiming that it had incited hatred by publishing a column comparing the police to “trash” that should be “thrown in the landfill.” In 2017, Germany adopted the German Network Enforcement Act, a law obliging online platforms to remove “manifestly illegal” content within 24 hours or risk hefty fines.
Nor is Germany the only European democracy to crack down on offensive speech. In September, for example, a French court fined an activist €10,000 for depicting President Emmanuel Macron as Hitler on billboards protesting France’s COVID-19 policies. And last November, Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, coordinated a clampdown on online hate speech in Germany, Italy, France, Greece, Norway, Britain, and the Czech Republic. In Germany alone, police searched more than 80 dwellings, seizing smartphones and laptops, while 96 suspects were questioned about hateful posts that included “insulting a female politician.”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/americans-dont-envy-european-speech
Yet another example of how English and French Canada are just too culturally different to ever truly understand each other. Why do we even bother with Canada anymore?
The author thinks rights are very brittle things, once 'lost' in a single decision, shattered forever. As the survivors of our Japanese camps can tell you, sacred rights can be grossly abrogated in a panic, then restored when calm is.
As to speech rights, I have only seen them expand for a half-century. Cyberspace was just phone calls, in the sixties, and you could charge somebody with "making an obscene phone call" if they said 'hell' or 'damn', since those words were obscene. Now, in cyberspace, you can bully a woman to abandoning her apartment with threats of gang-rape torture deaths, and generally get away with it. (Only a half-dozen examples there, but if you just want examples of women being bullied out of a cyberspace conversation with "free speech", then there are thousands of "obscene phone calls" per day, these days.)
I would say that last week, during COP26, in Postmedia comment columns, especially the N.Post, about 8% of comments made fun of Greta Thunberg, generally of her intelligence in some way. The notion that "equality bureaucracy comes calling" deserves to be rejected from The Line on the "we reject bullshit" credo. The sentence starts with "Don't be surprised" as if it happened to at least 50% of those who insult Thunberg's intelligence. Is it even 0.1% of the NP commentators? (Because, trust me, over 1000 such insults can be dug up.)
Deciding which speech is "active speech" is a complex nest of precedents that I'm no expert in. But Charlie Manson never killed anybody: all he did was emit a stream of words at people. He was still convicted of murder.
Such decisions go back decades. The notion that our not-young Supreme Court, who had all digested millions of words of case law before Twitter was invented, and continue to consume ten thousand words a day of legal thinking for a living, are addled by 50-words-or-less philosophy bites, beggars belief. I'm pretty sure it was mostly on precedent, and how different jurists view them in today's culture.
Here's the thing: the word "woke" appears twelve times in the essay, and the word "law" only eleven. I haven't the author's legal background, but I think we can see this essay isn't about law, but changing culture. Culture informs how the law is read, and used, and our culture is changing to reflect ever-more sympathy for the weak and marginalised. The bending-over-backwards to not-hurt them puts pressure on rights that have been assumed for some time.
BUT: the comedian's rights are very new. Ask Lenny Bruce. Those same swear words that made your phone call obscene would get you de-platformed off every stage bigger than your Mom's living room when I was little, much less the rest of a modern comedy act.
The rights to make money from giving offense, using any words you want, that have appeared during my own lifetime, are enormous. If this decision had gone the other way, it would have chopped back about 0.5% of what I've seen become possible since the Smothers Brothers were "silenced", and it wouldn't have been any kind of slippery slope, or shattered window.
Calm down, buddy.