Grandparent’s is a universal argument, that applies to other countries / situations as well. Russia, which is technically not a monarchy, have the same problem with hate speech law.
For obvious reasons, it’s harder to give an example from a more liberal country, but his/her point still stands.
"Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to use a public communications network to send certain types of messages including those that are grossly offensive or threatening. The prosecution argued that by posting your video entitled “M8 Yer dug’s a Naazi” on to the Internet, you committed that offence.
“The centrepiece of your video consists of you repeating the phrase “Gas the Jews” over and over again as a command to a dog which then reacts. Sometimes the phrase is “You want to Gas the Jews”. You recite “Gas the Jews” in a variety of dramatic ways. “Gas the Jews” in one form or another is repeated by you 23 times within a few minutes.
“On the whole evidence, including your own, applying the law as made by Parliament and interpreted by the most senior courts in this land, I found it proved that the video you posted, using a public communications network, was grossly offensive and contained menacing, anti-Semitic and racist material.
“You deliberately chose the Holocaust as the theme of the video. You purposely used the command “Gas the Jews” as the centrepiece of what you called the entire joke, surrounding the “Gas the Jews” centrepiece with Nazi imagery and the Sieg Heil command so there could be no doubt what historical events you were referring to."
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."
I think this applies here. Freedom of speech is the right above all rights and limits to that right need to be extremely precise and generally agreed upon.
The western world is drunk on politics. Concepts of racism, harassment, violence, fascism and the like are creeping into inappropriate territories. This is not a time to start making decisions about what people are or aren't allowed to say.
Then Twitter has the right to choose who's speech they want to amplify.
"Concepts of racism, harassment, violence, fascism and the like are creeping into inappropriate territories. This is not a time to start making decisions about what people are or aren't allowed to say."
On the contrary, this move by Twitter is a step toward fending off some of those concepts.
I don't think I (or my parent comment) were trying to defend free speech. For context, I'm not American, and I'm a supporter of UK-style online hate speech crackdown laws.
I commended them for pointing out the lie behind "guy got sued for posting a dog gif", and adding context behind it. The discussion was not "posting nazi videos is hateful, but allowed because free speech"
Yes, I'll fall over myself to defend the right of someone to post a Nazi-themed dog image. Free speech means the freedom to offend. It even means the freedom to hate. Censorship solves nothing, and it's far too tempting a power to be given to the self-righteous.
Fall over yourself all you want to defend free speech, much respect to you. My parent debunked the specific lie that UK police stretched a law to fine a man for uploading a gif of his dog, and that is what I was applauding. Predictably, the replies ignore the lies and rant about free speech.
What else will you fall over for the right of people to post? Does this include the freedom to post without recieving a targeted harassment campaign, doxing, etc, or are you only concerned with government action?
They have a queen and a royal family which, AFAIK, literally do nothing meaningful, aren't running the country, don't produce anything of value (from what I can see) and yet are paid billions (land holdings etc) and are forcing populous to pay fealty to them in many respects...
I just don't understand why... The only thing I can see is "Because I said so, that's why", which doesn't seem to be a sound basis for government.
The most popular argument I’ve heard is that the royal family actually makes more money for the UK than they cost, although those arguments seem to assume that abolishing royalty would mean bulldozing the artifacts and architecture which are the real revenue source. I think the real reason why is that the aristocracy does actually run a lot of things, if a bit indirectly. The House of Lords is a powerful, rich group of people, and who hands out the honors thst enobled them? How many in the House of Commoms aim to become lords and retire? Would they really vote to dismantle the institution which might make them lords?
> They have a queen and a royal family which, AFAIK, literally do nothing meaningful, aren't running the country, don't produce anything of value (from what I can see) and yet are paid billions (land holdings etc) and are forcing populous to pay fealty to them in many respects...
I think that's kind of a backwards view of how it works these days. If anything, the royal family are a bunch of mascots that not only bring in billions to the UK, but also, for better or for worse, serve as a unifying identity for millions of people.
If anything, I think most celebrities in the US serve as a bunch of vacuous narcissists, while at least the royal family understands "noblesse oblige" and their jobs basically involve making non-stop charity appearances.
Here's a great example from a more liberal country. Bill c 16 was wielded in this way by her university against Shepard less than a year after being passed.
Furthermore, her perceived infraction was as banal as presenting two sides of a debate over bill c 16 itself. The university's argument was that even presenting the opposing argument was in breech of university discrimination policies.
> The Spanish Guardia Civil has arrested a Catalan teacher for publishing hate speech on social networks, according to digital media outlet Pallars Digital.
> “Which tweets, which facebook posts, I do not know,” he tweeted after his release, adding that “the accusation is incitation of hate, I suppose hate against the Guardia Civil.”
> “No aggression against the Guardia Civil and the National Police, no violence; But let's make them realize that they are neither welcome nor loved,” Riu wrote on October 3 via his Twitter account. “Let us peacefully make life impossible until they leave Catalonia.On October 3, Riu published.” He confirmed that he has criticized the Spanish government and security forces in some of his online publications. In some cases he used obscene language, specifically against Spanish politicians, and in one Tweet he called Spanish police “orangutans.”
Arresting someone for having called the police forces “orangutans” on an online forum is very undemocratic and not ok.
That's the problem with "peaceful" transitions from fascist governments, where many institutions don't even change their leadership, let alone their culture.
To be fair to Spain, though, the judge closed the case.
Bill C-16 was not wielded against her by the university -- your link demonstrates that an individual professor in the meeting mistakenly believed her conduct was against the "Canadian Human Rights Code" (not a thing that exists). That the subject of conversation that led to the meeting was Bill C-16 does not mean Bill C-16 was the authority the manager in question was using to argue her conduct violated rules. I think the principles of free inquiry are more important than Shepherd's feelings, and so correcting this misconception is important.
Subsequently, she was not punished, and after she herself made the meeting a national issue by doing a sob story tour, the university ultimately cleared her. She then sued the university for being mean to her, which is exactly what you'd expect someone whose main argument is the principles of open, uncomfortable discussion are more important than hurt feelings.
Shepherd then founded an organization on campus to promote open inquiry, and the first speaker she invited was, of course, a white supremacist who had just gotten fired for being a guest on a holocaust denial podcast. I mention this for no particular reason. If someone reading happens to infer that perhaps Shepherd's martyrdom was to a large extent inflated by Shepherd herself to raise her profile by courting controversy, I couldn't possibly be held responsible for that perception.
Your interpretation of the situation is disingenuous and politically motivated (kinda like hate speech prosecution). Literally the first paragraph from the wiki article:
>Shepherd was reprimanded in November 2017 for having played her communications class two clips from The Agenda with Steve Paikin, a TVOntario current-affairs program, which showed a debate with Jordan Peterson, a critic of political correctness, about the compelled use of gender-neutral pronouns.[2] The context of the debate was Bill C-16, a proposal to add "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground for discrimination to the Canadian Human Rights Act and as an identifiable group to the Criminal Code.[4] The bill became law in June 2017.[5]
and regarding the Faith Goldy event from Shepard herself:
>Originally, this event was supposed to be a debate about immigration in Canada–but every professor I invited to debate Goldy declined. One must wonder: if her arguments are so intellectually void and unreasonable, as critics claim, why was no one willing to take on her supposedly bunk arguments about white identity? Wouldn’t it be an easy win?
>Running out of time and with no opposing speaker to represent the pro-open borders side, LSOI decided to launch the Unpopular Opinions Speaker Series, for which Goldy would be the inaugural speaker with her speech “Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European-Canadian Identity.”
>The series would feature speakers who are strong and articulate, yet polemical—speakers who discuss subjects that most might consider taboo. A central tenet of this speaker series, we decided, would be a robust open floor Q&A session at the end, so that the presenter’s views could be directly challenged and confronted.
>I had my own questions for Goldy planned: wouldn’t a theoretical “white ethnostate” be rather dull and homogenous? Doesn’t a diversity of cultures in Canada enhance our perceptions of the world and understanding of one another?
>I never got to ask my questions.
>In fact, I never even got to hear Goldy speak a single word on her topic, as protesters pulled the fire alarm while the introductory remarks were still being made. And that was that; event over.
I haven’t watch the full video, but this paragraph from[1] summarizes the issue well:
“Following Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russian authorities have increasingly used vaguely-defined, anti-extremism laws to suppress the work of human rights activists. Codified through the laws on Foreign Agents, LGBT Propaganda, and Hate Crime, the Russian authorities’ interpretation of extremism permits an arbitrary application of these laws, which allows a dangerous means of discrimination against peaceful groups.”
Not if the problem is with the implementation. The fact that some countries use their courts to jail political enemies is not a reason not to have courts, for example.
No. But its still bad to create exceptions to the rule of not jailing your political enemies and then using democracy as a prop to pretend there's nothing wrong.
Exactly. "tyranny of the majority" is the cited reason the United States adopted the bill of rights with the very first amendment cementing our freedom of speech. This is not coincidental.
It's actually a federal monarchy. "The country is a federation of seven emirates consisting of Abu Dhabi (which serves as the capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Quwain. Each emirate is governed by a ruler; together, they jointly form the Federal Supreme Council. One of the rulers serves as the President of the United Arab Emirates." So in practice, the presiding monarch's power is checked by the other monarchs. Still far from democracy and of no use in a discussion about hate speech laws.
Not countries, and not illegal _but_ :-) I personally know that Barcelona an Dublin have introduced laws that make it more difficult to have more apartments hit the market (Licences with heavy penalties)
It’s not all black and white, though. Limited supply pushes up the prices (and AirBnB’s earnings are a percentage of the total spend), licensing requirements remove a few unknowns, decrease the potential of the host running some kind of bait-and-switch scam and make a rental appear more legitimate from the guest’s point of view.
(typing this from an AirBnB apartment run by a licensed host in Barcelona)
Regardless of the epithets used to describe them, it's worth remembering that, accounting for turn-out, it was around 37% of the British electorate that voted to leave the EU.
Errr yes? That was the whole point. The general concept I had of it was along the lines of "Lets see what the general opinion is, so if there's a large majority one way or another we'll know if we need to look into it".
The non-binding bit was so they didn't have to _commit_ to actually doing anything, just in case.
If that was the case it would have been called a plebiscite rather than a referendum.
That it was in actual fact a plebiscite to those who actually understand this nuance isn't relevant to the "Brexit means Brexit" hordes who don't. Or to your friends and neighbours looking on aghast ...
Sure, it isn't just apathy (as in your example). But if you compare the turn-out for the Scottish independence vote in 2014 (~85%) with the EU referendum (~72%), I think it might be a considerable factor.
Another factor is complacency on the part of those that would have voted to remain: polling leading up to the referendum showed a clear remain win.
(I should point out that I'm not suggesting that the result of the referendum isn't pro-Brexit, but that the numbers don't support the case for a so-called "hard Brexit")
Yes, as time goes by it seems as though sense is starting to sink in, though it is still quite close. A year ago I wouldn't have been confident at all.
I'd be for a second referendum on an actual agreement for what Britain's relationship with the EU would be, post-Brexit. Some of the options, particularly those favoured by those that voted to remain, are poor.
I think many people right across the continent would probably have similar feelings.
Many are "unhappy" with how the EU is presently being run but nobody would want to "leave".
The confusion around Brexit emerges from just how poorly the referendum was run. It was a choice between "remain" which can only be a vote for the status quo (unsatisfactory for many) and "leave" which is open to so many interpretations as to be useless.
But to call Brexit a "referendum" in any constitutional sense is talking it up a bit. It was a plebiscite. An actual binding referendum against a written constitution would have to provide actual wording; rather than just a single word.
Reminds me of all of the scapegoating of the EU for local policies and outright fiction like banana curve standards.
Ironically the actual things to object to the EU about like their godawful internet policy proposals aren't on the radar.
Anyway UK has parliamentary supremacy so a constitution would be empty words without changing that. I would say that the policy seems very dangerous but constituions are messy in terms of getting ease of change right - especially in such an legal body. Imagine if nasty old bits like not allowing Jews to inherit property got embedded.
Semantics about strawmen applied to history aside it still would have added significant friction to it. Antisemitism was downright fashionable until WW2 and it could have impeded more gradual progress like the first Jewish member of parliament. It can be changed but it is significantly harder and easily can wind up judged "not worth the effort". Just look at how long it has been since the US ratified an amendment to the constitution.
I thought this was because Britain didn't have a constitution as such so the don't have actual referendums?
> An actual binding referendum against a written constitution would have to provide actual wording; rather than just a single word.
I don't disagree for any philosophical reason, but this is very easy to abuse for anyone that favors the status quo. The most notable example I can think of is the republic referendum (to remove the queen as head of state) here in Australia. Deciding the form of the republic was done first and the constitutional changes to do just that was the only question put to the public, splitting the Republican vote.
On the other hand the EU has a bit of a reputation for voting until the plebs get it right, so I can definitely see the case for binding referendums.
> I thought this was because Britain didn't have a constitution as such so the don't have actual referendums?
The UK does have a constitution, it's simply not codified into a single document. Parliamentary sovereignty means that Acts of Parliament are part of the constitution, and so any referendum's result cannot be binding, which may partly explain why they weren't seen as part of UK politics up until recently - there have only ever been three national referendums, one on EC membership in 1975, on changing the voting system in 2011, and leaving the EU in 2016.
There are a 1.4 million 18 and 19 year olds in the UK that didn't get to vote in 2016.
Likewise there are over 1 million who did get to vote who are no longer alive.
When accounting for the entire country, about 1 in 4 voted to leave the EU, 1 in 4 voted to remain, 1 in 4 didn't know/care and trusted their MPs to do what was best, and 1 in 4 were not allowed to vote because they were too young and must rely on their MPs to do what is best.
Is this true? Doesn't the GDPR only applied to those within the EU (i.e., resident or not), or anyone, anywhere, if the company handling the data is in the EU?
The title of this article is click-bait, surely? Apple have made much PR out of their privacy stance. Indeed, the article says: "Apple makes a big deal about its different approach to privacy on the company website".
The eye opening part was how little data there was and the hoops needed to verify the recipient. This is in comparison to Google and Facebook. Both have orders of magnitude more data and sent the data with, apparently, little verification.
But they could collect data and presumably profit more. If they did collect more data and profited from this data collection would they really lose enough customers to offset this increase in profit? It seems to me they wouldn’t. I think they are taking a moral stance on the issue at least for the time being. This may change in the future.
It is surprising though for the company not to lie about this given the shenanigans that many large companies engage in.
Perhaps because we've all been conditioned to ignore PR, or to believe the exact opposite of what PR says. Seeing that it's true is an unexpected situation.
It's also eye opening in the context of a comparison against the other FAANG companies in question.
