A bit of both, really.
It gets the more placid, those who are looking for a peaceful protest, to stay home, leaving only those who are willing to put up a fight.
Asking why the abhorrent are more qualified to determine your freedoms is obviously not an honest question. It’s either stupidity or trolling. Ditto this; he’s obviously referring to the CHOP in Seattle:
(2) is already happening. Having created laws against hate speech, both the UK and Scottish government are seeking to extend them. The latter is showing an alarming authoritarian bent.
(1) it’s not being decided by the community, it’s decided by a minority of activist types who seek to bully everyone else into submission. I’m not fond of bullies. In any case, it doesn’t matter if it’s the government or the community that disapproves of your speech. Both are equally capable of being wrong.
Aren’t you an American? I understood Americans learned about their constitution in school, along with how it’s the greatest country in the world!!1! Were you away the day they covered the 1st amendment, or too busy fantasising about [gender of choice] or something?
Andy disagreed with you just above.
Don’t get me wrong, what Trump did was bad for several reasons. I watched the video of the police clearing protesters for his church photoshoot, and it’s obvious the crowd wasn’t doing anything to warrant their treatment. We expect bad things from Trump. But like I said, I wondered what his purpose was. Fortunately, Trump has been booted out, so now you just have to worry that the next populist will be more competent.
@octopus, I’m pretty sure they said we aren’t required to use wacky made-up pronouns, just a choice of he, she or they. What’s the problem with that?
(And on that note, I prefer ‘they’. It’s bad enough being judged based on stupid gendered expectations in real life, I don’t want to get that shit online, too.)
The suggestion to ban anyone who says ‘Democrat party’, on the other hand… like, seriously dudes, just get over it.
Oh, no! Whatever will we do if we can’t be as racist as we like while traveling abroad in Scotland?
Just because something is “in the constitution” doesn’t mean you won the arguments. Slavery is also about the constitution; were you there when they covered it in school, or did you grow up in a Southern state where they didn’t?
More like “dude”. No one except maybe the OP thought the term should be moderated more harshly than any other non-obscene snarl word.
Nuh-uh, there were millions of Dopers rioting in the streets. Cities being burned. They occupied the town square for months!
One has the right to demand others be compelled to share their personal perceptions. No one has the right to enforce the demanded compulsion.
Too late
And even the OP came back and agreed that it shouldn’t be a bannable offense.
Sounds like everyone has gotten over it… Except for @DemonTree
Glad to hear it. I dunno what anyone found to talk about for >200 comments then, but I couldn’t be arsed to read more than a few posts in, and now Discourse keeps popping it up every time I go into that forum.
I was on another continent. Apparently reading comprehension isn’t your strong point. Also a bunch of people in another thread said slavery is never mentioned in the US constitution, and the internet agrees. Perhaps your founding fathers were ashamed of the hypocrisy?
Yeah, it’s all just hilarious as long as your rights are protected. Everyone from the Catholic Church to the UK Humanist Society to the Scottish Police Federation has criticised the proposed bill. Make sure you don’t mock any fundies while there, cause if someone takes offence you could find yourself in the slammer.
I’m not American either, so they aren’t MY founding fathers; and while the constitution doesn’t mention slavery by name, it DOES enshrine it in US law (for example the 3/5ths compromise).
I doubt they were self aware enough of the hypocrisy of saying “all men are created equal” while holding slaves to be ashamed of it, though.
It isn’t mentioned by name until Amendment XIII (technically part of the U.S. Constitution), but other words are used that clearly refer to enslaved people.
~Max
I’m not an expert on US history, but I know enough to know that our founding fathers and their respective system of governance were deeply entrenched in the issues of the day, namely, slavery. The Declaration of Independence used ambiguous language because of slavery. The reason rural voters have so much more influence in electoral college votes is slavery. Even the New Deal included a compromise to protect Jim Crowe in the south - the exclusion of domestic laborers and farm workers from those protections, in order to preserve the “racial order” of the South. (This reason was explicitly stated on the House Floor.) Even our freakin police force came from people creating an organized means of capturing runaway slaves. It may not be explicitly codified in the law as written, but there is almost no part of the US government that doesn’t have its origins, at least partially, in the oppression of black people.
Some of them were slave owners, no? So they didn’t believe in their own principles enough to put them into practice personally.
I hadn’t heard about that. What’s the link?
And I have heard this, but every country has a police force, and half the states didn’t even allow slavery and AFAIK weren’t mad keen on catching escaped slaves, so how is it possible?
Where are you from then? Also, happy cake day!
The 3/5ths Compromise. The argument was that electoral college votes should be distributed according to each state’s population. This would give northern states the advantage because they had the most voters. The South argued that, even though they couldn’t vote, slaves should be counted as voters. So the compromise was to count each slave as 3/5 of a person.
Northern states were hardly innocent when it came to the oppression of black people. They did return slaves from other states. The issue with the police in the US is there was historically strong overlap between members of the police and the KKK. My own grandfather was Sherriff of his town and a member of the KKK. And we live in Michigan. (I also had another grandfather who was not only KKK but according to family lore had lynched people.) This stuff runs deep. It’s deeply entrenched in the identity of countless people. It has endured for generations. Racism isn’t just a casual thing here, it often is a way of life, a form of social bonding, a fundamental part of one’s identity.
Literally the first thing out of my grandfather’s mouth when I first met him at age twelve was “You ain’t dating no n*****s are ya?”
In case you wondered why this country is so fucked up.
Oh, they were all aware of the hypocrisy but money has a way of leading people to interesting conclusions.
The debates at the time demonstrated it aptly. The Southerners weren’t ashamed of the practice at all and it was heavily in the financial interests of the landed gentry to keep the practice going, and the Northerners were thinking of the Greater Good of not dividing the Union from the get-go by insisting on anything.
Some of the Founding Fathers knew the question would have to be dealt with eventually and feared it would lead to violence between the states but punted it down the road, anyway.
The “funny” thing is if the colonies hadn’t revolted, it’s quite likely Parliament would have outlawed the practice in North America decades earlier than it actually happened and at much lower human cost.
But there’s no slaves now. Surely they adjust the electoral college votes to reflect the states’ current populations?
That’s super fucked up. And you’re not even old, you’re about my age IIRC. Someone who lynched people could still be alive. 
So you’d think, but no. They capped it out a long time ago, so that states like Wyoming are VASTLY overrepresented not just in the senate, where this is intentional, but in the house, too.
Oops, wrong link: