Prior to the release of the video, Dankula’s YouTube channel only had 9 subscribers, all of whom were friends. He posted the video to (a) annoy his girlfriend and (b) to entertain people who he knew would ‘get’ his dark sense of humour. The video only went viral when someone posted it to Reddit and it made the front page. This is something that was (a) extremely unlikely (since 99.99999% of the content posted to Reddit never makes it anywhere near the front page), (b) he couldn’t have planned, and (c) was completely beyond his control. The fact that the video gained attention doesn’t mean he posted it for attention.
Secondly, he’s not ‘playing’ the victim. He is a victim. He’s a victim of a stupid law, stupidly misapplied by a stupid person. In order to find Dankula guilty the judge had to explicitly disregard the relevant context of the video. Any sufficiently dark joke can be framed as hate speech when you do that. Hell, Blazing Saddles is one of the funniest movies ever, but take away enough context and it starts to look a lot like hate speech.
Thirdly, it doesn’t matter that he’ll probably just get off with a warning. He shouldn’t even get that much. This shouldn’t be a matter for the government. Period.
What this guy did should not be a crime at all, and they shouldn’t be using the threat of more severe punishment to stifle speech in this way, no matter how dumb or offensive the speech.
Are you familiar with any recent cases where someone has actually been prosecuted for simply mouthing off to a cop? I mean, I’m pretty sure I could walk up to a cop and flip him the bird if I wanted and it wouldn’t be prosecutable. Now… whether that would be wise for me to do so is a totally different question, but legal on it’s own I suspect.
I’m not familiar with the UNC-CH matter, but I wouldn’t think that would be the same sort of individual right to free speech matter we are talking about here.
I’d actually say that free speech is generally one area where Republicans and Democrats have generally lined up with one another. I mean sure, there are some fringe folks on both sides who’d like to limit it in one way or another, but by and large the major parties have seemed to be in lock-step as far as I can tell. I guess there has been some disagreement on who has free speech (e.g., corporations), but not really so much on defining what “free speech” is. I don’t think any mainstream politician in the US would seriously advocate a hate speech law (not that it would constitutional anyway).
Absolutely–and I know that people who are getting the shit kicked out of them by cops are comforted by knowing that they were legally in the right.
Of course not. The claim that Shodan made is something about gored oxen, though, and it’s blatantly clear that the free speech violations that the right complain about are overwhelmingly, on this board and on Fox News both, trifling shit like this pug case, instead of serious governmental overreaches like the UNC case or the cops-beating-up-mouthy-civilian cases.
Well, the phrase is associated with a very bad case of someone who should not have been prosecuted and was engaging in activity that was actually nothing at all like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, but the concept of actually shouting “fire” in a crowded theater (or something comparable, i.e. a deliberate attempt to spread panic where no threat exists) is one that legitimately challenges the concept of freedom of expression.
i.e. I wish Holmes had saved the phrase for a better case instead of the stupidly unfair Schenck v. U.S..
Sure, but Holmes used this example precisely because he saw it as an exceptional case, one that existed just beyond the far limits of what constituted acceptable speech. Unfortunately, in deciding the Schenck case, he and the other justices (all of them) made a really shitty call about where those limits are and what constituted an exceptional case.
Also unfortunately, too many people seem to latch onto it as a way to justify censorship. Rather than acknowledge the main principle that you have discussed here, that this constitutes an example of a tiny group of instances in which speech can be limited, there is a tendency to make it a sort of bucket into which we can throw a variety of instances that really do not belong there at all. The implication seems to be that, in cases where there is any dispute whatsoever, it’s better to err on the side of censorship rather than on the side of free speech. That’s not the principle.
Supporting this particular case with the “fire in a crowded theater” argument demonstrates, in my opinion, an egregious and unjustified misreading of the basic principle involved in the phrase.
Yeah, that particular case was bullshit. The concept though, has some independent merit even if it had no bearing on the case with which it originated.
Are you serious? I’ll let you off if you haven’t read 1984 (but given the worldwide political climate it really is required reading) but the first main paragraph on wiki for the goose-step is…
You may associate it specifically with the nazis but I certainly don’t and I’d hope that you’ll admit that the “thirteen o’clock” points clearly towards one particular regime, the USSR. Ask yourself why I included *that *term.
Thing is though, monitoring and punishing humour, art, music, restrictions on free speech and expression are totalitarian traits. It really doesn’t matter what the flavour of totalitarian regime happens to be.
Though I didn’t use it as an example, the act of criminalising these nazi-themed comments by this man would be very much at home in nazi Germany.
Then by all means prove what you claim is so blatantly clear. What is the total number of free speech violations complained about on the SDMB and FoxNews, the total number of civilians beaten up only for mouthing off to a cop, add 1 to that for the UNC case, and compare.
He draws the line for legal action at outright incitement to violence or harassment, I tend to agree with him and we already have laws up to that task without the need of the concept of “hate speech”
Easily done, but I’m not gonna do your particular monkey dance. For every example you find of conservatives on this board or on Fox News complaining about free speech violations from police or from Republicans, I’ll show you two examples from the same source complaining about free speech violations from undergrads.
But since I don’t think you’re genuinely doubting that this is the case, I don’t expect anything from you in this regard. I think you’re just hoping either that I’ll do a stupid amount of work for you which you can then criticize for being incomplete (as it necessarily will be–the “total number?” pah), or you’re thinking that you’ll respond to my obvious disdain for your demand by saying, “Yup, that’s what I thought, you got nuthin.”
I’m willing to give you three minutes, though. First page of this thread has five or six different board conservatives (depending on how you count them) complaining about the suppression of speech by left-wing college folks. You wanna find me two or three examples of conservatives on this board complaining about speech suppression from police and/or right-wing sources?
Or you wanna go to another source, say, Fox News or Breitbart, and find me similar complaints, and I’ll match you two for one there as well.
Again, though, I don’t think you actually doubt the claim. Ball’s in your court.
Edit: go here, here, and here for some more examples of right-wing board members complaining about leftists on campuses suppressing speech; these are where I’ll draw more examples from, on the off-chance you can dig up even two examples of conservative board members complaining about speech suppression from the right. And there are a ton more where those came from.
My point, in responding to the use of the phrase by PatrickLondon, was that the concept has also no bearing at all on THIS particular case, the one we’re discussing in this thread. In terms of its consequences, nothing about this guy’s Nazi dog video approximates the yelling of “fire” in a crowded theater.
It did. The conversation about freedom of speech on this board is taking place internationally. I’m not sure what you’re getting at by saying this, to be honest.
Not a single person in this thread has suggested that the judge in this case erred with respect to Scottish (or British) law. As i said in a previous post, i went and read the section of the Communications Act that he was found guilty of violating, and a rational reading of that Act seems to support the conviction.
But the principle of free speech is bigger than the Communications Act.
You dismissed the pug case as trifling shit. It may well seem that way, compared to problems you have in America, but in the UK we don’t have those same problems, so it’s not such a trifling issue.
Actually, no-one has dismissed the pug case as a trifling issue, as far as i can tell. I know that i certainly don’t feel it’s trifling.
In fact, we’re debating this case on the other side of the world precisely because the principles at stake are incredibly important. It’s not the case itself, or the principle, that’s worthy of ridicule here; it’s the law that allows a person to be convicted of a crime for posting a stupid and offensive video on the internet.