Hostility? Hell yes! It stems from the fact that you have never shown me anything but the back of your hand. Your attempts to be glib fall well short of what I would find humorous.
Agreed.
Handguns do not in any way indicate fear or lack of joy. That you choose to define them in that manner is entirely on you. What, no difference of opinion is tolerated, you have the final word?
Of course I do. I know people that are too stupid to breathe. That does not mean that I have the right to determine what they may or may not do. That is why we have a Constitution and a judicial system.
I have nothing to catch on to. My opinion is different from yours. That tolerance thing that I keep hearing about, maybe you can work on that a little bit. How about it?
As far as having bigger fish to fry, I think you’ll find that the Democrats will find the time to try to cook the little fish as well. I don’t think they’ll be able to, but they will surely try.
Perhaps you should put some ointment on that. We already have the human rights tribunalsin Canada, and nobody on the left in either Canada or the United States seems the least bit disturbed by it.* That does little to reassure me about the left’s commitment to free speech.
*Of course, no one expected a Canadian Inquisition …
And that, in a nutshell, is why I believe the left is fundamentally anti-democratic. In the eyes of the average leftie, there is nothing worth preserving in America’s culture or society, so they are justified in making any changes they please without regard for the principle of majority rule.
Furthermore you don’t actually need laws regarding free speech when you create a culture where questioning the executive is considered tantamount to saying “I’m with the terrorists”.
That’s because, to be quite brutally honest, most people in the US don’t give a crap about Canada at all, much less Canadian politics. I read a Canuckian political cartoon, and I still didn’t know about that.
Believe it or not, I agree with you on Canada’s hate speech laws. Speech should not be made illegal unless it incites to violence or is libel or slander. But the thing is that we are talking about two different countries with two different constitutions. Hate speech laws won’t make the grade here. And don’t cite me hate crimes laws…no one is punished solely for speech. If motive (which is ALWAYS considered in criminal cases) is determined to be that the victim of an assault or murder or intimidation attempt is of a suspect class, and the defendant is shown to have vocalized this fact, then punishment is increased. But no one is punished solely for slurs. Not legally, anyway. Social punishment has always been extra-legal, though.
Bingo. LP seems to believe that we’re in an inevitable slide toward censorship based on the fact that when he spews racist shit, people are *mean *to him.
Speaking from the conservative wing of the extreme left…
I am a First Amendment fundamentalist, I am instantly suspicious of any and all efforts to limit speech. I also oppose “hate crime” laws as being beyond the reasonable scope of law. When someone attacks someone, the motive is already clear, they seek to harm. That’s all it takes, far as I’m concerned, no further adjudication is necessary, nor justifiable.
We can only judge actions, motivations are forever beyond our ken.
I know you loves you some Fox News and all, but could you, maybe every once in a while, actually try to get the story straight instead of swallowing all the hot, right-wingy spew they expel?
I agree with this 100%. I don’t so much care *why *you tied that guy to the back of your truck and dragged him a couple of miles. The issue at hand is not what motivated your rage, it is your inability to control it.
However, when Obama gets through with the Supreme Court, the Constitution probably won’t mean much any more. Lefties consider the Constitution a “living document,” i.e. they want to ignore its cultural and historical context and the intent of the men who composed it. Let’s face it, anyone who can see a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution clearly doesn’t care what the Constitution actually says.
Boy, there’s a lot of factual inaccuracy in that article.
Mark Steyn isn’t, and never has been, “persecuted.”
It’s a civil matter, akin to a libel suit. Steyn isn’t under any sort of criminal prosecution.
It wasn’t even Mark Steyn that was the receipient of the complaint anyway, it was the magazine he wrote for, which is spelled “Macleans,” not “McLean’s.” A McLean is a sandwich.
Nobody in Canada gets hanged for anything.
The statement that no defendant has ever won a case in a human rights tribunal is simply a lie. In fact, Macleans won that case.
Ironically, none of this story has a direct connection to the Canadian hate speech law, which is a rarely used law - since this was not a criminal prosecution.
There are legitimate criticisms of that law, but at least find a cite that can get ONE fact right, hmm?
To put it another way, may righties believe they are somehow the guardians of the cultural and historical context of the Constitution. On the left side of things, I argue that this context is anything but unanimously agreed upon and that the right cynically exploits it to achieve its own ideological goals. We care very much what the Constitution actually says, which is why we do not leave the contexual narrative in your hands.
But I specifically said people on the left. You know, those wonderful people who are always reminding the rest of us of how deeply they care about injustice.
“The white race is the cancer of human history.” – Susan Sontag.
Personally, I couldn’t care less what the Founding Fathers considered applicable to the Constitution. They’re dead. And they wrote a highly imperfect document. Perhaps you’d feel more sanguine about it if it still said that people of African descent were ineligible to be citizens and, in fact, could still be slaves? Or that women couldn’t vote?
The trendline on the Constitution has been upward toward more freedom for all men and women in this country. I like that. I can see where someone who thinks this country is only for white people of European descent would feel differently, though.