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By all possible measures you are more free to offend people today than you were in Monty Python's time, not less. Remember the whole row when Life of Brian was

By all possible measures you are more free to offend people today than you were in Monty Python's time, not less. Remember the whole row when Life of Brian was released (nobody would bat an eye towards such "blasphemy" today), or that the word "masturbation" or swear words were censored.

vixen99 7y ago
Historical comparisons are pointless in this area. Given that last year in the UK a man was convicted in a UK court for a joke held to be ‘grossly offensive’ it's evident that if you don’t believe in a person’s right to say things that you might find ‘grossly offensive’, then you don’t believe in freedom of speech.
- vidarh 7y ago
  If you are thinking of the pug giving the nazi salute thing, there are a number of qualifications worth adding to that: - The judge expressed pretty much surprise that the defense did not even try to raise a human rights defense, and that as a result he could not take that into account in his judgement. It came very close to the judge basically telling him that his defense were idiots and that he'd have likely gotten off if they'd argued it was a human rights violation to go after him for this. - The law in question is awful. To the point where the Crown Prosecution Service has drawn up a number of guidelines for prosecution that means very few people actually ends up prosecuted because there are many easy outs. Firstly, what you get prosecuted for is to cause something grossly offensive to be published to someone likely to take offense electronically, not for telling an offensive joke. There are exemptions that protects broadcasters quite substantially. These two factors exclude most potential cases. The CPS guidelines also takes into account, and advises against prosecution, if the poster of the material takes it down or otherwise acts to limit distribution, and apologize, once made aware it has caused offense. - He was not prosecuted for making a simple joke. He was prosecuted for bookending a video with the joke wherein the bulk of the video itself is him repeating 'gas the jews' and 'sieg heil' over and over dozens of times interspersed with Hitlers speeches. The intent of the law is to stop hate speech. The reason he got into trouble is because it was not at all obvious that the intent of his "joke video" was to make a joke and not to use a mildly funny joke as an excuse to get away with spreading hate speech. The intent of the law would be entirely gutted if you could just insert a slightly jokey context around a bunch of hate speech and claim it was just a tasteless joke (we can certainly argue whether stopping that hate speech is justified). You'll note that none of the "reporting" on it that reproduces enough of the video to show the joke have faced prosecution, because it takes that very specific small amount of bookending of a lengthy section of hate speech without any kind of contextualizing to emphasise the joke aspect to step over the line. This makes it very different from "just" making offensive jokes. An example there is that complaints about Jo Brand recently suggesting the people throwing milkshakes at far right politicians might try acid instead went nowhere because she contextualized it in a way that made it very clear she did not actually want anyone to go out and do it or take it seriously. And she didn't repeat "throw acid at Farage" over and over in the middle of it. - The person in question did not take it down after he was made aware. After it blew up, he conducted interviews where he explicitly expressed that he understood that it had been grossly offensive. He basically admitted to the offense in the media, at great length, giving the judge pretty much no choice. Despite the above, he got close to the mildest reaction possible, with a small fine. To reiterate: The law in question is awful, but the "nazi pug" affair is a horrible demonstration of why. > then you don’t believe in freedom of speech. It is not binary. No country on the planet allows unabridged freedom of speech. Including the US. Because everyone recognizes that speech have effects, and some of those effects have significant implications that causes very direct harm. Other times the problem is not the speech, but how and where it is conducted - speech that is fine in private may be seen very differently if you shout it in someones face. As such a lot of restrictions on speech are not restrictions on you actually saying what you want, but trying to strike a balance to prevent the way you express yourself to cause unreasonable harms to others. Now, I agree that the UK doesn't get the balance right on that. But I also do not believe anyone who claim to want to restrictions on speech, because in my experience that just means they have not thought through the consequences. In practice, once you start walking through examples, I've yet to meet someone who will not get to a point where they agree some things should be limited. They may try to suggest it's not actually a restriction on speech, though. But most regulation of speech is not about what you can say, but about how and where you can say it, in recognition that what is "just speech" to one person can be an outright assault or serious harassment or incitement to violence to another.
  - andrepd 7y ago
    >He was not prosecuted for making a simple joke. He was prosecuted for bookending a video with the joke wherein the bulk of the video itself is him repeating 'gas the jews' and 'sieg heil' over and over dozens of times interspersed with Hitlers speeches. The introduction of the video made it amply, inequivocally clear that what followed was meant to be taken as a joke. He starts with something like "my girlfriend thinks her dog is adorable, so I'm going to turn it into the least adorable thing in the world, which is a nazi". There is no way this can possibly be construed as hate speech in any shape and form (unless you think that uttering the phrase "sieg heil", in whatever context, humorous, historical, etc, is "harmful" in itself). This is the same as the people who object to the word "nigger" as racist, going so far as to censor Mark Twain-type books where it appears in a plainly anti-racist context, because that's how that type of people work: never any nuance, never any context. The man and his joke poses no real credible threat. In fact the amount of serious, actual damage done by this whole affair, the thousands of people radicalised against the "politically correct" upon seeing these preposterous cases, the fuel given to reactionaries by these indefensible rulings... This actually did real damage. >nazi pug The dog isn't a nazi. The dog was... raising its paw.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      Read the judgement. It makes it very clear why that introduction was insufficient. For starters his girlfriend wasn't following his channel, and his channel was explicitly claiming to publish grossly offensive things. That you don't think it can be construed as hate speech is up to you, but the job she set out very clearly why the bookending he did was insufficient. Not least this is because he himself kept making it clear in multiple contexts that he knew it was grossly offensive, and so fell afoul of the law.
      - vidarh 7y ago
        [in case it's unclear, my phone corrected "judgement" to "job she" above; it was meant to be ...", but the judgement set out very clearly..."]
vidarh 7y ago
I agree. As an example of just how offensive it was seen: For Norway, Life of Brian represents the last time the country's anti-blasphemy law was used as justification for censorship (Life of Brian was not formally banned, but it initially did not get a classification, and so could not be shown in cinemas, at a time when there were few other options; it was finally granted classification about 6 months later). The law was finally repealed in 2015. From the mid 70's until the law was struck off the Norwegian Heathen Society have periodically tried to provoke prosecution with the intent of triggering public opposition to the law, but they consistently failed to get the kind of reaction Life of Brian got. Prior to that the last person affected was the poet/writer Arnulf Øverland, who in 1933 was charged (and acquitted) for the speech "Christianity – the tenth plague". The last conviction happened in 1912. For something similar to happen again today would be near impossible - when the law was removed there had been cross party support for removing it for many years. Of course that's one country, but similar secularisation has happened in large parts of the world, and I can think of very few parts of the world where the trend has gone in the other direction.
- andrepd 7y ago
  A funny story about that is that it was used in marketing by the pythons: "So funny it was banned in Norway!"
patrec 7y ago
Does your list of "all possible measures" include "significantly increased likelihood of meeting a grisly end"?
- andrepd 7y ago
  I don't follow.
  - patrec 7y ago
    It's hopefully not hard for you to think of ways of giving offense that will greatly increase the likelihood of not dying a natural death in 2019's UK. Was that equally or more true in 1979?

vixen99 7y ago

Historical comparisons are pointless in this area. Given that last year in the UK a man was convicted in a UK court for a joke held to be ‘grossly offensive’ it's evident that if you don’t believe in a person’s right to say things that you might find ‘grossly offensive’, then you don’t believe in freedom of speech.

vidarh 7y ago
If you are thinking of the pug giving the nazi salute thing, there are a number of qualifications worth adding to that: - The judge expressed pretty much surprise that the defense did not even try to raise a human rights defense, and that as a result he could not take that into account in his judgement. It came very close to the judge basically telling him that his defense were idiots and that he'd have likely gotten off if they'd argued it was a human rights violation to go after him for this. - The law in question is awful. To the point where the Crown Prosecution Service has drawn up a number of guidelines for prosecution that means very few people actually ends up prosecuted because there are many easy outs. Firstly, what you get prosecuted for is to cause something grossly offensive to be published to someone likely to take offense electronically, not for telling an offensive joke. There are exemptions that protects broadcasters quite substantially. These two factors exclude most potential cases. The CPS guidelines also takes into account, and advises against prosecution, if the poster of the material takes it down or otherwise acts to limit distribution, and apologize, once made aware it has caused offense. - He was not prosecuted for making a simple joke. He was prosecuted for bookending a video with the joke wherein the bulk of the video itself is him repeating 'gas the jews' and 'sieg heil' over and over dozens of times interspersed with Hitlers speeches. The intent of the law is to stop hate speech. The reason he got into trouble is because it was not at all obvious that the intent of his "joke video" was to make a joke and not to use a mildly funny joke as an excuse to get away with spreading hate speech. The intent of the law would be entirely gutted if you could just insert a slightly jokey context around a bunch of hate speech and claim it was just a tasteless joke (we can certainly argue whether stopping that hate speech is justified). You'll note that none of the "reporting" on it that reproduces enough of the video to show the joke have faced prosecution, because it takes that very specific small amount of bookending of a lengthy section of hate speech without any kind of contextualizing to emphasise the joke aspect to step over the line. This makes it very different from "just" making offensive jokes. An example there is that complaints about Jo Brand recently suggesting the people throwing milkshakes at far right politicians might try acid instead went nowhere because she contextualized it in a way that made it very clear she did not actually want anyone to go out and do it or take it seriously. And she didn't repeat "throw acid at Farage" over and over in the middle of it. - The person in question did not take it down after he was made aware. After it blew up, he conducted interviews where he explicitly expressed that he understood that it had been grossly offensive. He basically admitted to the offense in the media, at great length, giving the judge pretty much no choice. Despite the above, he got close to the mildest reaction possible, with a small fine. To reiterate: The law in question is awful, but the "nazi pug" affair is a horrible demonstration of why. > then you don’t believe in freedom of speech. It is not binary. No country on the planet allows unabridged freedom of speech. Including the US. Because everyone recognizes that speech have effects, and some of those effects have significant implications that causes very direct harm. Other times the problem is not the speech, but how and where it is conducted - speech that is fine in private may be seen very differently if you shout it in someones face. As such a lot of restrictions on speech are not restrictions on you actually saying what you want, but trying to strike a balance to prevent the way you express yourself to cause unreasonable harms to others. Now, I agree that the UK doesn't get the balance right on that. But I also do not believe anyone who claim to want to restrictions on speech, because in my experience that just means they have not thought through the consequences. In practice, once you start walking through examples, I've yet to meet someone who will not get to a point where they agree some things should be limited. They may try to suggest it's not actually a restriction on speech, though. But most regulation of speech is not about what you can say, but about how and where you can say it, in recognition that what is "just speech" to one person can be an outright assault or serious harassment or incitement to violence to another.
- andrepd 7y ago
  >He was not prosecuted for making a simple joke. He was prosecuted for bookending a video with the joke wherein the bulk of the video itself is him repeating 'gas the jews' and 'sieg heil' over and over dozens of times interspersed with Hitlers speeches. The introduction of the video made it amply, inequivocally clear that what followed was meant to be taken as a joke. He starts with something like "my girlfriend thinks her dog is adorable, so I'm going to turn it into the least adorable thing in the world, which is a nazi". There is no way this can possibly be construed as hate speech in any shape and form (unless you think that uttering the phrase "sieg heil", in whatever context, humorous, historical, etc, is "harmful" in itself). This is the same as the people who object to the word "nigger" as racist, going so far as to censor Mark Twain-type books where it appears in a plainly anti-racist context, because that's how that type of people work: never any nuance, never any context. The man and his joke poses no real credible threat. In fact the amount of serious, actual damage done by this whole affair, the thousands of people radicalised against the "politically correct" upon seeing these preposterous cases, the fuel given to reactionaries by these indefensible rulings... This actually did real damage. >nazi pug The dog isn't a nazi. The dog was... raising its paw.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    Read the judgement. It makes it very clear why that introduction was insufficient. For starters his girlfriend wasn't following his channel, and his channel was explicitly claiming to publish grossly offensive things. That you don't think it can be construed as hate speech is up to you, but the job she set out very clearly why the bookending he did was insufficient. Not least this is because he himself kept making it clear in multiple contexts that he knew it was grossly offensive, and so fell afoul of the law.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      [in case it's unclear, my phone corrected "judgement" to "job she" above; it was meant to be ...", but the judgement set out very clearly..."]

vidarh 7y ago

I agree. As an example of just how offensive it was seen: For Norway, Life of Brian represents the last time the country's anti-blasphemy law was used as justification for censorship (Life of Brian was not formally banned, but it initially did not get a classification, and so could not be shown in cinemas, at a time when there were few other options; it was finally granted classification about 6 months later). The law was finally repealed in 2015. From the mid 70's until the law was struck off the Norwegian Heathen Society have periodically tried to provoke prosecution with the intent of triggering public opposition to the law, but they consistently failed to get the kind of reaction Life of Brian got. Prior to that the last person affected was the poet/writer Arnulf Øverland, who in 1933 was charged (and acquitted) for the speech "Christianity – the tenth plague". The last conviction happened in 1912. For something similar to happen again today would be near impossible - when the law was removed there had been cross party support for removing it for many years. Of course that's one country, but similar secularisation has happened in large parts of the world, and I can think of very few parts of the world where the trend has gone in the other direction.

andrepd 7y ago
A funny story about that is that it was used in marketing by the pythons: "So funny it was banned in Norway!"

patrec 7y ago

Does your list of "all possible measures" include "significantly increased likelihood of meeting a grisly end"?

andrepd 7y ago
I don't follow.
- patrec 7y ago
  It's hopefully not hard for you to think of ways of giving offense that will greatly increase the likelihood of not dying a natural death in 2019's UK. Was that equally or more true in 1979?