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Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

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Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#281

Post by yibg »

TomGullen wrote: post #71
NikolaNovak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example. " Why not,and who gets to make the determination? I'm an atheist, and having so many blasphemy and religion protection laws in liberal democracies misused (or rather, used exactly as they are truly intended) so horribly has really taught me what poorly defined restrictions on speech mean in the real world. As for racist speech, I really truly b…

Racism is wrong and dangerous, and giving oxygen to it helps propagate and give validity to it. Censoring it might keep the racists to their ugly selves, but that's OK with me.

Who gets to define what is racism and what isn't? And how broadly do we apply this logic? Racism is wrong and dangerous so we can censor. What about sexism? Ageism? Heightism? Extend this out and anything that can be potentially offensive to anyone shouldn't be allowed.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#282

Post by decremental »

Radim wrote: post #255
decremental wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not an evolution. There's nothing organic taking place. It's a concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce populations into going along with things that are expressly against their own freedoms and interests by people who are by any standard their enemies.

> a concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce [others] into going along with things [I want]. How is that outside of evolution? Your definition of "organic" seems suspect.

If tomorrow the government commanded that the color blue is now to be called red, that would not be an evolution of language. It would not be language evolving organically as language does over time. It would be change by force outside of the way things change naturally on their own.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#283

Post by zhengyi13 »

ciupicri wrote: post #268
helloworld11 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many countries, including many in Europe have some very serious, heavy racial issues that are both more ingrained than those of the U.S and in quite a few cases more violent or openly discriminatory. The U.S. however is generally at or close to the center of global media familiarity and attention, so naturally, the theme of its own racial issues is disproportionately magnified. How many major countries are overtly et…

What European countries?

Every single one with a Roma population, likely.

Anecdotally, I remember having discussions with Danish family in the 90s, about racially-related issues in America, and in the shape that they took, I recognized how woefully unprepared they were to really look at their own racist attitudes (e.g. vis a vis Turks and immigration). When I returned in 2019, and had a chat with a gentleman supervising a number of different immigrants on some sort of work-integration program... well, I wasn't much impressed with his expressed attitude towards the workers.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#284

Post by hervature »

Pyramus wrote: post #239
hervature wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They obviously meant speed is quantifiable. You can measure speed and say "you violated the limit".

Yes, but it doesn't strengthen the argument. If society A says the speed limit is X and society B it's Y and society C it's infinite. What's the point that speed is objectively measurable?

That making a rule even makes sense. It is not an argument as to what amount is sensible, just that "amount" is sensible.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#285

Post by krapp »

f7ebc20c97 wrote: post #279
basisword wrote: post #13

I’m generally in favour of some limits on speech. I don’t think you should be able to tweet racist messages for example. It’s obviously very complicated and something people are going to argue a lot about. BUT this case has made me change my opinion. Things much worse than this are tweeted every day and this is the one that gets prosecuted. It’s blatantly politically motivated (‘national hero’, British soldier etc) a…

The slope is slippery because, given enough time, lawyers are always be able to form a causal effect chain from human action A to undesirable outcome B.

This implies all such causal chains, regardless of their nature, will always be accepted as valid. If that were true, no lawyer would ever lose a case.

It's the same argument that people make when they say, because any word can be claimed to mean anything, any so-called hate speech crime can be used to make any arbitrary speech illegal, simply by labeling any form of speech "hate speech."

It's the 'perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless void' model of society that assumes societies are not made up of humans with brains already aware that people can lie and attempt to game the system, and that no one will ever be willing or able to correct flaws in the system. Even in the case of OP, I doubt the UK could take any arbitrary tweet and sentence someone under the same law.

That said, I think the laws in the UK in this regard are going too far - but a slippery slope implies an irreversible process. These laws exist because the people of the UK want them to. If they wanted otherwise, they could change the laws to reflect that. That isn't a slippery slope.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#286

Post by nullc »

beaconstudios wrote: post #140
helloworld11 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from me absolutely being in favor of even offensive and racist speech out of general principles, you'd be surprised (or not) by how easily "racism" can be redefined to include all kinds of things that are very, very dubiously racist by any normal definition. There are extremely woke people who consider even questioning any of their arguments about race or class as a racist act. There are cases where a person ma…

> Out of many criticisms of the U.S. that the country deserves, its mostly rigid protection of free speech rights in a formal sense is one good thing, and it hasn't led to a hell of bigotry, or at least no more so than have weaker protections for free speech in other countries. Depends on how you measure it. The US has some pretty notable racial issues, even compared to other Anglosphere countries. I wouldn't put tha…

> even compared to other Anglosphere countries

lol. I find it hard to not laugh at that. Having done business in US, UK, and varrious places in Europe, my first exposure to business culture outside of the US left me utterly shocked about the high levels of blatant and unabashed racism that was ubiquitous outside of the US.

It often involved racial groups that weren't legible to me as an American but was was particularly striking in how unprofessional it was. In the US someone might quietly dislike some race or another, but in a professional context someone explaining a project delay with "You know those can't be trusted to get anything right." would be shocking, but I encountered statements like that outside of the US a dozen times across multiple countries.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#287

Post by Dylan16807 »

heurisko wrote: post #82
gonzo41 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

White working class boys in the UK are amongst the least likely to go to university in the UK, they don't have a privilege for being white. I think terms like white privilege drive resentment and are divisive. "In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race..." Barack Obama. htt…

Privilege is multidimensional, for crying out loud.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#288

Post by Dylan16807 »

account42 wrote: post #115
matthewmacleod wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they don't have a privilege for being white. As a white (and formerly working class) boy from the UK, I can confidently say that nobody has at any point in my life discriminated against me on the basis of my ethnic background. That is the extent of what this expression means – it does not mean that any individual to whom it applied is in a superior position relative to others, but only that they do not suffer from di…

The entire point of the term "white priviledge" is to justify discrimination on the basis of people's ethnic background.

The point is to recognize discrimination.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#289

Post by Radim »

decremental wrote: post #282
Radim wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce [others] into going along with things [I want]. How is that outside of evolution? Your definition of "organic" seems suspect.

If tomorrow the government commanded that the color blue is now to be called red, that would not be an evolution of language. It would not be language evolving organically as language does over time. It would be change by force outside of the way things change naturally on their own.

> outside of the way things change naturally on their own.

"Naturally on their own", you say?

It sounds like you consider humans outside of forces of nature, outside of evolution.

Are you a theist perhaps?

I'm trying to understand your position, because to me humans and human relationships and human societies and human actions seem (obviously) a part of nature. They're complex systems, yes, but there's nothing inorganic or unnatural or magical about them. The same rules of biology and physics apply as everywhere else.

And yes, coercing others to capture more resources for self seems a prototypical example of a (co-)evolutionary arms race.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#290

Post by defen »

hairofadog wrote: post #235
namelessoracle wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OK hand sign is racist now. There's rumbles of milk being racist. The scary thing that should terrify everyone is we are going to come to a point where being called racist no longer matters or nobody cares, and then your gonna see REAL racism come back with a fury and force you wont like.

While I am not condoning banning speech, your examples above compile into a pretty disingenuous take. While I'm sure an example could be found if you looked hard enough, I have never once heard of anyone crying 'racist' about normal people making the normal OK hand sign innocently. I have, however, heard the term 'racist' accurately used to describe people making an inverted OK sign when said people happen to be stan…

> While I'm sure an example could be found if you looked hard enough, I have never once heard of anyone crying 'racist' about normal people making the normal OK hand sign innocently.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

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