Shut up and play nice: How the Western world is limiting free speech

The case of t-shirt guy (Barry Thew) is much worse than "4 months for wearing an offensive t-shirt".

Turns out he has a history.

a) He's a psychiatric patient, on anti-psychotic meds with a history of compulsory in-patient detention,

b) His son died in police custody 3 years ago.

He also has a series of criminal convictions, most recently for cultivating cannabis, but I'd like to note that there's a really strong association between schizophrenia and self-medication with cannabis. (I'm told -- this is purely anecdotal, but comes first hand from a dignosed schizophrenic -- that it makes the voices shut up for a while.)

The judge tossed out the mental health argument advanced by the defense. Moreover this case was a public order case, a minor one, but came up before a judge in a crown court (usually the province of serious offenses such as robbery and murder), who imposed a much heavier sentence than would normally be the case for a public order conviction. (Public order offenses are frequently dealt with by a spot fine or, at worst, brought up before a magistrate who has much more limited sentencing powers. It may be that Threw's status -- he was also found to be in breach of a probation order because he was found to be in possession of cannabis -- accounts for that, but: WTF? Four months for possession of cannabis, and another four months for wearing a loud t-shirt in a built-up area? What are we coming to?)

Thew is pretty obviously a petty criminal and what, on the internet, we'd term a troll. But his treatment by the state in this case is odious and heavy-handed, and raises disturbing implications.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/oct/11/manchester-man-jail...

I moved to Europe somewhat recently, and I haven't seen any tolerance or understanding: people are incredibly racist towards anyone with non-white skin, and it's socially acceptable to make snide comments about race in polite society. The U.S. (where I come from) is not exactly a pinnacle of race relations, but I was shocked by how much worse it is in Europe. There was a professor in my department of Bangladeshi heritage, and she got all sorts of weird comments. And as a CS professor, she was obviously not going about committing crimes, but rather writing research papers, but this didn't seem to matter to people.

In Denmark, at least, there's also this inaccurate perception, like what you mention, that immigrants are causing all the violence. But here we have basically two main sources of violence: biker gangs, who are mostly white, and immigrant gangs, who are mostly not. The kinds of people who vote Danske Folkeparti and are really worried about crime never seem to mention the biker gangs. Same in the UK: a huge amount of crime in the UK is caused by lower-class whites, the group sometimes derogatorily termed "chavs", and overlapping with "hooligan" culture. But you don't see the BNP complaining about them. Why? Because that's where their own members come from.

Some of my family is Greek, and there is no real tolerance there either, except from a smallish segment of left-wing internationalists. There are 2nd-generation Chinese-origin Greeks who speak perfect Greek and are generally integrated, but are still called racist names and considered "foreigners" by the Greeks who have a very ethnic view of Greekness (the majority).

99.99% of disgusting hateful speech is just that: disgusting hateful speech.

The other .01% is the only hope we have as a species of honestly addressing our situation and problems and adapting and moving forward. The mob cannot tell the difference between these two groups. In fact, unless you are from the future looking back, nobody can. People who change society for the better through their speech are almost universally hated. At first.

This isn't a nice-to-have feature of modern life. This is critical stuff. To see Ban Ki-moon say “when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.”? A little bit of us all die.

We as a secular free society must protect people humiliating others, their beliefs and values, through speech. It's the price we paid to get to where we are -- thousands of unpopular folks yelling in the wilderness about how we are stupid, wrong, immoral and how we should improve ourselves. It's much to steep of a price, too much depends on it, for us to abandon it now.

Everyone should chill out and have a beer by the beach. Unless you are in the US, where that's illegal.

How does this differ from the violent history of Christianization? From Theodosius I declaring Christianity mandatory and destroying the pagan temples, to Icelanders being held hostage to put pressure on them to convert (which they eventually voted to do, under that pressure), to colonial militias spreading Christianity in Africa and Asia, the religion basically spread by the sword. And it was maintained for hundreds of years thereafter through state violence: in most of Europe, if you attempted to convert to another religion, or declare yourself an atheist, you'd be executed as an apostate or a heretic. Even the Jews were expelled from many parts of Europe, where they had been tolerated by the Muslim empires (and prospered in Ottoman Istanbul and Salonica).