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In France, Only Journalists Can Film Violence
BostonBTS sends word that the French Constitutional Council has just made it illegal to film violence unless you are a professional journalist (or to distribute a video containing violence). The law was approved exactly 16 years after amateur videographer George Holliday filmed Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. The Council was tidying up a body of law about offenses against the public order, and wanted to ban "happy slapping." A charitable reading would be that the lawmakers stumbled into unintended consequences. Not according to Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi: "The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said [Cohet]. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet."
Call me a cynic, but I suspect that politicians draft overly broad laws on purpose, in an effort to criminalize as much as possible. They can create so many complicated laws that it is impossible for most citizens to even be aware of what is and what is not legal. This later allows them to selectively apply the law for political ends. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
In fact, most of western europe denies its citizens free speech rights
Most? There are a few big ones like Germany and France, yes, but I very much doubt most. Do you actually have anything to back this claim up?
Americans can be proud that we are still protecting our most fundamental human right.
Aww, come off it. You have "free speech zones", you've classified some forms of speech as "munitions" subject to export regulation, your corporations have used the law to remove results from Google, to stop hacker magazines from publishing hyperlinks, you're dropping down the press freedom index, the White House censored the New York Times even when the CIA said that there was nothing classified in it... even Slashdot has been censored.
I really should make a list, whenever somebody like you posts a comment like that, I always miss loads out because I'm just listing things off the top of my head. There are many, many instances of freedom of speech being curtailed in the USA. If you think the USA has free speech, then you are (dare I say wilfully) wearing blinkers.
You know, as my Chinese S.O. never fails to point out, the Chinese have just as much freedom of speech as we do! In China, you can say anything you want to.
It's freedom after speech that's not guaranteed...
They do indeed have something akin to the constitution which guarantees human rights as well as freedom of speech.
As someone that loves france (I lived there for a few years) I'm so deeply saddened by this horrible choice they've made. I suspect it won't stand but that remains to be seen. France has been a forward thinker in human rights for so many years(they're one of the only nations in Europe to accept refugees and grant asylum) which just adds the the craziness of this law.
France's motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité or (Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood) doesn't seem very well upheld by this new law which does not grant liberty, removes equality and is very unlikely to foster any brotherhood.
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
I suspect the EU will have something to say about this. I can't imagine this will not be shot down as a violation of free speech.
I had never heard of it before, but based on the WP entry on the subject, I'm guessing that the term "happy slapping" is similar to "pretexting": A term invented by the perpetrators of the crime to make it seem less criminal. Then the idiot media picks up and happily repeats the terms until they become common parlance.
The enemies of Democracy are
As usual. Instead of finding the root of the problem and eliminating that, they issue a law that not only is pointless, it actually can be helping the criminals.
It's not like beating someone up in the first place is legal, and the punishment for doing this outweighs by magnitudes the taping. Still, people do it. Does ANYONE think outlawing taping it would change anything? Does anyone think the 'happy slappers' are gonna think now "Hey, beating up is fun but noooooo, we can't tape it anymore so it ain't fun no more"? Does anyone really think this is changing anything AT ALL?
Instead, it's now illegal to tape someone beating up someone and thus creating evidence against the thug. Nice work, France. Protect your criminals.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
The most pathetic thing is the USA has never learned from WW2, the Viet Cong, Saddam Hussain, Osama Bin Laden, Augusto Pinochet and many more, all one time allies and then enemies of the US, and there's twice as many tyrants that are still loyal to the US, all financially backed by the USA, trained and armed without thought to their politics, because they served to fight some real or imagined enemy when it was convenient to the US. The USA's short sighted enemy of my enemy is my friend foreign policy still causes war and suffering across the world, and still the USA stabs it's closest allies in the back in favour of whatever tin pot dictator it thinks will give it an advantage against whoever their boggy man of choice is or will help snatch some economic resource.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Remember, the left-right spectrum is an economic spectrum, ranging from pure communism at the far left to pure capitalism at the far right, and everything in between. Not all leftists believe in civil liberties (look at Stalin, Mao, and Castro, for example). Respect of civil liberties are represented on a different scale.
The left-right spectrum is not a purely economic one. In its original sense, the Left were those in favor of individual liberty (of both the economic and civil variety), what we today would call Libertarians in America, or Liberals in Europe; while the Right were those in favor of maintaining elitist control of both person and property. After that original Left pretty much won in most of the world, a new Left emerged advocating socialist/communist economic policies; and for a while, the Left-Right divide was almost a purely economic one, with everyone generally in favor of civil liberty, and the Right now those opposed to the socialist reforms, as opposed to the new Left. Some of those on the "new left" even went so far as to completely reverse most of the benefits gained by the old Left, like those totalitarians you named.
But there are still vestiges of the older Right around, though they now ostensibly support capitalism (though what they really support is themselves being rich and powerful), and in recent years they've been gaining power again (ironically under the banner of the "new Right"). Trying to fit all four of these positions (the old Left; the new Left; the new Right; and the totalitarians you mentioned, who are not too different from the old Right) onto a linear spectrum is futile; the new Left and Right aren't further along the same axis as their old counterparts, they're along a different axis entirely. The old Left-Right was a pure battle between authority and liberty. The new Left-Right is, quite literally, orthogonal to that (on a Nolan chart at least). The modern Right sides with the old Left on economic issues, and the modern Left sides more with the old Right on economic issues; and more perplexingly, those with authoritarian positions most similar to the old Right are now most often considered Leftist (like those you mentioned), while those with libertarian positions most similar to the old Left are now considered Rightist!
But it's all a big bag of hooey anyway. The only consistent meaning to "Left" and "Right" are "progressive", generally support by the underdogs, who want a change for their own betterment; and "conservative", generally supported by the big dogs on top who don't want their comfy spot in life disturbed. These notions map well to the origins of the terms (the commoners on the Left of parliament and the lords on the Right), but they don't evaluate consistently into any particular position on either civil or economic matters, because what's new today will be old in a few generations, and what's old today will become new again.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I highly doubt a rural farmer could afford an infrared camera. The bottom line should be:
If you break into someone's house, you forfeit your personal safety.
What would you do if you and your wife heard a crash in the middle of the night, and men rummaging around your house? There is no time for the overworked police to arrive, and you might get shot, stabbed, beaten, you stuff stolen, and your wife raped in the meantime.
It is a basic human right to strike back at someone who threatens you and/or your property. According to US police surveys, the number-one fear of a criminal is that the victim might have a gun [citation needed]. And it has been statistically proven, many times, that the more trained citizens carry guns, the lower the crime rate in the area is. With a gun, suddenly the littlest old lady can fend off the biggest thug, and you usually don't have to shoot it.
The government can't save you.
And I find it amazing that someone could think that because France attempted to dissuade the USA from an ill-advised war, it somehow makes them an 'enemy'. Someone who tries to talk you out of doing something stupid is doing you a favour.
Another thing I find amazing is the implicit idea that the USA single-handedly baled anyone out of either world war. The Americans entered WWI too late to have a major impact on the outcome (though they probably hastened the end), and the UK has at least as good a claim to resisting fascism when it counted in WWII. Which isn't to say that the USA didn't make a profound contribution to these struggles, but there were British and Canadian troops storming the beaches at Normandy too, you know.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. France did fight from the beginning. They just weren't prepared for Germany's new strategies and overwhelming force.
Excuse me? Do you know who America's biggest allies in Afghanistan are? France is in the top 3 of countries that provide the most troops in Afghanistan. The US is attacked, its allies are there to help them out. What France criticised was the US's attack on a country that didn't attack the US, and wasn't in any way a threat to US souvereignty.
I personally find it amazing that France was the first to support the US in its war of independence and has continued to be America's ally throughout its existence, and yet some Americans continue to be a tacit enemy of France.
They did. France and Germany have fought plenty of wars over the last couple of centuries. Now what are you gonna do about that anti-French sentiment in the US? How come US politicians were talking about "punishing" its oldest ally? Do Americans have any sense of history at all?
That's not quite true. France has had a pretty valuable ally in the US. And vice versa. The problem is that France refuses to become a lackey, and wants to be an ally on equal footing, while the US in recent years has mostly been looking for lackeys.