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In Canada, Criminal Libel Charges Laid For Criticizing Police
BitterOak writes "A Calgary man is facing criminal charges of libel for criticizing police. According to the story, the RCMP have filed five charges against John Kelly for claiming on his website that Calgary police officers engaged in perjury, corruption, and obstruction of justice. What makes the story unusual is that the charges are criminal and not civil. Even in Canada, which has much less free speech protection than the United States, it is extremely rare for people to be charged criminally with libel. It is almost always matter for civil courts."
I rarely post on /. anymore, but let me give this a shot...
It's literally impossible, for example, for working-class Black lesbians to have a fair and equal debate with bourgeois white straights; there's too much of a power imbalance. Further, not all ideas are equal. I feel completely fine, without knowing any of the nuances or details of their arguments, saying that the KKK's ideas are hateful and beyond worthless; they're dangerous.
As much as armchair libertarians like to claim it is, speech is not harmless. Someone's probably going to call Godwin's law and ignore the rest of this post, but speech is the means by which the Holocaust got under way. It wasn't just Hitler's regime randomly foisting anti-Semitism upon the masses, but mass complicity in the anti-Semitism by the common German, which was played off of by Hitler's regime. Basically, the national discourse around Jews at the time was similar to our national discourse around undocumented immigrants at the moment. Not to mention that much of this happened to other groups as well, some notable examples being the alter-abled and the Gypsies.
In other words, the Holocaust might not have happened if it weren't for hate speech.
Finally, failing to sufficiently protect marginalized groups forces us (and I use the anarchist "we," i.e., anyone who would assign themself to this statement and no one else) to address our problems on our own, by means which will almost certainly be more radical, more millitant, and more effective.
Quebec men prefer pussies, you like cocks?
By the way the Cajuns did not leave, they were deported by the English.
Maybe. But Fox News seems to be doing awfully well.
I think you're right, but then I wonder about what happens when there's not a significant majority who can pick apart and ridicule the hate. Or, like a number of political movements in the US (and elesewhere of course) the people espousing those views seem entirely immune to reason, debate, logic, facts and so on.
It frequesntly seems to come down to left-leaning people who think ideas are key and that truth and reason should win the day, and (significantly) more right-wing people who are playing a different game entirely, where it's all actually about red vs blu, warring monkey tribes striving for dominance at any cost.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
They're one of the most successful players on the world stage. Diplomatic, friendly, sociable and selfish. How can you lose?
Canada is going dark. If you want to be a part of the program, you'll be okay. If you want to be an individual, you'd better only do that within the acceptable boundaries, which are, for the most part, pretty wide. But the problem is that they're narrowing. There is a lot of pressure being put on the country these days from dark forces; the people have been sufficiently dumbed down to have allowed a genuine psychopath into power.
Two words:
"Fox North."
-FL